Baby Kochamma Is Forced to Wave the Red Flag

Baby Kochamma Is Forced to Wave the Red Flag is a brief episode in the 1969 workers’ march that becomes a crucial link between public political theater and private retaliation. A marcher gives Baby Kochamma a red flag, orders her to wave it and say a Communist slogan, and leaves her exposed to the crowd’s laughter. In the days afterward, she transfers her humiliation onto Velutha; when she later accuses him at the police station, the march’s affront has become part of the story she tells and believes.

The march and the coerced performance

A man described as being like a knot gives Baby Kochamma his red flag as a present and tells her to hold it. She does so without looking at him. Then he orders her to wave it. The distinction between holding and waving matters: she is no longer merely carrying someone else’s banner but visibly performing allegiance before the assembled marchers. She has no choice, and tries to wave the flag as though she were not waving it.

The flag’s material details sharpen the indignity. It smells of new cloth and a shop, crisp and dusty; its freshness contrasts with the lack of freedom in the gesture it is made to signify. The man next commands her to say “Inquilab Zindabad.” Baby Kochamma whispers the words, and he praises her as a good girl. The crowd roars with laughter. What might look like a small comic interlude is therefore also a scene of compelled speech: the slogan comes out, but only under pressure, and the public response fixes the moment as humiliation.

From public shame to private hatred

The episode does not end when the march moves on. In the days that follow, Baby Kochamma concentrates all her fury over the public humiliation on Velutha and sharpens it like a pencil. Her anger attaches to him as a representative figure: in her mind, he comes to stand for the march, the man who forced her to wave the Marxist Party flag, the man who christened her Modalali Mariakutty, and all the men who laughed at her. The sequence ends in a blunt change of feeling: she begins to hate him.

This transfer is central to the episode’s consequence. The march humiliates Baby Kochamma through a particular man’s actions, but her resentment settles on Velutha, whose presence in the march makes him available as the target of a larger, accumulated grievance. When she later speaks to the police, she grafts onto him the manner of the man who had humiliated her at the march: she describes a sneering fury and brassy insolence that had frightened her. The account turns remembered shame into apparent evidence about Velutha.

The accusation at the police station

At the Kottayam police station, Baby Kochamma tells Inspector Thomas Mathew that a factory worker, a Paravan, had tried to force himself on her niece, a divorced woman with two children. She has misrepresented the relationship between Ammu and Velutha, seeking to contain scandal and preserve the family’s reputation in the Inspector’s eyes. As she tells the story, she begins to believe it herself. The earlier humiliation does not alone account for her accusation, but it helps explain how Velutha becomes the vessel for an anger first shaped by the march.

The Inspector challenges the family’s account of its relationship with Velutha. He observes that people first spoil such people and carry them about like trophies, then come asking the police for help when they misbehave. Baby Kochamma lowers her eyes like a chastised child and continues. She invokes Velutha’s place in the family’s history: he had been known to her since childhood, educated by her family at the school for Untouchables founded by her father, trained as a carpenter by them, and housed in a home given to his grandfather by them. She presents those acts of patronage as proof of what Velutha owed the family, converting past dependence into an argument against him.

She also recalls seeing him at the march and repeats rumors that he was or had been a Naxalite. The mention causes a faint furrow of worry on the Inspector’s brow. Baby Kochamma says she had warned her nephew about Velutha, then invokes a dead child and two missing children before breaking down. The police tea and the preparation of her First Information Report give the account official form; the Inspector assures her the Kottayam Police will cooperate and that Velutha will be caught before the day is out.

Political calculation and the machinery of authority

The march’s aftermath reaches beyond Baby Kochamma and the police. The Inspector, a Congress man, takes the precaution of sending a Jeep for Comrade K. N. M. Pillai because he wants to know whether Velutha has political support or is acting alone. He does not want a confrontation with the Marxist government. The political affiliations differ, but both men understand the practical stakes of the report: before acting, the Inspector seeks assurance that the pursuit will not provoke party resistance.

When Comrade K. N. M. Pillai arrives, the Inspector shows him Baby Kochamma’s First Information Report. Their conversation is brief and cryptic. Comrade K. N. M. Pillai admits knowing Velutha but omits that Velutha is a Communist Party member and that he had come to his door late the previous night. Although he knows the attempted-rape allegation is untrue, he does not refute it; instead, he assures the Inspector that Velutha lacks the party’s patronage or protection and is on his own. The march’s coerced performance thus sits at the beginning of a chain in which personal resentment, family reputation, police procedure, and party calculation converge around an accusation that is not corrected by those who know better.

Narrative significance

The novel sets the smallness of Baby Kochamma’s public embarrassment against the scale of what follows. Estha and Rahel witness the police violence that morning without understanding it as a demonstration of the pursuit of ascendancy, structure, order, and monopoly. The narrative describes that violence as history in live performance: not an accidental mugging or private settling of scores, but an era imposing itself on its witnesses. The flag scene supplies an earlier, smaller performance of power, in which Baby Kochamma is made to speak and gesture for an audience, then carries the wound of that spectacle into the account that helps expose Velutha to state violence.

The episode’s force lies in the gap between what is seen and what is later made to count. The crowd sees a woman compelled to wave a red flag and laughs; Baby Kochamma later recasts the march as evidence of Velutha’s insolence and danger. Her private memory becomes part of an official report, while Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s omissions leave the accusation uncontested. A forced slogan becomes more than a moment of embarrassment: it is the first visible turn in a process by which humiliation is displaced, a false story gains institutional authority, and Velutha is left without protection.