In spite of all the investigations and enquiries by the
greatest minds of the world down the ages, life remains a riddle, an enigma. Poets have not been lagging behind philosophers, theologians, religionists, saints, and supporters of every ideological hue in attempting to unravel the mystery of life. The one problem that has been haunting many of our thinkers is that man finds himself too often at crossroads not knowing which of the two or three options to choose. Since the ultimate aim of life is still elusive, it becomes extremely difficult to make a choice at every crucial stage of one’s life. Robert Frost has given expression to this dilemma in a memorable poem called “The Road Not Taken.”
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no steps had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back,
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence;
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less travelled by
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Forst, known for his evocative use of the figure of speech called synecdoche (by which a part represents the whole or the whole represents the part), leaves the message deliberately ambiguous. The protagonist of the poem does not tell us what kind of difference the road not taken has really made. Does he imply that if he had taken the other road, his experience would have been the same? Does not the poem tell us that the right to choose may not be a privilege when it ultimately proves to be a case of Hobson’s choice? Is there also the subtle suggestion that the very experience of having to choose is a painful one?
Kalaignar deals with a similar theme in his characteristic manner in a poem “Which to opt for – That or This?”. Using the traditional journey metaphor the poem opens with the recounting of the obstacles one has to face from beginning to end:
You walk into the first step of life in this world
Weeping and wailing.
Destination of the Journey unknown
You keep wavering and vacillating.
There is a smile on your face;
You give in to the mood of anger.
You walk lion – like now,
Then you get shrunk into a mouse.
The passion of love moves you to the extreme;
You also accomplish extraordinary tasks
With penance – like devotion.
You are weighed by cares
As if carrying the foetus;
And you hope to unburden them
Somewhere on the way.
Ungrateful men and betrayers
Obstruct your journey midway.
………
Death stares you in the face
At the end of this journey all.
You are burnt into ashes,
Or you are interred and entombed.
Then the poet gives expression to his firm belief in a single birth for every being echoing the words of the Tamil Siddha Poet Sivavakkiyar.
Will the milk drawn from the teat
And the flower dropped from the stalk
Get back to their sources?
Will the life gone unseen
Ascend the ladder of the physical frame?
Again he stresses the belief that death is the end of everything.
The slippery board called the path of life
Will take you and me along its course with ease
And drop us into the goal of life.
Isn’t death the full stop that nature marks?
Finally, the idea driven home is that one can make hell of heaven and heaven of hell.
You have in you
Power and mind’s strength
In ample measure
That could turn
Heaven into hell
And hell into Heaven
The way
You put the power and the strength into use
Will provide you answer to the question:
Which to opt for – hell or Heaven?
The religious myths about heaven and hell and about the choice one has to make between the two are categorically rejected at the end of the poem.
Some of the Western scholars who are familiar with the ancient Tamil writings have expressed their admiration for the vision of life embodied in them, especially for the daring attitude to death. The poets and their patrons we come across in Purananuru do grieve when some one dies and there are elegies eulogizing the dead king or chieftain and using the tragic occasion to glorify the past achievements of the hero. But neither the poets nor the warriors are scared of death though they condemn the god of death and call him names. They consider death an integral and inevitable part of life and may even welcome it preferring an honorable death to a shameful survival. Valluvar can even have a laugh at death.
He that was alive yesterday is not to be seen today; and this is the glory of this world (336).
The fledgling coming out of the egg flies away from it. Such is the bond between life and body (338).
Death is like falling into sleep and
Birth is like waking up from sleep (339).
Is there no stable home for
The life staying for now in the body? (340).
That such profound utterances about life and death have left a lasting imprint on Kalaignar’s mind is evident in a number of poems. An exquisite piece called “The Medicine not Prescribed by the Physician” portrays a celebrity who is at death’s door.
Losing him?
That intellectual, activist,
That man
Who lives enshrined in every atom
Of the minds of people of that little village!
Even if
Indra’s Heaven,
Non-existent though
Be offered to us on a platter,
We do not want it.
Keep it for yourself
And spare the life of our man
The people of that village prayed
Weeping and wailing.
But the man, lying on his bed, was suffering unbearable pain that shook every limb of his body.
There was no medicine,
That they didn’t give him;
There was no doctor
Who wasn’t concerned that
His prescriptions didn’t work on that man,
The disease
That came unto him like a guest
Showed no signs of taking leave.
Though they were ready to do anything to bring even the herbs from the rich Sanjeevi Mountain to see him back to health, he pleaded with them not to put themselves into difficulty for his sake in a faltering voice choked with emotion. He preferred death to such a life of unrelenting torture.
He was writhing in a sea of pain
As does a boat on water
With cracks developing all around
He said
He needed to repose in mind’s quietude
For him to be relieved of his affliction,
And no medicine there was to get it for him.
Death,
The medicine no doctor prescribed
Came as the cure ultimate
For his illeness
That came unto him as a hill
To go off as mist.
The poet says that death proved to be the only medicine that could deliver the great man from the tyranny of life.
An outright condemnation of terrorism becomes the burden of a small poem which begins with the topical allusion to the notorious September 11 disaster.
Can fire be by fire extinguished?
Can water be by water stopped?
Can hatred be by hatred cancelled?
Can heart be by heart transformed?
Can a wicked deed be by another wicked deed
Called terrorism removed?
With these preliminary remarks, Kalaignar brings in an account of the tragic episode, a blot on our civilization.
Like a beautiful woman’s coiffure bound,
That spiraled up and up to touch the sky
These buildings, by American engineers built–
The world Trade Centre’s skyscrapers.
The beautiful capital of Washington,
The powerful New York, ever vigilant against enemies,
Pentagon, the mammoth military base,
That encloses fighter planes
Enmity insidiously entered all over here,
Like smoke screening everything!
Almost Whitmanesque in its use of the catalogue, the description of the disaster cautiously avoids the pitfall of a melodramatic appeal.
For thousands to fall like corpses,
For young women to lose ambitious young sons and daughters,
And suffer thus,
For those who went to their offices hale and hearty
But to die in thousands,
For men and women, attired to go to offices,
And longingly waited for at home,
By wives, husbands and loving ones,
With all their loving kisses gone,
Like stones shattering glass to smithereens,
Compassion, kindness, love and affection,
As though by the sea carried away.
The poem ends with a piece of advice to all those who claim that they resort to terrorist acts only to create a sweet new world:
In your new world,
Sweetness there may be,
But no man alive will anywhere be!
Kalaignar’s reflections on the nature and meaning of life are to be found in his “portraits of the contemporary realities of the Tamil Society as much as in his responses to the current political and social events to which he has been an authentic witness.” At times he may even devote full length poems to meditations on life but even in them his ideas are seen to come“as felt thoughts in the proper emotional context through a series of glowing metaphors.”
While advising his partymen not to give up their onward march on any account, he enumerates the wrongs that man may do to man and tells them how they should heroically overcome the obstacles keeping the ultimate goal in mind.
Do not in trepidation be if a wild river your path does cross.
Judging how your forebears crossed it,
Make a bridge or by your sinews swim,
And the banks you reach, without stopping your journey.
One from the pack of howling jackals may turn left;
And another to the right!
Why bother whether they turn left or right!
See they do not harass you!
Animals and wild snakes may lurk in the bush
Only to ward the dangers off, you do a weapon require.
The mounting chaff of human enmity to end
Carry you do the sword of goodness and the armour of love.
When you eagerly climb the snowy peaks;
Handy it is to wear footwear, free from inner hassles
Never will they slip you up.
Though clusters of images and mixed metaphors beautify the poem, its real charm consists in the feeling that it evokes in the readers who know about the innumerable hardships that Kalaignar had to face in his long and eventful life during which he has been having a punishing schedule for himself. While going through the poem, one cannot help feeling that he has been consciously or unconsciously describing the arduous journey that he himself has undertaken.
It is the small poem entitled “Water Family” which witnesses to his technical virtuosity, especially to the stock of similes he has at his beck and call. There is a self-critical handling of similes in his description of the rains, the seas and the rivers.
If it is described that an old man’s cough is thunder,
If the light of his bulging eyes in fatigue is lightning,
If the saliva he dribbles is rain,
We won’t accept such sickly rain.
I shall an example cite for the youths to like.
The stars in the sky are beauteous women,
Their collective speech is the rumbling of thunder,
Their flashing eyes are streaks of lightning,
The fragrant waters they sprinkle
On the loved one, the round moon, is the rain!
The example appropriate to warriors bold is:
Two bold hearts confronting each other,
Is the crash of thunder!
The spear of warriors clashing is lightning in the sky,
The blood the warriors shed is rain,
The sky is largely the battlefield!
Kalaignar can endlessly go on in this vein since he has mastered the art of writing poetry by familiarizing himself with the rich gamut of Tamil poetry beginning with the ancient Tamil Classics and ending with the organ voice of the Dravidian Movement, Bharatidasan.
There are several short poems which bear out his argumentative skill. Like the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, Kalaignar can shine in dialectics and demonstrate his debating prowess in verse. Asserting that there is only one birth and that the belief in rebirth is but a sort of comfort for men who keep wailing about the reality of death, he discusses at length the problem with the belief in rebirth:
The view
That there is no rebirth after death
Can bring many a good in its wake.
Awakened to the reality
That death will come sooner or later,
People would take to worthy deeds
Works of ethics enjoin upon them
And finish these deeds
Well within their life - span.
On the contrary
Belief in afterlife
Would result in
People leaving their tasks unfinished
In the hope of continuing them in the birth next.
The talk of rebirth is a thing of deceit,
Do realize that
There is only one birth
…
What blabbering
Is all this talk of men
Living through eternity?
It sounds meaningful
When one says
Man lives
Through what he leaves behind.
But
When one says
Man has no death
Doesn’t it mark a jarring note?
Those
That one has written, spoken, created or guided through
Are things
Which can live timelessly
Beyond one’s death.
One becomes deathless
Because one has given unto posterity
Things deathless.
It stands to reason
When we speak of living through fame;
It militates against reason
When we speak of living through deathless soul.
One would be reminded of the amazing worldview presented in a Sangam poem by Kopperunchozhan:
Only the wavering with a weak heart
That clings to flawed perspectives will not
Stop doubting if they should do good deeds
Or not, the one that goes hunting for tuskers
May catch them; the hunter of small birds may
Return empty – handed; if the great with great
Aims may enjoy the fruit of their good deed,
They can even gain the pleasures of paradise;
If there is no heavenly joy, they may be
Freed from the cycle of births; if there is no
Rebirth, it is great to perish with a blameless
Body leaving a fame as high as a Himalayan peak.
Kalaignar, soaked in Sangam poetry, would have certainly been impressed with this piece and would have written his poem as a partly favourable response to this.
Kalaignar rewrites the well known puranic story of Cavitthiri and Cattiyavan to drive home the truth that men and women are of one kind. In his version of the legend, she implores the god of death for the boon to get her husband back to life. When she receives a firm ‘no’ as the reply, she begs him prayerfully to grant her another boon at least. When he consents, she prays for the boon of a child. When the god gives his consent thoughtlessly, she asks, “How can the boon materialize without my husband?” Taken aback, the god throws his hand hard on the buffalo’s back and exclaims, his head hanging down, “O I am outsmarted!” But he obliges her and getting her husband redeemed, she says she would henceforth be a challenge to the overbearing male chauvinism. Praising “the dazzling smartness of her womanly wit”, the god of death himself plays the role of a male feminist by advising her,
Mores and values
Are things shared between men and women;
All talk of
Superiority of men or superiority of women
Is unwarranted;
The difference manifests all in the physical make,
And does not exist in the mind’s realm.
Strength or weakness of character
Is a matter of individual mould,
Where no question of sex crops up.
Men and Women are of one race
The race of humankind.
Championing the feminist cause, he, in poem after poem, may condemn those who speak ill of women in verse, castigate the common social evils like the dowry system, the cruel treatment of widows and the atrocious punishments meted out to the erring women.
During the medieval times, there were some saints and mystics who were particularly harsh on women holding them responsible for all the evils. Chiding their modern descendants, the poet says,
He vilified women in verse
Calling them
Crafty witches taking the guise of women;
It was the same he
Who was born to a woman.
He poured scorn at them
Saying
They stupefied him by their eyes
And lured him by their breasts;
It was he
Who grew up
Feeding on the breast milk of a woman.
The poet’s heart bleeds when he learns that female infanticide is on the rise, even some women conniving in this inhuman act. And then in unbearable agony he bursts out:
Can we remain patient anymore
Seeing the suffering of womenfolk?
Will a bow choose to break its own string?
Will a lute snap its own arrow?
……….
If the animate things,
That men and women are,
Find the perpetration of cruelty
Against women acceptable,
Will this Society come to any good
Or will it get a thrashing in future?
The elegies that Kalaignar has been penning periodically are reflective of his magnanimity as well as of his fertile imagination. Apart from his own leaders Periyar and Anna, numerous great men of other political parties and celebrities in other walks of life are all generously acclaimed for their achievement. The highest praise is, of course, reserved for Periyar, his mentor.
In his poem, “Thanthai Periyar”, after proudly recalling a few touching scenes of his association with the formidable social reformer, he adds,
Those that did divisions of caste create,
Stunned they were as though they had
A Crash of thunder heard.
God, religion and superstition
All in one as subtly knit,
See, they flee in lightning speed!
The ignorant old world
So adored and admired,
See they disintegrate by the Erode Quake!
The most memorable lines about Anna are to be found in “As your Shadow we move about “and” “Enmity Conquer We Shall!”
Even before your coming,
The Tamils a history had.
But only after you came,
The Tamils of their history had a clear view!
Literature there was for Tamils!
But only after your advent,
Alive you made it,
For the world to know of it!
A culture of their own the Tamils had!
But time was when ignorant of it they were,
Leader! Because you came,
The Tamil, a Tamil became!
The painstaking work done by Anna in the political social and cultural arenas is symbolically presented in the second poem:
Dear brother!
Our elder born!
In pouring rains,
In streaking lighting,
In crashing thunder,
In fierce storm,
With a little lamp held in your hand,
The journey you began with a smile!
On what path?
On a steep rock!
On a path full of stones!
To let the lamp glow,
You gave it to our hands. Yes!
And the foremost disciple of Anna assures him on behalf of his younger brothers that the lamp handed over to them would be shielded from the winds keen to put it out and taken safely on the victory path.
Though the Dravidian Movement fought the Congress Party tooth and nail during Nehru’s time, and though the Dravidian parties were opposed to many of Nehru’s ideas, Kalaignar did not hesitate to pay a generous and sincere tribute to the doyen of Indian democracy in a poetic symposium on “The Democracy that Nehru Found”.
A fighting and principled hero Nehru was.
He snatched the flag of the Whites,
Who our freedom robbed,
And our flag of freedom hoisted instead.
He was the lion - hearted who ever served,
Following Gandhi’s path.
Receiving all the blows the British inflicted,
Their repressive measures he withstood.
He was the one who sacrificed a promising life of youth,
And spent it in the darkness of a prison.
Mightily angry though he often was,
He lit the fire of freedom!
Though very rich, he did for the poor care,
And flourished as a paragon of qualities great,
Again, Kalaignar can think of a series of choice symbols to describe the reputed Indian leader, the very image of nobility.
A splendid fruition he is, eye - catching as the Marina,
A pearl cherished, silk longed for,
Big Temple of Thanjavur so famed,
The Kaviri cool, the silken fabric of Kanchee,
Pandya of dauntless shoulders.
Such profiles, besides brief biographies, do contain flashes of genius by way of musings on the end of life.
greatest minds of the world down the ages, life remains a riddle, an enigma. Poets have not been lagging behind philosophers, theologians, religionists, saints, and supporters of every ideological hue in attempting to unravel the mystery of life. The one problem that has been haunting many of our thinkers is that man finds himself too often at crossroads not knowing which of the two or three options to choose. Since the ultimate aim of life is still elusive, it becomes extremely difficult to make a choice at every crucial stage of one’s life. Robert Frost has given expression to this dilemma in a memorable poem called “The Road Not Taken.”
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no steps had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back,
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence;
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less travelled by
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Forst, known for his evocative use of the figure of speech called synecdoche (by which a part represents the whole or the whole represents the part), leaves the message deliberately ambiguous. The protagonist of the poem does not tell us what kind of difference the road not taken has really made. Does he imply that if he had taken the other road, his experience would have been the same? Does not the poem tell us that the right to choose may not be a privilege when it ultimately proves to be a case of Hobson’s choice? Is there also the subtle suggestion that the very experience of having to choose is a painful one?
Kalaignar deals with a similar theme in his characteristic manner in a poem “Which to opt for – That or This?”. Using the traditional journey metaphor the poem opens with the recounting of the obstacles one has to face from beginning to end:
You walk into the first step of life in this world
Weeping and wailing.
Destination of the Journey unknown
You keep wavering and vacillating.
There is a smile on your face;
You give in to the mood of anger.
You walk lion – like now,
Then you get shrunk into a mouse.
The passion of love moves you to the extreme;
You also accomplish extraordinary tasks
With penance – like devotion.
You are weighed by cares
As if carrying the foetus;
And you hope to unburden them
Somewhere on the way.
Ungrateful men and betrayers
Obstruct your journey midway.
………
Death stares you in the face
At the end of this journey all.
You are burnt into ashes,
Or you are interred and entombed.
Then the poet gives expression to his firm belief in a single birth for every being echoing the words of the Tamil Siddha Poet Sivavakkiyar.
Will the milk drawn from the teat
And the flower dropped from the stalk
Get back to their sources?
Will the life gone unseen
Ascend the ladder of the physical frame?
Again he stresses the belief that death is the end of everything.
The slippery board called the path of life
Will take you and me along its course with ease
And drop us into the goal of life.
Isn’t death the full stop that nature marks?
Finally, the idea driven home is that one can make hell of heaven and heaven of hell.
You have in you
Power and mind’s strength
In ample measure
That could turn
Heaven into hell
And hell into Heaven
The way
You put the power and the strength into use
Will provide you answer to the question:
Which to opt for – hell or Heaven?
The religious myths about heaven and hell and about the choice one has to make between the two are categorically rejected at the end of the poem.
Some of the Western scholars who are familiar with the ancient Tamil writings have expressed their admiration for the vision of life embodied in them, especially for the daring attitude to death. The poets and their patrons we come across in Purananuru do grieve when some one dies and there are elegies eulogizing the dead king or chieftain and using the tragic occasion to glorify the past achievements of the hero. But neither the poets nor the warriors are scared of death though they condemn the god of death and call him names. They consider death an integral and inevitable part of life and may even welcome it preferring an honorable death to a shameful survival. Valluvar can even have a laugh at death.
He that was alive yesterday is not to be seen today; and this is the glory of this world (336).
The fledgling coming out of the egg flies away from it. Such is the bond between life and body (338).
Death is like falling into sleep and
Birth is like waking up from sleep (339).
Is there no stable home for
The life staying for now in the body? (340).
That such profound utterances about life and death have left a lasting imprint on Kalaignar’s mind is evident in a number of poems. An exquisite piece called “The Medicine not Prescribed by the Physician” portrays a celebrity who is at death’s door.
Losing him?
That intellectual, activist,
That man
Who lives enshrined in every atom
Of the minds of people of that little village!
Even if
Indra’s Heaven,
Non-existent though
Be offered to us on a platter,
We do not want it.
Keep it for yourself
And spare the life of our man
The people of that village prayed
Weeping and wailing.
But the man, lying on his bed, was suffering unbearable pain that shook every limb of his body.
There was no medicine,
That they didn’t give him;
There was no doctor
Who wasn’t concerned that
His prescriptions didn’t work on that man,
The disease
That came unto him like a guest
Showed no signs of taking leave.
Though they were ready to do anything to bring even the herbs from the rich Sanjeevi Mountain to see him back to health, he pleaded with them not to put themselves into difficulty for his sake in a faltering voice choked with emotion. He preferred death to such a life of unrelenting torture.
He was writhing in a sea of pain
As does a boat on water
With cracks developing all around
He said
He needed to repose in mind’s quietude
For him to be relieved of his affliction,
And no medicine there was to get it for him.
Death,
The medicine no doctor prescribed
Came as the cure ultimate
For his illeness
That came unto him as a hill
To go off as mist.
The poet says that death proved to be the only medicine that could deliver the great man from the tyranny of life.
An outright condemnation of terrorism becomes the burden of a small poem which begins with the topical allusion to the notorious September 11 disaster.
Can fire be by fire extinguished?
Can water be by water stopped?
Can hatred be by hatred cancelled?
Can heart be by heart transformed?
Can a wicked deed be by another wicked deed
Called terrorism removed?
With these preliminary remarks, Kalaignar brings in an account of the tragic episode, a blot on our civilization.
Like a beautiful woman’s coiffure bound,
That spiraled up and up to touch the sky
These buildings, by American engineers built–
The world Trade Centre’s skyscrapers.
The beautiful capital of Washington,
The powerful New York, ever vigilant against enemies,
Pentagon, the mammoth military base,
That encloses fighter planes
Enmity insidiously entered all over here,
Like smoke screening everything!
Almost Whitmanesque in its use of the catalogue, the description of the disaster cautiously avoids the pitfall of a melodramatic appeal.
For thousands to fall like corpses,
For young women to lose ambitious young sons and daughters,
And suffer thus,
For those who went to their offices hale and hearty
But to die in thousands,
For men and women, attired to go to offices,
And longingly waited for at home,
By wives, husbands and loving ones,
With all their loving kisses gone,
Like stones shattering glass to smithereens,
Compassion, kindness, love and affection,
As though by the sea carried away.
The poem ends with a piece of advice to all those who claim that they resort to terrorist acts only to create a sweet new world:
In your new world,
Sweetness there may be,
But no man alive will anywhere be!
Kalaignar’s reflections on the nature and meaning of life are to be found in his “portraits of the contemporary realities of the Tamil Society as much as in his responses to the current political and social events to which he has been an authentic witness.” At times he may even devote full length poems to meditations on life but even in them his ideas are seen to come“as felt thoughts in the proper emotional context through a series of glowing metaphors.”
While advising his partymen not to give up their onward march on any account, he enumerates the wrongs that man may do to man and tells them how they should heroically overcome the obstacles keeping the ultimate goal in mind.
Do not in trepidation be if a wild river your path does cross.
Judging how your forebears crossed it,
Make a bridge or by your sinews swim,
And the banks you reach, without stopping your journey.
One from the pack of howling jackals may turn left;
And another to the right!
Why bother whether they turn left or right!
See they do not harass you!
Animals and wild snakes may lurk in the bush
Only to ward the dangers off, you do a weapon require.
The mounting chaff of human enmity to end
Carry you do the sword of goodness and the armour of love.
When you eagerly climb the snowy peaks;
Handy it is to wear footwear, free from inner hassles
Never will they slip you up.
Though clusters of images and mixed metaphors beautify the poem, its real charm consists in the feeling that it evokes in the readers who know about the innumerable hardships that Kalaignar had to face in his long and eventful life during which he has been having a punishing schedule for himself. While going through the poem, one cannot help feeling that he has been consciously or unconsciously describing the arduous journey that he himself has undertaken.
It is the small poem entitled “Water Family” which witnesses to his technical virtuosity, especially to the stock of similes he has at his beck and call. There is a self-critical handling of similes in his description of the rains, the seas and the rivers.
If it is described that an old man’s cough is thunder,
If the light of his bulging eyes in fatigue is lightning,
If the saliva he dribbles is rain,
We won’t accept such sickly rain.
I shall an example cite for the youths to like.
The stars in the sky are beauteous women,
Their collective speech is the rumbling of thunder,
Their flashing eyes are streaks of lightning,
The fragrant waters they sprinkle
On the loved one, the round moon, is the rain!
The example appropriate to warriors bold is:
Two bold hearts confronting each other,
Is the crash of thunder!
The spear of warriors clashing is lightning in the sky,
The blood the warriors shed is rain,
The sky is largely the battlefield!
Kalaignar can endlessly go on in this vein since he has mastered the art of writing poetry by familiarizing himself with the rich gamut of Tamil poetry beginning with the ancient Tamil Classics and ending with the organ voice of the Dravidian Movement, Bharatidasan.
There are several short poems which bear out his argumentative skill. Like the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, Kalaignar can shine in dialectics and demonstrate his debating prowess in verse. Asserting that there is only one birth and that the belief in rebirth is but a sort of comfort for men who keep wailing about the reality of death, he discusses at length the problem with the belief in rebirth:
The view
That there is no rebirth after death
Can bring many a good in its wake.
Awakened to the reality
That death will come sooner or later,
People would take to worthy deeds
Works of ethics enjoin upon them
And finish these deeds
Well within their life - span.
On the contrary
Belief in afterlife
Would result in
People leaving their tasks unfinished
In the hope of continuing them in the birth next.
The talk of rebirth is a thing of deceit,
Do realize that
There is only one birth
…
What blabbering
Is all this talk of men
Living through eternity?
It sounds meaningful
When one says
Man lives
Through what he leaves behind.
But
When one says
Man has no death
Doesn’t it mark a jarring note?
Those
That one has written, spoken, created or guided through
Are things
Which can live timelessly
Beyond one’s death.
One becomes deathless
Because one has given unto posterity
Things deathless.
It stands to reason
When we speak of living through fame;
It militates against reason
When we speak of living through deathless soul.
One would be reminded of the amazing worldview presented in a Sangam poem by Kopperunchozhan:
Only the wavering with a weak heart
That clings to flawed perspectives will not
Stop doubting if they should do good deeds
Or not, the one that goes hunting for tuskers
May catch them; the hunter of small birds may
Return empty – handed; if the great with great
Aims may enjoy the fruit of their good deed,
They can even gain the pleasures of paradise;
If there is no heavenly joy, they may be
Freed from the cycle of births; if there is no
Rebirth, it is great to perish with a blameless
Body leaving a fame as high as a Himalayan peak.
Kalaignar, soaked in Sangam poetry, would have certainly been impressed with this piece and would have written his poem as a partly favourable response to this.
Kalaignar rewrites the well known puranic story of Cavitthiri and Cattiyavan to drive home the truth that men and women are of one kind. In his version of the legend, she implores the god of death for the boon to get her husband back to life. When she receives a firm ‘no’ as the reply, she begs him prayerfully to grant her another boon at least. When he consents, she prays for the boon of a child. When the god gives his consent thoughtlessly, she asks, “How can the boon materialize without my husband?” Taken aback, the god throws his hand hard on the buffalo’s back and exclaims, his head hanging down, “O I am outsmarted!” But he obliges her and getting her husband redeemed, she says she would henceforth be a challenge to the overbearing male chauvinism. Praising “the dazzling smartness of her womanly wit”, the god of death himself plays the role of a male feminist by advising her,
Mores and values
Are things shared between men and women;
All talk of
Superiority of men or superiority of women
Is unwarranted;
The difference manifests all in the physical make,
And does not exist in the mind’s realm.
Strength or weakness of character
Is a matter of individual mould,
Where no question of sex crops up.
Men and Women are of one race
The race of humankind.
Championing the feminist cause, he, in poem after poem, may condemn those who speak ill of women in verse, castigate the common social evils like the dowry system, the cruel treatment of widows and the atrocious punishments meted out to the erring women.
During the medieval times, there were some saints and mystics who were particularly harsh on women holding them responsible for all the evils. Chiding their modern descendants, the poet says,
He vilified women in verse
Calling them
Crafty witches taking the guise of women;
It was the same he
Who was born to a woman.
He poured scorn at them
Saying
They stupefied him by their eyes
And lured him by their breasts;
It was he
Who grew up
Feeding on the breast milk of a woman.
The poet’s heart bleeds when he learns that female infanticide is on the rise, even some women conniving in this inhuman act. And then in unbearable agony he bursts out:
Can we remain patient anymore
Seeing the suffering of womenfolk?
Will a bow choose to break its own string?
Will a lute snap its own arrow?
……….
If the animate things,
That men and women are,
Find the perpetration of cruelty
Against women acceptable,
Will this Society come to any good
Or will it get a thrashing in future?
The elegies that Kalaignar has been penning periodically are reflective of his magnanimity as well as of his fertile imagination. Apart from his own leaders Periyar and Anna, numerous great men of other political parties and celebrities in other walks of life are all generously acclaimed for their achievement. The highest praise is, of course, reserved for Periyar, his mentor.
In his poem, “Thanthai Periyar”, after proudly recalling a few touching scenes of his association with the formidable social reformer, he adds,
Those that did divisions of caste create,
Stunned they were as though they had
A Crash of thunder heard.
God, religion and superstition
All in one as subtly knit,
See, they flee in lightning speed!
The ignorant old world
So adored and admired,
See they disintegrate by the Erode Quake!
The most memorable lines about Anna are to be found in “As your Shadow we move about “and” “Enmity Conquer We Shall!”
Even before your coming,
The Tamils a history had.
But only after you came,
The Tamils of their history had a clear view!
Literature there was for Tamils!
But only after your advent,
Alive you made it,
For the world to know of it!
A culture of their own the Tamils had!
But time was when ignorant of it they were,
Leader! Because you came,
The Tamil, a Tamil became!
The painstaking work done by Anna in the political social and cultural arenas is symbolically presented in the second poem:
Dear brother!
Our elder born!
In pouring rains,
In streaking lighting,
In crashing thunder,
In fierce storm,
With a little lamp held in your hand,
The journey you began with a smile!
On what path?
On a steep rock!
On a path full of stones!
To let the lamp glow,
You gave it to our hands. Yes!
And the foremost disciple of Anna assures him on behalf of his younger brothers that the lamp handed over to them would be shielded from the winds keen to put it out and taken safely on the victory path.
Though the Dravidian Movement fought the Congress Party tooth and nail during Nehru’s time, and though the Dravidian parties were opposed to many of Nehru’s ideas, Kalaignar did not hesitate to pay a generous and sincere tribute to the doyen of Indian democracy in a poetic symposium on “The Democracy that Nehru Found”.
A fighting and principled hero Nehru was.
He snatched the flag of the Whites,
Who our freedom robbed,
And our flag of freedom hoisted instead.
He was the lion - hearted who ever served,
Following Gandhi’s path.
Receiving all the blows the British inflicted,
Their repressive measures he withstood.
He was the one who sacrificed a promising life of youth,
And spent it in the darkness of a prison.
Mightily angry though he often was,
He lit the fire of freedom!
Though very rich, he did for the poor care,
And flourished as a paragon of qualities great,
Again, Kalaignar can think of a series of choice symbols to describe the reputed Indian leader, the very image of nobility.
A splendid fruition he is, eye - catching as the Marina,
A pearl cherished, silk longed for,
Big Temple of Thanjavur so famed,
The Kaviri cool, the silken fabric of Kanchee,
Pandya of dauntless shoulders.
Such profiles, besides brief biographies, do contain flashes of genius by way of musings on the end of life.
