When Perumal Murugan said ' Author Perumal Murugan has died'

If you don't already know, what's been happening with Tamil writer Perumal Murugan, here are a bunch of articles to provide context - not just with that particular article, but all the other articles and the section titled 'Key Developments'.

Today, Perumal Murugan was forced to sign an agreement with, I think, four differen organisations we can safely call 'Hindu', and this is what he has said:

This is tragic; not just because when there are immoderate, impulsive outpourings of support for a magazine none of us has read half a world away, none of the few voices raised since the end of December was loud enough or carried enough clout to make a difference to his leaving Tiruchengode, or to avert this disastrous silencing; but also because we have no right to demand Murugan's bravery, to ask that he be resolute in the face of threats to his life. If the author has to die for him to live, who are we to say he must not?

Anyway.

I'm just putting this out there because I've spent all day so upset about this. 

Some measure of - I don't know what - was achieved by listening to David Shulman talking about the concept of truth in the Kambaramayanam. It seemed to speak down the centuries to what has happened today. But I don't yet know how to put all of that into a clear post. All I know is that scholarly expositions of what appear to be abstractions have real, political context and resonance and I was glad to have it, to think upon and find a way to understand what I feel about this whole thing, which is different to how I felt about it this morning.

Until then, here it is, this silence, a grammar of which Shulman promises to write one day.

Sundara Ramaswamy: No Longer At Ease

My essay on Sundara Ramaswamy appeared in Mint last week. All through the time I was reading Waves and Children, Women, Men, I made copious notes and wanted to include so much more than I was able to - even though it was rather a generous word count.

I wanted to quote entire passages from the the novel: Lacham play-acting an entire meal as head cook, conversations between people, observations made in passing. I wanted to talk about how Children, Women, Men is really historical fiction in the best way - in the detailing of a world that no longer exists but is so readily recognisable for someone of a particular age. Or the little nugget that SuRaa was derailed in the middle of writing the novel by a character who appears in it, who demands all his time so that he later becomes the protagonist of JJ: Some Jottings (Children, Women, Men was completed much later).

But alas, none of that was possible and I've done the best I could when I wanted to say much more than I could.

**

Sukanya said that Sridaran often mentioned the word ‘modern’. What an attractive word! Dreams and visions swirled around it. ‘However hard we try and think, our brains won’t catch the sense of it exactly, Ramani. We must go and live in London to understand what it means,’ said Sukanya.

–       Children, Women, Men. Ch. 73.

Sundara Ramaswamy died in 2005, leaving behind him a body of work that included three novels, several short stories, some poems (written under the pen name ‘Pasuvayya’) and translations into Tamil of the work of Malayalam writer Takazhi Sivasankara Pillai. He also published and edited the Tamil literary journal Kalachuvadu that has carried the works of new and established writers over the years.

Su Raa, as he is popularly known, was greatly influenced by the work of the writer Pudumaipittan (whose collected works the Kalachuvadu Trusts edited and published in 2000). His early stories, such as ‘Heifer’ and ‘Sita Brand Soap Nut Powder’ had the kind of direct language and sharp observations about people and society that Pudumaipittan and other progressive writers of the early 20^th century thought necessary, in order to resuscitate Tamil literature from its excessive formality.

In time, Su Raa, as he was popularly known, distanced himself from the writers of the left and began to publish in some of the many little magazines that had sprung up in Tamil Nadu. The two books under review here give the reader a flavour of the range of Su Raa’s work: Waves is a selection of his stories and Children, Women, Men is his last published novel (1998).

Su Raa stories were written in two distinct phases: pre-1966 and after 1973. In her Introduction, Lakshmi Holmström, who has translated some of these stories, mentions this gap of six years in Su Raa’s story writing, but does not say why he wrote no stories in these years, what other writing those years were occupied with and why his stories are so remarkably different in the years after ’73.

In the absence of biographical context, it is up to the reader to plunge into the stories and experience them without the filter of literary exposition. This is not at all a bad thing: the difference in style and content between stories such as ‘Heifer’, ‘Sita Brand Soapnut Powder’ and ‘Prasadam’ on the one hand and ‘Essences’, ‘The Hollow’ and ‘Waves’ on the other, are self-evident. The earlier stories are sharply delineated studies of character and social situations, written with a characteristic humour and fondness for the people they represent. The later stories, on the other hand, are more surreal, allusive and dream-like. They often end abruptly and far away from they seemed to be headed. These stories are narratives of states of mind that one comprehends instantly and entirely but has to later reach to understand.

In Children, Women, Men, several characters experience a sense of unease and a loss of identity in the rapidly changing social milieu of pre-Independence Kottayam. SRS, the patriarch of the main family in the novel, refuses to attend the death anniversary – the ‘thivasam’ – of his father, seeing it as meaningless ritual. Other characters rebel in their own particular ways: Chellappa urges the widowed Anandam to come away with him; Sridaran wants to marry Valli, without regard to caste or generational taboos; Savitri is corrosively honest in her periods of ‘mental illness’; Balu, SRS’s son, is unable to rebel and develops a kind of fear that is best described by the German word angst.

Valli looks at her face in a cracked mirror and at once the sense of divided self that everyone experiences in their own ways is made literal. Such a dislocation is not just symbolic but also linguistic. Virudan Sankunni the postman says, ‘Once you learnt English, you never understood other people’s misfortunes.’ Balu, hiding in the store room, later watches Valli and Ramani return from their convent school and thinks, ‘They were laughing English laughter.’

None of these characters need to live in London to experience what modernity brings in its wake: as in post-WWI Europe, so in Travancore State in 1937-39.

The narrator of the short story ‘Crows’ wants desperately to belong to the world of crows:

Whenever I told the older crows, ‘I am a poet as well,’ they looked at me with a little smile. It seemed to me that they said, ‘That is really not very important to us.’ It struck me as perfectly fair that as long as I took no notice of the poetry of their world, they were at liberty to ignore the poetry of mine.

Bridging the language barrier often seems as arduous a task as understanding another species without the benefit of a common language or mode of thought. Su Raa was trilingual: in addition to English, he read and spoke Malayalam with ease and learnt to read and write Tamil when he was young (though, as a Tamil Brahmin he always spoke it). In his second novel, JJ: Some Jottings (Crea-A, 1981. Trans. A.R.Venkatachalapathy, Katha, 2004), Su Raa uses the life of a fictional writer, JJ, to write a post-modern satire of Tamil and Malayalam literary movements and debates. A character in JJ says, ‘We speak of Kafka. Of Simone de Beauvoir. Of Borges. But we do not know of Kuttikrishna Marar. We do not know of Gopalakrishna Adiga. How's that?’

It is a familiar complaint and not an unjustified one – it is true that a generation that is most comfortable speaking English, though it has not completely lost its ability to speak or write another Indian language, tends to be more familiar with writers from the west rather than writers of other Indian languages. Books such as Waves and Children, Women, Men help in tilting the scale towards a literature that ought to be more familiar than it is. Perhaps the riches these translations promise can even be an inducement to readers to begin reading in languages other than English.

Review: Wild Girls Wicked Words

This short review appeared in Mint last week. I've had massive power outages and connectivity problems, so haven't posted this until now.

I really should write or keep the longer versions of reviews to put on the blog. I had a lot more to say about this book, but I edited it down and didn't keep the longer review.

*

Wild Girls Wicked Words: Poems of Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi & Sukirtharani

Edited & Translated by Lakshmi Holmström

Kalachuvadu Publications [Sangam House]. Rs. 295. Pp: 230

Every year, around 8 March the world sketches a tribute to women. Each year the gestures seem more hollow and meaningless, a gimmick to sell anything from facials and makeovers to health-checks and insurance. At least since the Delhi rape, it has become clear that far from achieving equality, women in India face even more challenges than the popular narrative would have us believe.

A whole decade ago in Tamil Nadu, there was widespread outrage in literary circles at the publication of Kutti Revathi’s book of poems, Mulaigal (Breasts). Around the same time, other women poets, Malathi Maithri, Salma and Sukirtharani were also publishing poems that spoke about the bodies and desires of women and about wanting a space to call their own. Whatever pious noises about violence against women we are hearing now, things were different in 2003. Back then, these women received death threats and, as Lakshmi Holmström recounts in the introduction to this volume, one film lyricist even said they “should be lined up on Mount Road in Chennai, doused with kerosene oil and burnt alive.”

Ah, that trusty debating strategy used by men in times of social upheaval: kerosene (See also: acid).

That these women continued to write undeterred by threats says much more for their individual courage and perseverance than it does for society as a whole. In the decade since, each of these four women have published more collections of poems and have continued to write about whatever they wanted to, regardless of the compulsions of their private or public lives.

Wild Girls Wicked Words, translated and edited by Holmström, ironically references the indignation of the literary establishment in Tamil Nadu. It is a bilingual collection of selected poems that, while still being appetisers, are substantial enough to give the reader an idea of the kind of poetry these women write, with biographical notes to provide context.

The poems are about the things you might expect – the bodies of women, the relationship of women with their lovers, their children; and about landscape, so intimately tied to the idea of poetry in Tamil literature since the earliest Sangam poetry. But the originality of the ideas and images and tonal variety give these poems depth and edge, making one pause often to absorb and re-read a line.

The first poem, ‘She who threads the skies’ by Malathi Maithri, begins thus: “As the sky fills/the empty shell/after a bird has hatched,/ so desire fills everything.”

These women are unafraid both of desire and of declaring it. “I watched over them in amazement”, Kutti Revathi says simply in her poem ‘Breasts’. In another poem about meeting her lover, she invokes one of Sangam poetry’s most famous lines: “red earth and pouring rain”.

Indeed, for all the contemporary cadences of their poetry, these poets are often in dialogue with the tradition of Tamil poetry; sometimes, as in Malathi’s or Sukirtharani’s poems, they are sardonic; but these poets see themselves as writers who are intimately tied to both place and language. Unsurprisingly, therefore, a portion of the poems in this collection are about Sri Lanka and more specifically about the civil war. These poems are poignant and anguished but are never mere harangues.

Sukirtharani’s poetry is perhaps the most stark and angry of the four, standing as it does at the intersection of Dalit and feminist writing. In her poem ‘Translating her’, she says:

They ask me what the song means/ prying, eager, as if checking out/ the sex of a newly born./ I translate her poverty/  the hunger she eats,/  the hunger she expels

Salma’s experiences as a Muslim, a woman writing in secret and wanting to explore both solitude and selfhood (thanimai/thanmai) are better known via her novel The Hour Past Midnight, which takes its title from the poem ‘A midnight tale’, collected here. Images of confinement act as counterpoint to the imagined peace of a simple solitude. But sitting at the edges of domesticity is a chilling truth:

In this universe/ there may be many creatures/ alone with their prey/ living amicably together/ leading pleasant lives. (‘An evening, another evening’)

‘Language must be redeemed from the grave of its own inadequacy’, declared Malathi Maithri in 2001. This collection demonstrates that this is being done, both with passion and craft.

Manasellaam maargazhi thaan, kanavellaam kaarthigai thaan

On the cusp of the two months - Karthikai (for a lovely lovely description of which, read Raja Rao's Kanthapura) and Margazhi - I thought of these lines from the song 'Nenjam Ellam' (Mani Ratnam's Ayutha Ezhuthu).

Lyrics by Vairamuthu. Someone competent please translate: Veena? BM? Rahul? Vivek?

Kaadhal ennai varudum poadhum
Un kaamam ennai thirudum poadhum
En manasellaam maargazhi thaan
En kanavellaam kaarthigaithaan
En vaanam en vaasal thirandhu
En bhoomi en vasathil illai
Un kuraikal naan ariyavillai
Naan arindhaal sooriyanil suththamillai

Festive Restive

I lay in bed at 6am listening to my mother in the kitchen. Feeling pressured by all this excessive energy early in the morning, I got up. The smell of roasted rice and dal greeted me halfway down the stairs. But before I could reach the kitchen, my mother had disappeared somewhere.

Every available surface on the kitchen was occupied by cut vegetables and ingredients for pongal. The coffee was relegated to some corner and much effort had to be made to heat up some milk. The pongapanai was all decorated, with fresh haldi - leaves and root - and chandana-kungumam and all. If my mother was not busy in the kitchen, it meant she was doing some competition entry type kolam outside.

Sigh.

Can someone tell me why this business of varying the tedium of our days and celebrating every minor shift in the skies falls to the women? I mean, most of these festivals seem to be about eating different kinds of food not available during the rest of the year (with good reason. I mean, try making some of these things every day of the year) or waking up at the crack of dawn to stare at each others' very familiar faces in a different light, and somehow drumming up enough enthusiasm in the middle of wanting to murder somebody for making you lose sleep.

But coming back to the women question - seriously. Name one festival that requires the men to do most of the work: the cooking, decorating, feeding and cleaning up. No, don't talk to me about Rakhi: it's the women who fast until they manage to tie a little bit of thread around some fellow's wrist.

As for me, my idea of a festival is one that celebrates not having to wake up early and cram a days' worth of activity into the first two hours. But Pongal I remember with especial fondness: in Delhi during the old-style film festivals - the one that used to run from the 10th to the 20th of every other January - I remember some young men from Madras shivering in the wet and cold January morning, shouting pongal-o-pongal! to each other in their thin, miserable voices. Lines of people waiting to go in to the warm theatre looked at them curiously and wondered what all this waving of leaves and festive looking pots were about. Ah schadenfreude!



Happy Pongal, everyone. I suppose.