Why a Kerala small town is an entire chapter in the story of India’s official movers and shakers
From ex-RAW chief Shankaran Nair to NSA Narayanan, from VP Menon to Foreign Secy Menon, bureaucracy has Ottappalam’s fingerprints
If former RAW chief K Sankaran Nair’s revelation about India paying $6 million in kickbacks to wangle a $250-million Iranian loan isn’t found worth a discussion in Nair’s own somnolent little town, blame it on the legacy of Ottappalam.
Few small towns in the country could claim as many movers and shakers in the top bureaucracy as this pastoral municipality of barely 50,000 people. Ottappalam, clearly, has got too used to its men making news to notice.
A few minutes down the dusty and narrow bone-shaker of a road winding away from Shankaran Nair’s original home here was the house of the wily V P Menon, Std VII dropout and one-time coolie-turned-secretary of state who more than helped Sardar Vallabhai Patel annex the many princely states to Independent India — more land and more people, in fact, than even Bismarck did in Germany.
Go farther and you come to the home of M K Narayanan, the current National Security Advisor, take a turn and move on and you soon hit the narrow lane leading to the imposing colonial façade of Palat, home to some of India’s top bureaucrats and three Foreign Secretaries, including the incumbent.
The best-known and continuing lineage of Ottappalam bureaucrats from this house was spawned by Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair — jurist, educational reformist and the liberal and moderate president of the Indian National Congress in 1897, who eventually fell out with Mahatma Gandhi.
Nair was knighted in 1912 and was made member of the Viceroy’s Council in 1915, only to have him pen his famous Minutes of Dissent underscoring the ills of the British rule in the Despatches on Indian Constitutional Reforms. It was incredibly accepted by the British Government, over the Council’s views.
Sir C Madhavan Nair, Sir Chettoor Sankaran Nair’s nephew, was member of the British Privy Council, his brother Diwan Bahadur Chettoor Gopalan Nair was the Collector of Malabar whose research work on Malabar Muslims is still in print, his cousin Chettoor Govindan Nair was Law member in the Viceroy’s Executive Council, another nephew SK Chettoor was Union commerce secretary and a writer of considerable note, yet another, KK Chettoor was Ambassador to Japan, Burma and Brussels.
It’s a long list that also includes the likes of former State Bank of India Chairman RN Chettoor, former Central Administrative Tribunal chairman Justice Chettoor Sankaran Nair, and more. KPS Menon, India’s foreign secretary and one of the country’s most high profile diplomats of his time was Sir C Sankaran Nair’s son-in-law, from Ottapalam itself.
The other Foreign Secretary bearing the same name, KPS Menon (Junior) was his son, and the current Foreign secretary, P Shivasankar Menon is his nephew. Other serving senior civil servants belonging or related to the family include those like the Secretary (Food Processing) P I Suvrathan and C Govindan Nair of the UP cadre of IAS. The latest is K Suja, who has just entered the IFS .
There have been attempts to explain why Ottappalam, just another little town of hardly any consequence otherwise, has been producing more high profile bureaucrats than the entire state put together — and why all them, invariably, are Nairs, who are only one of the four equally major local communities.
Historically the Nairs in Ottappalam and erstwhile Valluvanad were only the big tenants of the Brahmin Namboothiris who owned all land on record, unlike their land-owning counterparts elsewhere. When the British took over Malabar and chose to make adjacent Cherpulassery one of their two main bases, the Nairs found a lot of inviting space to gravitate towards them with the conservative local Namboothiris chosing to keep aloof, the lower-caste Ezhavas and dalits remaining unequipped to use the opportunity— and the British anyway keeping the Muslims, the other major community in the area, at a big distance especially since they famously used to play havoc with British sea trade, according to historian S Rajasekharan Nair, who is also the secretary of the Sir Chettoor Sankaran Nair Trust here.
Though relatively well off as big tenants, the Ottappalam Nairs had survived with the original land-owning Brahmins as social overlords, which naturally gave their many generations the considerable flexibility, tact and adaptive skills. Besides, the Nair tenants here had also been de facto landlords — no non-labour intensive cash crops were grown in Ottappalam and the entire economy was paddy-based, and labour-intensive, which meant the cash remained with the Nairs leaving the other non-Brahmin communities in total dependency and deprivation. The British lost no time picking the local Nairs as their administrative buttresses, often with sweeping local powers.
Soon, the Ottappalam Nairs were thronging the elite schools and colleges of the British Presidency of Madras that reigned over Malabar, and the ICS and then the post-Independence versions of the Civil service were only the next logical steps.
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