© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
A notebook in which his elder brother, KP Narayanan, had copied down Kumaran Asan’s poems was renowned director KP Kumaran’s first introduction, at age 10 or 12, to the poet who transformed Malayalam poetry in the last century. Asan has been with Kumaran since then. At 84, Kumaran has lost count of the number of times he’s read the poet. With the passage of time, Asan has only grown taller in Kumaran’s eyes, a grand renaissance figure whose life as a social activist and poet has few parallels in the history of modern Kerala.
Asan is arguably the most important Malayalam poet of the last century, and one of its greatest writers. Gramavrikshathile Kuyil (The Koel On the Tree in the Village), which was released in select theatres in Kerala last week, is Kumaran’s tribute to Asan. Kumaran, who has been associated with almost every progressive cultural and political movement of his time, says the biopic is his attempt to capture the soul and spirit of a great social and cultural figure who was misunderstood and misrepresented many times during his short life. During a half-century long career, Kumaran directed films such as Athithi (1974), a landmark film for parallel cinema in Malayalam, Rugmini (1988, based on a short story by Madhavikutty), Akasha Gopuram (2008, inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s play, The Master Builder, 1892), and a series of short films and documentaries. Film scholar C S Venkiteswaran says that unlike his contemporaries in parallel cinema, Kumaran uses elements of mainstream cinema, like songs, to create an engaging narrative style. Kuyil stands apart from his earlier films for its theme, treatment, unconventional cast (Carnatic musician Sreevalsan J Menon is brilliant as Asan), and the extensive use of poetry.
Kumaran Asan died at the age of 50 in 1924. His first major work — Veenapoovu (The Fallen Flower, 1907) — was published at age 34 and to great acclaim. Asan’s life in letters as a published author was short. But in those 16 years, between the publication of Veenapoovu and his tragic death in a boat accident, Asan published close to a dozen masterly works — Nalini (1911), Leela (1914), Sree Buddha Charitham, Prarodanam, Chinthavishtayaya Sita (1919), Karuna (1923), Chandalabhikshuki (1922). These poems have a transcendental quality that distinguished them from the work of his contemporaries; their inner luminosity has not faded after so many years.
Kumaran’s Kuyil focuses on the last seven-eight years of Asan’s life — a hectic time: He was producing great poetry, had fallen in love with a much younger girl, whom he married at the age of 45, had become a father, and acquired wealth. He was now a widely respected community leader and nominated to Sri Moolam Praja Sabha, a popular assembly at the court of the Travancore king. He’d acquired a self-awareness and confidence about his poetic genius that he chose to reflect on the higher truths of life, primarily ethical questions and the tension between life and death, unlike his contemporaries who were caught in the whirlpool of here and now. Asan was deeply political, but his poetics framed politics in a broad framework of human emancipation and as an intense spiritual effort towards expanding human freedom.
Born in the Ezhava caste, deemed as backward in the erstwhile Travancore state and excluded from public office and employment, Asan knew all about social exclusion. He was the favourite disciple of Sree Narayana Guru, the poet-sage whose radical spiritual vision provided fuel for Kerala’s transition from being a deeply casteist society in the 19th century to a relatively modern political community. Guru mentored Asan in his formative years and sent him out of Kerala to get educated. In Kavyakala Kumaran Asaniloode, a fine study of Asan and his poetics published in 1969, PK Balakrishnan writes that Narayana Guru was the land and sky where Asan’s poetic genius flourished.
Not surprisingly, Asan wrote that the essence and eternal truth of this universe was love (“snehamanikhila saram oozhiyil”). In Chandalabhikshuki, the story of a Dalit woman’s self-discovery and conversion to Buddhism, he offers a searing critique of the caste system: “Caste is the smoke of jealousy/ seething up in the dark covey of ignorant minds/ Filled up with lust for earthly pleasure/ And envy at the happiness of others./ It changes its hue with amazing rapidity/ Like the evening cloud, as anger,/ Arrogance and rotten misanthropy./ It will divide its own house and estrange/ Near relatives and antagonise classes/ And finally annihilate the whole world” (translated by PC Gangadharan). However, the long narrative poems Chintavishtayaya Sita and Karuna are widely considered his finest works. Sita is part monologue, in which the queen of Ayodhya, in exile in Valmiki’s ashram, reflects on her life. Deeply philosophical, it gives Sita agency, who questions the deep patriarchy that underline Raghu’s lineage and Raghava’s court. An exquisite piece, it reveals a poet in absolute control of his craft and content. He blends philosophy, drama, love, anger, compassion in perfect proportion to deliver a cathartic experience of the human condition.
Kuyil opens with Narayana Guru’s consecration of a temple in Aruvippuram in 1888, a landmark event in Kerala history that Guru described as the consecration of Ezhava Sivan when the Brahmin orthodoxy questioned his act. The biopic is not merely an exercise in marshalling facts; it is more of another artist trying to understand the outer and inner worlds Asan journeyed through during the most creative phase of his life. So, despite Asan’s persona as a social figure, he is rarely seen among the crowds in Kuyil: The poet is mostly seen in a contemplative mood, with his dear wife, Bhanumathi, and close friends such as Sahodaran Ayyappan.
So, why Asan now? Kumaran believes that Asan, despite the voluminous literature on the poet, has not been understood fully or holistically by Malayalis. His life and work call for a new interpretation: Ours is a time of forgetting, forgetfulness is all pervasive in culture, history, Kumaran says. Political thought and political work blend seamlessly in Asan’s life. At the insistence of Guru, Asan had become the founder secretary of SNDP Yogam in 1903, a communitarian outfit of the Ezhava community, after returning from his studies in Bangalore, Madras and Calcutta. Kumaran points out that Asan’s writings in Vivekodayam, a magazine he edited, suggest that the poet was essentially a philosopher: He has a vision of emancipation that glows despite being in the shadow of Guru. It was Asan who brought a lot of clarity to the Malayali consciousness with his reflections on love, freedom, man-woman relations, the need to reject caste and so on, Kumaran says. Also, Kumaran was drawn to the storyteller in Asan — his major poems are well-constructed narratives. The movie takes its title from a poem Asan wrote in anguish when he was targeted by his rivals in the SNDP Yogam.
Asan needs to be re-read, recognised as a seminal figure of Kerala renaissance. Gramavrikshathile Kuyil is a remarkable effort at situating Kumaran Asan as a renaissance figure and a deeply contemplative poet. It should help the world beyond Kerala discover Asan, whose 150th birth anniversary falls in 2023.
