An ever-lasting legacy
Reviewed by Shalini Rawat

A Comma In a Sentence
by R.Gopalakrishnan
Rupa Rainlight 
Pages 164 Rs 295

History affords us a peep into events and lives of people gone by that, contemporaneously, moulded each other. And yet only handfuls, driven by variegated motives, have ventured forward to document the past and commit it to writing. The oral traditions of myth-making and story-telling too offer us all a chance to present a 'worm's eye-view' or a glimpse into events as they happened from below. These versions may collate, affirm, dismiss or diametrically oppose the current premise in history but they nevertheless offer us an alternative and refreshing perspective.

The author's attempt to squeeze six generations of family history into a slim volume is commendable. It brings to the fore events of local, regional and even national importance that seem to have been assimilated in the collective haze with which we perceive the lives of our ancestors. It talks of the "Brahmin only" agraharams (collective community-specific living spaces) and child brides, the grandeur of the coronation ceremony of Queen Victoria while the Great Famine of 1877 swept the land. It recollects the resistance to British rule in the town of Vellore where Indians, both Hindus and Muslims, were mercilessly lashed and even hanged to death for wearing caste marks. It hints at the concerted effort by the missionaries towards conversion (directed even at the Tanjore Maratha ruler of the day and narrowly avoided by the machinations of a bunch of Brahmins at the court!).

The narrative frequently switches back and forth from the individual to the collective and echoes the thought that the personal is, indeed, political. The text is by no means erudite but highly perceptive. To fill in the gaps in the lives of people who have lived much before one's time requires that one take on board the various components of anecdotes, history, geography, culture, society and politics and assemble them to construct a tale that appeals to the generations who come later. R. Gopalakrishnan does all this with great finesse.

But more than offering a story for idle consumption, the author is on a mission to discover and eventually pass on the elements that vitalised and revitalised the family, making them both, strike roots and take flight. He attributes the phenomenon to core middle-class values of love for education, tolerance, adaptation, good personal ethics and belief in some kind of a Supreme Power.

In another era, untouched by today's communication conveniences, partings and letter endings were often occasions for advice from elders — uberwise, commonsensical and emotional in equal parts. The author's urge to leave behind a "legacy" implies that the systems of the past had some value, even if they are perceived to provide more social cost than benefit today, and help to justify not replacing or discarding them altogether. His "comma in a sentence", likewise, is not obsolete. In his words, "the greatest treasure that we can leave for our children is not wealth but sanskar. The more of us who can do so, the better society will be."

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