The critics who accuse Karunanidhi and his fellow Tamil
poets of linguistic and ethnic chauvinism should know what happens elsewhere. Shakespeare was proclaimed as a symbol of British superiority as early as the nineteenth century even by the sober Wordsworth:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held; In everything we are sprung
Of earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.
The bard of Avon was presented as the most prized possession of the British by Carlyle in a famous utterance:
“Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakespeare!”
Report Brooke’s war sonnets proudly declared the unrivaled supremacy of England.
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.,....
And laughter, learnt of friends, and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Winston Churchill used the occasion of the poet’s death to reinforce a recruitment drive during the war:
The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable war sonnets which he has left behind will be shared by many thousands of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hardest, the cruelest and the least –rewarded of all the wars that men have fought. They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself. Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most pious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proferred.
Those who condemn Karunanidhis’ poetic effusions on the past achievements of the much maligned Dravidian race should care to find out what some of the top Jewish intellectuals, despite their Marxist leanings, started preaching in the last phase of their long career. Irving Layton, the most prolific of contemporary Canadian poets, in one of his early poems, claims that he had rooted out Jehovah from his heart, spurned Moses and his Tables of Law and torn up his father’s phylacteries in order to dedicate his life and poetry to the Marxist cause. But very soon in a collection called Fortunate Exile, he included poems that glorify the Jewish community, gloat over their incrediable achievements and resort to unrestrained attacks on Christians and Christianity. In “A Brief History of the Jews,” the proudest boast a Jew can think of, the Jews are presented as the custodians of human love while the rest of the world consists of ungrateful wretches. A short piece called “Ibn Gabriol” declares that philosophy, metaphysics and theology are the monopoly of the Jews whereas all the non-jews are louts, murderers and dunces. He has many poems on the victims of the holocaust but expresses his grievance off and on that it has not been given enough publicity and that the Jews themselves seem to be forgetting it. Layton requests the slaughtered Jews to fill his ears with direct curses on their dead enemies so that he shall tongue them till the sun turns black in the sky.
Saul Bellow, a Nobel Laureate, claiming to have written novels that transcend ethnic, religious or national identifications, is obsessed with “the Jewish question’ in one of his last writings, Ravelstein. Most of the major and minor characters of the novel express the view that a Jew should take a deep interest in the history of the Jews and that the Jews have nothing of greater value than their religious legacy. The protagonist’s statements often identify the prominent Jew-haters that are dead and gone and make it clear that though the place may be France, Italy or America, it is not safe for a Jew even though constitutional guarantees may be on his side.
What is much more noteworthy than all these is the case of Seamus Heaney, a modern Nobel Laureate from Northern Ireland. When his poems were included in the anthology called Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry 1982, he was not elated by the honour done to him but became furious because he was included in the list of British poets. He wrote a stinker to the publishers telling them that since he happened to be an Irish Poet, he resented being represented as a British Poet. That epistle in verse written in righteous indignation has been published under the title “Open Letter”:
I hate to bite
Hands that led me to the limelight
In the Penguin Book, I regret
The awkwardness:
But British, no, the name’s not right.
Though his Irish language and English happen to belong to the same family and though his poems were in English, he took objection to his being identified as a British since that would mean that the Irish continued to be under the domination of the English. He furiously remarked that though Ireland, Scotland and the Wales were known as Britannia in old legends, since Ireland had become an independent nation, the word “British” had wounded the Irish like King Arthur’s sword!
Another Irish poet called John Hewitt, in a poem of his would refer to the period when Ireland was under the control of the English as ‘eight hundred years’ disaster. Almost all the Irish, Welsh and Scottish poets refuse to be identified as the British even though their tongues are extremely close to English. They all the time assert their nations’ individuality and proudly write about their own national myths and legends.
These examples will indicate how deep-rooted is the love of the Westerners for their own language, nation and culture.
A diligent reader of Kalaignar’s writings, George Hart is able to pinpoint the secret of their success in his “Foreword” to the California University anthology of selections from Kalaignar’s works:
Though we may read Sangam poems two thousand years later than they were composed, ‘our response to them is ineffable for they have such a powerful appeal even now. Those songs of the distant past about love, heroism, generosity, humanitarianism and morality are so relevant today that they can clarify to us any contemporary situation. Kalaignar’s mind and heart have been shaped by this literature and he has grown into what he is now because of his knowledge of this literature. He desires to depict the Tamil Society of the Sangam Period in his poems and other writings as that society was an egalitarian one.
There are very few Sanskrit words in Sangam Poems. Having realized this, he is careful to eschew Sanskrit words as far as possible in his poems and essays. Even when he uses the old Tamil words, his ideas illuminate contemporary situations. Kalaignar’s profound knowledge of Sangam literature and didactic writings in Tamil and Tamil history and culture is mainly responsible for the greatness of his creative works. When one reads them one feels that no one else has explained the ideas of ancient Tamil texts so well as he has done….
His glorious creations reveal his deep understanding and love of Sangam literature. But that is not all. We feel that his objective is to create a society as democratic as the one of the Sangam period. His desire is that all should live a glorious life enjoying equal status.
Every creative artist should emulate his example and write not only to highlight the grandeur of Tamil but to instill in the Tamil hearts the desire to create a society as just and democratic as the one of the Sangam age.
Now the time has come when the west has become aware of and started appreciating the antiquity and uniqueness of Tamil culture. As early as the nineteenth century Whitman demanded that “the long overpaid accounts of Greece and Rome” be crossed out. Recent findings about the culture of Africa and the Indus Valley civilization have opened the eyes of the fair-minded intellectuals the world over who have begun to acknowledge the superiority of some of these eastern cultures and to openly point out the vanity of swearing by exclusively western models.
The classical heritage of Greece and Rome now tends to be seen alongside many other, sometimes older ‘classical’ cultures. The middle and far East, India, China and Japan as well as the largely oral cultures of Africa and the Americas ….. also have their highly elaborate, distinctive and often extremely powerful philosophies, sciences and world-views.
It is A.K. Ramanujan who pinpoints the real merit of Sangam poems. He confesses that while translating some of them into English, he found that there were many that he, though a poet living in the twentieth century, would have liked to have written himself and that he did not translate out of love but out of envy, out of a kind of aggression towards them.
These classical Tamil poems attracted me by their attitude to experience, to human passion and to the external world, their trust in the bareness, the lean line with no need to jazz it up or ornament it. They seemed to me classical, anti-romantic, using the words loosely as we know them in European literature…. Look at the classical Tamil poems, their attention to experience. Yet their attention to the object is not to create the ‘object’ of the imagist, but the object as enacting human experience the scene always a part of the human science, the poetry of objects always a part of the human perception of help and others….
The ability to engage entirely the world of things, animals, trees and people, attending to their particularity, making poetry out of it and making them speak for you - this seems to me extraordinary. But the ancient Tamils were a community, a ‘Sangam’ of poets, with a symbolism and a reality they shared.
Not a fabulous mythology but the realities of nature and culture used as a symbolism, a language within a language which allowed them to write with tremendous economy and allusiveness. Describe a drumbeat or falling water or a wildcat’s row of teeth; one little thing could say many things. If the world was the vocabulary of the poet, convention was his syntax.
It is to be noted that the Sangam poems exerted a strong influence on his subject, imagery, poetic technique, thought and vision of life. Describing his early reaction against Hinduism, Ramanujan observes that he believed that only a kind of modern rationalism was the answer to all the problems of a hierarchy of birth. He would never translate the Vedas because his interest has always been in the mother tongue, not Sanskrit since he always felt that the mother tongues represent a democratic, anti-hierarchic, from-the-ground-up view of India.
Karunanidhi started writing poems even as an adolescent, very soon realized his merits and limitations and formulated a suitable theory of poetry for himself and forged a style of his own by getting himself acquainted with the writings of Bharati and Bharatidasan. Though he did not take much time, he learnt the art the hard way and that learning, therefore, stood him in good stead. He himself states how his admirers and detractors could give him valuable hints and help him choose the right path. The statements of one of his early admirers remained etched on his mind for a long time keeping alive his desire that his productions should “pile up to the height of the Himalayas.”
My dear friend Cinnakkuttuci speaks
In a flattering vein:
there is a poet indwelling in Kalaignar as is the lovely pearl in the depth of the wavy ocean
A truth I had come to know with ease
As far back as sixty years ago
When I read your revivifying poems
On Hindi imperialism …
Though those were the times
When a composition of the kind of yours
Would hardly be accepted
As falling within the grammar of poetry,
Yet it was also the age
When racial awakening was also articulated
In a measure trumpet- like!
And today
We feast on your
Heartrending elegiac verses,
Poetic tributes,
Thunders like strains on the heroic feats of the Tamils,
Poems of rational fervour that sound sweet to the ears,
Philosophical reflections striking like the thoughts of the Siddhas
Which come all together
And hold our hearts captivated.
Such compliments he must have got in plenty but he knew where his strength lay and how his verses might falter because of his lack of knowledge of prosody. The earliest influence on him was his father Mutthuvel who happened to be a talented poet. He had no doubts about what was going to be the major theme of his poetry, if not of all his writings:
Guided by the conviction
That my land, language, honor and feelings
Shouldn’t go unprotected
Even if my poetry stands uninformed by norms of prosody,
I would make verses
Where the feelings that well up in my heart
Would translate into lines of these verses
which would impact the betrayers of their clan,
The folks of shifting stand they are
He defends his choice of poetic prose unfettered by the metrical bonds:
I have chosen to present my standpoint on things
In poetic prose
With honesty of purpose running through my words,
Unlike those people
Who bend and break the verse lines
Into two or three
Taking recourse to hocus-pocus in words
And calling them all things of their own.
Who would make a visit to it for bathing
Were the Kurralam Falls to be turned into a Channelled course of water
Rather than letting it fall from a height?
Because we could not regulate its fall,
Would it be right of us
To obstruct its natural course at the source?
Are there folks around
Who would brush aside
Richness of imagination and profundity of thought,
Making out a case for traditional poetry?
Would anyone pluck out and throw off aubergine and bittergourd
Saying they are unripe?
Do see that
Like these vegetables that go into making curry,
My verses too would serve a purpose of their own;
You may do well to have a taste of them.
In a poem called “The Vision that my Heart Relished” he speaks of his favourite subjects, which, of course, should centre round the Tamil race, its language, literature and culture:
Even as they lived
One apart from the other
In the regions nature apportioned
Mountain, sylvan tract, maritime region,
Agricultural plains and arid desert land,
The Tamils lived
Imbedded in cultured ways….
The ripe witted and high minded Tolkappiyar,
Apart from letter and word,
Gave unto his race the grammar of life too
For them to be guided into the fullness of living.
Valluvar wove the Kural
In the Tamil language of unplucked fruit’s sweetness
For the world to benefit from.
Let’s listen to his words of authentic truth
And exult in them
As if we had rains after a drought.
Cilappatikaram, Valaiyapathi, Manimekalai,
Cintamani and Kuntalakeci
These works shine forth as ornaments true
Of Mother Tamil,
Thanks to the labour of love
Of the poets of that day.
How many were the works they composed!
How many were the poets who lived in that age!
The Tamils then had for their assets
These treasures of wisdom
Gifted by men of ripe learning.
Kalaignar can think of endless strategies thematic, generic and technical to eulogize ancient Tamil Classics to his heart’s content. Such pieces, though numerous and focusing all the time on the antiquity and uniqueness of classical Tamil, will never satiate his Tamil readers because of the subtle variations of tricks in each of them. Even the readers who begin in a hostile mood owing to extra-literary prejudices will be drawn to them in no time. Besides arresting alliterations, assonances and rhymes of diverse kinds, he may constantly play on words, make puns and resort to humorous twists and surprise endings.
There are poems and poems by Kalaignar which take us back to the Sangam period commonly believed to be the golden age of the Tamil Society. Often he uses the Sangam poems themselves for this purpose and recreates the scenes in his own words, the scenes that depict the valour of the Tamil youth and the chastity of the Tamil lady whose intense love for her man is revealed in a myriad of situations. As Ganapathy observes,
Poet Kalaignar has such a powerful sense of the historical presence in him that he is inevitably wedded to the great and glorious past of the Tamils in all its vitality and actuality, in all its pomp and splendor, which he describes as though he were right there at the centre stage, seeing with his eyes, hearing with his ears, and feeling with all the intensities of his mind and heart (xxi).
The heroic women portrayed in some of the poems of Purananuru have a fascination for him. One such poem narrates the story of the steel-hearted old woman who, hearing that her son was wounded on the back, rushes to the battlefield swearing that she would cut off her breasts if the news were true. Reworking on that, Kalaignar presents it in modern Tamil underscoring the old mother’s fierce love for heroism and family honour.
She took out a sword,
And hastened to where the drumbeats were heard,
“I fed a coward with my milk,
Is he a coward fallen on his chest!
A battle warrior!
Long ago, my immortal husband bared his chest
And he fell challenging a speeding spear.
Was he born to him?
Alas! Where is honour gone?
He fell like a crumbling wall.
Bravery echoes from the lofty peaks of the Himalayas-
Here, music vibrates, from the Veena’s strings,
And that too as “honour”, “honour’ sound it will!
Eating shark and drinking mead,
Did you hail from a cowardly clan?
Blemish you have heaped
On the bold warriors of the Tamil race.
I fed you with my breasts,
I reared you, my son –
Where are those shoulders stout and strong?
Didn’t you itch for a battle?
She went to the field and turned over the bodies of the dead warriors. Her son lay dead, with a spear piercing his chest! She was more delighted than when she had given birth to him. There the puram poem ends but Kalaignar adds a pleasing twist to the scene:
“Perturbed I won’t be by any scene!
My son as a warrior died.
I was about to pluck away my breasts that fed him.
Oh! Where is that wicked one who told me a blatant lie?
A sword here there is! I shall now seek his tongue!”
Another Purananuru poem triggers off his thoughts on socialism and the heartless exploitation of the poor by the rich in contemporary society. A jewel of a poem, it says that there is everything in common between the king who does not share his royalty with anyone and the lowly hunter who goes sleepless hunting wild animals. Both have to be satisfied with the same measure of food and two sets of pieces of cloth. And the poet from this observation draws the lesson that the only value of money is that it can be given away and that if one wants to enjoy the whole of his possession, one may lose a lot.
That the Sangam poet Nakkirar could have this vision of life two thousand years ago naturally wins the admiration of Kalaignar who elucidates the poem by shifting it to the modern context. Kalaignar’s poem alluringly called “Socialism Proclaimed in a Puram Poem”, begins with an apostrophe to the rich:
O you the rich! To sleep lulled
By the soft blowing southern breeze,
You live in multi-storey mansions!
Ever exploiting the sweat of the toiling masses,
Keen you are on amassing wealth aplenty!
Like a vulture that preys on the dead,
Your belly you do enlarge!
Pushing the poor into abysmal darkness,
You run after wealth, with a mind unsatisfied!
He wants to know from the rich if, because they happen to be stinking rich, they can consume on a leaf rubies cooked as vegetables and a garnished mixture of stewed emerald and if they can pound pearls and corals and boil them as rice to go with them in order to fill the bag of their belly. Those who trumpet today that socialism must flourish should know how Nakkirar proclaimed it long, long ago.
After realizing the truth that
Only a small measure may be eaten,
And only two dresses worn
Is it just that many wallow in dire poverty
And a few dance about in pomp and plenty?
While the physical and mental needs are the same,
For all born in the world,
Thoughtlessly, why should one alone gather wealth so much,
While many die in the abysmal depth of life?
To eradicate poverty, the proper way is
To destroy selfish possessions by individuals and care for many lives,
Letting them share by the principle of socialism.
The purpose of life is to ensure such an equitable distribution,
To find joy on earth!
Rereading Sangam poems in the light of Marxian principles is a brilliant strategy to enlighten the young Tamils on both and to sensitize the rich to the importance of altruism.
poets of linguistic and ethnic chauvinism should know what happens elsewhere. Shakespeare was proclaimed as a symbol of British superiority as early as the nineteenth century even by the sober Wordsworth:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held; In everything we are sprung
Of earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.
The bard of Avon was presented as the most prized possession of the British by Carlyle in a famous utterance:
“Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakespeare!”
Report Brooke’s war sonnets proudly declared the unrivaled supremacy of England.
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.,....
And laughter, learnt of friends, and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Winston Churchill used the occasion of the poet’s death to reinforce a recruitment drive during the war:
The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable war sonnets which he has left behind will be shared by many thousands of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hardest, the cruelest and the least –rewarded of all the wars that men have fought. They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself. Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most pious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proferred.
Those who condemn Karunanidhis’ poetic effusions on the past achievements of the much maligned Dravidian race should care to find out what some of the top Jewish intellectuals, despite their Marxist leanings, started preaching in the last phase of their long career. Irving Layton, the most prolific of contemporary Canadian poets, in one of his early poems, claims that he had rooted out Jehovah from his heart, spurned Moses and his Tables of Law and torn up his father’s phylacteries in order to dedicate his life and poetry to the Marxist cause. But very soon in a collection called Fortunate Exile, he included poems that glorify the Jewish community, gloat over their incrediable achievements and resort to unrestrained attacks on Christians and Christianity. In “A Brief History of the Jews,” the proudest boast a Jew can think of, the Jews are presented as the custodians of human love while the rest of the world consists of ungrateful wretches. A short piece called “Ibn Gabriol” declares that philosophy, metaphysics and theology are the monopoly of the Jews whereas all the non-jews are louts, murderers and dunces. He has many poems on the victims of the holocaust but expresses his grievance off and on that it has not been given enough publicity and that the Jews themselves seem to be forgetting it. Layton requests the slaughtered Jews to fill his ears with direct curses on their dead enemies so that he shall tongue them till the sun turns black in the sky.
Saul Bellow, a Nobel Laureate, claiming to have written novels that transcend ethnic, religious or national identifications, is obsessed with “the Jewish question’ in one of his last writings, Ravelstein. Most of the major and minor characters of the novel express the view that a Jew should take a deep interest in the history of the Jews and that the Jews have nothing of greater value than their religious legacy. The protagonist’s statements often identify the prominent Jew-haters that are dead and gone and make it clear that though the place may be France, Italy or America, it is not safe for a Jew even though constitutional guarantees may be on his side.
What is much more noteworthy than all these is the case of Seamus Heaney, a modern Nobel Laureate from Northern Ireland. When his poems were included in the anthology called Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry 1982, he was not elated by the honour done to him but became furious because he was included in the list of British poets. He wrote a stinker to the publishers telling them that since he happened to be an Irish Poet, he resented being represented as a British Poet. That epistle in verse written in righteous indignation has been published under the title “Open Letter”:
I hate to bite
Hands that led me to the limelight
In the Penguin Book, I regret
The awkwardness:
But British, no, the name’s not right.
Though his Irish language and English happen to belong to the same family and though his poems were in English, he took objection to his being identified as a British since that would mean that the Irish continued to be under the domination of the English. He furiously remarked that though Ireland, Scotland and the Wales were known as Britannia in old legends, since Ireland had become an independent nation, the word “British” had wounded the Irish like King Arthur’s sword!
Another Irish poet called John Hewitt, in a poem of his would refer to the period when Ireland was under the control of the English as ‘eight hundred years’ disaster. Almost all the Irish, Welsh and Scottish poets refuse to be identified as the British even though their tongues are extremely close to English. They all the time assert their nations’ individuality and proudly write about their own national myths and legends.
These examples will indicate how deep-rooted is the love of the Westerners for their own language, nation and culture.
A diligent reader of Kalaignar’s writings, George Hart is able to pinpoint the secret of their success in his “Foreword” to the California University anthology of selections from Kalaignar’s works:
Though we may read Sangam poems two thousand years later than they were composed, ‘our response to them is ineffable for they have such a powerful appeal even now. Those songs of the distant past about love, heroism, generosity, humanitarianism and morality are so relevant today that they can clarify to us any contemporary situation. Kalaignar’s mind and heart have been shaped by this literature and he has grown into what he is now because of his knowledge of this literature. He desires to depict the Tamil Society of the Sangam Period in his poems and other writings as that society was an egalitarian one.
There are very few Sanskrit words in Sangam Poems. Having realized this, he is careful to eschew Sanskrit words as far as possible in his poems and essays. Even when he uses the old Tamil words, his ideas illuminate contemporary situations. Kalaignar’s profound knowledge of Sangam literature and didactic writings in Tamil and Tamil history and culture is mainly responsible for the greatness of his creative works. When one reads them one feels that no one else has explained the ideas of ancient Tamil texts so well as he has done….
His glorious creations reveal his deep understanding and love of Sangam literature. But that is not all. We feel that his objective is to create a society as democratic as the one of the Sangam period. His desire is that all should live a glorious life enjoying equal status.
Every creative artist should emulate his example and write not only to highlight the grandeur of Tamil but to instill in the Tamil hearts the desire to create a society as just and democratic as the one of the Sangam age.
Now the time has come when the west has become aware of and started appreciating the antiquity and uniqueness of Tamil culture. As early as the nineteenth century Whitman demanded that “the long overpaid accounts of Greece and Rome” be crossed out. Recent findings about the culture of Africa and the Indus Valley civilization have opened the eyes of the fair-minded intellectuals the world over who have begun to acknowledge the superiority of some of these eastern cultures and to openly point out the vanity of swearing by exclusively western models.
The classical heritage of Greece and Rome now tends to be seen alongside many other, sometimes older ‘classical’ cultures. The middle and far East, India, China and Japan as well as the largely oral cultures of Africa and the Americas ….. also have their highly elaborate, distinctive and often extremely powerful philosophies, sciences and world-views.
It is A.K. Ramanujan who pinpoints the real merit of Sangam poems. He confesses that while translating some of them into English, he found that there were many that he, though a poet living in the twentieth century, would have liked to have written himself and that he did not translate out of love but out of envy, out of a kind of aggression towards them.
These classical Tamil poems attracted me by their attitude to experience, to human passion and to the external world, their trust in the bareness, the lean line with no need to jazz it up or ornament it. They seemed to me classical, anti-romantic, using the words loosely as we know them in European literature…. Look at the classical Tamil poems, their attention to experience. Yet their attention to the object is not to create the ‘object’ of the imagist, but the object as enacting human experience the scene always a part of the human science, the poetry of objects always a part of the human perception of help and others….
The ability to engage entirely the world of things, animals, trees and people, attending to their particularity, making poetry out of it and making them speak for you - this seems to me extraordinary. But the ancient Tamils were a community, a ‘Sangam’ of poets, with a symbolism and a reality they shared.
Not a fabulous mythology but the realities of nature and culture used as a symbolism, a language within a language which allowed them to write with tremendous economy and allusiveness. Describe a drumbeat or falling water or a wildcat’s row of teeth; one little thing could say many things. If the world was the vocabulary of the poet, convention was his syntax.
It is to be noted that the Sangam poems exerted a strong influence on his subject, imagery, poetic technique, thought and vision of life. Describing his early reaction against Hinduism, Ramanujan observes that he believed that only a kind of modern rationalism was the answer to all the problems of a hierarchy of birth. He would never translate the Vedas because his interest has always been in the mother tongue, not Sanskrit since he always felt that the mother tongues represent a democratic, anti-hierarchic, from-the-ground-up view of India.
Karunanidhi started writing poems even as an adolescent, very soon realized his merits and limitations and formulated a suitable theory of poetry for himself and forged a style of his own by getting himself acquainted with the writings of Bharati and Bharatidasan. Though he did not take much time, he learnt the art the hard way and that learning, therefore, stood him in good stead. He himself states how his admirers and detractors could give him valuable hints and help him choose the right path. The statements of one of his early admirers remained etched on his mind for a long time keeping alive his desire that his productions should “pile up to the height of the Himalayas.”
My dear friend Cinnakkuttuci speaks
In a flattering vein:
there is a poet indwelling in Kalaignar as is the lovely pearl in the depth of the wavy ocean
A truth I had come to know with ease
As far back as sixty years ago
When I read your revivifying poems
On Hindi imperialism …
Though those were the times
When a composition of the kind of yours
Would hardly be accepted
As falling within the grammar of poetry,
Yet it was also the age
When racial awakening was also articulated
In a measure trumpet- like!
And today
We feast on your
Heartrending elegiac verses,
Poetic tributes,
Thunders like strains on the heroic feats of the Tamils,
Poems of rational fervour that sound sweet to the ears,
Philosophical reflections striking like the thoughts of the Siddhas
Which come all together
And hold our hearts captivated.
Such compliments he must have got in plenty but he knew where his strength lay and how his verses might falter because of his lack of knowledge of prosody. The earliest influence on him was his father Mutthuvel who happened to be a talented poet. He had no doubts about what was going to be the major theme of his poetry, if not of all his writings:
Guided by the conviction
That my land, language, honor and feelings
Shouldn’t go unprotected
Even if my poetry stands uninformed by norms of prosody,
I would make verses
Where the feelings that well up in my heart
Would translate into lines of these verses
which would impact the betrayers of their clan,
The folks of shifting stand they are
He defends his choice of poetic prose unfettered by the metrical bonds:
I have chosen to present my standpoint on things
In poetic prose
With honesty of purpose running through my words,
Unlike those people
Who bend and break the verse lines
Into two or three
Taking recourse to hocus-pocus in words
And calling them all things of their own.
Who would make a visit to it for bathing
Were the Kurralam Falls to be turned into a Channelled course of water
Rather than letting it fall from a height?
Because we could not regulate its fall,
Would it be right of us
To obstruct its natural course at the source?
Are there folks around
Who would brush aside
Richness of imagination and profundity of thought,
Making out a case for traditional poetry?
Would anyone pluck out and throw off aubergine and bittergourd
Saying they are unripe?
Do see that
Like these vegetables that go into making curry,
My verses too would serve a purpose of their own;
You may do well to have a taste of them.
In a poem called “The Vision that my Heart Relished” he speaks of his favourite subjects, which, of course, should centre round the Tamil race, its language, literature and culture:
Even as they lived
One apart from the other
In the regions nature apportioned
Mountain, sylvan tract, maritime region,
Agricultural plains and arid desert land,
The Tamils lived
Imbedded in cultured ways….
The ripe witted and high minded Tolkappiyar,
Apart from letter and word,
Gave unto his race the grammar of life too
For them to be guided into the fullness of living.
Valluvar wove the Kural
In the Tamil language of unplucked fruit’s sweetness
For the world to benefit from.
Let’s listen to his words of authentic truth
And exult in them
As if we had rains after a drought.
Cilappatikaram, Valaiyapathi, Manimekalai,
Cintamani and Kuntalakeci
These works shine forth as ornaments true
Of Mother Tamil,
Thanks to the labour of love
Of the poets of that day.
How many were the works they composed!
How many were the poets who lived in that age!
The Tamils then had for their assets
These treasures of wisdom
Gifted by men of ripe learning.
Kalaignar can think of endless strategies thematic, generic and technical to eulogize ancient Tamil Classics to his heart’s content. Such pieces, though numerous and focusing all the time on the antiquity and uniqueness of classical Tamil, will never satiate his Tamil readers because of the subtle variations of tricks in each of them. Even the readers who begin in a hostile mood owing to extra-literary prejudices will be drawn to them in no time. Besides arresting alliterations, assonances and rhymes of diverse kinds, he may constantly play on words, make puns and resort to humorous twists and surprise endings.
There are poems and poems by Kalaignar which take us back to the Sangam period commonly believed to be the golden age of the Tamil Society. Often he uses the Sangam poems themselves for this purpose and recreates the scenes in his own words, the scenes that depict the valour of the Tamil youth and the chastity of the Tamil lady whose intense love for her man is revealed in a myriad of situations. As Ganapathy observes,
Poet Kalaignar has such a powerful sense of the historical presence in him that he is inevitably wedded to the great and glorious past of the Tamils in all its vitality and actuality, in all its pomp and splendor, which he describes as though he were right there at the centre stage, seeing with his eyes, hearing with his ears, and feeling with all the intensities of his mind and heart (xxi).
The heroic women portrayed in some of the poems of Purananuru have a fascination for him. One such poem narrates the story of the steel-hearted old woman who, hearing that her son was wounded on the back, rushes to the battlefield swearing that she would cut off her breasts if the news were true. Reworking on that, Kalaignar presents it in modern Tamil underscoring the old mother’s fierce love for heroism and family honour.
She took out a sword,
And hastened to where the drumbeats were heard,
“I fed a coward with my milk,
Is he a coward fallen on his chest!
A battle warrior!
Long ago, my immortal husband bared his chest
And he fell challenging a speeding spear.
Was he born to him?
Alas! Where is honour gone?
He fell like a crumbling wall.
Bravery echoes from the lofty peaks of the Himalayas-
Here, music vibrates, from the Veena’s strings,
And that too as “honour”, “honour’ sound it will!
Eating shark and drinking mead,
Did you hail from a cowardly clan?
Blemish you have heaped
On the bold warriors of the Tamil race.
I fed you with my breasts,
I reared you, my son –
Where are those shoulders stout and strong?
Didn’t you itch for a battle?
She went to the field and turned over the bodies of the dead warriors. Her son lay dead, with a spear piercing his chest! She was more delighted than when she had given birth to him. There the puram poem ends but Kalaignar adds a pleasing twist to the scene:
“Perturbed I won’t be by any scene!
My son as a warrior died.
I was about to pluck away my breasts that fed him.
Oh! Where is that wicked one who told me a blatant lie?
A sword here there is! I shall now seek his tongue!”
Another Purananuru poem triggers off his thoughts on socialism and the heartless exploitation of the poor by the rich in contemporary society. A jewel of a poem, it says that there is everything in common between the king who does not share his royalty with anyone and the lowly hunter who goes sleepless hunting wild animals. Both have to be satisfied with the same measure of food and two sets of pieces of cloth. And the poet from this observation draws the lesson that the only value of money is that it can be given away and that if one wants to enjoy the whole of his possession, one may lose a lot.
That the Sangam poet Nakkirar could have this vision of life two thousand years ago naturally wins the admiration of Kalaignar who elucidates the poem by shifting it to the modern context. Kalaignar’s poem alluringly called “Socialism Proclaimed in a Puram Poem”, begins with an apostrophe to the rich:
O you the rich! To sleep lulled
By the soft blowing southern breeze,
You live in multi-storey mansions!
Ever exploiting the sweat of the toiling masses,
Keen you are on amassing wealth aplenty!
Like a vulture that preys on the dead,
Your belly you do enlarge!
Pushing the poor into abysmal darkness,
You run after wealth, with a mind unsatisfied!
He wants to know from the rich if, because they happen to be stinking rich, they can consume on a leaf rubies cooked as vegetables and a garnished mixture of stewed emerald and if they can pound pearls and corals and boil them as rice to go with them in order to fill the bag of their belly. Those who trumpet today that socialism must flourish should know how Nakkirar proclaimed it long, long ago.
After realizing the truth that
Only a small measure may be eaten,
And only two dresses worn
Is it just that many wallow in dire poverty
And a few dance about in pomp and plenty?
While the physical and mental needs are the same,
For all born in the world,
Thoughtlessly, why should one alone gather wealth so much,
While many die in the abysmal depth of life?
To eradicate poverty, the proper way is
To destroy selfish possessions by individuals and care for many lives,
Letting them share by the principle of socialism.
The purpose of life is to ensure such an equitable distribution,
To find joy on earth!
Rereading Sangam poems in the light of Marxian principles is a brilliant strategy to enlighten the young Tamils on both and to sensitize the rich to the importance of altruism.
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