Documentation of rural Mahabharata
PREMA NANDAKUMAR
PADUKALAM: P. K. Ponnuswamy; Manivasagar Pathippagam, 31, Singar Street, Parrys, Chennai-600108. Rs. 225.
The village structure has helped sustain India’s economy and culture very well for several millennia. After 1947, the anxiety for technological advancement led to the decline and fall of the Indian village. Further, universal suffrage has led the various political parties to build caste-based vote-banks which are easily manoeuvrable in the countryside. Liquor, the vagaries of nature and the tradition of spending on family festivities have also had their share in mak
ing Indian villages a place of sorrow. And yet, it is here that the soul of India remains alive.
Coming in the line of classics like K.S. Venkataramani’s “Murugan Oru Uzhavan” and Shankar Ram’s “Mannasai”, this is a creative documentation of the village-based Gounder community through three generations. Indeed it is a rural Mahabharata peopled by the sensible and the hysterical, the good and the evil, the romantic and the killjoy.
Rivalry
In the background is the waving greenery of sugarcane and the sweet smell of boiling jaggery which can overwhelm any stench that could include Pechimuthu who had slipped into the burning pit. When the sugarcane field burns, we are arrested by a Senecan tragedy whose dark reverberations are symbolised by the charred remains of two bullocks.
With an adroit style that avoids the melodramatic, Ponnuswamy wields the Kongu area Tamil dialect to recount the generational rivalry of three Gounder families. Most of the women of Padukalam could have slipped out of our classical texts. The Kunti-like Koothampundi Aathal, Mariamma who reminds one of Mandodari, and Marathal who is sheerly heroic in uttering a lie. They haunt our memory as all of them want a peaceful life, the peace that eludes them all the time in the rural struggle for existence. And yet, the villagers have their own innocent ways of drawing as much joy out of life as possible.
Sobering thoughts
The novelist attracts our attention to the manner in which proverbs and idioms are woven by the rural folk with enviable ease and how dark humour is often used by them to drive home a point. There is the drama troupe of ‘Jnana Sundari’ taking us back to a bygone age of the real stage. And the scene of the mock fight between hunters and the folk heroes, Ponnar and Sankar. A gathering meant to restore unity but turning into a fatal scene of ambiguous deaths. Padukalam could well be a commentary on the celebrated exclamation of Aeneas: sunt lacrimae rerum.
The novel leaves one with sobering thoughts regarding the touch of tears in mortal things. Also with a ray of hope that love, friendship and fraternal bondage continue to sustain the human family as the indestructible leaves of grass.
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