DIFFERENT REGISTERS
Metaphor for a generation
C.S. LAKSHMI
SPARROW COLLECTIONS
THERE are not many writers who would take up a theme and do thorough research on that and then turn it into fiction. Turning fieldwork into fiction has been attempted by very few writers. This is because this involves travel, preparing field notes and then weaving a story around it. But there is one writer who has done this for many, many years and she is Rajam Krishnan. I have had differences with her in terms of the story she has woven around the field notes she has collected. But I have always admired her for her energy and guts to venture into different areas and experiences and making them come alive in her fiction. She can go to Thanjavur and write about the life of farmers who stand in the slush of the fields and do agricultural work; she can be in Goa and write about the independence of Goa. She can write about the women in the salt fields and she can also write about women in politics who have been forgotten by history. She can write about the life of fisher folk and she can also write about people who live in the mountains. Behind all these novels are authentic and well-researched field notes, which can make any anthropologist proud. But Rajam Krishnan has been doing this not to prove her mettle as a researcher but to make the act of writing meaningful for herself and her readers. She is now 78; but for this writer, writing is not just an occasional indulgence but a passionate commitment. Some time back she lost her husband and a great many changes have taken place in her life since then in terms of residence and her own health. One would have thought that it would take some time before she takes up writing again. But in December 2002 has come her new novel Uthara Kaandam. With this Rajam Krishnan has again proved that writing is something that is an integral part of her life.
Uthara Kaandam is a kind of a culmination of all her thoughts on the nation and its politics. It is a novel woven with complex images of politics, leaders, freedom fighters and their lives. More than anything else, it is a novel which exposes degraded human lives and forsaken Gandhian values. In the introduction she says that the novel is about everyone and everything that she has known in these 78 years. Rajam Krishnan feels that the politics of Tamil Nadu has degraded to a level where women, despite being referred to as thai and thaikulam are the worst sufferers. The powerless and economically inferior women get victimised whereas those in powerful positions in the society become easily a part of the cutthroat politics whose aim is quick money, limitless power and personal gains. The novel is a collage of images of people who have staked their personal lives to hold on to values which they believed the freedom struggle taught them contrasted with images of a generation of leaders and hangers-on who have absolutely no concern about these values for they don't exist in their vocabulary or agenda. At the centre of the novel is Thayamma who is 80 years old, looking back at her past while experiencing the hard realities of her present life. Brought up by a Gandhian couple, she has to face the indignity of begetting a son who turns politics into a vulgar game of power-grabbing at whatever cost. He has scant respect for women but occasionally he comes to ask his mother to live with him for her staying alone at that age may encourage adverse comments from his political rivals.
The most touching characters in the novel are Ramunni, Sayabu, Subbiah, Sambu Athai and the Gandhian couple. Ramunni and Sayabu die early in the novel but their voices and tears seem to haunt the novel. Ramunni escapes being hanged for his Marxist views in his young age when the Communist Party was underground. He dies a powerless, poor man and when Thayamma visits him, after a while he begins to weep bitterly. "The hangman's rope would have been better for me. Our dream of a "Bharata samudayam", where there is equality, democracy and non-violence is now shattered," he says. The term "Bharata Samudayam" is one the poet Bharati used to hail the nation. And Ramunni's weeping becomes the metaphor of his generation.
The novel ends in a highly dramatic way when Thayamma decides to leave her house along with a much-exploited young working girl and go to the village where the Gandhian couple had initially raised her. The village has just experienced caste riots after a young girl and a boy from different castes run away from home to marry and they are found out and killed. But in the village, is also a sub-inspector who knows about the history of the Gandhian couple and there is also an old ally whose children have settled down in the U.S. and elsewhere who has come to settle down in the village. And, in a typical Rajam Krishnan style of hope emerging out of nowhere, there is also a group of youngsters from various parts of India, one of them from the family of the bold Gandhian woman who had initially given succour to Thayamma, who swear that they will try to bring values back into the life and politics of the nation. Thayamma's life has come one full circle and she is there where it all started and hope is born again within her, like a new life. The inspector returns her bag with her white sari safely. There is not a spot on the sari and it is white with no stains. The white sari becomes the symbol of all that is held sacred by her and its return brings hope, which she had almost lost.
The unstained white sari is also Rajam Krishnan's message of not giving into oppression and injustice of any kind as a person and as a writer.
C.S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai. She is the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women).
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