Introduction
Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi, born in 1924 in a hamlet of Thanjavur in the Southern part of India, has eminently succeeded in making spectacular contributions both as a statesman and as a man of letters. His has been a full life providing ample space for diplomacy, social reformation and creative writing. Neither a philosopher nor a full-fledged academic living in an ivory tower, he has the courage and the wisdom to think and to act remarkably. A prolific writer endowed with unusual powers of observation and meditation, he has been ceaselessly adorning his beloved Mother Tamil with a steady stream of writings, leaving no genre untouched. It may be poetry or prose, song or verse, essay or story, play or fiction, social novel or historical novel, creative writing or criticism, memoir or autobiography, script for a film or a play, broadcast or speech – he can handle it with astonishing ease. What he has written till today may run to more than fifty volumes of 300 to 400 pages each.
What Karunanidhi states in the first volume of his autobiography about the year in which he was born is a telling comment on the ethos of the times as well as on the political, social and cultural forces that moulded his worldview. That was a year that witnessed momentous events. Lenin, the supreme architect of the communist revolution in Russia, died and Stalin came to power. Trostsky’s advocacy of violent worldwide revolution was abandoned in favour of Stalin’s plan for “Socialism in one country” and the communist leaders decided to adapt the movement to the differing situations in various countries. Turkey became a republic under the presidentship of Kemal Ataturk during whose fifteen – year reign, the country’s political and economic structure as well as its religious and social bases were totally transformed. Adolf Hitler’s Mein-Kampf, written during his incarceration in Bavaria, preaching anti-semitism, power worship and disdain for morality and outlining his strategy for world domination later became the bible of the Nazi Party. Since all the empires had been weakened by the first world war, many colonies boldly rose in revolt against them.
When Nazism, Fascism and Communism were becoming prominent in the West, Gandhian ideology started taking shape in India. It was in 1924 that Gandhiji, released from prison, became the President of the Indian National Congress and Jawarharlal Nehru was elected its General Secretary. India had awakened from its deep slumber and Gandhiji’s appearance on the political scene electrified the Indian masses. The Belgaum Congress meet had the party’s future course of action mapped out. Though most of the Indian political leaders were unanimous in their view that the British should be driven away from the country, they were hopelessly divided with regard to the strategies to be developed for dealing with the foreign power. The labour unions in the country were gradually becoming stronger and stronger. The feudal lords and Zamindars were waging a losing battle against the tillers of the soil. If in the south seeds were sown for organized fights for social justice, in the north there appeared signs of disruption of communal harmony.
It was in 1924 that Periyar E.V.Ramasami planned an epic battle against the evil of untouchability that later earned him the title of Vaikkam Hero. Besides laying a firm foundation for the labour movement in Tamilnadu, Thiru.Vi.Kalyanasundara Mudaliyar became a fierce fighter for the country’s freedom. Finally, Karunanidhi significantly adds that it was the year in which “the revolutionary of revolutionaries, who dispelled the thousand year old darkness of the Tamil land,” Arignar Anna, was a high school student equipping himself for the historic role he was going to play.
In his chronicle he is able to identify, of course with the benefit of hindsight, the intellectuals and men of action who later became his models as well as those against whom he had to define himself. Though all those personalities, movements, parties and ideologies might have attracted his attention at an impressionable age, he was going to choose Periyar and not Gandhiji, Arignar Anna and not Jawarharlal Nehru, the party wedded to Dravidan ideals and not the Congress, Periyar’s Marxism and not Nehruvian socialism, Tamil Nadu and not India. To him, as to his guides and companions in the Dravidian Movement, the social and cultural emanicipation of the Dravidians was of greater importance than even the political freedom of the country.
Even as a fourteen year old adolescent, Karunanidhi was captivated by the self respect movement of Periyar E.V.Ramasami, whose fiery speeches and writings exerted an irresistible influence on several thousands of young men and women of Tamilnadu during the early decades of the twentieth century. To the politically, socially, economically and culturally oppressed of the Tamil land, Periyar appeared as a new messiah who could save them from the atrocities perpetrated against them in the name of religion. His words and deeds, ideas and activities, principles and practices took the southern part of India by storm as he travelled the length and breadth of it tirelessly, asking the Dravidians to become aware of their racial identity and to boldly fight for their release from the shackles of slavery, superstition and inferiority complex which, in his view, had been the handiwork of an alien race. The young Karunanidhi was one of his prize catches.
If Periyar’s thoughts made an indelible impression on him, Arignar Anna’s powerful oratory became a perennial source of inspiration. He thoroughly soaked himself in Anna’s speeches and writings, committed numerous admirable utterances of his to memory and revelled in quoting them as often as possible. When it came to his own speeches, he didn’t slavishly imitate Anna but scrupulously developed a distinct style of his own. If Anna’s ornate and colourful prose is almost verse and if every paragraph of his can be turned into a viruttappa by a few slight modifications. Karunanidhi’s prose is punchy, heavily ironic and full of witticisms. If every sentence in the former’s speech, having a lyrical charm of its own, is a case of “linked sweetness long drawn out,” every sentence in the latter’s speech moves fast and quickly reaches its carefully planned climax. If Anna’s mastery of Tamil Prose is almost unsurpassed, every speech of Karunanidhi is a sparkling performance. One would be reminded of the comparison Dryden draws between Demosthenes and Cicero:
One warms you by degrees; the other sets you on
fire all at once and never intermits his heat …
One persuades, the other commands.
Of all the modern poets, it was Bharatidasan, the organ voice of the Dravidian movement, who won his heart by a poetry that galvanized the Tamils into action. He can use Bharatidasan’s similes, lines and whole poems to dramatic effect in his own speeches and dialogues for films. Inspired by Bharatidasan’s play Iraniyan allatu Inaiyarra Viran, he reconstructed the myths relating to Ravana, Vali, Hiranya and Indrajit. The Dravidian stance on many more legends, myths, literary representations and historical personages was later exquisitely articulated by Karunanidhi in different genres and modes.
Kalaignar’s lack of college education or of classroom learning of ancient Tamil writings never stood in the way of his becoming an accomplished writer and competing with the university wits of his time. Energetic and strenuous selfschooling more than made up for it. Plunging into studies of classical and modern Tamil works, he got as much out of them as any contemporary Tamil scholar could. He took to Tolkappiyam, Tirukkural, Ettuttokai, Pattuppattu, Cilappatikaram, Manimekalai, Kalinkattuparani and Sundaranar’s Manonmaniyam just as fish take to water, and a sound knowledge of these stood him in good stead by shaping his vision of life and having quite an impact on the texture of his prose and poetry. Besides writing learned expositions of some of these texts, he could provide new renderings of many of these into lucid modern Tamil so that they could easily reach the masses. Because of his re-presentations of Tirukkural in more than one form, Tiruvalluvar became a household name in Tamilnadu.
There is no simple yardstick with which the performance of any writer can be assessed. It has to vary from group to group if not from individual to individual for there are writers and writers. Their missions vary; their methods differ. Gandhiji was a prolific writer but would never claim the title of an artist. Among those that have produced many works of lasting value, there have been political revolutionaries such as Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao Tse-Tung, political theorists such as Hobbes, Thomas Paine, and Karl Marx, statesmen such as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Malraux, philosophers such as Voltaire, Bertrand Russell and Sartre, activists such as Mahatma Gandhi, Periyar E.V.Ramasami and Martin Luther King and scientists such as Charles Darwin, Julian Huxley and Einstein. The writings of these can not be measured against those of creative artists such as Flaubert, Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot, who firmly believed that artistry was of primary importance and that their loyalty to language came before everything else.
Karunanidhi is almost equally split between his responsibilities to art and politics. He may be in or out of power, he may be the Chief Minister of Tamilnadu or the Leader of the Opposition but his creative vigour shows no signs of abating. The older he grows, the more voluminous the literary output happens to be. For the life, career and achievement of Karunanidhi, we can find three amazingly close parallels in contemporary world history; Arthur Koestler, Pablo Neruda and Wole Soyinka. Koestler, who, interestingly begins his autobiography with an account of what happened in different parts of the world on his birthday, was a communist when he was in his twenties, left the party during the Stalin purge trials, became an influential spokesman of the non-communist left and is now remembered for his writings characterized by an impressive journalistic style and a sense of commitment. Neruda earned a name as a poet, diplomat and communist leader, received the Nobel Prize for literature while serving as ambassador to France and is known for his highly personal poetry in the collection Twenty Love Poems and One Song of Despair and for his writings that glorify his home country’s landscape and condemn the exploitation of the Red Indians. Soyinka, a Nigerian revolutionary, playwright, poet and novelist, has won international acclaim for his writings which combine Western and Yoruba traditions.
Karunanidhi’s writings, dashed off in the white heat of inspiration in the midst of a hectic schedule, are in Tamil, at once a classical and modern language that has, because of several centuries of constant use, become a supple medium of prose and verse. They have to be made available in English if the world at large, especially the West, has to recognize their power and glory.
Prof . P. Marudanayagam
Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi, born in 1924 in a hamlet of Thanjavur in the Southern part of India, has eminently succeeded in making spectacular contributions both as a statesman and as a man of letters. His has been a full life providing ample space for diplomacy, social reformation and creative writing. Neither a philosopher nor a full-fledged academic living in an ivory tower, he has the courage and the wisdom to think and to act remarkably. A prolific writer endowed with unusual powers of observation and meditation, he has been ceaselessly adorning his beloved Mother Tamil with a steady stream of writings, leaving no genre untouched. It may be poetry or prose, song or verse, essay or story, play or fiction, social novel or historical novel, creative writing or criticism, memoir or autobiography, script for a film or a play, broadcast or speech – he can handle it with astonishing ease. What he has written till today may run to more than fifty volumes of 300 to 400 pages each.
What Karunanidhi states in the first volume of his autobiography about the year in which he was born is a telling comment on the ethos of the times as well as on the political, social and cultural forces that moulded his worldview. That was a year that witnessed momentous events. Lenin, the supreme architect of the communist revolution in Russia, died and Stalin came to power. Trostsky’s advocacy of violent worldwide revolution was abandoned in favour of Stalin’s plan for “Socialism in one country” and the communist leaders decided to adapt the movement to the differing situations in various countries. Turkey became a republic under the presidentship of Kemal Ataturk during whose fifteen – year reign, the country’s political and economic structure as well as its religious and social bases were totally transformed. Adolf Hitler’s Mein-Kampf, written during his incarceration in Bavaria, preaching anti-semitism, power worship and disdain for morality and outlining his strategy for world domination later became the bible of the Nazi Party. Since all the empires had been weakened by the first world war, many colonies boldly rose in revolt against them.
When Nazism, Fascism and Communism were becoming prominent in the West, Gandhian ideology started taking shape in India. It was in 1924 that Gandhiji, released from prison, became the President of the Indian National Congress and Jawarharlal Nehru was elected its General Secretary. India had awakened from its deep slumber and Gandhiji’s appearance on the political scene electrified the Indian masses. The Belgaum Congress meet had the party’s future course of action mapped out. Though most of the Indian political leaders were unanimous in their view that the British should be driven away from the country, they were hopelessly divided with regard to the strategies to be developed for dealing with the foreign power. The labour unions in the country were gradually becoming stronger and stronger. The feudal lords and Zamindars were waging a losing battle against the tillers of the soil. If in the south seeds were sown for organized fights for social justice, in the north there appeared signs of disruption of communal harmony.
It was in 1924 that Periyar E.V.Ramasami planned an epic battle against the evil of untouchability that later earned him the title of Vaikkam Hero. Besides laying a firm foundation for the labour movement in Tamilnadu, Thiru.Vi.Kalyanasundara Mudaliyar became a fierce fighter for the country’s freedom. Finally, Karunanidhi significantly adds that it was the year in which “the revolutionary of revolutionaries, who dispelled the thousand year old darkness of the Tamil land,” Arignar Anna, was a high school student equipping himself for the historic role he was going to play.
In his chronicle he is able to identify, of course with the benefit of hindsight, the intellectuals and men of action who later became his models as well as those against whom he had to define himself. Though all those personalities, movements, parties and ideologies might have attracted his attention at an impressionable age, he was going to choose Periyar and not Gandhiji, Arignar Anna and not Jawarharlal Nehru, the party wedded to Dravidan ideals and not the Congress, Periyar’s Marxism and not Nehruvian socialism, Tamil Nadu and not India. To him, as to his guides and companions in the Dravidian Movement, the social and cultural emanicipation of the Dravidians was of greater importance than even the political freedom of the country.
Even as a fourteen year old adolescent, Karunanidhi was captivated by the self respect movement of Periyar E.V.Ramasami, whose fiery speeches and writings exerted an irresistible influence on several thousands of young men and women of Tamilnadu during the early decades of the twentieth century. To the politically, socially, economically and culturally oppressed of the Tamil land, Periyar appeared as a new messiah who could save them from the atrocities perpetrated against them in the name of religion. His words and deeds, ideas and activities, principles and practices took the southern part of India by storm as he travelled the length and breadth of it tirelessly, asking the Dravidians to become aware of their racial identity and to boldly fight for their release from the shackles of slavery, superstition and inferiority complex which, in his view, had been the handiwork of an alien race. The young Karunanidhi was one of his prize catches.
If Periyar’s thoughts made an indelible impression on him, Arignar Anna’s powerful oratory became a perennial source of inspiration. He thoroughly soaked himself in Anna’s speeches and writings, committed numerous admirable utterances of his to memory and revelled in quoting them as often as possible. When it came to his own speeches, he didn’t slavishly imitate Anna but scrupulously developed a distinct style of his own. If Anna’s ornate and colourful prose is almost verse and if every paragraph of his can be turned into a viruttappa by a few slight modifications. Karunanidhi’s prose is punchy, heavily ironic and full of witticisms. If every sentence in the former’s speech, having a lyrical charm of its own, is a case of “linked sweetness long drawn out,” every sentence in the latter’s speech moves fast and quickly reaches its carefully planned climax. If Anna’s mastery of Tamil Prose is almost unsurpassed, every speech of Karunanidhi is a sparkling performance. One would be reminded of the comparison Dryden draws between Demosthenes and Cicero:
One warms you by degrees; the other sets you on
fire all at once and never intermits his heat …
One persuades, the other commands.
Of all the modern poets, it was Bharatidasan, the organ voice of the Dravidian movement, who won his heart by a poetry that galvanized the Tamils into action. He can use Bharatidasan’s similes, lines and whole poems to dramatic effect in his own speeches and dialogues for films. Inspired by Bharatidasan’s play Iraniyan allatu Inaiyarra Viran, he reconstructed the myths relating to Ravana, Vali, Hiranya and Indrajit. The Dravidian stance on many more legends, myths, literary representations and historical personages was later exquisitely articulated by Karunanidhi in different genres and modes.
Kalaignar’s lack of college education or of classroom learning of ancient Tamil writings never stood in the way of his becoming an accomplished writer and competing with the university wits of his time. Energetic and strenuous selfschooling more than made up for it. Plunging into studies of classical and modern Tamil works, he got as much out of them as any contemporary Tamil scholar could. He took to Tolkappiyam, Tirukkural, Ettuttokai, Pattuppattu, Cilappatikaram, Manimekalai, Kalinkattuparani and Sundaranar’s Manonmaniyam just as fish take to water, and a sound knowledge of these stood him in good stead by shaping his vision of life and having quite an impact on the texture of his prose and poetry. Besides writing learned expositions of some of these texts, he could provide new renderings of many of these into lucid modern Tamil so that they could easily reach the masses. Because of his re-presentations of Tirukkural in more than one form, Tiruvalluvar became a household name in Tamilnadu.
There is no simple yardstick with which the performance of any writer can be assessed. It has to vary from group to group if not from individual to individual for there are writers and writers. Their missions vary; their methods differ. Gandhiji was a prolific writer but would never claim the title of an artist. Among those that have produced many works of lasting value, there have been political revolutionaries such as Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao Tse-Tung, political theorists such as Hobbes, Thomas Paine, and Karl Marx, statesmen such as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Malraux, philosophers such as Voltaire, Bertrand Russell and Sartre, activists such as Mahatma Gandhi, Periyar E.V.Ramasami and Martin Luther King and scientists such as Charles Darwin, Julian Huxley and Einstein. The writings of these can not be measured against those of creative artists such as Flaubert, Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot, who firmly believed that artistry was of primary importance and that their loyalty to language came before everything else.
Karunanidhi is almost equally split between his responsibilities to art and politics. He may be in or out of power, he may be the Chief Minister of Tamilnadu or the Leader of the Opposition but his creative vigour shows no signs of abating. The older he grows, the more voluminous the literary output happens to be. For the life, career and achievement of Karunanidhi, we can find three amazingly close parallels in contemporary world history; Arthur Koestler, Pablo Neruda and Wole Soyinka. Koestler, who, interestingly begins his autobiography with an account of what happened in different parts of the world on his birthday, was a communist when he was in his twenties, left the party during the Stalin purge trials, became an influential spokesman of the non-communist left and is now remembered for his writings characterized by an impressive journalistic style and a sense of commitment. Neruda earned a name as a poet, diplomat and communist leader, received the Nobel Prize for literature while serving as ambassador to France and is known for his highly personal poetry in the collection Twenty Love Poems and One Song of Despair and for his writings that glorify his home country’s landscape and condemn the exploitation of the Red Indians. Soyinka, a Nigerian revolutionary, playwright, poet and novelist, has won international acclaim for his writings which combine Western and Yoruba traditions.
Karunanidhi’s writings, dashed off in the white heat of inspiration in the midst of a hectic schedule, are in Tamil, at once a classical and modern language that has, because of several centuries of constant use, become a supple medium of prose and verse. They have to be made available in English if the world at large, especially the West, has to recognize their power and glory.
Prof . P. Marudanayagam
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