Playing with Ideals

Set in the slums of Madras (now Chennai), Love and Loss is the story of construction worker Thangam and her illegitimate son Chitti. One day, Thangam’s lover, a roadside astrologer named Manikkam, moves in with the mother and the son, with his small steel trunk and three caged parrots. Unprepared for this new figure in his mother’s life, Thangam’s son burns with a fury and resentment that will break his mother’s heart.

From vivid details like the noisy flirtations of workers at construction sites to the tender beginnings of Thangam’s relationship with Manikkam, Jayakanthan’s narrative humanises the feelings of the men and women involved in this tragic drama. From the loud quarrels of slum dwellers to the painful rift between the mother and the son, he never portrays the slum people as anything other than men and women driven by aspirations and conflicts just like anyone else.

Oru Nadigai Natakam Parkiraal, published in Tamil in 1971 and now translated as Once an Actress in an accompanying volume, is the story of the relationship between a stage actress and a theatre critic. The novel is especially notable for the finely etched characterisation of Kalyani, the woman who has given up a job as clerk in a government office to devote herself full-time to the stage. When the critic Ranga asks her if the world of Tamil drama gives her enough creative satisfaction, Kalyani replies with self-assurance that despite all the flaws of the plays in which she acts, it makes her happy to stand under the bright lights on the stage. “If these are not the plays of your ideal world, so what?” she asks the critic, and he has no answer. With subtlety and intelligence, the novel explores the complicated path of the relationship between player and audience, artist and critic, woman and man.

Outspoken, opinionated and prolific in his literary output, Jayakanthan has written a range of essays and social criticism in addition to novels, novellas and short stories. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1972 and the Jnanpith Award in 2002. Born in 1934, he was already a school dropout when a troubled relationship with his father made him run away from home. Taking shelter with a relative associated with the Communist Party of India, he was introduced to socialist ideology early in life.

Although Jayakanthan was later alienated from the leftist ideology, what stayed with him and sustained his creative oeuvre was a deep commitment to the struggles of the marginalised. Domestic helps, teashop boys — all these characters flit in and out of the pages of his novels, not silently but with things to say, and they say them in unmistakably clear voices. Jayakanthan’s narrative style can sometimes be awkward and disjointed, and this comes through in these translations as well, but the vividness, humanity and fierce sense of pride of his characters more than make up for these flaws.