The State funeral for Kalaignar Karunanidhi was conducted with military precision with the armed forces in charge of arrangements the moment the DMK leader’s mortal remains left Rajaji Hall for the public to pay homage on Wednesday evening in Chennai. The family took a back seat during the procession, gathering at the burial site beforehand.
Every wish of the party patriarch and known atheist in the Periyar tradition was followed in the funeral with no religious last rites being held. The Isai Vellarar caste people do follow a tradition of burying the body and Karunanidhi’s family chose a coffin with an inscription — in a typical Christian or secular tradition — to lower the remains into the ground.
Whether MK wished to have a memorial or not, his Dravidian party could not have done without a memorial being built. It is in the party and the Dravidian movement’s political interest to have a memorial so that followers may have a site and an epitaph to remember the leader by. As he was a practising atheist in having taken after his mentor Periyar, there were no religious rites to be performed although some of his closest kin did follow an old Indian tradition of dropping rice into his coffin.
Having donated his ancestral home in the village as well as his residence in Gopalapuram in Chennai to a hospital trust, MK did not, however, go the whole hog in donating his body to science. His kin may not have allowed such a wish even if the Kalaignar had entertained the thought. It was too important for a leader to leave behind mortal remains that are made visible in a memorial as per one of the oldest traditions of man.
In his lifetime, Kalaignar had done a lot to break down the caste barriers and take the disadvantaged and the downtrodden. An upper caste dominated society had even prohibited the Dalits and lower castes to enter Tamil Nadu’s temples and their funeral processions could not even come into Brahim-dominant streets. Some of this discrimination still exists deep in the countryside, but DMK’s Dravidian movement always sought temple entry for all castes and had made a lot of progress in this direction.
As Dr. Nikhil Joshi, atheist recounts, “Karunanidhi was very good in opposing casteism and religion. His way of gathering people was the sectarian identity of the Dravidian nation. So instead of resorting to the irrationalism of religion and caste, he resorted to a separate linguistic irrational way of uniting people.
It is often recommended that we should follow religion as a guiding principle as it will bring morality to our life. But there are pitfalls to it. We can commonly see that many immoral acts are committed in the name of religion, primarily because religion doesn’t offer logical reasoning for that morality. It is something like obedience. If you place your trust in the wrong person, they will have full control of you and will get anything in name of morality from you.
We, humans, evolved as social organism even before we were introduced to the concept of religion. So, we don’t need religion to be ethical in our life. Our evolution as a social animal has ingrained the sense of morality among us. So it is wrong to say that without religion we shall be immoral.”
Although MK was an atheist he did not prevent any of his family members with faith from pursuing their belief. He was a democrat to the very end in recognising an individual’s rights. As the poet Kureeppuzha Sreekumar explains, “Atheists are great humanitarians; they wouldn’t want wars. Nor would they intrude in anyone’s privacy or freedom. You can’t find an atheist among people who wage war and exhort murder. There wouldn’t be any atheist who vouches for destruction. Their thoughts are progressive to the core.
What better example than our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was non-religious, whose daughter married a Parsi and grandchildren married a Sikh and a Christian!
The Vaikom Sathyagraha for people’s right to passage irrespective of caste was led by E.V. Ramaswamy, one of the greatest atheist leaders the country has seen. Karunanidhi and Annadurai were his disciples. Karunanidhi even changed her original name Dakshinamoorthy, named after an upper caste deity to embrace humanist principles and led a life following those. His ideology based on atheism started as a cultural movement and later, with his political entry, became the base of Dravidian politics. He led the movement against superstition in Tamil Nadu and ensured that even in death, he stood firm in his stance without yielding to farcical last rites.
There’s a poem by Vyloppilli Sreedhara Menon in which a man’s last rites are being arranged by people and finally a person asks his wife for rice grains to stuff into the dead man’s mouth, to which she replies, “Had there been rice here, he wouldn’t have died.” Such is the absurdity of customs and ceremonies. As an atheist, Karunanidhi lived and died as a role model.”
The simplicity of a burial with no religious rites save the offering of flowers and some rice being dropped into the coffin, came as an eye opener for many who are tied down by the rituals to be followed after the death of kin. As Sumanth Raman, political analyst elaborates, “It was expected because throughout his life he made it known that he was an atheist and a rationalist. So, therefore it was about respecting his wishes. Even in their family, they had clarified that some members of the family are believers and M. K has never objected to that. He had given them the freedom to have beliefs and thus they have respected his wishes in having the burial in a way that he would have wanted.”
And so rests an atheist to complete a quartet of iconic Dravidian leaders on the famous Marina Beach of Chennai. Of them two - MGR and Jayalalithaa - were people of faith and the other two - CN Annadurai and M Karunanidhi - were rationalists. If that suggests anything, it is that man has for long been divided into two categories of faithful and atheists.
