THE SIXTY-YEAR JOURNEY: BHASHA LITERATURE
TAMIL: Vasantha Surya
Sa Kandasamy.
Flawless poetics and swelling cadences, yesterday.
Symbolist techniques, modern and postmodern fiction,
deconstruction, and all the isms today.
With all these goings-on in this carnival fairground
it's a good thing it lost its way and went off on its own
naked as a baby, my poem.
“Vanapechi”, by Thamizhachi Thangapandian, Uyirmai, 2007
T he risky ‘goings-on' in Tamil literature today have miraculously failed to deflect many acts of creation. The preferred medium for social and political awareness-raising in the Tamil country from the days of A. Madhaviah, Subramania Bharati, Bharatidasan, Kalki and others, literature has striven to keep its head above polemics, wielding the language to chisel new self-images from people's lives. Leaders, some of whom are themselves writers and poets who have sharpened the idiom of change and empowerment, have not only keenly followed but attempted to set the literary scene. Not stopping with rhetoric extolling the glories of a tongue which antedates Sanskrit and has outlived it, successive state governments have followed a conscious policy of literary patronage, stocking government libraries with contemporary works.
Sahitya Akademi award-winner Sa Kandasamy notes that writers have now emerged from all communities, castes, and districts. Popular magazines and, in recent years, desktop publication have provided outlets for their work. A lively ambience for innovation and literary criticism have been created by Kalachuvadu, Uyirmai and other ‘little' magazines on foundations laid in the early 1930s by Manikkodi.
Productive period
Dilip Kumar, who is Gujarati by birth but writes on the polyglot urban experience in supple Tamil prose, says some 30 to 50 novels written after the 1950s have been comparable to any written anywhere. Several writers have tweaked the indigenous story-telling and poetic traditions to articulate present-day sensibilities. Despite syntactic orthodoxies which continue to privilege written Tamil, and ignoring the tut-tutting of purists, Ki Rajanarayanan, Poomani T. Janakiraman, and Sundara Ramaswamy have succeeded in establishing in literature the place of living speech as it manifests itself in changing urban and rural dialects. Bama lets her Dalit characters speak about themselves in their own uninhibited lingo.
Sa Kandasamy's are among those works which go beyond ‘Tamil-ness' to tell about people taking to new ways of life — and developing new character traits, like the persuasiveness of a politician or the resourcefulness of an entrepreneur. Joe D'Cruz's Aazhi Choozh Ulagu is, according to Dilip Kumar, “almost an ethnographic study of the fishing community.” Salma's Irandaam Jaamam describes the half-lit lives of women of the Muslim trading class.
New freedoms
Certainly women's writing has thrown off the veils described in Ambai's (C.S. Lakshmi's) 1980s study The Face Behind the Mask. If a popular writer like Vaasanthi can write insightfully about women's low self-esteem leading to female foeticide, other nuances of feminism have been tackled by dozens of writers, including Ambai herself. “Knowingly or unknowingly,” says Kandasamy, “the best Tamil short story writers follow the Sangam tradition.” Typifying the Tamil literary genius, their stories trip nimbly along paths of droll understatement and innuendo trodden by poet-storytellers over two thousand years ago. The imagination is stimulated; it is not taken over. Tracing the path, he recites a sly prose-poem from the Kalithogai spoken by a girl to her ‘bangle-flashing friend': almost haiku-like in its economy of imagery and words, it tells how she and her lover have cleverly managed to get on her mother's good side.
The ‘ pudu kavidai' (‘new poetry') of half-a-century ago did away with formal poetics. Now a tsunami of verse seems about to wash away recognisable aesthetics and to blur the language, with the confessional mode vying with post-modernist affectations. The use of pen-names seems to free a poet to assume multiple identities in his/her poems, and to be safely ‘original'.
But what about authenticity? The poet Sukumar says, “In truth, a good poem does not have to strive to be ‘new', it is new and fresh in its very being, a question and a demand in itself.”
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