Cho Ramaswamy passed away in Chennai on Wednesday. That the end came barely a day after Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa’s death is coincidental — he had been in and out of hospital for a year now — but perhaps apposite. Cho was her great admirer and, some would say, even apologist.A trenchant critic of Sasikala Natarajan and the Mannargudi family’s influence on Jayalalithaa, it must have broken his heart to see the prominence accorded to them at the funeral.A brilliant and incisive mind, Cho was born into a family of lawyers, and studied law. However, he came into his own when he took to the stage, and also had a successful run in films playing the hero’s funny sidekick.Until he took to journalism, Cho’s claim to fame was as playwright, stage artist and film actor. At a time when theatre was the domain of professional troupes, Cho belonged to the emerging amateur theatre.While professional troupes toured across the Tamil hinterland, staging plays in makeshift halls , amateur theatre groups drew their audiences from the middle class and were confined to the cities. This was the heyday of the sabha, voluntary cultural associations, based largely in the Brahmin neighbourhoods, sustained by subscriptions and business sponsorship by often Brahminmanaged firms. The sabhas provided, in the pre-TV days, entertainment in the form of plays and music concerts.This was the time when the ascendant Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) was displacing Brahmin political power, and challenging its cultural authority. The sabhas were a non-confrontational response to this challenge.While mocking the highfalutin dialogue of the Dravidian movement plays, Cho’s scripts used the Brahmin dialect. He was a pioneer in using the Chennai street dialect, the demotic language of the lower classes, but he had little empathy for it, using it only for comic effect. Cho articulated the elite distrust of democratic politics, especially the rise of the Dravidian movement.Cho fancied himself to be a Bernard Shaw — his Manam Oru Kurangu was an adaptation of Pygmalion. Despite his biting satire and humorous asides that regaled audiences, his plays lacked seriousness and were bereft of a wider social vision.Despite his unacknowledged borrowing of the name Thuglak for his political journal from Girish Karnad, Cho demonstrated little awareness of the modern theatre in, say, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali or Hindi.In 1970, Cho launched Thuglak. It had been three years since the DMK swept to power, and two years into M Karunanidhi’s chief-ministership. Thuglak articulated the anxieties and insecurity of conservative, middle-class Brahmins threatened by the new political culture and turned them into reactionaries.Periyar EV Ramasamy was still active at that time. A little ahead of the elections in 1971, he had organised a conference in Salem against superstition where tableaus depicted scenes from the Hindu puranas.Thuglak published a special issue on the theme, and whipped up a frenzy. The confiscation of copies of the journal fuelled its popularity. The controversy soon subsided and, contrary to expectations, the DMK returned to power, defeating the alliance between K Kamaraj and C Rajagopalachari which Cho had banked on.During the Emergency, Cho played a crusading role in defence of democracy. The cover of one issue of Thuglakwas printed solid black, and reviewed a film titled Sarvadhikari (Dictator)! At this time, he headed the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). But soon he left it as he refused to make a distinction between the violence of the state and non-state actors.This he would take to extreme length in later times, as he defended and legitimised even encounter killings. While Karunanidhi remained a target, Cho relished attacking MG Ramachandran (MGR) and his politics. In his view, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) was populist, with no ideology. However, when Jayalalithaa took over the party, and followed in MGR’s footsteps, the same lack of ideology ceased to matter.Cho’s political positions would cause any liberal to squirm. Cho’s nationalism was often a garb for Hindu supremacy. Democracy delivered undesirable results, so democracy itself was suspect.Reservations undermined merit. Human rights questioned the state. Feminism challenged women’s traditional roles. The Hindu caste order ensured harmony.In Sri Lanka, Tamils had better put up with Sinhala majoritarianism. In economics, public sector was anathema. Despite his aversion for Indira Gandhi, Cho believed in a benevolent despotism. His advocacy of Narendra Modi, forgetting his earlier support for LK Advani and AB Vajpayee, is of a piece.Cho articulated this vision through gags, witticisms and wisecracks. By turning everything into a joke he undermined the seriousness of public debate. Rather than make his readers introspect, he confirmed their fears and turned them into disgruntled cynics.In later life, Cho turned into a commentator on the Hindu view of life, retelling the Mahabharata and penning a wholesale polemical defence of Brahminism — but he was no C Rajagopalachari, lacking his refinement and wider vision.What then explains Cho’s stature and all-India visibility? Before the media revolution, he delighted with sharp and convenient quotes in English, endearing himself to Delhi journalists already biased against the inscrutable Dravidian politics. His apparently anti-establishment views notwithstanding, he was in close touch with the powers that be.Cho dabbled directly in politics and facilitated alliances. For instance, in 1996, he smoothened the alliance between the DMK and the breakaway Moopanar’s Congress. Critical of an ideologically vacuous MGR, he did not hesitate to consistently advocate Rajinikanth’s entry into politics. In the annual meetings that he organised, he tested the political waters and directed the parties of his choice towards his course.In tributes, Cho has been termed as a right-wing public intellectual. But he was no Arun Shourie or Swapan Dasgupta. Despite being an extraordinarily intelligent man, Cho never indulged in sustained argument, his aim being to flatter or stoke prejudice rather than change minds.Thinking of Cho, one image comes to mind. In days past, at the doorways of Brahmin agraharams, old people would sit and grumble over the coming of the Kaliyug and its topsy-turvy order. However, from Subramania Bharati and A Madhaviah to Sundara Ramaswamy and Gnani Sankaran, Tamil Brahmins have produced a host of self-critical intellectuals who enriched public life and intellectual discourse. It is tragic that a man of Cho’s abilities did not belong to this line.(Venkatachalapathy is a historian and Tamil writer)