In pursuit of excellence
M. HARISH GOVIND
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M. Krishnan Nair's literary acumen and scholarship attracted admirers from all walks of life.
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M. Krishnan Nair
The Baker model house at Paippinmoodu in Thiruvananthapuram, `Sai Krishna,' was always a magnet for visitors. They included literary men, former students, aspiring writers, politicians - the professor once caught one nodding off when he was talking - and others plainly drawn by an awed admiration for the best known and perhaps the most controversial Malayalam literary critic of our times.
Warm welcome
Krishnan Nair welcomed all warmly, graciously asking them into the simply furnished sitting room. Many of them would sit silently, having come merely to hear their host speak. The moments of embarrassed, if expectant, silence would soon be broken by the professor himself. Conversation came to him with the same lucid ease as writing.
This writer had paid the professor a visit along with a friend early in October, 2004. That was a time when ill-health was fast catching up on him and he was no more his old self. I was seeing him after a year or so and he looked thin and weak.
The last time I had seen the professor was from a distance at Spencer Junction, where he was waiting at the pedestrian crossing with a couple of paperback volumes tucked under the arm. His domed bald head, grey hair sticking out defiantly at the temples, was held high and the back was ram-rod straight. The white cotton shirt and dhoti were starched stiff as usual.
But that day, when the professor came in, silently, wearing a sleeved under-banian, he looked a pale figure of that former self. Advanced age seemed to have suddenly got the better of his proud carriage.
When the professor opened his mouth, however, the measured speech wherein not a word was wasted and the near-obsession with correct pronunciation, was just the same. The slightly nasal voice, so familiar to tens of thousands of his students and the literary world at large, might have lost its ring, but not its riveting quality.
"I am not able to walk these days... gone old, you see... 86 years", he said, smiling wanly. Seated, after the usual brief introductions, he plunged into intellectual small-talk about the state of the literary world, without ceremony, as was his wont.
When he spoke, it was as if continuing from where he left off. His listeners did not find anything amiss in this, such being the communicative power of the man. He said how fortunate it was for him to have had students of rare calibre. "I do not claim to be intellectually superior to them", he added.
He recalled the professor of English literature who wanted to put a particularly irritating student in his place during a Shakespeare class. The tutor had asked, "Boy, is `Twelfth Night' a comedy or a tragedy?' Said the student, "Sir, it is a comedy, but in your hands it is a tragedy!"
Experience in class
Then there was his own experience with a student during a lecture on Kumaran Asan's `Karuna.' That day's class dealt with the part describing the Buddha's disciple, Upaguptan, going to see Vasavadatta, the courtesan, lying dismembered in the cemetery.
"Nadakkavoode varunnu bhanumanil ninnu kaattil/ Kadapottipparannethum kathirupole... ", he recited.
"I explained that though pole is used, the poetic ornament employed is not upama but ulpreksha since the comparison is to the metaphor of a kathiru breaking away from the sun", said the professor.
The student had raised his hand for permission to speak and asked, "Sir, is it enough to say just that?" The professor responded, "Then you say what there is more to say." The student said that Asan was also comparing bhanuman, the sun, to the Buddha in the same breath.
The suggestion was that the Buddha was despatching one ray out of a million rays - Upagupta - as a messenger of love to Vasavadatta as she lay awaiting welcome death. Said the professor, "I then told the boy, `You please come here; your place is on the podium and mine is that of the student'!"
Krishnan Nair always set great store by the traditional values of hospitality. It was as if he wanted to set a model for others in this regard. He welcomed guests with a `namaste' delivered with folded hands and till the day he was strong enough, used to accompany visitors to the gate to see them off.
Towards the end, the professor became less and less able to receive guests the way he would have wanted to, and to offer what he knew they wanted-brief forays into the rarefied world of literature in his company. Perhaps it was as well, because the last thing he would have wanted to be was to be known as a "bad host"!
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