TAMIL
Social novels
Prema Nandakumar
INBA NINAIVU AND SANTHIPPU: Akilon; Dhagam, G-3/8, Masilamani Street, Pondy Bazaar, T. Nagar, Chennai-600017. Rs. 45.
TO READ again the first work of a well-known novelist can tease our critical antenna. Does it declare his identity? Did he mature early? Did he change? Did he rise to the heights gradually or was it one leap into the unknown? Reading Inba Ninaivu in the background of Akilon's published works which brought him several awards and transformed him into a trend leading to several academic dissertations can be educative to students of creative imagination.
The essential Akilon is very much present in Inba Ninaivu. Men who are honest, patriotic, simple and romantic. Women who know only to love and suffer as they are always prisoners of patriarchy. The invariable play of chance to advance the narrative with sudden turns. The stifling odour of desolation is never far away.
It is a young man's novel, catching the romantic tingle of adolescence and silencing it with death in the end. Written when the Gandhian Age was speeding towards the denouement, we have the idealist Ramanathan who gives up thoughts of marriage on the advice of the Mahatma to work fulltime for the nation.
But how idealistic is he when he runs away from a promise made to a 16-year-old girl who loved him? The second novelette, Sandhippu is an attempt to highlight the evils of caste. But the entire technique is cinematic and exemplifies the dictum that nothing fails like excess in the delineation of man's chaste emotions. An inverted Devadas theme but Muthiah nowhere manages to become a tragic hero nor does Bhuvaneswari bring honour to the `Pudumai penn' concept put forward by Subramania Bharati.
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