Remembered realities

Na. Muthuswamy (1936-2018) belongs with the great lyrical realists of medieval Tamil poetry, says David Shulman on the founder of the avant-garde theatre group Koothu-p-pattarai.

Published : Nov 08, 2018 12:30 IST

Na. Muthuswamy.

Na. Muthuswamy.

Na. Muthuswamy , the veteran theatre personality and founder of the avant-garde theatre group Koothu-p-pattarai, passed away in Chennai on October 24. He was 82. His short stories are often described as the finest explorations of Tamil prose. A recipient of both the Padma Shri and the Sangeet Natak Akademi awards, he was part of two exciting parallel publications in Tamil, Nadai and ka cha ta tha pa ra , that discussed not only literature but other creative forms such as the visual and the performing arts.

A few days before his death, Westland Books brought out an anthology titled Bullocks from the West consisting of five of his short stories and a play, translated with enormous sensitivity by David Shulman and S. Ramakrishnan. Shulman has written an insightful afterword for the collection, which, in more than one sense, brings out the importance of Muthuswamy’s creativity. As homage to the master storyteller, Frontline reproduces an abridged version of Shulman’s afterword. This shorter version does not include the section dealing with an outstanding story, “Panchali”, because of lack of space.

David Shulman on Na. Muthuswamy

Na . Muthuswamy is best known as the founding director of the experimental repertory theatre Koothu-p-pattarai, the “Theatre Workshop”, which for over three decades has occupied the gravitational centre of the theatre world in Chennai—some would say, in South India generally. Muthuswamy himself wrote dozens of plays that were produced by this group; some, such as England , translated here, have been performed many times and achieved the status of modern classics. Unlike many contemporary Tamil writers, Muthuswamy is fully alive to the long literary and artistic traditions in Tamil that preceded his own generation. He has situated his own work in relation to these classical sources, including the Terukkuttu (street theatre) art form prevalent in villages of northern Tamil Nadu, with its overpowering emotional charge and its rootedness in the ritual settings of the Draupadi cult and the texts, such as Villiputturar’s 14th-century Tamil Mahabharata , that shape the worship of this goddess. 1 Not by chance, kuttu turns up as a topic of particular fascination in Muthuswamy’s short masterpiece, “Panchali”, a remarkable meditation on all the great themes of Muthuswamy’s works, including fundamental questions of psychic continuity in a world where even great goddesses may be seen to be losing their grip.

I need to preface this discussion with a few words about Muthuswamy’s prose works generally. He has written some two dozen short stories, many of them set in his native village of Punjai in the Cauvery Delta, the Tamil heartland. I think the Punjai stories are the best that modern Tamil prose has to offer. They alone should suffice to make their author’s name known throughout the world, despite the slightly peripheral space Muthuswamy, as a short-story writer, could be said to occupy in his own Tamil Nadu. He has not quite made his way into the modernist canon in Tamil as one sees it emerging from the intense literary debates and experiments of the last 30 years or so. Other, in my view lesser, writers have occupied that space; and we no longer have the Sangam plank, the infinitely expandable wooden board on which true Tamil poets could always find a seat, and which would dump imposters or pedestrian poets without ceremony into the waters of the Golden Lotus Tank in the Meenakshi temple in Madurai. Once there was a gold standard for Tamil literary art.

How this happened is a question of some interest that I cannot address here. One has to know how to read the Punjai stories, and this also requires attuning one’s ear to the utterly distinctive rhythms—lyrical, syncopated, non-linear—of Muthuswamy’s prose. I suppose not everyone can hear them, and I can assure you that translating them into English is mostly impossible, and not for the usual reasons that translators marshal when offering an apologia pro vita sua . The greatest writers cannot be translated because of the complete isomorphism between the music of their words and thoughts and the irreducible music running through the language they speak and write. Dante is like that. Kamban, the author of the Tamil Ramayana , is like that. Hafez and Mandelstam are like that. Muthuswamy belongs in this series.

Apart from the question of language and style, the Punjai stories have a character of their own that we can attempt to spell out. It is easy to say that they reveal a world that no longer exists, the dense, resonant world of rural Tamil villages in the Delta. No one has ever drawn in the contours of that life as Muthuswamy has—using mostly very economical means, not drowning us in words. The sentences are rooted in a known landscape, literally fixed in space by the constant mention of routes and directions; one is always being told that a certain lane runs west, just north of the culvert, the houses facing south, and so on. The villagers are aware of the cardinal directions at any point and at any moment. On the other hand, their sense of time is infinitely elastic and seems never to move directly from some known past via the present moment into an unknown future. Time laps at the moment of recalling like ripples or riptides moving in contrary vectors through a living river. There is always what happened on “that day”, and often we hear about what happens “this day”, usually something that almost manages to keep memory at bay—almost, but not quite. Punjai time lacks even minimally straight lines, and this basic trait of Muthuswamy’s prose must thus link him with Borges, who said that he never believed his childhood geometry teacher who tried to convince him that the shortest path between two points is a straight line.

Punjai time is thick time. Newly superimposed strata continuously reshape the previous layers, poking at what is being narrated, the way the artisans punch and knead the clay that will become the huge face of the goddess at the final night of the festival. At times, we feel that we are in a kind of dreamtime, wedded to concrete, realistic details, but even dreamtime is overwhelmed by the sheer density and intensity of Punjai hours. So on some pages, especially when someone dies, there is a Newtonian moment: gravity has triumphed, if only for that second, and time moves forward for a while in equal countable units and without interruption. This, too, can happen. Death is final after all.

You can see how far Muthuswamy is from the magical realism that Marquez and his many epigones have established as a prevalent literary mode, amenable to imitation. There is much that is magical in Punjai, especially the luxuriant colours and smells and tastes of the village, and with them the subtle textures of love and failure and loss and self-delusion and, sometimes, hope. All this constitutes a pure kind of magic. But Muthuswamy could be called a realist—perhaps a dream realist, that is, someone who can see the way the eerie pathways of the mind lead us inevitably to what is, or was, there, as he, the author, remembers it. In this sense, Muthuswamy b elongs with the great lyrical realists of medieval Tamil, poets such as Turaimankalam Civappirakacar and Ativirarama Pantiyan and Kumarakurupara Cuvamikal. He has somehow, miraculously, grown naturally and organically from that now mostly ignored tradition.

Many of the Punjai stories have this dark texture, sometimes hidden behind a wry or witty, self-deprecating tone (as in the very fine text of “Nadappu”, not included in this collection). Often, the darkness overwhelms: Nirmai, “Waterness”, is perhaps the finest example, a horrifyingly beautiful portrait of a wasted life drawing to its end. The hyper-modern neologism of the title encapsulates the mostly silent innerness of this lone woman; she is as dark and liquid as the Salai Pond where she bathes each day. Although the word is well attested in the medieval lexicons and classical texts, where it tends to mean either “nature/quality” or a liquid “coolness”, Muthuswamy uses it to suggest an unstable fluidity of awareness, especially the tremulous textures of deep and hopeless loneliness. In this story, like in many others, snatches of other stories, remembered episodes, infiltrate the primary narrative, so that by the end we find ourselves haunted by the interlocking surfaces of awareness in this village, seen largely through the eyes of a young boy, or of a grown man remembering himself as a young boy, which is not quite the same thing.

I have been using words such as “dark”, “grim”, “devastating”—and without explaining further, I think it’s good to keep them in mind as you read. “Kalyani”, in its own strange way a story with a happy ending, if one reads backward toward the beginning, offers us a picture of the nationalist ideologies that washed over the Tamil country over half a century ago and of their often far-reaching consequences. It is important to know that Muthuswamy himself was, especially during his student days at Annamalai University, strongly involved in the anti-Brahmin, nationalist politics of the nascent Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), though he himself comes from a Brahmin community. When he writes of living the romance of a re-imagined Tamil past, he knows from experience what this feels like. In this story, Muthuswamy, while sticking to his understated, precise style, doesn’t hold back. A complex, continuously evolving consciousness is revealed. One might see the story as showing us the humanisation of a single person growing into himself via the usual diversions and blind alleys—until he becomes capable of loving, the most difficult and most worthy of all human achievements. Of course, Muthuswamy would never have said it in the words I’ve just used. He sings it, in that bewitching Tamil prose, in indirect and thus unerring ways.

The s tories tend to nestle deep inside one another, so much so that the entire Punjai corpus could be seen as a single, steadily evolving novella-like work, deeply integrated in all its parts. Often we find two stories that almost seem to mirror one another. Thus, “Fortress of Fantasy” ( Kalpanai aran, 1967) adumbrates “Kalyani” (2008). Both the dream-struck hero of the former and the bohemian, often drunk ideologue of the latter inhabit a vital, compelling world of the past—to a large extent, the same mythic world. For Kalyani, the ancient story of the Chola prince Attanatti and his grieving wife Adimandi comes to life as he walks the bank of the Cauvery river. As in “Panchali”, the story rises up to capture its narrator. In “Fortress of Fantasy”, the past has completely taken over the present.

He fell silent. His eyes were like floats on a line cast in the stream of time.

(This is another of those Muthuswamy sentences that knock the breath out of you.) Padayachi lives so deeply in the imagined past, now entirely present, that this imagined set of characters and stories bring him to the brink of murder. Obsessed, it seems, with a potential rival for property, Padayachi rushes off, sickle in hand, to kill this enemy who, he thinks, is trying to drown the Chola prince. A moment before, his mind has concocted a rape scene in tangible detail. One mythic image generates another. That set of images obscures and contains Padayachi’s jealous fantasies about his wife. The only reality he is capable of seeing is the one playing itself out in his mind.

In this sense Pada yachi is like all the rest of us: hence the extraordinary force of this story. Any sensitive reader soon realises that Muthuswamy’s primary concern is with what happens in the human mind. He is the great poet of the imagination as moulding, perhaps creating, a living world. Muthuswamy’s stage is the mind. The past, insofar as it exists as such, provides the raw stuff of ongoing, continuous fantasy projections; and the play is always in the process of being enacted now, on this day, before our eyes and before the character’s inner eye. As S. Ramakrishnan has said in his remarks about Muthuswamy on the dust cover of his collection of stories, “He has the mind of a proficient dramatist/actor and the mature mind of a dancer.” I like thinking of Muthuswamy as a dancer creating something new at every step. Both the abstraction and the concreteness of furious mentation are lucidly stated here. The truly astonishing achievement by the author of these stories lies in finding a juicy, earthy language commensurate with such a unique combination.

I have not mentioned the story that sometimes seems to me most emotionally consequential; each time I read it—and Muthuswamy bears many re-readings—I find it even more moving than before, as my body tells me. “Bullocks from the West” might seem almost innocent compared with the grimness of “Nirmai” or the engulfing madness of “Panchali”. But rarely have the full sadness of loss, and the meaning of loss, and the insidious workings of loss in mind and self, and the danger of ultimate, infinite loss, been so subtly evoked. What looks like a minor incident stuck, idiosyncratically, in a child’s memory, suddenly, in a short rush of sentences, offers us the agony of existence itself. The agony lurks deep inside the lush landscape of the village with its streets and trees and ponds, a landscape so rich that it might seem, at first, to leave no room for gaps and empty spaces. By the end of the story, this lushness is the space of unthinkable emptiness, which is also the inner landscape of growing up. “Bullocks from the West” can easily be paired with any of the other four stories we have chosen, its child’s-eye view of the village world inhering in the terrors that dominate all of them.

England, possibly Muthusw- amy’s best-known play, really needs to be seen in live performance, not read on the pages of a book or screen. Seeing a DVD recording of one such performance entirely transformed my own sense of this text; I can only hope that readers of this book will have a similar opportunity. It is important to know that, like most plays for the stage, this one went through many permutations, never fully crystallising into a single fixed text. It wasn’t easy for us to decide which of the available type-scripts and printed texts to translate. One needs to think of this play as a growing organism, different each time it was performed, subject to improvisation by the actors who are, themselves, under the sway of the mesmerising, lyrical Tamil lines no less than of the stark visual images they are speaking: images of entrapment, sexual hunger, an endless struggle to extricate oneself from the threads that bind and the compulsions of nostalgic memory infiltrating present perception. Like all the stories we have translated, this play, too, offers a complex, indirect entry into the mind: the mythology of the freedom movement is examined, undermined, and reconceived in a series of attempts to make sense, somehow, of the historical moment of liberation from colonial rule. As I have said earlier, the prose of the stage and the discursive, non-linear style of the Punjai stories resonate strongly with one another—hence our wish to pair them in this volume.

Again: Muthuswamy’s corpus of stories and plays really needs to be read and seen as a single and singular, continually evolving work in progress. Thus, this slim volume is no more than a first taste, a selection, perhaps representative, from the much wider and deeper body of compositions, each of them worthy of meditation in its own right. Each, in its own way, encapsulates the corpus as a whole. We can only hope that we have captured something of the original thickness. As for me, I have seen nothing comparable in the Tamil of this generation.

David Shulman is the Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author ofTamil: A Biography.

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