DIFFERENT REGISTERS
One's own space
C.S. LAKSHMI
SPARROW COLLECTIONS
Poorani.
OFTEN when Republic Day or Independence Day approaches one's mind goes back to those who closely associated themselves with the nation and its cause. It is not the great leaders one thinks of but those whom one has come across in the course of one's work — people who have done their work quietly with conviction and courage and have not thought of rewards or awards. One such person is Sampoornam who writes under the name of Poorani. I met her a few months ago and was amazed to see a 92-year-old young person who immediately began to discuss contemporary Tamil literature with me and the conversation went on to include so many other topics like politics, status of women, fundamentalism and so on. Her daughter Krishankini, who is a writer, told me that her mother had a large collection of unpublished writings. I requested to be allowed to go through the manuscript. It was then that I realised how some women disseminated their ideas of the nation and its politics.
Poorani could study only up to the fifth Standard. Her father was a Tamil Pundit who taught in a High School. So Poorani continued to read books even after she stopped going to school. She got married at the age of 13 and came to her husband's house when she was 15. Her husband belonged to a business family. The sons of the family, including her husband, ran a hotel. There was not a single book in the house. And Poorani did not know what to do with her time. She began to write a few poems. After a couple of months she told her husband that she longed to read some books. Her husband asked her why she had not told him before and the next morning as she was drawing the kolam at the threshold, the paperboy came and placed the Tamil daily Tamizh Nadu on the parapet. In the evening, a boy from the hotel came and gave her two novels and told her that he had been asked to bring her novels as she read them, from the local library.
Apart from the print medium, there was not much space in the public sphere for a house-bound woman to come out and express her creative ideas. A lot of what women created remained within the household without any claim of authorship. It could be an embroidered pillow, a ship in a glass, coloured bead curtains with peacocks or swans hanging on the front door swaying in the wind, welcoming the visitors. The threshold smeared with cow dung paste would be filled with kolams recreating flowers, birds and heavenly beings which will get mixed with the soil by the end of the day after being tread upon the whole day. Often when asked who created these works of art, one would be told it was either the mother, wife or a widowed sister and there will always be a corollary saying that these were done as a hobby, to pass time. These creative expressions never found place in an exhibition space. But creative people like Poorani created their own spaces within the traditional space given to them, to express themselves.
It was customary those days to have five-day marriages and there were several occasions for songs. Poorani began writing very interesting songs for marriages and into these songs she brought the idea of the nation. She wrote a long song on the nation called "Desia Odam" which was sung in many marriages and without ever going into print became a popular song sung in many marriages. She wrote many more in this vein and all of them became popular. Poorani set her songs to the popular tunes of those days and so they caught on with people very easily. In one of her songs she compares Gandhi to Krishna. Krishna was born in a prison and Gandhi has also been in prison; Krishna worked for the Pandavas to get their kingdom back and Gandhi is working for us to get our nation back; Krishna has a chakrayudham as a weapon and Gandhi has the charka; Krishna gave clothes to Draupadi to save her honour and Gandhi has given us khadar to save our honour — thus goes her interesting comparison.
Many schools approached her to write songs for their annual day functions. Later she was part of a women's association by name Bharata Mata Madhar Sangam where she wrote plays and made young girls enact them. In 1954, when the then Chief Minister Kamaraj visited their association, Poorani wrote a song inviting women to work together in many ways and welcome the guest. Structured as a dialogue, the song went thus:
Friend dearest,
Come, let us together
Build the sangam, come...
Let us happily
Weave on the charka,
Come...
Let us do many other things,
Come...
There were no sangams
In the past
Go away
Can women ever
Come out of the house?
Go away
I shall not do
What is not right
My friend,
Kitchen is our place
And I can't come
Go away
Let's go forward
With no hesitation,
Come...
Let's make wonders
On this earth,
Come...
Let's welcome the minister,
Come.
Set to the tune of Bharati's "Oli padaiththa kanninai" where the word "Come" is sung three times, the song was full of hope and energy and expressed the mood the women of the country were in at that time. Even the kummi song she wrote for the Independence Day in 1956 exhorts women to safeguard the freedom won and work relentlessly for the nation. But by the end of the 1960s Poorani was quite disillusioned and writes bitterly about communalism, caste wars and the endless political wrangles. In one of her recent poems she asks: It is the government's duty to lay roads and provide drinking water to its citizens. Why does it have to be used for publicity on the T.V? Why do they treat the villages like a different county and make it seem as if charity is being extended to them?
Last month Poorani's daughter Krishankini made an effort to put selections from her mother's works into print and Kalachuvadu Pathipakam has recently brought out a collection of Poorani's poems from 1929 onwards. The poems in this book span several decades and they tell many stories about women and the nation. These are poems which speak about history. Poems a woman has written to record the history of the nation in her own way covering several aspects of personal life and history.
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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