My Family and Baroda: A 100-Year-Old Journey
(And no, I didn't come up with that acronym to sound 'cool'. Pinarayi Vijayan did. Probably. At least that's what he kept waxing on and on, during COVID-19.)
NRK means that I'm a Malayali who lives outside the state of Kerala in south India. In my case, in particular, I am an NRK born to NRKs and lived (and continue to live) in two states within India: Maharashtra and Gujarat.
Primarily, I'm from Mumbai. Thanks to the force of nature that was my Ammacha (my maternal grandfather), who migrated here way back in the 1950s, I grew up in the most chaotically beautiful city in this whole wide world. My spoken Hindi is of the most tapori kind, which could give Munshi Premchand ten successive heart attacks, followed by a brain aneurysm.
My Hindi, however, is a LOT better than my Malayalam. The way I speak Malayalam? It's comedic gold.
I know, some of you would probably bombastic side-eye me as you read the two paragraphs above. I can understand pure Malayalam (thanks to the campy soap operas my Ammacha used to watch) and I can understand pure Hindi (thanks to the merciless CBSE Hindi curriculum I had to mug up and the folks who translated Pokémon from Japanese to Hindi and broadcasted it on Cartoon Network, India).
But I sadly don't have a strong hold over these two languages and I don't want to pretend otherwise.
I do, however, hope that my kids can speak better Hindi, Malayalam and whatever-mother-tongue-my-future-husband-has. I fully intend to send them to Malayalam language classes (like my maternal grandmother, my Ammamma, sent my mom) and really wish that they have a stronger hold on their heritage than I did, growing up.
(Of course, if my aunt or my seventeen-year-old cousin read this, I'm sure they'd go: for you to have kids, you need to find a husband. Which, dear reader, is... a topic for another blog post because my love life's Hiroshima Nagasaki at the moment).
Anyway, where was I?
Yes. So while I'm primarily from Mumbai (and speak the crudest form of Hindi), I was also raised in this wonderful place called Baroda.
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| Bylanes of Baroda, captured clumsily by yours truly |
Baroda, or Vadodara as it's officially called, is a small but well-developed city in Gujarat. Its beauty lies in its serenity: be it the wide, well-planned roads and lush green trees (the most common being banyan, or Bargat, which is the root of Baroda's name). I kid you not, the minute you step into Baroda, you'll feel at ease instantly.
Baroda was once a princely state too.
For those of you don't know, princely states were states in the British Indian empire which weren't ruled directly by the British, but by a sovereign who had to have an alliance of sorts with the British Raj.
In Baroda's case, it was ruled by Gaekwads from the Maratha Empire. And the most famous of them all?
Was this ruler called Sayajirao Gaekwad.
Originally called Gopalrao, he was from the extended Gaekwad royal family and was never in the running to be a king. But fate surely had other plans.
Gopalrao was chosen from a set of distant Gaekwad relatives by the British government at the time (or so, Wikipedia says). Post coronation, he went on to become one of the most famous Gaekwad rulers and a very important figure in Baroda's history.
And around the time he started his rule and shifted his base from Nagpur to Baroda?
Was around the time when his partial namesake, my paternal great-grandfather, A Gopalan Nair moved in too.
(The prefix 'A' in his name stands for something that my NRK Malayali self can neither pronounce nor correctly write)
Riches to Rags
Gopalan Nair, my dad's maternal grandfather, was born in a very, very rich Nair family.
For those of you who don't know, Nairs were a wealthy and powerful community in Kerala. They had a lot of military power, land and respect within the community. They were (and still are) also very heavily into the arts and culture scene.
Even today, you can see that in quite a few public Malayali figures are Nairs. The legendary Lalettan (one of the two greatest stars of Malayali cinema, along with Mammooka), the not-at-all-legendary-and-should-burn-in-the-deepest-pits-of-hell Dileep, Leena Nair (the CEO of Chanel), Gita Gopinath (the first deputy MD of IMF) and Shashi Tharoor (you're living under a rock if you don't know who he is) - they are all Nairs.
And the most unique thing about Nairs? Was that they were matrilineal.
This meant that, unlike many other communities within India, every daughter of the family had the rights to the property and if she was the eldest, she could be the head of the family. Or else, the oldest son who had the strongest matrilineal ties was the de-facto karnavaran.
While all of this sounds very... very progressive on paper, this matrilineal tradition was gruesome on the woman who married into a Nair family and her children.
If the Nair husband died, the wife and the children were point-blank told to leave the house, right before the husband's funeral. This meant that the wife and the children were immediately cut off from the husband's side of the family. With no rights to the property.
And this is exactly what happened to Gopalan Nair and siblings.
In a day's time, he and his immediate family had to pack up their bags and leave. Without even getting the chance paying their final respects to their father.
It's... brutal.
One minute, you find out that your father's gone. And the next, you're not given a moment's notice for closure and asked to essentially... go away. That's awful.
I cannot imagine how tough it must've been for my great-grandfather.
He was all of eleven when his dad died, and he and siblings were asked to leave. He had every reason to be bitter.
But... he didn't. He chose to hustle hard to achieve things that no one ever expected him to do.
And it all started off when he ran away from home to kickstart his business in Baroda.
The Teenage Runaway
My dad tells me that Gopalan Nair had once tried running away from our ancestral village near Calicut after his father died.
The first time, for a bit, he was caught in the Calicut city by an extended relative.
The second time, he did the unthinkable: he ran off to Bombay.
Which, during that era, meant that he was excommunicated. Cut off for life.
You see, during those times, if you crossed the banks of Korapuzha (I dare you to pronounce it) river, you're basically... not a part of the local community.
And that's why, nobody bothered to run after a fatherless, poor kid and find out if he was okay.
(This, by the way, is my hypothesis. I don't know, for sure, what those people really thought because 99% of them died by the time I was born in the late '90s)
After fleeing to Bombay, Gopalan Nair met a Gujarati businessman and started working for him. Sometime later, the Gujarati businessman helped set up a tyre business for Gopalan in a dinky village in Gujarat.
Of course, my great-grandfather thought that was useless. How many Indian people would use tyres in the 20th century Gujarat? And that too, a very, very rural part of Gujarat, where people probably still use bullock carts in the 21st Century.
And so, he set his sights on the majestic principality of Baroda.
Rags to Riches (Again)
While I don't know the exact timelines, my great-grandfather came to Baroda when Sayajirao Gaekwad's reign had officially kicked off.
It was a very exciting time to be there. Sayajirao was a stark contrast to his predecessor, the demonic Malharrao. He started his reign by focusing on education, especially for the ones from the underprivileged communities. In fact, by 1906, he practically made primary education compulsory AND free, which was the first time an Indian ruler had passed a rule like that.
He also founded the Bank of Baroda, set the foundation for the Baroda College (which would go on to become famous MS University) and built the aesthetic masterpiece (and a possible venue for my future wedding if the groom's worth it), the Laxmi Vilas Palace.
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| Laxmi Vilas Palace (aka my future wedding venue) 😆 |
And that's not all.
Sayajirao Gaekwad really rooted for people to win. He was a patron of BR Ambedkar and sponsored his higher education. He also promoted other icons like Sri Aurobindo and the famous painter, Raja Ravi Verma.
In fact, if you go to Laxmi Vilas Palace, the throne room has Ravi Verma's original paintings. This time, when I went there with my cousins and dad, I actually saw the paintings (and not the printout of his painting, There Comes Papa, which is framed at my aunt's place).
When I saw the original pieces, I was... blown away. Each of his works has a brilliant amalgamation of European painting techniques and Indian sensibilities, which really came out beautifully.
Okay, I guess I'm digressing from the topic. Art history really tends to make me go nuts. Let me steer back.
Anyway. While he did all these reforms, Sayajirao was a really grounded person. He upheld the best of Maharashtrian values, while embracing the vibrant Gujarati culture and accepting everyone, instead of alienating those perceived to be 'lesser'. Even today, his descendants stick to his ethos and continue to contribute to the Baroda community, while living monastically simple lives (when they could live in the palace).
To sum it up, Sayajirao really was epic.
And it was during his reign between 1900 and 1920s that my great-grandfather flourished too. His tyre and re-treading business, called National Tyres at the time, really boomed during the war period.
Gopalan Nair went from being a teen who had nothing to being a young adult running a well-established set up in one of the thriving principalities of the country at the time.
And so, one fine day, he decided to go back home. To Kerala.
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| My great-grandfather post his business's monstrous success |
It was quite the cinematic entry. He had this topi, kurta, dhoti and jacket on, and looked... very, very posh. Not like the abandoned boy who'd ran away.
Somehow, after the initial shock wore off, some of his relatives recognized him, and... surprisingly, he was welcomed back home with open arms.
(I think probably being rich helped. Some Nairs are very, very materialistic too. Give them gold and they'll follow you around like golden retrievers for the rest of their lives.)
Soon, he got married to my great-grandmother and they shifted to Baroda at place which was in the rare pockets where Maharashtrians stayed.
My great-grandmother? She was such a champ. Though she was born in Kerala and had no prior exposure to other backgrounds, she quickly accepted the shocking amalgamation of Maharashtrian and Gujarati cultures that was Baroda. She became such a pro that she could speak Marathi as fluently as a native (I'm sure she knew Gujarati too, but everyone, till date, keeps raving about her amazing Marathi).
By 1940s, one could see that my family had embraced Baroda wholeheartedly.
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| And there they are, my Achamma and Achacha. |
You know what was cooler? My Achacha topped his class and got a gold medal (which is still mega cool because I don't think we have anyone born in our family after him who has a gold medal).
To the left, I've attached a snippet of his graduation diploma from 1951, where it's written that he got the first rank. It is pretty marvelous, isn't it?
Around 20+ years later, my dad, too, moved to Baroda and studied Physics at the same university. After that, he joined the family business.
By the 90s, my Achamma's younger brothers had settled down in Baroda to raise their families. My parents and I lived here too, till my mom and I had to go back to Bombay for her work.
***
It's been around 100 years since we've been in Baroda.
While my great-grandfather, Gopalan Nair, wasn't Ambani-level rich, he did work insanely hard to build a better life, not just for him, his wife and his siblings, but also for his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
Thanks to his grit, there was a certain level of privilege that my dad's side of the family had, while growing up. And that privilege did give the future generations (like mine) awareness about opportunities that go beyond the traditional trifecta of engineering-medicine-government jobs.
Achamma got a chance to study at a really fancy convent school. Her brothers were either given a portion of the family business or got the opportunity to study courses, which weren't thaaat accessible to the rest of the population at the time.
His grandchildren also benefitted from his hustle. My dad, for instance, studied at a fancy CBSE school (which was very expensive for the general population at the time) and my aunt too went to a convent. My dad's younger cousins got the opportunity to pursue more artistic professions, businesses, and professional courses.
Heck, my dad's youngest cousins (who are only 4 and 3 years older than I am) did their undergrad in mass media from a liberal arts university. This, additionally, was one of the reasons why my father wasn't horrified at the prospect of me going for a post-graduate fellowship in liberal arts and he pretty much accepted it wholeheartedly.
And now? If I look at my own journey, my great-grandfather's hard work did benefit me in a small way too. Of course, it wasn't so huge for me that I was driven in chauffeur-driven cars all the time and end up being groomed to be an MRS who'd be a pretentious Instagram Influenza Influencer buying off followers through loss-making paid campaigns.
But it did make me aware and open to opportunities that my peers would balk at doing. And I'm massively grateful for it and I'm being very blunt: I do want to put in my 100% into whatever comes my way.
Having said that, I'm the most thankful to him for the fact that he gave us access to one of the most magical places in this world: Baroda.
While I love Bombay from the bottom of my heart, Baroda's where I truly feel at peace, where I feel like everything is going to be okay, no matter what.
Whenever I've had terrible times in life - like when my school friends ostracized me in the eighth grade, or I got my heart broken at 20 (don't ask why) - going to Baroda always made me whole again and believe that everything will work itself out.
And that's something I cherish the most.
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| An NRK, as of today |
Thank you for taking your time out to read this, dear reader. I know it must have not been easy. You really need to have the patience of a saint to get through this.
Stay awesome as ever, though.
Much love,
Archie <3
I enjoyed reading it.The way people travelled and landed in totally strange ambience and adjust and restructure themselves have always confirmed my belief in fate predestined or other wise
ReplyDeleteI met Mr.Gpalan Nair in 1960 and as the families knew each other he enquired about ours.What attracted me was his assertive personality .And I loved the structure of the house which was different from conventional structures. I think you can observe and study people and write about them more.