There was a time, not all that long ago, when English speakers in the south of India routinely referred to our north as ‘Upper India’. This sense of the north’s upper-ness included, somewhere in its folds, a sense of the north having the upper hand in the affairs of the nation, of being bigger, more populous and, therefore, the more dominant of the two. Being ‘upper’ also encased within its meaning the fact of the nation’s capital, Calcutta and later Delhi, being ‘up’ there, with Simla as the nation’s summer capital ‘up above the world so high like a diamond in the sky’.
The political summit
The Imperial Legislative Council, with its Central Legislative Assembly as the Lower House and the Council of State as the Upper House, being located in Delhi pushed that upperness further up. Seeing persons of the eminence of Muhammad Habibullah, A. Rangaswami Iyengar, S. Srinivasa Iyengar, Omandur Ramaswami Reddiar, Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar, Tanguturi Prakasam, Ananthasayanam Ayyangar, T.S. Avinashilingam Chettiar, V.V. Giri, S. Satyamurti, N.G. Ranga, C.N. Muthuranga Mudaliar, T.S.S. Rajan, K. Santhanam, M.C. Rajah, the Raja of Bobbili and N. Sivaraj ‘move’ diligently to Delhi by up-bound trains, for legislative sessions, could not but reinforce the perceived image of India’s north as India’s political summit. Later, the Constituent Assembly with N. Gopalaswami Ayyangar, Alladi Krishnaswami Iyer, Rajaji, Jerome D' Souza, K. Kamaraj, C. Subramaniam, V.I. Munuswamy Pillai, in it, and some remarkable south Indian women — Ammu Swaminathan, G. Durgabai, Annie Mascarene, Dakshayani Velayudham — and successive Lok Sabhas and the Rajya Sabha drawing Members of Parliament of the stature of A.K. Gopalan, T. Nagi Reddy, C.N. Annadurai, P. Sundarayya, Panampilly Govinda Menon, C.H. Mohammed Koya, M. Ruthnaswamy, K.T.K. Thangamani and Era Sezhiyan, going to Delhi, by air rather than by rail, of course, continued the ‘India’s north as India’s peak’ image. Needless to say, that ‘peak’ was scaled in terms of outstanding legislative performance by these men and women.
