Price of a poem

THE arrival of two books from Tenkasi (Tamil Nadu) took me back into a past of leisurely savouring of metaphor and image: T.K. Chidambaranatha Mudaliar's (TKC) Essays, and son Deepan's Arumbiya Mullai (Budding Jasmine). In both, the language has the elegance of Tirunelveli region. There is a natural similarity in their approach to life, art and stylistics, personal warmth, a penchant for refinement and suggestivity. Impish humour sparkles through the pages.

Up until the first half of the 20th Century, Tamil scholarship applauded pedantry and bombast. That's when TKC emphasised bhava or emotional content as the first requisite of any art. He was fond of saying that poetry must be rescued from the pundits, and that it was rarer to come across a genuine rasika than a good poet. He likened the prevalent Indian craze for Western literature to admiring the full moon on the night of the New Moon. His "Vatta Thotti", a gathering of litterateurs and artists, both in Madras that he visited, and in Kuttralam where he lived, became a pivotal centre of new thinking on aesthetics.

TKC's denunciations of holy cows fired controversies. But read his commentaries on Kamban or Kuravanji, his occasional notes on temple sculpture and Carnatic music, and above all, the delightful letters he wrote to friends young and old. You will know that his ruthless trouncing of the spurious is in direct proportion to his passion for poetry. He was no grim aristarch out to censure, but a rasikamani who identified himself with the creative mind in the niceties and nuances of expression. He influenced the community of artists and aesthetes beyond his lifetime. To read TKC on Andal or Avvaiyar is to discover those fugitive, fragile and fine-shaded tones that we missed in less acute readings. To be introduced to poets by TKC is to make them our pals for life.

Arumbiya Mullai (1942) testifies to the same discerning empathy in the son. As writer Ka. Na. Subramanian says in his afterword to this reprint (2000), the book is no award winner, but zealous readers have treasured it through the years. These random ruminations in prose and verse, from personal letters to music criticism, includes fiction, slight and fragmentary. Yet, as Ka. Na. Su points out, the writing bears the individual stamp of the writer, mirrors his mellow culture and sensitivity.

The book has untranslateable tracts of pure fun, like "Mudaliar Veettu Kalyanam", bubbling with the idiosyncracies of local custom and dialect; fragments of fiction seeped in a tender sensuousness alien to our times; sketches of festivals, and pastoral picnics by the swelling Cauvery. Deepan's songs have a toe-tapping lilt.

Astute rapture marks Deepan's critique of Subramania Bharati. And listen to this: "Veena Dhanammal has not stopped with training voice and finger, she has trained her mind. The free flow of inherent feelings shape themselves into melodic form. Since each note and each syllable rise from the heart, they are ever new, like the fresh blooms of the day."

Ahead of his times, he avers that art nurtures spirituality even when the artist leads a dissolute life. "In the world of art what matters is not the purity of the mind but the purity of the art itself."

One of TKC's essays describes the Tamil (and Indian) notion that the sahrdaya deems himself fortunate in exchanging his life for a poem. In a true poem language becomes mantra, it melts and transforms us until we become one with word, rhythm and metre. That is why the Pallava king Nandivarman insisted on hearing the kalambakam (elegy), composed by a truth speaker, though when it was recited before the king, the poem reduced the royal rasika to ashes. TKC admits that the tale is mere fancy, and yet, Nandivarman, the poet, the poem and the reader, are living entities, inseparable and real.

As I read this a vague memory nudged me to find a note from TKC's collection of letters (1961, Price: Rs.3). It was addressed to the poet Desikavinayakam Pillai, who had sent an elegy on Deepan's death at age 30. The bud had fallen before it could blossom. Even at such a tragic moment, TKC's love of poetry does not desert him. He praises the lyric, a venba, in his own inimitable way, phrase by phrase, until the voice cracks, "Our friends were overwhelmed by the grief inhering in the poem. But I felt boundless joy at the dawning of a Tamil lyric. Our tradition believes that you can lay down life for poetry. It appears that the price of a life has inspired your verse."

GOWRI RAMNARAYAN

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