TRENDS IN TAMIL LITERATURE: II

By K. CHANDRASEKHARAN

(Concluded from the previous number)

During the last decade, Tamil Nad has been going through a fast change of outlook. People’s minds are obsessed by the democratic idea and the spirit of Socialism. The conservative belief in certain moral standards as part of building up a society in which we have had our living and moving, no longer holds us. The raging madness for linguistic areas and boundary demarcations has ushered in noticeably a false set of values. Universal suffrage guaranteed under the Constitution in some measure and the breaking up of social barriers have made inroads into age-long notions of respect for upper classes. With the infiltration of communistic ideologies, there is a steady accentuation of feeling that none can be superior to any other in any matter. The dire result happens to be a startling matter-of-factness born of too great a tendency to ignore spiritual values in a country where a rare tradition has attached the utmost significance to them.

The cheap Tamil press, in the shape of a plethora of periodicals of all conceivable. varieties and prices, has flooded the country with ready made opinions on all matters affecting the happy co-existence of persons belonging to many grades and types of society. As competition forces these dailies to greater licence of language, there is a perceptible lowering of standards in taste and authentic reporting. Some of these organs of popular will are merely born for spreading communal hatreds and keeping alive class conflicts through communication of cheap and often vulgar indictments against well-established reputations as well as sensational headline news of abnormalities.

The innocent and the unsophisticated among the readers, however small they may be, get into a mood of feverish mutual recrimination and intolerance, resulting sometimes in frantic demonstrations and disfigurations of street walls with anti-social slogans. Propaganda of every type when engineered by political adventurers becomes responsible for a virulent poison getting injected into the hearts of men and women of even distant villages, hitherto in comparative security from social conflicts.

Again a group calling itself ‘Progressive Writers’ has started sowing seeds of doubt among the indiscriminate readers that what hitherto they enjoyed as literature could any longer comfort them. This doubt happens to be the result of a hallucination that they are creating a more serious literature than those who were keeping old men and women from their corners by telling them mere tales of love. It insists on the subject matter of the novel or the short story or the play being intended for the making of a better world by means of criticism of the existing order. In brief, it tries to give an impetus to the theory that art has a mission for describing something more intimate with actual life than stories of heroism and love. According to it when the very existence of man is jeopardized by the presence of acute economic difficulties creating problems of the day like the condition of labour and the urgent need for distribution of employment to all, no more can mere love themes call up the sympathy of the reader at large. Modernity is absolutely necessary in everything and the concept of youth itself, according to it, is a new cry forgetting as it does that the revolt of youth is as old as Angada in the Ramayana.

Nevertheless we know that however much changes take place on the surface, down below in the depths everything remains the same. Otherwise the appeal of the Classics universally cannot be possible. One of the witty writers of the West remarked that the more the world changed the more it remained the same.

With the desire to achieve freedom of expression, fiction in any shape would easily draw the literary novice, as it has the advantage of conveying truth in as convenient manner as possible. It can say things with precision without seeming so much as tending to say it. But the art of the novel and the short story are both not so easy to handle as many seem to imagine. In order to make it all look probable and the characters live in the pages, the novelist has to press into service a series of incidents and facts that are not by themselves so interesting, though highly significant for the development of the story. Nevertheless the novel may also degenerate into one of sheer story or plot interest satisfying the craving for clever turns and surprises.

An artist has to remember certain things if really he cares to remain an artist first and last. Even though, for the sake of realism, he has to draw upon the raw material of life, he has to eschew a good many details in order to achieve his aesthetic end. He is not a photographer but a painter. While the one is a pure mechanical process, the other makes a totally different attempt, depending upon so many superior aids as proportion, perspective, colour sense and imagination. In a painting a good deal has to be omitted in order to make the portrait all-absorbing. In similar manner, we find even in the most realistic fiction so much of omission compared to what we get in actual life. Literature, we may conclude, is like the cream which comes up after the churning of the milk of experience. A true artist only introduces what strikes him as the kernel of his observation of life. Thus in a good novel we prefer expectation to surprise. Shocks and surprises are the stock-in-trade of the melodrama. “Literature does what life does not–it eliminates the unessential”, wrote a modern English critic. It certainly sums up everything that could be said of a good effort.

Creativity cannot partake of things unreal. Our modern mind, itself a hasty tourist, in its breakneck speed over superficialities ransacks the markets of cheap sensations. This is the net result of its innate sensitivity to life getting dullened by constant preoccupations of a distracting kind. The literature it produces seems sometimes like investigating into the bizarre, the out-of-the-way and the abnormal. It has to rack its resources in order to be striking. It elaborates mere changes in style as in modern millinery and the outcome, we find, is a mere polish of the metal, not the bloom of the rose.

The danger of resorting to abnormality in order to be original has to be guarded against. A great artist expresses his feeling, which is usual, in an original manner and never in an out-of-the-way or abnormal milieu. Rabindranath Tagore says in his Religion of the Artist:

“I have read modern writing in which the coming out of the stars in the evening sky is described as the sudden eruption in the bloated body of darkness. The writer seems afraid to own the feeling of cool purity in the star-spangled night, which is usual, lest he should be found out as common-place. From the point of view of realism the image may not be wholly inappropriate and may be considered as outrageously virile in its unshrinking incivility. But this is not art; this is a jerky shriek, something like the convulsive advertisement of the modern market that exploits mob psychology against its inattention. To be tempted to create an illusion of forcefulness through an over-emphasis of abnormality is a sign of anesthesia. It is the waning vigour of imagination which employs desperate dexterity in the present day art for reproducing shocks.”

Hardly will it be necessary for me to add to what has been so vividly expressed by the poet. Only I may be pardoned for saying that there is nowadays a tendency among the writers of novel and short-story here to exhibit morbidity and seek abnormality for appearing fresh. Some have even mistaken the purpose of art to be a censorship of conservatism and of the conventional in life and thought. The sex theme is often therefore indulged in by some whose purpose requires external aids to sustain interest in literature. The absorption of the writer in mere sexual life of man is bound to be sterile of literary matter. No doubt there is nothing that can draw the curiosity of the adolescent more effectively than the theme of sex and there is no kind, of curiosity that provides less food for the Imagination. If questioned as to how best to preserve the true from the false type in literature, it may be difficult to answer. All that can be guaranteed is that delicacy of taste of one type or other is as much necessary to the arts as it is to preserve society from disintegration. Perhaps without such wholesome restraints, the arts too may tend to become monotonous trivialities. Valmiki, Kalidasa, Kamban and Bharati knew a great deal more than any of us about lower life and the bogs and mires of human imagination, yet they never portrayed all that confronted their sight, taking care to be ultimately artists.

I have explained, perhaps at greater length than needed, why art sometimes degrades itself if writers lose themselves in mere realism. If today the stream of imagination in Tamil Nad has more often to carry mere turbidity and current, we may have to attribute it to the nature of the freshes when they first emerge from the hills and course down in rapids. Experience and time, like banks, will control the rush of writings from spreading into an inundation and spoiling cultivated tastes and standards around.

One word more while dwelling on fiction. Tamil Nad has in the recent paid produced only short story in great quantity, principally because of the incessant demand on writers from the journals for only the story, to the exclusion of any other form of writing, even the novel appearing in serial. One can now say without fear of contradiction that, more than the novel, the short story produced here has impressed the literary world outside. Perfection in the art of short story in some manner is within reach of the absorbed wooer, unlike the novel which demands of its votary qualities of more than one type to sustain its appeal. We are already perceiving a healthy reaction to the enormous output of short story. Informed minds there are nowadays who evince visible disapproval of stories which can at best only entertain or divert the reader, but not hold him in their grip for long by their thought-content. With all that, there is no gainsaying the fact that surer discipline of the pen is more perceptible with the growth in the number of periodicals, Another important result of the incentive to writing given by journals is the quick addition to the number of women writers. A score of them have demonstrated the capacity for serious thinking and profundity of expression in contrast to men writers.

In the new endeavour of publishing translations of works from other regional languages like Bengali, Marathi, Hindi, a select group of authors have distinguished themselves by the advantage gained in knowing more than one language. But as yet, beyond fiction, other works of modern writers in the other languages have hardly gained favour with this group. Russian, French, Polish and American stories have also found their way into Tamil language by reason of the interest evinced by publishers who know the trick of making best sellers out of them.

Tamil drama has yet to find a steady welcome from us. Save for the very limited instances of this form of literary craftsmanship, we may have to deplore the barrenness in this field. Thanks to the early enthusiasm of Pammal Sambanda Mudaliar, we have a number of presentable stage-plays, but to christen them as literature may perhaps require temerity. The staging of Tamil plays is of course on the increase since very recent times, partly due to the individual talents of certain actors of merit as also due to the desire of some playwrights who, through the stage and the screen, are doing propaganda for certain political views getting disseminated among the masses. The immediate outcome of such motives is visible no doubt in the declamatory speeches put in the mouths of characters supposed to be engaged in dialogues, and the veiled themes suggesting hotly contested questions of the hour in the public mind. Beyond satisfying crowds of indifferent levels, they do not convince art-lovers of any sustaining literary experience. The drama, we know, is not so easy to create. So many elements of human knowledge and arts should go to create it. That is perhaps the reason why old Alankarikas in Sanskrit always referred to it as the high water mark of literary excellence.

Biographical literature has not grown, as it ought to, in and which is not without enduring personalities in all spheres of human activity. We had, and still have, men and women of mental calibre and potentiality who could any day stand comparison with world figures for their outstanding integrity of character and excellence of achievement. If only writers imbued with sufficient nobility of purpose and stamina for endeavour were to be forthcoming, the biographical section of our literature can in no time be filled with exemplary life studies. Appreciation is a faculty which is as much a stimulus for se1f-growth as any other desideratum for an integrated life. It is the woeful lack of this quality which has been responsible for the attenuated supply of books in this particular field. If biographies are few and far between, fewer still are autobiographies and sketches, which have all a common source of inspiration, namely, to instill in others the idea how man has to learn and emulate in order to regain his full stature. The story of Sri Ramachandra is a source of constant correction and example to us, because the poet who conceived it makes us realise how the great alone can describe the greater.

Literary criticism is practically little in a place and in times where much writing is produced in journals. Real norms and values of literary writing have not yet been set up by critics for those who produce books by the day and stories by the hour. Much that is shoddy and unenduring is filling the pages of magazines which pride themselves on their circulation and popularity. Art, according to many, is not something to be searched for and obtained with effort, but recognisable by its availability at all places and accessibility to all levels of understanding. Anything which requires a little effort of comprehension is conveniently labelled as high-brow and unfit for normal daily food. In the name of democracy, a drive for literacy and driving out of literature are achieved at once by the protagonists of the common man’s due from life.

The serious essay and the light skit have no attraction for the moderns. The very import of essay writing no longer appeals to people who exert themselves only to get entertained and never to be moved deeply by anything they read. It cannot be said, that one cause alone is responsible for the absence of the essay form of writing. The reader as well as the writer are both accountable for mutual reactions on the type of book production, especially when most writing here has first to get published in the journals and then only attain book-form of anthologies from the same pen.

I cannot pass on without paying a tribute to the writers on scientific subjects amidst us. They have rendered the double service of not only making available to our readers the precious results of the scientific discoveries of other countries but also enabling lay minds to get some idea of what is so essential as knowledge at the present day. They are not many and can be counted on one’s fingers. Still their services are not only lasting but timely, when we as a new nation want to grow with other nations and take a part in the deliberations of an United Nations Organisation.

Tamil classics have drawn the modern scholars, who have the advantage of Western models, for presentation of old themes in new forms. Thus many a votary of the immortal poems of Kamban and Ilango have sought, not in vain, to create fresh enthusiasm in the young of the land by editing highsouled texts from ancient lore, replete with lessons for good conduct and noble living. Perhaps the last five years have seen many more books and articles on some of these classics as in no other period within our ken. The greater scope for Tamil studies in our Universities is in a great measure accountable for some of these authors also flourishing. One striking feature arrests our eye in almost all these modern attempts at reinterpreting old books. They are written in simple understandable prose, unlike their predecessors of a few decades back.

Politicians of top-rank have also been responsible for the increasing popularity of Tamil writing. If Gandhiji was not only a great man of action but an ardent litterateur, his bhaktas and followers like Jawaharlal Nehru and Rajaji have also earned for themselves a nation’s gratitude by the moral upliftment they have supplied in the shape of books of lasting merit. Rajaji as a Tamil prose writer can for long retain his hold on minds that are prone to receive edification from his thoughts.

Before coming to the field of poetry, let me touch upon the individual and institutional agencies responsible for a widespread recognition of Tamil literature and its growth in recent decades. ‘T. K. C.’ as an individual had, by his overpowering love for Tamil, lighted a lamp the oil of which has had frequent feeding from a host of others. The ‘Kalaimagal’ and the ‘Kalai Vlarch Kazhagam’ have advanced, by their award of prizes of substantial amounts, the increasing zest for creative work. Other smaller groups are also serving in the same way to keep up the spirit for talented persons to do sustaining work in the field. Some of the well-known Mutts have also come forward in the same direction with ample bounties for religious literature.

Tamil poetry in verse form has had no mean order of votaries starting from Kavimani Desika Vinayakam Pillai to the latest schoolboy who writes off a few lines for children’s magazines. The variety and range of levels of mastery of poetry is of a bewildering kind. Not many of them are poets but merely stanza-composers. A few have originality and still fewer vision. Music composers too are in their midst and a lot of indifferent lines get attuned to music. Whether metrical quality has been fully explored or whether the ear for symphony has been completely satisfied in them, one thing is sure, that every journal worth the name publishes something in the nature of verses, thereby giving a fillip to writers specialising in the field.

Let me close now. To survey Tamil literature during the present juncture is no easy task, fraught as it is with so many handicaps. In the first place one is so close to the times when these writers exist that he is denied the correct perspective to judge. Again the space of an article is so short that one cannot bring in everything he wants into it. Further, the impossibility of clear demarcation between imaginative and other types of writing makes the attempt difficult. More than everything else, embarrassment and a sense of unripeness of judgment upon writers who are contemporaries, have prevented my furnishing concrete examples and names of many for whom I would love to find a place in any account of Tamil writing. I hope, my endeavour to show what way trends in literary writing are pointing will enable the reader to gather a sustaining harvest of impressions.

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