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Book Review
Tamil litterateur
Ashokamitran
KA NAA SU SIRUKATHAIGAL: Kaavya Shanmugasundaram; Kaavya, 16 II Cross Street, Trustpuram, Kodambakkam, Chennai-600024. Rs. 350.
For all his influence on modern Tamil writing Ka. Naa. Subramanian sought and obtained very little worldly gain and lived an unspectacular, frugal and probably melancholic life. The Government of Tamil Nadu with the best of intentions ‘nationalised’ the works of many early writers and compensated their successors. It meant placing the writings in public domain for a publisher to bring out the writer’s work without having to compensate the literary heirs h
imself. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Ka. Naa. Subramanian is one such ‘nationalised’ writer and this is a collection of the short stories the publisher of this book had managed to lay his hand on. Everybody will agree that a book of this kind should have had a proper contents page and also the chronology of the writer. It should also have been made clear that the year appearing at the end of a story pertains to the year of the collection it is taken from and the whole collection should have had a critical introduction.
Artistic mind
Ka. Naa. Subramanian didn’t win much approbation for his short stories in his lifetime, and in a sense, even for his longer works and translations. Born in Thanjavur district in January 1911 and after graduation from Chidambaram, he took upon himself the precarious livelihood of a full-time Tamil writer and wrote incessantly stories, novels and poems in modern mode. He was severe on mediocrity but he was completely free of malice. He took up literary criticism and literary history more in an effort to inform Tamil readers of better reading material than what was then available in popular magazines. But his entire lifetime and identity got confined in the public mind as a severe literary critic. Reading his short stories now, one can find an extremely artistic mind working out a delicate path to tell subtle stories for conveying truly profound messages.
Without striking a pose of a rhetorician or a reformer as most early modern Indian writers did, he stood out by his artlessness but tackled numerous topics deftly and convincingly. As early as 1955, he had in a story treated out in full the ramifications of what became a hot political issue in 1975-77 — abuse of power. Also on what would be considered an explication of the five “hindrances” in the path of liberation — sleep. As early as 50 years ago, he had written almost in a casual manner, how the male ego feels belittled when the man’s wife excels in the intellectual pursuit of creative writing. (This is just the opposite of the problem faced by the extraordinary writer Scott Fitzgerald with his writer wife Zelda.) One of his haunting stories is of a young man making an unscheduled visit to the village he was forced to leave years ago.
Almost as a personal credo, he avoided the high and mighty propositions. Generally his writing was in the first person and always had something novel and interesting to tell. He must have written more stories than those found in this volume. Like a number of writers, R.K.Narayan and Norman Mailer included, he had to go to a different publisher for each new collection. That way this book is a welcome restoration.
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