TRIBUTE
The comet moves on
LAKSHMI KANNAN
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P.G. Sunderarajan (Chitti), who died on June 23, was the last of the Renaissance men of Tamil literature.
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The man behind the formidable critic with an array of books was great fun to know. Endowed with a rare level of energy and child-like joie de vivre, he hugely enjoyed himself in his journey through life.
Wit and humour: Chitti's work was prolific. Photo: S.R. Raghunathan
THE legendary man of Tamil literature P.G. Sunderarajan passed on in Chennai, on June 23. With that a very rich and interesting era in Tamil writing comes to a close, for the last of the Renaissance man has upped and left.
Fame and respect
Prodigiously talented, Sunderarajan wrote critical books and biographies in English and for his prolific output in Tamil, he used the nom de plume "Chitti", a name that earned him immense fame and respect from every discerning Tamil writer, scholar, critic and lay reader. It is also a name that became synonymous with a sharp, acerbic wit and an unsparing critical sense oddly matched with a compassionate understanding of the human predicament. Admittedly, his keen interest in English writings fed certain fullness to his critical writings in Tamil.
With all this tucked in his "portfolio", Chitti insisted on being called An Ordinary Man when Narasiah (author of the well-known Kadalodi) wrote his biography. Only now, Chitti had an impish logic behind it. He was born on April 20, 1910, the day Hailey's Comet was seen streaking across the sky. Astronomically, it was considered as "a comet seen on an ordinary year", so "that makes me an ordinary man," he argued. And got his way. Finally the biography of this extraordinary man — whose life spanned five decades of all the significant political, literary and social movements before and after the Independence of India and read like a history of Tamil literature — was published with the title Sadarana Manidhan (An Ordinary Man).
His failing health did not dim his alertness to events around him. Just a few days before he passed away, he sent me a mail that asked with the clean, prelapsarian wonder of an old-timer, why an educated girl like Kavya Vishwanathan from Harvard should resort to plagiarising in her patchwork novel. "What led her to make this foolish move?" he asked, incredulous.
The versatile sweep of his books in Tamil includes literary criticism that he wrote in a crisp style, literary history, biographies, humour and translations. In the last category, his translations of The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin, Lesser Brown's Seeds of Change and Professor A. Nilakanta Sastri's History and Culture of Tamil are unusual choices. In English, his biographies of that fugitive on the run, freedom fighter Satyamurthi, and Sri Paramacharya are again, unique in perspective.
I consider it my good fortune for not just getting to know Chitti, but to be considered as a friend by this legendary figure, despite the vast difference in our age and the obvious disparity in our literary stature. Nothing seemed to matter when we got together. Not age, nor even gender or the geographical distance between us, with me living in Delhi and he in Chennai. So valuable were his friends to him that he would persuade his biographers, interviewers and commentators to include their names in their writings. At times, friendship proved to be a fertile ground for projects that bloomed as well-written books.
Literary friends
One such literary friend was the late Shivapada Sundaram who later moved over to London to join the B.B.C. When they successfully co-authored two massive literary histories titled (in English translation) A Hundred Years of Tamil Novel, and A Hundred Years of Tamil Short Story, they came to be called "the literary twins." When I met Sundaram in London, he could not stop talking about his good friend Chitti.
Another close friend was the renowned iconoclastic novelist T. Janakiraman (popularly known as Thi. Jaa to the acronym-addicted Tamilians) with whom he co-authored the beautifully written travelogue Nadanthai Vaazhi Kaaveri, published by Penguin as Eternal Kaveri in English translation. And it was through Thi. Jaa that I got to know Chitti, in the early 1980s.
The man behind the formidable critic with an array of books was great fun to know. Endowed with a rare level of energy and child-like joie de vivre, he hugely enjoyed himself in his journey through life. Outspoken and uncompromising, he was also a compulsive letter writer. In the times of curt e-mails and terse SMS, he revived the lost art of graceful letters, dripping with literary flavour, newsy about book release, literary frauds, about somebody's promising talent or someone else's phoney pretensions.
Critics have remarked that he brought a Wodehousian kind of humour to Tamil writings. It could also turn Puckish in the reckless way he let would let it run wild or direct it against himself.
Impish humour
He talked about his youthful days in college when he wrote poems in English in the name of `Scribbler". They went on to win a prestigious prize. "My God, these are bad times for English poetry," he thought and promptly stopped writing poems! When, during a conference a photographer wanted to take pictures of him, Chitti quipped: "Young man, you're wasting your colour film because everything is finally going to come out in black and white," a reference to his dark complexion.
When he met the critic John Oliver Perry from Tufts University, Boston, at my place, Perry remarked on his unusual interest in tribal culture and his translation of Verrier Elwin. He enquired if Chitti had a background in Anthropology. "No, I just have a strong primitive streak in me," replied Chitti.
To me and to his family and friends, he lives on. In his books, his indestructible values that have rubbed off on the wonderfully warm family he created around him. To distract myself from the grief that pressed upon me heavily, I decided to dust the cabinet in my study, gather all his books and arrange them on one shelf. They spilled over rebelliously, much like he did, in life.
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