Family Histories- Part 3

Of A New baby and a Split in a Party

1964

Location : Trichur

((Read the first part here))

One of my mother’s earliest memories is from January 25th, 1964. She was three years old and enrolled in a nursery school in Trichur at the time.

My mother is the one perched on the swan.

On this day, however, she was playing inside her house with her elder sister. After a while, her father came in with his Yashica camera and herded them both outside. Amma’s father TKG Nair was a renowned journalist and political organizer. He was an editor at the Communist party’s newspaper Navjeevan at the time of this memory. The camera, as my mother remembers, was from one of his tours to the erstwhile Soviet Union.
“The doctor is here. Time for us to play outside.” Amma remembers him saying.
Camera around his neck, he herded the pair of girls outside and clicked pictures of them. One of those photographs is the one you see here.

My mother and her elder sister on the day their younger brother was born in 1964

After a while, their domestic help arrived with her goat and the girls wandered off to play with the goat. The doctor came and called their father later in the day and he went back inside. Shortly after, Amma and her elder sister were summoned and there was a baby wrapped in a white cloth — their brand new baby brother.

At the time when Amma and her sister were welcoming their baby brother to the family, the Communist Party Of India, the party her father belonged to, was undergoing great turmoil. It was in 1957 that the party had been elected to form the state government in Kerala, making EMS Namboodidripad the first communist leader in India, to head a popularly elected government in India.

EMS Namboodirapad swearing-in as the first Communist leader of a democratically elected Communist State Govt.

In 1964, things were changing between China and the Soviet Union. Both nations had very different ideas of what constituted Communism and on the practical applications of Marxism-Leninism. Their respective geopolitical stances during the cold war did not help either. This played out in the sub-continent as a split in the Communist Party of India. Soon after the Sino-Soviet rift, a huge portion of the Communist Party of India, based mostly in West Bengal and India, split to form the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M).

The split reflected in the flags.

This turmoil was reflected in Amma’s home at the time. The paper my grandfather worked for was to be shifted to another district — Kozhikode and the family would have to relocate. Uncertain of how the living situation there would be, my grandmother took her three children and went to her mother’s home in Payannur to set up base for a while. My mother was enrolled in yet another nursery school there, rewarding her with yet another gem of a class photo pictured here.

My Mother in the darker floral dress.

My grandfather stayed with CPI and was a leftist all his life despite all the turns it would take in the future. An ideology that he would leave behind for his children who also engaged with it in different ways, but that is a story for another time.

((Read all chapters of Family Histories — The Personal is Political here))