Writing on the banks of the Cauvery - Kalki and Venkataramani
There were many distinguished writers from the period between the World Wars but from amongst them, two names stand out for the extremely passionate,
almost filial affection for the river Cauvery that pervades their writings.
They were Kalki and Venkataramani. As writers, they were in fact, poles apart.
One wrote mostly in Tamil; the other, in Tamil as well as English but more
frequently in English. The former is universally hailed as the ‘father of Tamil
historical fiction’ and rarely did he venture to take on a contemporary subject
though his successful Sahitya Academy award winner Alai Osai (1948) and the novel Thyagabhoomi that was made
into a blockbuster movie (1939) proved
that he could comfortably handle other genres, too; the other wrote English
novels on Indian village life and at the head of the plot he usually placed a
Gandhian protagonist who preached temperance and enlisted support for the
freedom movement and even while writing on a subject that supposedly
constituted his forte, barely managed to remain in the fringes. Kalki was a born writer, with humble
beginnings. He made all his money and name through his writings, and till his
last breath, relied on journalism for his daily bread. Venkataramani was the
son of a landlord and held a degree in law venturing into writing fiction only
as a pastime when he grew bored of his legal practice. So was there anything common
between them? (Apart from, of course, the fact that their writings glorified
Tanjore and the Cauvery) Both were staunch nationalists dedicated to the cause
of India’s freedom; both Venkataramani as well as Kalki were born in the 1890s
and died in the 1950s.(In that sense, they were close contempories). And then,
both were champions of social reform.
Kalki was the nom-de-plume of R. Krishnamurti who was born
on the 9th of September 1899 at a village near Mayavaram. His
father, Ramaswami Iyer was an accountant of limited financial means and Krishnamurti struggled to pursue his
education. Nevertheless, in 1921, he quit school in response to the Mahatma
Gandhi’s call for non-cooperation and became a political activist. Two years
later, he joined a Tamil journal Navasakthi
edited by the Madras labour leader and Tamil scholar, Thiru Vi. Kalyanasundaram
Mudaliar, as sub-editor. But Krishnamurti’s journey as a writer truly began
only in 1931 when he joined the editorial staff of S. S. Vasan’s Ananda
Vikatan. Soon, Kalki’s columns in
the magazine became so popular that they pushed sales to record levels. In the late thirties, he published his first
novel – a social drama named Thyagabhoomi that was serialized in the Ananda
Vikatan. In 1939, taking advantage of a friendly Congress government in the
province, the famous Tamil film director K. Subrahmanyam (grandson-in-law of K.
S. Venkatarama Iyer) made a movie on it
which not only broke box-office records
but also garnered critical acclaim. Today, it is considered a milestone in the
history of Tamil cinema. Kalki also wrote another famous social drama – Alai
Osai – but by the early forties, he had moved over to historical fiction.
In 1941, he broke up with Vasan and started his own weekly named Kalki
The forties and the early fifties comprised
what might be, perhaps, the most productive period in Kalki’s life. The Second
World War had drastically altered the political situation in the subcontinent.
Social reform movements were now confined to the backburner and the cause of
the country’s liberation once again became top priority. In an emotionally
charged atmosphere where Indians felt cheated of the independence promised to
them, writers like Kalki inspired the masses to fight by harking back upon a
glorious past. Parthiban Kanavu (“the
dream of Parthiban”) and Sivagamiyin Sabatham (“Sivagami’s vow”)
were serialized in Kalki between 1941 and 1946 and became instant hits.
Set in 7th century South India, Parthiban Kanavu reflects on
the later part of the Pallava king Narasimhavarman I’s reign. Its
prequel Sivagamiyin Sabatham covers the early years of Narasimhavarman
I’s reign. Both were published later in
book format. Upon India’s
independence in 1947, Kalki wrote Alai Osai (“the Sound of the waves”),
a marked deviation from its immediate precedecessors which were all historical
fiction. The book won Kalki, the Sahitya Academy Award for Tamil language and
was compared by T. P. Meenakshisundaram to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.[1] In the early fifties,
perhaps with an intuition of approaching death, Kalki wrote his most popular
work – Ponniyin Selvan (Ponni’s Beloved) which was serialized in Kalki
between 1951 and 1954. Shortly after the serial concluded, Kalki - the writer
succumbed to tuberculosis. He was fifty five. The Government of Tamil Nadu
nationalized Kalki’s works. The street in the neighbourhood of Adyar in Madras
city, where he lived at the time of his death, was renamed after this great
writer.
The
linguist, Kamil V. Zvelebil, gives an impressive analysis of Kalki’s writings
in a short, but very interesting, last chapter of his book The Smile of Murugan. Zvelebil says that the two factors that have
stood in favour of Kalki viz a viz other authors were historical
accuracy and readability.[2]
By readability, I refer to the ease of prose. His works shunned puritan
language and difficult or archaic terms.[3] The reason was simple. When Kalki started off
as a writer, his finances weren’t good and his priority then was to make money.
To make money, he needed to sell, and to sell, he needed to understand the
common man’s limitations and work within those barriers. Gradually, the simple prose became his
trademark. Another conscious
innovation that Kalki made in order to appeal to the masses was his careful
choice of Tamil nationalistic themes. For this, Kalki delved into the past and
the vast corpus of history books,
academic journals, research papers and
monographs from the British period that were available then, came in handy. But Kalki was probably shrewd enough to
understand that his audience weren’t too welcoming of any criticism of the
larger-than-life Cholas and so, some major failings of the Cholas – their
unequal society, their excesses against unarmed civilians during their wars of
conquest over the Western Chalukyas or Ceylon and other unflattering episodes
of history were ignored and illusions of a golden age were force fed to an
unsuspecting public. That said, it can never be doubted that Kalki was
obviously the greatest writer of historical fiction that the Tamil civilization
has produced in recent times – an Alexander Dumas in Indian skin and eastern
garb.[4]
And Zvelebil gapes in awe at the meticulous research that permeates his
writings.[5]
In fact, such was his obsession with realism that, Zvelebil remarks, he even
visited monuments himself and tried to read and interpret inscriptions on his
own.[6]
Nationalist
sentiments were often concealed in Kalki’s writings in the form of allegories.
In his Parthiban Kanavu, serialized
in Kalki magazine at the height of
the Quit India Movement, speaking through one of the novel’s main characters,
the wily Sivanadiyar (Saiva ascetic)
, Kalki bemoans that Tamils had allowed
themselves to be ruled by outsiders and exhorts them to rise in order to save
their prestige.[7] The
Sivanadiyar’s ramblings are open to multiple interpretations and shades of
linguistic nationalism, South Indian regionalism, as well as a hint of
pan-Indian nationalism are all discernible. Viewed through the prism of Quit
India politics of the time, Parthiban
Kanavu betrays a deep-seated mistrust of outsiders - first, the Pallavas, next, all non-Tamils
and thirdly, North Indians. Kalki wasn’t
exactly being hostile but the story emplifies a naïve and narrow-minded
prejudice prevalent among the lay masses at that time. But by the time Kalki wrote Ponniyin Selvan, his last great work, in
the early fifties, India had already become independent and the Tamil
Renaissance was scaling new heights. The need for lamentation had come down and
Kalki tried to temper his writings to a new era of expectation and hope by
focusing on the glorious and highly successful rule of the Medieval Cholas. In this, Kalki was to some extent successful and his works stamped the
emerging post-independence Tamil literature with their class.
Venkataramani,
on the contrary, was a writer who was far less accomplished than Kalki. In
fact, he rarely finds mention in any discussion on Indian writers in English.
Born in Kaveripatnam, the site of the ancient Puhar, in the year 1891 to
Siddhanatha Aiyer, a wealthy landlord, Venkataramani studied at the National
High School, Mayavaram and the Madras Christian College.[8]
After qualifying as a lawyer from the Madras Law College, Venkataramani
apprenticed for a time under Sir C. P. Ramaswami Iyer. Around the mid-twenties
or so, Venkataramani started to publish short stories and other works of
fiction. Two of his earliest works – an anthology of philosophical essays
titled Renascent India and its
sequel, The Next Rung, won
appreciation from Rabindranath Tagore, India’s first and only Nobel laureate in
Literature.Venkataramani, eventually became an enthusiastic follower of Tagore and
even adopted Tagore’s stylized signature as cover art for his own works. Venkataramani was also a devotee of
Chandrasekharendra Saraswati VIII, the Sankaracharya
of Kanchi and was instrumental in arranging for his meeting with an emerging
Indophile named Paul Brunton - an interview that would transform Brunton’s life
forever.[9] In his later years, Venkataramani acquired a reputation as an
expert on Indian villages and his views and opinions on rural upliftment were
often sought after by various government agencies and princely states.
Venkataramani’s
works depict an India in the throes of the freedom movement and most have a
moral to tell. The protagonists are usually simple-minded freedom fighters of
the Gandhian school. One of the main
characters in Murugan the Tiller (1927),
Ramachander, is a Brahmin boy from a well-to-do family in the Delta that had
just fallen into tough times. His simplicity, honesty and kindness render him
lovable to his peers as well as the workers in his farm. Forced to seek
employment due to the family’s declining finances, Ramachander gives away his
land to his tenants and takes up a job as a clerk in the provincial civil
service. Gradually, Ramachander earns a reputation for hard work and devotion
and his main patron is one George Cadell, whom the author reveals to be a
descendant of William Molle Cadell, the Resident and District Collector of
Tanjore during East India Company rule.[10] While serving under Cadell, Ramachander
develops the knack of coming up with simple, imaginative solutions to complex
problems. For instance, to tackle endemic crime in the Dusi-Mamandur area in
North Arcot district, he proposes the desilting of the Palar channel that
supplies water to a vast, manmade reservoir at Dusi-Mamandur. He reasons that
this will ensure a regular drinking water supply to the village and surrounding
areas and usher in prosperity thus reducing crime. Ramachander’s idea works
well and wins appreciation from the Governor, himself. In his Kandan the Patriot (1932), the prinicipal
character is a Padayachi named Kandan, whose ancestors had migrated from
Thillayadi and settled down in South Africa.
Kandan studies at Oxford and clears the Indian Civil Service
examinations but “disappointed love” makes him resign from the civil service
during his probation.[11]
Kandan returns to his ancestral place in India and joins the freedom movement.
Kandan leads an agitation against the local landlord who tries best to use his
power and influence to crush him. At
about this time, Kandan’s collegemate at Oxford and an ICS officer, himself,
Rangan aka Rangaswami arrives in Tanjore district to take charge as Assistant
Collector of Tranquebar. Rangan is the very antethesis of Kandan. He is a
typical ICS man, travelling in first-class compartments and regarding the dirty
and disorganized Indian with scorn and disdain. While Kandan chose to quit the
ICS, Rangan chose to stay and change things. But by a strange twist of fate,
after his arrival in Tranquebar, Rangan, too, resigns from the civil service and
joins Kandan. The Indian government deputes a CID officer named Ponnan to keep
an eye on Rangan but Ponnan, too undergoes a change of heart. The story ends
with an agitation in Tranquebar that is abruptly broken up by police firing and
the death of Kandan by police bullets. Rangan is tried and sentenced to one
year rigorous imprisonment. The story thus comes to a halt but the irony of
three government servants later turning against the British Raj is beautifully
captured in those pages.
The bounteous Cauvery is a recurrent theme in
Kalki’s as well as Venkataramani’s works. Kalki calls the river, Ponni (“the golden one”).[12]
Kalki’s biographer Sundha gives him the epithet “Ponniyin Pudhalvan” or “Ponni’s
child”.[13]
The village of Alavanti on the banks of the Cauvery forms the setting for
Venkataramani’s Murugan the Tiller. Venkataramani’s romantic description of the
Adyar river mouth and the leafy suburb that flanks it in his other novel Kandan the Patriot might have been
partly inspired by an idyllic childhood spent on the banks of the Cauvery,
which he calls “the eddy-eyed river”.[14]
Unmindful of such idle flattery, however, the Cauvery flows, with a gentle,
imperceptible drift - a mute witness to the turbulent changes unfolding right
on its banks – from the British annexation of the Mahratta Raj to the cultural
and economic high of Pax Britannica,
to the first voices of dissent that arose in the form of the Madras Mahajana
Sabha, and which eventually grew into a raging storm with the advent of Gandhi,
to the challenging of long-established social and religious norms, and finally,
in the violent peasant agitations of the forties that broke up the traditional
capitalist system of land ownership that prevailed in the Delta.
[1] Zvelebil, Kamil (1973). The Smile of Murugan Upon Tamil literature of South India, pp
289-291.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] See
Dr. M. S. Venkataraman’s scholarly analysis in the preface of his 2003 English
translation to Kalki’s Parthiban Kanavu.
[8] Refer
Ramaswami, N. S. (1988). Makers of Indian
Literature: K. S. Venkataramani for facts about Venkataramani’s life. K. S.
Venkataramani’s biography in The Southern
India Educational, Commercial & Industrial Directory 1939 (1939) by Shivaji Publications
(See p 317) gives his birthplace as “Neppathur” but I wish to go by what N. S.
Ramaswami says.
[9] See
Paul Brunton’s A Search in Secret India
(1934).
[10] Venkataramani
(1927). Murugan the Tiller, Svetaranya Ashram, p
78.
[11] Venkataramani (1932). Kandan
the Patriot, Svetaranya Ashram, p 39.
[12] See
short preface by Dr. M. S. Venkataraman to the English translation of Kalki’s Parthiban Kanavu.
[13] Ibid.
[14] For “eddy-eyed”, see Ramaswami, N. S. (1988). Makers of Indian Literature: K. S.
Venkataramani. Sahitya Akademi, p 31.
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