Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

A progressive modernist

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, who died on Monday, would be remembered as one of the most powerful voices in modern Indian poetry, particularly in its stream of progressive modernism.

Kadammanitta came on the literary scene and made his presence felt in the Sixties and Seventies when modernism in Indian poetry was branching off to a path of subversive possibilities, rebelling against the sentimentality of romanticism and also the self-indulgence of modernism. His, as also of that of a whole generation of writers across India imbued with the revolutionary zeal, was a search for a collective identity that had its roots firmly planted in the native cultural landscape and was linked to the dehumanising contemporary experience marked by capitalist aggression. In him, the primitive and the modern coalesced and one whole generation of Malayalis grew up hearing him and singing with him.

With its folk idiom and raw power, Kadammanitta’s poems literally exploded with energy. And, no wonder, he liberated poetry from the holy communes of the aesthetes to the wide world of the masses, those who populate the margins of existence. His was a call to action as all insurrectional poetry strives to be and he achieved this end by dipping into the folk literary tradition and native rhythms. But he did not confine himself to powerful rendering or draw energy and inspiration from the oral folk tradition. He was equally effective when he chose to break the meter and opted for free verse.

Kadammanitta is the name of the village, the land of the ritual art form ‘Padayani’, where M.R. Ramakrishna Panikkar was born as the son of Meletharayil Raman Nair and Kuttiyamma on March 22, 1975.

A graduate in political science, he was inspired by Left ideology from early days. His poetic sensibility grew when he was working with the Postal Accounts Department in Chennai and became involved with a group of writers and painters led by M. Govindan. His first collection of poems came in 1976.

His major works include Kurathi, Kaattaalan, Kiraathavrtham, Santha, Kadammanitta, Kannurkkotta, Kozhi, Chaakkala, Avar Parayunnu, Njaaninnumente Graamathilaanu, Nagarathil Paranja Suvisesham and Pasukkuttiyude Maranam. He has also translated poems by Octavio Paz, Lorca, Leopold Cedar Senghor and Cesar Vallejo and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Kadammanitta was a member of the Kerala Assembly from 1996 to 2001 and president of the Kerala State Library Council from 1994 to 2004. He has also won several awards, notably the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award for best excellence in poetry (1982), Asan Prize (1982) and Kerala Sahitya Akademi’s award for the contributions of a life time (1992). He had opted not to write serious poetry in the 1990s and but broke his silence with a poem after visiting Gujarat.

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