FIRST PERSON
Life and literature
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‘My life and my poetry are inseparable.’ AKKITHAM ACHUTHAN NAMBOODIRI
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Photo: K.K. Gopalakrishnan
Towering personality: Akkitham.
“Ah! A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what is a heaven for?”
So says Robert Browning. But has my reach exceeded my grasp? I cannot say. But the heaven? I have experienced it in my writings. My life and my poetry are inseparable. I write what I do and I do as I write. My life can be read in my poems.
How did I cultivate a philosophy of life in which unconditional love forms the central point of my early childhood? It must be because of my father’s elder brother whose eyes were always filled with tears that he used to wipe with his loincloth from time to time. He showered on me immense affection.
He passed away when I was five. Why his eyes were always filled with tears? This was a question, which always haunted me. He had six sons and four daughters. But all his sons passed away during their childhood; the girls survived.
The answer to my haunting question later flashed in my mind in the form of a verse:
“When I shed a drop of tear/For the sake of others dear,/In my soul there do appear/A thousand social spheres”
Early mentors
My tuition master Unnikrishna Menon, his ardent disciple and a great poet Edasseri Govindan Nair and the social reformer V.T. Bhattathiripad were in the forefront of those who influenced the shaping of my personality.
When I was seven and a half, I began learning Sanskrit, astrology and Rig Veda. This continued for six years.
There is a sooktham called Sampada sooktham in the end of Rig Veda. I studied these by heart in my 12th year. It contained the word ‘Samanam’ repeated more than 10 times. My father h
ad brought a copy of Vallathol’s Malayalam translation of Rig Veda. I could, therefore, understand the exact meaning of these lines.
It was in this background that the article E.M.S. Namboodiripad’s “Why Socialism”, C. Achutha Menon’s “Soviet Nadu”, and Wendel Wilkey “One World” helped me expand my social views and approach to life itself. This led me to the works of Karl Marx; this attracted me greatly. To be brief, I believe that the Sampada sooktham is the first literary work, which preached communism.
Which eternal poet in the world has not sung about the glory of love? The role of the Malayali writers from the erstwhile Valluvanadu area (parts of Palakkad, Malappuram and Thrissur districts that borders the Nila, also known as the Bharatapuzha), especially from the Ponnani school of literature, is noteworthy. They were all aware of Bharathiya Dharma.
Marxian ideas
Karl Marx was a product of England’s democracy. He spent hours and hours at the famous libraries in England. Reciting the love songs of Burns, the famous Irish poet, was a relief to him.
There is no proof for his association with Indian Vedic vision, which conceived all beings in this world as one. Still he absorbed the idea contained in the dictum, Vasudhaiva Kudumbakam (the world is one family). He thought that, i
n course of time, a society will emerge that needs no Government to rule it.
Men will be so disciplined and prepared to rule themselves. They will reach the stage of Godliness as the Indian mythology perceives. Aurobindo believed it. The perspective of Marx was almost the same as Aurobindo’s. Marx had studied human life very deeply.
Even today, the Westerners in general believe ‘you act what you negotiate!’ In business one may not get what he or she deserves; they get what they negotiate.
Then what about the Indians? To them the motto is ‘half self; half God’. This really means, ‘do thy duty, the result is not thy concern’ (Karmanye vadhikarasthe Ma phaleshu kadachana).
This perception is considered as Bharathiyam. The author of this perspective is Veda Vyasa. He was experimenting on the idea of reconstituting the worldly existence according to reason.
The second experiment was of Marx. It was targeted in the same direction. We can say that Vyasa’s vision was subjective and Marx’s was objective. But both these experiments are one.
I can never recognise the division between subjective and objective, mental and physical or spiritual and material.
We know that it was not possible for Marx to observe India through the point of view of Einstein, Karl Sagan or Michel Danino. It cannot be counted as a shortcoming of Marx.
Politics, religion and caste; none of these influence my human outlook. It is only eternal values that decide human bonds. My early collection of poem Veeravadam (Challenge) and Valakilukkam (jingling of bangles)
contain my poems on social reforms.
In my later poems, Irupatham nootandinte ithihasam (The saga of 20th century) and Kuthirna Mannu (Soaked earth) were about the communist movement, before and after the Calcutta Thesis.
Close connections
I had always been very close with the Sarvodaya movement led by Kerala Gandhi Kelappaji. Related to those activities, I wrote a long poem, “Dharmasooryan” (The Sun of rectitude), in which I tried to delineate how the moon of action (Karma chandra) became a Dharmasooryan. I always bore in mind the close connection between life and literature existed.
I thought all my poems should be different from one another. I found that anything and everything could be the source of a poem. I learned that form is the soul of every poem (Reethirathma Kavyasya).
I think this thought is absorbed in my writings because I studied Sanskrit in my early days. Besides, poet Edasseri Govindan Nair, who believed that form and content are inter-connected and of equal importance, was my guide.
Love, God and Poetry are one and the same. Dharma (Righteousness), Satyam (Truth), Swathanthryam (Freedom) and Samathwam (Equality) all are one.
Through my poems like Irupatham nootandinte ithihasam, Idinju polinja lokam (The world that crushed) and Pandathe mesanthi (The former priest), I have been trying to express my views on the dist
ress of Dharma.
This idea was born in me because I slept in the same mat of Kerala’s revolutionary social reformer V. T. Bhattathiripad. Such experiences and the ethos of my poetry are mutually reciprocated.
Octogenarian Akkitham Achuthan Namboodiri, popularly known by his nom-de-plume Akkitham, is a renowned poet and a towering personality in Malayalam literature. It was Akkitham who initiated modernism in Malayalam poetry, through his long po
em Irupatham noottandinte ithihasam published in 1952. He is the recipient of this year’s Kabir Purashkar of the M.P. Government.
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