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Tribute to a 100-year-old pioneer socialist

— Photo: M.A. Pushpa Kumara

Caroline Anthony Pillai: She remained a powerful force in S.C.C. Anthony Pillai’s political life.

Caroline Anthony Pillai and her husband played prominent roles in Indian politics, especially in Tamil Nadu, for some six decades. After he died in 2000, she returned to Sri Lanka, where she lives with one of her sons in Alubodalawatte, close to her ancestral home.

Dona Caroline Rupasinghe Gunawardena was born on October 8, 1908 in the village of Boralugoda in colonial Ceylon. Her family was Sinhalese Buddhist gentry. Like her siblings, Caroline was schooled at the Boralugoda Temple and the Siddhartha Vidyalaya in nearby Kaluaggala. Later she attended Museus College in Colombo, the premier Buddhist school for young women.

In 1915 commercial rivalry between Sinhalese Buddhist and Muslim merchants flared into communal violence. The British governor imposed martial law and rounded up suspected nationalists, including Caroline’s father, who was falsely accused of giving dynamite to rioters, sentenced to death, and jailed for seven months until he was released for lack of evidence. The ordeal turned the Gunawardenas into resolute nationalists. Caroline turned her back on the establishment and became a teacher at the Siddhartha Vidyalaya.

Caroline was feisty and rebellious even as a girl. Her niece recently recalled how Caroline would instruct her to run under the bellies of elephants in order to become brave. “Every time her mother came to know of this escapade, Caroline would receive a caning for her efforts in teaching the young to be courageous. Caning notwithstanding, the lessons would be repeated.”

In the late 1920s Caroline became active in the nascent nationalist youth movement, which was inspired by the freedom struggle in India. Unlike in India, however, revolutionary nationalism or socialism didn’t exist yet in sleepy Ceylon. That changed when her dynamic elder brother, Philip Gunawardena, returned home in 1932 after a ten-year sojourn in the United States and England. Philip had joined the British Communist Party but got expelled when he sided with Trotsky against Stalin. Under his influence, Caroline became a Trotskyist. She helped Philip and his circle of recruits to radicalise the nationalist youth leagues.

In 1935 the Gunawardenas played a leading role in launching the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), the country’s first socialist party. Caroline was one of just a handful of women who defied convention and boldly proclaimed the need to cleanse society of all racial, caste, class, and gender discrimination. The LSSP got off to a roaring start. The party fielded candidates for the elections to the Second State Council. Caroline campaigned in the Avissawella district for her brother Philip. He was a fire-breathing mass orator who was popularly called “the Lion of Boralugoda.” Both Philip and one of his recruits, Dr. N.M. Perera, were elected. The two Trotskyists used the chamber not only to demand immediate independence but also to advance much-needed reforms that would benefit the working people of town and country, including the downtrodden Tamil workers who toiled on the British plantations. The new party formed fraternal links with the Congress Socialist Party. In 1937, the LSSP selected Caroline to attend the Faizpur session of the Indian National Congress. In those days, the LSSP was proud to be known as a “pro-Indian” party. In 1937-38 a number of Tamil youth, including S.C.C. Anthony Pillai, joined the LSSP. The party leaders felt that “Tony” had the potential to become a trade-union leader. However, since he could not speak Sinhalese, Philip Gunawardena suggested that he get some instruction from Caroline at Siddhartha Vidyalaya. In many ways Caroline and Tony were opposites. He was cool, she was impetuous. He was a Tamil, she was Sinhalese. His parents were Christian, hers Buddhist. He was 24 years old, she was 30. Yet the two became close and fell in love. In 1939 they married in a simple ceremony. Caroline and Tony moved to Nawalapitiya, a hill town surrounded by tea plantations, to organise the Tamil estate workers. This was dangerous work. The British planters used thugs to keep out agitators. But Caroline was fearless. As her nephew recently told me, she was “tough as nails.” It was in this period that Caroline gave birth to their first son, Mahendran, and then Ranjit Sen.

From the start the LSSP, following the Trotskyist line, opposed any new “imperialist war.” When the Second World War began, the British colonial authorities cracked down hard on the troublesome Trotskyists, arresting leading cadres, starting with Philip Gunawardena and three other top leaders. Despite the tightening vice of repression, Tony and Caroline led strikes by bus workers, harbour workers, and granary workers in 1940-41.Meanwhile, in India, Gandhi was threatening to summon a mass movement to force the British to “quit India.” The LSSP had already helped their Indian co-thinkers organise a skeletal Trotskyist organisation in 1942 - the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI). In July 1942 most of the LSSP cadres, including Tony, secretly crossed over to India in fishing boats. While most went to Bombay, Tony and several other Tamil party members went to Madurai. An anxious Caroline stayed behind with the children. Though small in numbers, the BLPI gave its full support to the Quit India revolt. In Madurai Tony and his comrades went underground with radical Congressmen, including T.G. Krishnamurthy, and sought to give leadership to the revolt. In contrast, the Communist Party actively opposed the Quit India revolt in the name of fighting fascism. In 1943 Caroline was able to re-join her husband, who was living in disguise at a hideout in Venus Colony in Teynampet. With the police beating the bushes for the BLPI, Caroline reluctantly had to return to Ceylon with the two children. After she left, Tony moved to another hideout behind the famous Ambi’s Cafe. He was eventually arrested in 1944 and sentenced to two years of rigorous imprisonment at Alipuram for “possessing seditious literature.”

After his release, Tony returned home to Ceylon. But he and Caroline had little time to settle back into the political life of their country. Thiru Vi. Ka. (V. Kalyanasundaram), the president of the Madras Labour Union, had great respect for the Trotskyists and offered to pass the mantle of leadership to Tony. And so Tony, Caroline, and the children went back to Chennai. In early 1947, the Madras Labour Union prepared for a strike. The government arrested Tony. At a mass rally that night, Caroline gave a powerful speech that “infused in the workers a new sense of dutifulness and showed them a new path.” (K. Appanraj, Anja Nenjan: Thoyizh Sangha Medai S.C.C. Antoni Pillai Vazhkai Varalaru, Chennai, 1995.) Afraid that the workers would try to free their leader, the government transferred Tony to a remote jail in Andhra. At the next mass rally Caroline called for a one-day hartal in support of the strike. More than 100,000 honoured the hartal. The government put her under house arrest. Always resourceful, Caroline wrote notes to the strike committee, pinned them to the inside of her eldest son’s trousers, and sent him to a rendezvous with the union leaders in Perambur. Although the strike was defeated after a hundred days, Caroline and Tony emerged as popular heroes. In 1947 Tony was elected president of the Madras Port Trust Employees’ Union and the following year he and two other Trotskyist officers of the Madras Labour Union were elected to the Madras Municipal Council.

In 1948 Caroline gave birth to her third son and two years later, her fourth. As the mother of a large family, she had limited time and energy for politics. Alas, as so often happens, she had to take a back seat to her husband’s career. But I have been told that she nevertheless remained a powerful force in his political life. She supported him in his party activities, advised him, and sometimes even prodded him to be more militant in his trade union work. She was his revolutionary conscience. Let us honour Caroline Anthony Pillai — the fearless girl who ran under elephants and became “the lioness of Boralugoda.”

(Charles Wesley Ervin is the author of Tomorrow is Ours: The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon, 1935-48, published by the Social Scientists’ Association. He lives in the United States. Email: wes_ervin@bellsouth.net )

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