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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Essay |
Clashing by Night
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| An epic new Tamil novel by a leading chronicler of subaltern lives |
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Published : 1 February 2012 |
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HARSHO MOHAN CHATTORAJ FOR THE CARAVAN |
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ARLY ONE MORNING towards the end of November, I arrived in Kovilpatti, a small but bustling industrial town in southern Tamil Nadu with a population of about 100,000. Kovilpatti presents the ramshackle look typical of most mofussil towns in South India, lately dotted with markers of skewed economic prosperity and immoderate consumption: fancy lodges, |
automobile showrooms, tourist taxis lining the streets, private hospitals and well-stocked pharmacies. This industrial town, which has a long tradition of producing textiles, matchboxes and firecrackers, is located in the middle of a vast tract of black soil—known as karisal bhoomi—spread across Tirunelveli, Ramanathapuram and Thoothukudi districts. Its rainfed agriculture supports cultivation of millets rather than paddy, and is vulnerable to periodic droughts and, on occasion, famine. Apart from its proximity to Madurai (100 km), Tirunelveli (55 km) and the port city of Thoothukudi (60 km), Kovilpatti is close to all the other centres of historical significance in karisal bhoomi: Ettayapuram, Kazhugumalai, Sivakasi, Srivilliputhur and Sankarankovil.
I take an autorickshaw to the bus stand, barely a kilometre away, and check into a lodge nearby. After a simple breakfast at the restaurant downstairs, I study my notes as I wait. My visitor arrives precisely at 10 am, a frail-looking, bespectacled man in his mid-60s, wearing an open smile behind his moustache. This is Poomani (formal name: Pooliththurai Manickavasagam), eminent Tamil writer from Kovilpatti, whose masterly 1,200-page historical novel, Agnaadi, set in his karisal bhoomi and dealing with the caste conflicts the land has witnessed over the past two centuries, is to be published soon. I have spent most of the previous two months reading a prepublication electronic copy of the novel’s manuscript, as well as his other two landmark novels, Piragu (Later) and Vekkai (Heat). With a steady output of critically acclaimed work over the past 40 years—five previous novels and more than 50 short stories—Poomani has established himself as the leading chronicler of subaltern lives in contemporary Tamil literature. But it is the scope and ambition of his latest work, and its potential to illuminate the dark corners of our recent history, that has brought me to Kovilpatti. What went into the construction of Agnaadi: a history of the inhabitants of this region spanning a period of 200 years and more, recreated through a novelist’s imagination and rendered in the language of fiction?
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ODERN INDIAN LITERATURE boasts of several important historical novels. Qurratulain Hyder’s Urdu novel, Aag ka Darya, published in English as River of Fire (1998), is one. It deals with all the signifiers of the history of the Indian subcontinent—Vedantic India, the arrival of the Muslims, colonialism and Partition. Sunil Gangopadhyay’s celebrated |
Bengali novel, Shei Shomoy, published in English as Those Days (1997), explored an important phase (1840-60) of the Bengal Renaissance and the contributions made by major historical characters of that period. It is said to have shattered many myths and traditional notions held as true by the people of contemporary Bengal.
Outstanding historical novels from South India include Masti Venkatesha Iyengar’s Chikkaveera Rajendra, published in English under the same title (1992), which describes the reign, commencing from 1820, of the last king of Kodagu (Coorg) and ends with his defeat by the British and consequent exile in 1834; and Thakazhi Sivasankaran Pillai’s Malayalam masterpiece, Kayar, published in English as Coir (1997), a historical saga that deals with the period 1885-1971, during which Kerala society underwent profound changes on the social, cultural and economic fronts.
The historical novel in Tamil has its roots in the discovery and publication of a trove of ancient literary texts in the early decades of the past century. During the period 1880-1930, many long-forgotten works of classical Tamil literature were unearthed from all over Tamil Nadu and published for the first time, an achievement largely credited to the untiring efforts of one scholar and researcher, Dr U Ve Swaminatha Iyer (1855-1942). Among these works are the now internationally well-known classics of Sangam literature: Cilappatikaram, Manimekalai, Akananooru and Purananooru. The rediscovery of these literary texts, which mirrored the lives of Tamils in the ancient period, gave Tamils a proud sense of their heritage. This vivid and new-fangled impression of a glorious past with kings and queens found its way into popular fiction in the 1920s, with the advent of weekly magazines designed for mass circulation. The outcome was the historical-novel-as-entertainment genre, which involved no more than a fanciful reconstruction of a remote past, in prose that mimicked a now defunct classical tenor, and peopled with characters who were unconstrained by the complex demands of realist narration. The works of ‘Kalki’ Ra Krishnamurthy during the 1930s and 1940s—Ponniyin Selvan, Sivagamiyin Sabadham and others—and later, the novels of Bhashyam ‘Sandilyan’ Iyengar—also serialised in weekly magazines, like Kalki’s—exemplify this genre.
That all the Indian writers mentioned above belong to the upper castes or higher echelons of society is not a coincidence. The upper castes were the chief beneficiaries of higher education during the British Raj and the early post-Independence period. Their works were eventually seen as being slanted by limited experience and narrow vision. This is similar to the way in which the elitist bias allegedly implicit in the works of white male writers has on occasion led to a revisionist view of their presentations, no matter how highly regarded these works have been as literature. The perspective on blacks in the American South advanced in the works of William Faulkner, Nobel Laureate and a writer revered as an American Master, was challenged bitterly by African Americans in the 1970s and 1980s. During the same period, portrayal by William Styron, in his The Confessions of Nat Turner, of the brutal conduct of rebellious black slaves was similarly censured as inaccurate and even defamatory by literary scholars of the black community. Closer home, the Kodava community was reportedly displeased with the negative portrayal of their last king, Chikka Virarajendra, in Masti’s classic novel.
Concurrent with the initiative towards subaltern histories in the late 1970s, when a group of South Asian scholars got together under the rubric of the Subaltern Studies Collective to formulate a new narrative of the history of India and South Asia, was the coming of age in Tamil Nadu of a generation of writers from the hitherto oppressed castes, nourished by the educational opportunities available to them following Independence and fired by the urge to tell their own stories for the first time. This was a watershed moment in the development of modern Tamil literature. Modernist writing in Tamil had begun in the 1930s with Pudumaipithan and the group of writers behind the literary magazine Manikodi. Thus commenced a significant period when the great themes of modernity—the collapse of traditional mores, loneliness and alienation of the individual, social transformation in the wake of industrialisation and urbanisation, moral conflicts in a rapidly changing society—were dealt with in prose fiction, a practice which flourished for the next 40 years. Inevitably, the inspiration for such fiction came from the western canon—from Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola to Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. In the 1940s, a variety of proletarian fiction, based on the principles of ‘socialist realism’, also came to be written and published, mostly in magazines with strong ties to trade unions and the communist movement. In the first two decades after Independence, both streams combined to establish a robust literary culture for Tamils of the modern age. However, the literature they produced was based more on ideas than on the wider social reality of the time. Further, in a land where several groups of people spoke their own dialects, the formalised languages of prose fiction, forged mainly by the educated upper castes, served to exclude vast sections of the people from participating in their own literature.
The new crop of Tamil writers from the rural and disadvantaged sections of society who emerged on the scene in the 1970s was well read, keenly observant and confident in its literary abilities. The (socialist) realism of their forbears gave way to naturalist writing of a very high order, presenting characters who had remained hidden till then and whose stories had never been told. These writers expanded the scope of contemporary Tamil literature in unprecedented ways, resulting in a steady output of novels and short stories about people at the bottom rungs of society. Poomani was a pioneer of this new trend. In the next three decades, he was followed by two generations of writers from the subaltern castes. His Piragu (Later), first published in 1979, is considered a landmark work, the first novel-length treatment of the life of a lower-caste man, a cobbler, as the living centre of his own life and family, locating him inextricably in the village community that he serves with lifelong dedication.
The next innovation was to tell the multi-generational saga of a community from the early years of the 20th century. The first such novel in Tamil was Neela Padmanabhan’s Thalaimuraigal, published in English as Generations (1972), which relies heavily on oral history and the author’s own experience to portray the lives of four generations of Chetti women in a village near Kanyakumari. The injustices suffered by women in a patriarchal society and the incipient struggle for redress form the main themes of the novel. The narrative is rendered in the regional dialect (vattara mozhi) spoken by the community. The author has said in a recent interview, “I tried to recapture in it the shadowy presence of my great grandparents and others from the depths of my psyche. Family background, rituals, rhythm, myths, beliefs, rural games and songs of children while playing in the street, and other boyhood experiences, conversations and thinking style, ie specific features of the colloquial expressions of the language (slang) of characters—all these I could recapture in it.”
Prapanchan’s Manudam Vellum (roughly, ‘Humanity Shall Triumph’) is recognised as the first historical novel in Tamil based on recorded history. Published in 1990, Prapanchan’s novel is a skilful recreation of a particular phase (1730-60) in the history of the French colony of Pondicherry, especially the shifting alliance of the French Governor Joseph François Dupleix with the Nawab of Carnatic, Chanda Sahib, and the conflict with the armies of the Maratha king of Thanjavur. Based largely on the diaries of Anandarangam Pillai (1709-61), a close aide of Governor Dupleix, the novel is told through the eyes of the common people of the time. Although several critics considered the novel’s structure to be unwieldy, with too many subplots—always a hazard in building a narrative out of a profusion of historical information—Prapanchan’s achievement is considered remarkable.
A third major novel which tells the multi-generational story of a community and the world around it is Joe D’Cruz’s Aazhi Soozh Ulagu (2005), roughly, ‘Ocean-ringed Earth’. D’Cruz writes about a fishing community in a village north of Thoothukudi. Told from the perspective of ordinary fisherfolk and in their own language, the novel depicts all facets of life in the village, especially their daily encounters with death on the high seas. D’Cruz also brings to light a highly developed vocabulary of nautical terms which is still in use. As writer Jeyamohan has pointed out, this was the first time in the history of modern Tamil literature that land was described as it looked from the sea. Although major historical incidents mark the narrative, it is largely an imagined story, unconstrained by research into specific events.
A milestone in the writing of research-based historical novels was achieved with Su Venkatesan’s Kaval Kottam (2008, roughly ‘Watchtower’), a narrative that dealt with the ruling dynasties of Madurai and the community of Kallars, who were responsible for the security of the Madurai fort during the 17th and 18th centuries, and were eventually vilified and punished by the British administration after the destruction of the fort by the British resident. Although the novel, which earned its author a Sahitya Akademi award in 2011, was lauded for bringing into public view for the first time the violent history of the Kallars and the oppression suffered by them, Kaval Kottam was seen by some critics as flawed in its less than skilled handling of historical information. Based largely on secondary research, the narrative is crammed with anthropological and other recorded information which is often inadequately woven into an imagined narrative, a shortcoming that is perhaps understandable for a first-time novelist and a researcher who published eight works of nonfiction before attempting to write a 1,000-page historical novel.
Whether research-based or purely imagined, all these historical novels have one thing in common: the lives they describe are lived out within a rigid framework of caste, socially bound and culturally delimited. They are typically histories of a single caste group. Up until the middle of the 20th century, when metropolitan life came to the Tamil nation, caste determined everything in life—occupation, shelter, income, station, kinship, social privilege (or vulnerability) and collective survival. Caste is mostly absent, perhaps through conscious exclusion, from the secular modernist narratives of contemporary India. It may well be that a prominent feature of our social reality is elided from what we recognise as our story.
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OST-INDEPENDENCE, the small town of Kovilpatti has spawned a host of important writers who have created and sustained a vibrant movement in modern Tamil literature: to write the story of a land—karisal boomi—and its people. It was the venerable Ki Rajanarayanan from Kovilpatti who blazed a new trail in the late 1960s with his Gopallapuram |
(1968), the story of a community of Telugu-speaking people who migrated south to escape Muslim rule and transformed a patch of barren land into a fertile, verdant village. The period depicted in the novel was the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when a Naicker dynasty ruled from Madurai. KiRa, as he is known, wove folklore, culture, traditional beliefs, sexual mores, landscape, and the region’s flora and fauna into a pathbreaking narrative of the community’s trials and tribulations, and rendered in dialects spoken by various groups in the region. It could be said that the movement towards a more representative, socially inclusive literature in Tamil began with KiRa and Gopallapuram.
Poomani was born in 1947 into a Pallar family of marginal farmers in Andipatti, a village near Kovilpatti. Enchanted by the stories he heard from his mother and the literary fiction he read during his childhood and teenage years, Poomani, the young adult, decided to take up the writer’s vocation, determined to tell the stories of the people he saw around him. In his struggle to find a way to tell those stories, he saw in KiRa’s work a possible model. According to Poomani, the senior writer combined in his writing “the scent of the soil with the natural flow of life’s energies to enable the writing to develop its own traits, instead of borrowing from other models”. He understood that KiRa used a well-crafted narrative language that brought real life closer to literary fiction. Poomani learnt from KiRa that the language of a creative work must be created alongside.
Another novel that influenced Poomani was P Kesava Dev’s Malayalam novel, Ayalkar, published in English as The Neighbours (1979). Kesava Dev’s chronicle of the evolution of the three major communities in Kerala—Nairs, Christians and Ezhavas—over a period of 50 years—from the times of feudalism to the rise of the new era—is considered his masterpiece. Poomani found in Ayalkar a worthy model: “It is a strong story, told with an aesthetic narrative style and keen imagination. The imagination adds lustre to the nature of the story, instead of dominating it. Changes and values arise anew on their own. The narration brings many things alive for the reader, carries him to the terrain of the story and stands him there. It makes him walk alongside, cry and laugh. When everything is wrapped up at the end, it makes him think.”
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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ponraj
17 April 2012
07:01 PM
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Very good noval,but he is breathing only Tamil,tamil,tamil.He is living more than hundred years.I pray all Temple.given to more power in kaarisal poomi.
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k.ellappan
21 February 2012
08:09 PM
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This article is fine. I want to get the book, read and know in depth the history as well as the narrative ability of the author POOMANI.
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V.Srinivasan. Retd.DR
18 February 2012
09:32 AM
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This monumental work by Poomani deserves a Gnanapet award since the materials for the narration are not merely imaginative but based on documentary proofs covering near about 200 years.
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