heraldofindia/article.php?id=624 Kumaran Asan The eternal flower A.J. Philip A few months back my aunt, who is 93, had a setback to her health but she quickly rallied. She was in good spirits when we visited her. Just to reassure us that everything was okay with her, she recited a poem, “Pallana aatil pathu veluppinu boat mungipoyi/ En Kumaran Asan athil pettu poi” (A boat capsized in the river Pallana in the wee hours/ My Kumaran Asan fell a victim to the accident). No, it was not the first time that I heard this song. In fact, I have heard the entire poem recited by my grandfather, bringing the listener to tears. All his children, including my mother, knew it by heart. Unfortunately, I learnt only the first two lines of the poem that depicted the tragic end of Asan. It happened on January 16, 1924. Asan boarded a passenger boat from Kollam to go to Alappuzha. It was overcrowded. As he was tired, he went down to the first class cabin on the lower deck to catch a few winks. Because it was slightly cold, he did not remove his coat. While crossing a small canal at Pallana, the boat got wrecked and capsized. Although Asan was a good swimmer, he could not escape. His body was recovered only a day later. There was a bruise on his forehead and the conjecture was that it came as a death blow. Ironically, the boat was named “Redeemer”, which in Christian parlance means Jesus. Many compared the death to another that occurred 102 years earlier when the great romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley died in a boat mishap. Recently, Malayala Manorama’s editorial director Thomas Jacob wrote that it took a couple of days for the newspaper to report how Kerala’s great poet met with a watery grave on account of the primitive nature of telecommunication in Kerala. An anonymous nimisha kavi (instant poet) wrote a poem on Asan’s death, which I quoted at the outset. Kerala had the tradition of instant poets bringing out booklets of poems that depicted events like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the death of Jawaharlal Nehru and the murder of Marykutty at Madatharuvi. Priced low, the booklets would be sold at bus stands, street corners and markets by those who could sing aloud some stanzas to attract the attention of passers-by. The success of the booklets depended on how quickly they were brought out. It seems Kerala has lost this tradition. Needless to say, the poem was my first introduction to Kumaran Asan. My grandfather, a farmer by profession, started a primary school in the village. He was not a poetry-lover and the only poem that he knew by heart, other than Christian hymns, was the one I quoted. Why did he become so emotional when he recited the poem? I tried to find an answer in the life and works of Kumaran Asan. These days newspapers are full of the caustic comments the Sree Narayana Guru Dharma Paripalanam (SNDP) General Secretary Vellappalli Natesan makes on the political developments in the state. He has a sharp tongue. More often than not, those whom he attacks do not respond for fear of a sharper attack. Every time his name figures in any report or TV programme, I remember Asan, who occupied the post of General Secretary of SNDP during its formative 17 years. No organisation in Kerala could have had a better leadership than the SNDP, whose President was Sree Narayana Guru, Vice-President Dr P. Palpu, a great visionary, and the general secretary Kumaran Asan. It was this trio that brought up the SNDP. Today when I visit my home town, I see on the roads buses belonging to Vellappalli Natesan Engineering College. No, it does not belong to the SNDP. For all his efforts to build up the organisation, all that Asan got was criticism, criticism and criticism. He did not build up anything to perpetuate his memory or to bequeath to his wife, whom he married when he was 45, and hist two sons. In his heavenly abode, Asan would definitely have been pleased with the Centre’s decision to confer the status of a “classical language” on Malayalam, while those in power would have welcomed the decision because of the Rs 100 crore that accompanied the conferment. Today Natesan is able to get away with his waspish comments because he represents a community on the ascendant, which is also the most preponderant in Kerala. A defining event in Kerala’s history was the visit of Swami Vivekananda in 1892. The visit is remembered for two episodes. He reached a rocky spot at the confluence of the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean and prayed there for a few days. Today a beautiful memorial to commemorate the event exists on the rock. It has a prayer room that will force even the hardened atheist to pray. When I visited the Vivekananda memorial last, the statue of poet-saint Tiruvalluvar on a nearby rock was not yet complete. It was opened to the public on the first day of the third millennium. The swami, who was preaching universal brotherhood from Chicago to Chhindwara, was shocked to find how the Hindu society in Kerala was divided on the basis of not only untouchability but also unapproachability. Vivekananda called Kerala a veritable lunatic asylum, truly a well-deserved denunciation, the significance of which can be understood by the fact that at Chengannur in central Travancore, Christian women had to protest to demand the right to wear blouses. They had to brave police lathis in which many women were injured. Asan belonged to the Ezhava or Thiya caste, a victim of social inequities. When the community sought the right to study in government schools and get jobs in government through a memorandum called the “Ezhava Memorial”, the Maharajah returned the memorandum “with the remark that the Ezhavas had no desire for education or government service and were satisfied with their traditional occupations, which indirectly indicated that the memorandum was a cooked-up affair”. That it was signed by 13,000 Ezhavas was of no consideration. Asan had to suffer caste prejudices at every stage of his life, though it is also a fact that he was allowed to study in Brahmin-led institutions in Mysore and Kolkata. What occasioned these thoughts was a lecture on the “women characters in Asan’s works” delivered at Kerala Club recently. The speaker introduced herself thus: “I am an assistant professor at a small college in a small place called Cherthala in Kerala. I did my Ph.D on Kumaran Asan’s poetry”. As Prof C. Lekha said this, I wondered how Cherthala could be described as a godforsaken place when one of its sons holds the Defence Minister’s post and has the ear of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi and could emerge as the dark horse in the race for prime ministership in 2014? Who could have imagined that a leader with much to be humble about and with no oratorical skills worth the name would emerge the most powerful minister after the Prime Minister? Similarly, how could I expect this humble teacher from the backwaters of Kerala to speak non-stop for two hours in fluent, idiomatic, error-free Malayalam that reminded me of well-known speaker Kaniapuram Ramachandran’s speeches? When she introduced the women characters of Asan one by one, they seemed to stand in front of the audience in flesh and blood, except one because it did not have either flesh or blood. It was a fallen flower that nobody wanted. Asan’s Oru Veena Poovu (A Fallen Flower) is often compared to a “beautiful emperor moth which came out of the cocoon in 1908 and which flew across the Kerala sky enchanting the lovers of poetry by its colourful wings”. As my friend and poet Chandrashekharan Nair told the speaker after the event that he thought Asan’s greatest character was the “fallen flower”, I could not but concur. I am not a great poetry lover but whenever I get an opportunity to tell my students about what is called the highest poetic utterance, I invariably cite two examples, Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be” and the first two lines from Asan’s Oru Veena Poovu. The first word in the poem, actually a sound, “ha” is enough to indicate the pathetic condition of the flower. Only a great poet could have introduced his subject in this manner. Here are the first few lines, translated into English by Manjeri Isvaran: “Ah! lovely bloom, once thou didst shine/High like a Queen!/ How sad thou liest down in dust/ Shorn of they (Please check, seems to be a typo) sheen!/ Inconstant is fortune on earth/ Impermanent is loveliness”. Speculations abound about what forced the poet to compose this poem. The proximate cause was the sudden illness of Sree Narayana Guru, who contracted cholera while they were traveling in Ernakulam. The Guru was taken to Palghat where he underwent treatment in a hospital, where there were a lot of flower-bearing trees. He might have been influenced by the sight of fallen flowers and the condition of the Guru to write this poem. Whatever be the cause, the fact remains that the publication of this poem marked a stellar event in the literary history of Kerala. Until the arrival of Asan, Malayalam poetry was free from the influence of English poetry. Oru Veena Poovu was the first to exhibit the influence of English poetry. Incidentally, Asan had read the works of Shelley, Keats and other modern poets while he was in Kolkata. “I have seen English poetry books in which Asan had made notes and underlined stanzas” said Prof Lekha. Ulloor S. Parameswara Iyer in his well-known history of Malayalam Literature, Malayala Bhasha Sahitya Charitram, writes: “In the literary firmament Veena Poovu introduces a star which is exceptionally bright”. No, the speaker did not quote anyone in the course of her lecture. Whenever she quoted, it was Asan’s verses, rich in imagery and thoughts. From the fallen flower to Nalini, whose childhood friend Divakaran had taken to sanyas, Asan dwells on the same subject of the fallen condition. She pursues her lover only to find that the conflict between human love and renunciation is eternal. It can be considered a tragedy because she is not able to fulfill her love. But if happiness is that which transcends physical delight, then there is fulfillment in Nalini’s love for Divakaran. Leela is the progression of the thought in Nalini. Leela is Madanan’s girlfriend but she had to marry a merchant’s son. Soon after the marriage her husband dies. She returns to her own home to be with Madanan, who broken-hearted had left for the Vindhyas. She finally meets him. From the zenith of the happiness of that meeting, he jumps into a river and she too follows him. The Sita in his Chintavishtayaya Sita (Sita Engrossed in Thought) is a virtuous, noble and understanding woman but a woman in flesh and blood all the same. She is all alone under a tree and she bids farewell to Ram in these words: “Dear Raghava! Farewell to thee/ Leaving the prop of thy arms/ I am rising up into the High Heavens/ Unafraid and free at last.” In Duravastha, Asan tells the story of a Nambudiri lady - Savitri - who lost her kith and kin in the Moplah rebellion (1921) and takes shelter in the hut of a Harijan - Chathan. It created quite a sensation at that time in social circles in Kerala. His Chandalabhikshuki is about a chandala woman Matangi worried about giving water to a Buddhist disciple, Ananda, for fear that she would pollute him. It is also a critique of the caste system. In Karuna, easily his masterpiece, Asan tells the story of the extremely beautiful Vasavadatha, who takes a fancy for Upagupta, the disciple of Lord Buddha. Every time she sends a messenger to fetch him, she gets the message that the “time has not yet arrived for Upagupta to visit Vasavadatha”. He finally arrives when she is gasping for breath. He explains why he did not come earlier. “You would not have listened to the teaching of the Tathagata, for your heart was wayward and you set your trust on the sham of your transient charms”. Through all his characters, Asan seems to tell us that true love is eternal and its highest fulfillment should be sought in the life after death. No, the teacher had not tired of speaking about the great poet. She could have continued longer but for the constraints her listeners faced in having to reach home for dinner. Who said Asan died? He lives in his works. The lecture was a gentle reminder that Kumaran Asan (1873-1924) will live as long as Malayalam lives. The writer can be reached at ajphilip@gmail Courtesy: Indian Currents
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 15:15:47 +0000
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