By K. SATCHIDANANDAN
Ayyappa Paniker’s Poetry:
An Afterword*
Ayyappa Paniker is one of the pioneers of that transition
of poetic sensibility which began in the early fifties in
almost all the Indian languages: a transition that consisted
primarily in a realistic revolt against senile romanticism on
one side and mechanical progressivism on the other. He has
remained to this day productively alive to the variety of
forms and patterns of poetry that range from short
confessional fragments, hymns, lullabies and epitaphs to lông
revealing sequences, dramatic monologues and classical
ballets. Paniker has also been a bold innovator of metrical
designs. Besides bringing back to Malayalam poetry the glamour
and the music of the Sanskritic, Dravidian and folk metres, he
has experimented with metrical collages, rhymeless verse with
irregular rhythms and stylised as well as sinuous, forthright
prose. But. he has not been swept off his feet by
considerations of novelty as many other modem writers have
been.
Look at his first important poem, ‘Kurukshetram’.
‘Kurukshetram’ was written during 1951-’57 and published in
1960. This is the first poem of
Ayyappa Paniker with a definitive thematic and idiomatic
significance. Most of its themes had already found fragmentary
expression in his earlier poems like ‘The Daughter of Snow’,
‘Beside the Fire’, ‘Before the Dream’, ‘Go, Morning, go!’ and
‘The Pilgrimage’. Its idiom too had long been in the making,
as revealed by ‘A Surrealist Lovesong’, ‘On my Wall’, ‘Uncles’
or ‘The Night’. But it is in ‘Kurukshetram’ that both these
are blended in harmony to produce a monologue of momentous
hesitations. Here, the actual and the timeless, the phenomenon
and the idea, meet eye to eye in the equivocations of a
disinherited mind. The poem poses its problem in the verse of
the Gita with which it begins: “Tell me, Sanjaya, what my sons
and the sons of Pandu did when they gathered on the sacred
field of Kurukshetra eager for battle?” This ancient question
of the disenchanted blind man is to the poet the ritualistic
prologue of the black mass of human agony. The first section
of the poem introduces theontological anguish shared by Arjuna
and Abraham alike and inherited by the alienated modern man in
his Hamlet-like trepidations, The second points to the
futility of philosophical systems invalidated by the burning
reality of existence. The third contrasts the phenomena of
experience with the archetypes of imagination and rejects
conventional moral standards as stale and unrealistic. The
fourth expresses a kind of metaphysical surrender to the
illusion of existence of which we are mere observers; the
concluding fifth section rejects even the solace of mystery;
the tension-fraught lyrical ego finds its final comfort only
in the assertion of the authenticity of the self-contained
individual after the Yeatsian fashion—’There is no truth
except in thine own heart...Dream, dream, for this is also
söóth’. The poet’s fancy rolls through the cyclic time that
repeats the tales of existential dread.
The poet addresses the star that seems to represent man’s
cosmic longings that survive the sharpest of agonies—a symbol
typical of Paniker’s’
roots in the romantic heritage:
See us,
Caught in the labyrinth of our daily grind;
It is a crowded market—this
where we plunge and push and outsmart
To gain each our end...
Here they come to buy and to sell
And what do they barter and sell
But themselves they buy and themselves they sell....
It is the bones that eat the marrow here
And the skin preys on the bones.
(Tr. T.K. Doraiswamy)
The image of the market in the last couplet expresses not
merely the romantic antagonism to the Luciferean city with its
frenzied crowds. It is the
realist’s revolt againt the whole brutal mirage of the
capitalistic world that decomposes human consciousness in a
flux of perplexed agony and degrades man to the status of an
object. The pangs of dismemberment natural to the alienated
mind of the poet grow acute when faced with the crisis of
faith, the drowning of the ‘ceremony of innocence’. The
‘Church of faith’ becomes ‘the rock of ages’ and the priestly
order wears ‘robes of utter darkness’. The melody of the star
echoes in the blood of Being and Becoming. Life knocks at the
door: ‘Isnesses’ and ‘Whatnesses’ are unavailing juggleries.
‘Even the cunning dialectics of a world-renowned Chanakya
wilts before the bright mockery of a blade of grass.’
The poet summons the ancient images of his subconscious to the
witness-box of reality. The moral earnestness of Rama
renouncing his wife is called in question. No Gita can satisfy
man in his living hour. Philosophy does not come to the rescue
of Oedipus. The Gods are gone to sleep. Even ‘time that
annihilates time’ is not worthy of our trust. We are only
witnesses to the statuary erected by time in this space-time
junction. Ideologies have only added discord to the vile
cacophony of tears. The poet places his trust in the dreaming
soul of man:
When the soul is illuminated
Who will speak of the Mount of Calvary?
If indeed for a moment rare
We would all just human be...
If indeed we could redeem the visions
That hurtle through our dreaming soul....
The poems of this period abound in natural images and symbols
invoked already in ‘Kurukshetram’—Star, flower, fire. Ocean,
morning, sun, wind, moon. The poet pays homage to the
elements; it is as if he wishes to discover himself among them
like Superveille: ‘Let me turn into an olive tree of Provence’.
His phenotypal imagination sickened by the pestilence of
civilization in ‘Kurukshetram’ demands expiation from these
unspeaking witnesses. In ‘Agnipooja’ (Homage to Fire) he
explores the mythical origins of fire which to him is the
element of aspiration, the sustaining and stimulating force of
existence. ‘Fire’ is associated in Paniker’s mind with that
ancient fire-bringer Pururavas and his love for the heavenly
dancer, Urvashi. His poem ‘Pururavas’ (i959) is a dream-work
that reinterprets the mythical search of the woeful hero for
Urvashi turned into a wild creeper in the valleys of
Gandhamadana, under her master’s spell. Pururavas, according
to Rigveda, (Mandala-I, vii-4) is the offspring of Budha and
Ila. Thus his very origin symbolises the marriage of earth and
heaven, prophesied already in ‘Kurukshetram’. Pururavas, in
his own life, repeats the story, as his Promethean spirit
seeks to re-establish the severed relationship with Heaven to
regain the lost Eden through his nuptial kinship with Urvashi.
Urvashi too represents divine Truth, incarnate Beauty;
Pururavas is the abandoned seeker of that Truth in its veiled
aspect. The poem reveals the poet’s faith in the illogical and
revelatory nature of Truth. ‘Truth that came flowing to a
cuckoo’s throat in an ancient twilight.’ The force that draws
the lover and that which draws the planet are one—what Goethe
calls die Wahlver wandschaften—
elective affinities. The unrecognised immediacy of Urvashi’s
presence bring to the lover’s heart memories of childhood—his
own, and of the human race. He feels like the solitary
Prussian at the discovery of Zarathustra: ‘I could sing a song
and will sing it although I am alone in an empty house and
must sing it to mine own ears:
Sing my mind, sing in a trance, in the bare moonlight
Sing of the brief loves of yore,
Of the longings that melted and rained away before our gaze,
Of the silvery cloud that smiled through the evening breeze
Of the larks lulled by the song of their own pulse.
The poem tapers to the bitterness of a prayer. Dawns and dusks
tempt us towards the grave. So the poet wants to unwear his
soiled memories:
Only to forget that which pains the sense
Only to father no more memories.
Poetry here becomes the apotheosis of solitude. The poet’s
reflective self invokes uncor~ ious energies to create a
living myth. The archetype of
romance—the dawn, the spring and the birth phase—is
resuscitated. The poetic structure shows examples of
condensation, displacement and
overdetermination, the characteristics common to dream-work
and poetic work.
Another poem of this period, ‘Hei, Gagarin,’ is an exhortation
to poetry to conquer the heights already measured by science:
The pioneers have hoisted their flags on the heights
Break the idols, poets, to grow god enough to bless.
The poet finds the whole cosmic pattern brimming with rich
experience. The clairvoyant realisation of the possibilities
of poetry throws the poet into a wild ecstasy. This turns into
iconoclastic fury in the concluding lines that command the
poets to transcend the limitations of space and time and
liberate the universe from its dark design. The tone of the
poem is deliberately lofty and the idiom Sanskritic. I~ is as
if the poet rides the clouds; the throbbing rhythm of
‘Mallika’ (a Dravidian dance metre) reproduces the appui. The
clarion’s echo passes from the dreaming earth to the sky
redolent of the mythical dance.
In ‘Mrtyupooja’ (Hymn to Death, 1967) the poet turned singer
invites death to take away his breath as the terrible
anticipations of the sunless day ~pressed in ‘Kurukshetram’,
‘Death,’ ‘The Night’ and ‘I know your Face’ find their sombre
fulfilment,
Hail, gentlegoer, winter’s night,
Darkness incarnate, hail!
The flush of the dusk departs,
Departs, dissolves in the flirting gossip.
Dark grow the vales of Sahya...
Come, coldness dense,
Come, darkness
Come, 0 fond love of death...
Darling of autumnal dreams, come!
Even the sustaining star melts in the enveloping gloom of the
‘endgame', the poet returns his life ticket to God. Poetry
aspiring to music is embarrassed to arrive at silence, the
other limit of language. The poem ‘points to the suffering to
deny the sun.’ Things break loose from words as man is
overpowered by his own works and falls away from himself,
Future stares at us like a ghost
Who, pray, who will sing
The well-rhymed parables of the dawn?
Dead are the saints and the sages
Earth’s holiness is but a hollow legend.
It is criminal to ignore the social implications of the poem.
It is the intense concern with life and values that drives the
poet to a desire for death.
“Have I not sung tomorrow’s tunes?
Give me my due,” this is our bard of liberty.
The poet pledged to the people’s cause
Makes a dash for the spot of war and famine,
“Here is cash,” he thinks, and pens his pains,
The teacher of virtUe ëarefully laces a silken smile
Onto the hems of his well-bleached garb.
“Frail is this corporeal mould, so seek I
The joy of my spirit in thee.”
In fetters is my fear-tom heart
In fetters are my feet.
The eternal gyrations of history and evolution only sicken the
poet’s heart. Myths may sprout again; the Fish may recover the
Vedas, the legend
may repeat of “Man undone by a woman undone by a serpent
undone by God.” The spent forces of the world may re-appear
only to repeat the whole bloody history of rapine and plunder,
‘the game of cats and mice caught in the frenzy of lust.’ So
th~ poet wants his life ‘to melt in the frozen veins of the
world’ and his toil-worn flesh to seek its final repose, The
image of the Gopi who leaves her child on the way and sells
her breast-cloth with its ‘ancient milk-moist oblivion’ aptly
sums up the numbness that has descended over human feelings,
the estrangement within the family and the lingering memories
of a forgotten world of splendour. The human beast treads the
earth in the name of the Almighty. Sage Kanva has a new riddle
to pose: “Why preserve the eyes since it is time for the
post-historic slumber?” Someone has placed the roots of the
earth in a flying saucer and hopes to sow the seeds in
undiscovered planets, but he is not likely to reap the
harvest. Only one Pranava wells up from the depths of the
earth that took in Sita: ‘Death, Death, glory to Death,
Death’. Sita represents virtue disowned and also the word, the
child of the furrowed earth. Man returns to silence, his
mother-tongue. However, ‘Mrtyupooja’ ends in the hopeful
prayer of Rama perplexed to discover the defeated demon reborn
in his heart as dancing death: ‘0, nursing Earth, retrieve my
darling, your womb re-animate!” The poem receives its texture
from the interweaving of Hindu and Hebrew myths effected
through the music of ‘Dandaka’ (a metre of Kathakali verse.)
The alienated self turns once again to the past to seek
identity in the narrowed and thus intensified tradition of the
family. ‘Kudunaba Puranam’ (The Family Legend) traces the
poet’s own lineage (and through it the history of the human
race), pays tribute to the mighty ancestors and comes back to
the present to end p in moral fury expressed in bitterly
ironic tones. Like Hart Crane the poet cries out—’ Where are
my kinsmen and the patriarch race?’ Paniker uses, as in ‘Mrtyupooja’,
a variation of the slow-moving Dandaka and mixes the affective
language of the sudden-blooded cyclothymic with the sarcasm of
the disenchanted cynic, and the rustic colloquial style with
the grand style reminiscent of the ancients. The design of the
poem brings to mind the architecture of the old aristocratic
houses of Kerala (Nalukettu and Ettukettu).
Time does not end here, darling,
Let us moan no more.
From what depths, wells up even this smile of ours!
And yet he is thrown back to his native awareness of universal
grief to find the earth and the sky rolling and melting in the
heat of an ancient separation:
Roll and melt and flow these garland-weaving stars
Streams, dusks, all lovers in separation.
Solid granite rocks melt in the heart of the woods,
Nights that swell up the seas well up in their spring.
They too suffer the torment.
The poet reads in the growing moon the tale of Shakuntala-the
innocent infant, the passionate lover, the betrayed woman, the
gratified mother, full-circled peace. The image sums up the
story of man moving painfully towards peace and unity.
Chitragupta, the. heavenly statistician who takes stock of
birth and death, himself is dying. ‘Birth is the birth of
death, and death, the death of birth.’ If this grief is
universal, it is pointless to waste our life in idle tears.
Our complaining habit is a mere survival from the obstinacy of
childhood. The fifth canto of the poem is a mildly cynical
narration of the gossips and the scandals of the poet’s native
village. The poet feels sorry that all the sacrifice of the
ancestors has come to this—this gossip between the moth and
the caterpillar!
Who is it that sings, who is it that wails:
‘Wither, 0, wither away, you gentle Rose
Meant you were not to be bprn to this noon,
The honey of your heart is not for this sand?’
.Darkness is all; and yet
There is light in this night,
Why, this night is the light—
Brag on man, for you are on duty!
The sarcasm grows plain in the dark valediction with its
echoes of the Brecht ‘Hauspostille:’
Praise ye man, praise on,
Praise the man that fails not to fill
The belly of the starving girl next door!
Liberty, equality, fraternity, co-operation—
Truth here is a miscellany,
Praise ye the man who fries the good soul in them
To serve to the gloating world,
Praise ye man, praise on!
III
The two American sequences-’Days, nights’(1970) and ‘Passage
to America’ (1972) reveal fully the possibilities and the
limitations of Paniker’s
poetry—his preoccupation with love, death and the futility of
life, his aversion to politics, war and urbanity, his~ black
humour, his frail passions of lust.
‘Days, nights’, the tragi-comic diary of the poet’s days in
America that tries to ‘hear life happening in time’ begins
with the vain dialectic of days and nights:
This mind is a vain task,
and thought, a tactic
Yet
Man’s thought seeks on tirelessly along
the highways where days float
and the gutters where nights rot.
By the time this vain task ends,
life ends too.
Maybe, that too is a tactic. (September—4)
The poet rides the legendary Chinese Dragon, that leads him on
to the magic sights of earth and imagination. Poetry becomes
organic as the
experience discovers its own form bringing at its service old
metrical patterns .ts well as the novel rhythms of prose. The
divisions of the poem are units of consciousness. Here the
mind frees itself from the Kierke gaardian This/ That and
establishes a synthesis of This and That in their essential
validity.
The title of the poem suggests the dualism that balances on
Sandhya (meaning, twilight half symbol, half-human). . The
poet’s mind is like Janus its pairs of visions: life—death,
flash—spirit, ,man—woman, emotion- intellect,
industry—agriculture, moment—eternity, illusion—reality,
happiness—selfishness, past—present, self—antiself. These
dialectical pairs are expressed sometimes directly and at
other times through symbols like the fly and the elephant, the
Mount Meru and the river Ganga, Adam and Eve, Indian and Red
Indian, war and the human race, square and circle. In the
meeting of the Indian and the American Indian, the poet sees
the historic union of two worlds of suffering—Two worlds, two
epochs, two islands of agony, two lights, two wingless birds,
two colours: they bleed in this twilight.’ (September—-5). The
farmer is an alien in industrial culture: ‘I have no faith in
this triumphal ecstasy. Success I loathe. I press defeat to my
heart. The culture defeats the virtues I cherish. Do you know
my name-‘Farmer!’ (September—7). Like Gary Snyder in his
“Passage to more than India,” Paniker rediscovers
Mother-Nature; he dreams of the new ‘greening.’ His
conversation with the holy virgin marvels at the mystery of
the human frame, not quite in the Greek spirit. In another
section we hear the murmur of death:
What do greyness and old age
Whisper to each other?
‘Let’s crush this man,
Crush him to death.’ (October—4)
There are also occasions of mischievous mockery and radical
irony reminiscent of his works like ‘The Ant,’ ‘Mo,’ ‘Epitaph,
‘Kishkindha’, ‘The
Tales of the Maharaja’ and ‘The Cartoon Poems.’ Look at this
piece titled ‘The Fly’ that makes fun of shallow optimism:
“The fly lost its power to smell and settled in the trunk of
an elephant. Now I too can smell, when the elephant smells,’
the fly felt comforted. When things went on like this, an
ulcer burst in the elephant’s trirnk ~nd there was foul smell
everywhere. The elephant sneezed, the fly was shot out. ‘How
good it was that I had lost my power to smell!’ even then the
fly felt comforted.” (September—5). Another poem attacks the
academic ‘Seekers of truth:’
Where is truth?
Sought the wise man
On her forehead, lips,
Breasts, navel and thighs.
Truth cannot be in one
It breaks if in twos,
Dwells, dwells truth
At the juncture of twos.
The ambiguous love of’Pururavas’ finds its tragic resolution
when the poet requests his darling Sandhya to leave him for
ever and to take away
with her the light she had brought into his life. In the
following part, love metamorphoses into a symphony of
Beethoven that freezes in the coldness of estrangement. The
secret of success in life is encapsulated in an epigram: ‘Take
care of the second; then you need not fear night, day, life
and death.’ (October—14). The warning is then carried to the
holocaust of war, the most abominable of the modern political
tragedies: ‘War, if we fail to kill you, you will kill us,’
Characteristically, even when he deals with such a purely
mundane issue, his verse echoes the eternal—he commands us to
carry the torch of the human eyes to the Moon and Mars.
(October—l6)~ In a dialogue with his own heart, the poet
thanks the heart for having beat in his loyal service so long
and warned him, in time, of its retirement (October—20). The
poet accepts man for his master for man even in this storm
keeps his head steady by the sheer force of gravity
(October—-22). He admires with equal enthusiasm the illusions
of the moment that keep us alive even in this our exile
(October—25). The moment splits apart to reveal its content of
eternity in the subsequent section. Mountains and rivers tell
the poet that selfishness is the greatest sorrow. The mighty
ocean endorses the message, but what can be learnt cannot be
taught. In the concluding sequence the poet comes back from
his stray wanderings to the real world to reassert his hopes
about postenty:
Entering the present moment we caught hold of eternity
inside future and past where time stands still—and we danced.
Then I said: ‘Dear Sandhya,
In India time was a continual flow
and Meru and Ganga, both part of it.
Now the principle ofjoy has been forgotten:
evening has been split into day and night,
and the whole of happiness has been turned into lies.
The four stages of life are four thousand.
One is reduced to many.
But perhaps the Blessed ones may recover lost times.’
(November-9) (Tr. Esther Young Smith) - .
‘Passage to America’ begins with the celebration of death
realised in its several nightmarish aspects—’ death in the
morning death in the evening
death in the cellar death in the alley death on the highway
the boy returning from the rally death in the cornfield the
girl going to the grocer’s death in the death from belief and
its comic relief,’ death roaring in the generation gap’ and
‘lying in history’s lap, sucking its sap.’ Then death in the
poem is much more than a tele-viewing of the Vietnam deaths;
it is symptomatic of the decadence that fills the fragmentary
life of affluent America. The idiom here becomes genuinely
modem as the poet refuses ‘to put his footsteps in the dual
safety of harmony.’ He abandons the rhymes of verse for the
rhythms of strident prose but refuses to abandon the struggle
of life for the cold comfort of death. “It’s easy enough
to’die in these circumstances, but think of the horror and the
glory of having to live.
The antithetical balance of the first sequence is soon
replaced by theerotic ecstasy of ‘My guitar, my sitar’, that
moves with the swaying rhythm of the bodies lost in
lovemaking. After the crescendo and the~hutual dissolution,
the rhythm softens, falls and breaks up into syllables. The
third sequence, dedicated to Snyder, presents the famous
American poet reciting his poetry, ‘chewing the afternoon like
his moustache’ and ‘droning on about a new civilization,’ his
‘mystic beard pointing to the seed of time’. The gravity of
the recital is broken by the mischievous interference of a dog
that listens to the poet, gets up and walks away ‘wagging his
tail in total agreement.’ “A dog is dignified by his tail, I
wish I had one.” The sequence reveals the gulf that yawns
between the fanciful world of poetry and the world of irksome
reality. The mysterious chanting heaves with the heaving
breasts of the poet’s darling as ‘her dark green skirt exudes
the smell of sweat.’ Much in the spirit of Ceasar Vallejo who
wonders what is the use of reading Andre Breton while a man
with a wooden leg is passing by, or Sartre who asks what is a
book to a hungry child, the poet here realises the
estrangement between poetry and the people and the physical
and the metaphysical.
The following sequence takes up the theme of the second, the
experience of which now reappears as memory that again wants
to become experience as ‘twice-punctured silver belle, her sea
of tranquility disturbed by high men penetrating fears yet
longs for the next assault in sweet dread of periodic stress.’
This is followed by what appears like a Chinese paradox:
‘Having learnt in a short life- uriie that chalk doesn’t write
on chalk, he turned to look for sunf1owers in beds of roses’.
Man wanders from error to error, by the Lime he learns to
correct himself, life ends too. In the next, the poet bids
farewell to his love after a night-long wake. The concluding
sequence has a formal perfection seldom equalled in recent
Malayalam poetry. The poet derides the heartlessness of
America with her capitalist culture:
..America,
I see your map
like the palm of a hand stretched out on my lap
mississippi traces your lifeline to the south
while the great lakes draw circles
along the St. lawrence headline
but where’s your heartline?
on the mount ofjupiter
new england cocks its eyes on europe
your venus is still in heat
in the far south in florida
and the mount of moon
ie shimmers on the californication beach
but america
where has vanished your heartline?
has some test explosion
sucked it underground?
i remember river phalgun
that goes dry in summer defying our prayers
where once the buddha got enlightenment
and learnt to take the earth for a begging bowl
but here the fission and the fusion
your scientists envision
offer your palmist nothing but confusion...
... ‘its christmas again
the shape of heart neatly. pinned to a cross
that stands on hill we have set up with skill.
(Tr. by the poet)
Pankier’ s American sequences have a double significance: it
is here that the protean diversity of the poet’s imagination
discovers a self-sufficient
form to suit its kaleidoscopic perception. Again, it is here
that the poet’s romanticism becomes strangely reconciled to
the reality of the outer world thus making itself free b~ an
awareness of its own limitations.
“Here life,” records the poet’s responses tc life Soviet
Russia and East Europe. The sequence is made up of thirteen
poems, each named after
a place he visited and dedicated to a person he met there. The
poem is a celebration of the writer’s faith in the possibility
of man’s progress and
perfection. There is here a new tenderness alien to the bitter
American sequences. Its commitment to a humanist ideal is
total and unreserved. The trenchant mockery of the ‘Passage’
gives way to a gentle humour, as when he offers ‘the
double-breasted Balkans’ to hold one if she finds it hard to
carry both or when he speaks of the ‘water-bottle-sky’ and
‘red-grape-sky’ and the fish of the lake “anxious to be
promoted to the dinner table.” The washed clothes hung in the
sun behind the open windows are enough to reassure the poet of
man and his bright visions. In another piece that exults in a
Whitman-like parade of proper nouns, the poet turns to
history. He listens to the screams of Macedonia and brings
together the anguished Abraham offering Isaac to his god and
Bhagatsingh, “crowned with vines and veins.” The poet once
buys a flower from a lame flower girl with “wintered legs” and
“autumnal eyes” and offers it back to her. It is symbolic of
“the life we consecrate with love-chants” upon our earth
“crumbling down all around us in spite of the transparent net
of supporting dreams.” The song of the Volga reminds him of
the ‘trembling blade of lonely grass” that he once adored on
the bank of an Indian lake. “Once I wrote of Gagarin the
space-trotter and asked the poets to rise to his height, at
least. The response has not been disappointing.” Evgeni
Evtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky and Bella Akhmadulina—”So much
for achievements. We should move on, move farther on. We
should see all things move and tell others they do, until
every man is raised to fullness like the ripe reward to the
tears of mothers, like the first leaf, moist and thrilled.”
Ayyappa Paniker has been writing for five decades now. There
is hardly any other poet in Malayalam who has innovated his
art so consistently and introduced so large a range of forms.
Looking back at his oeuvre as a whole one gets the feeling
that the humourist in Paniker has overtaken the serious, often
tragic, poet in him. While one can hardly discount his more
serious work, it is not unlikely that he will be regarded by
the posterity as a true humourist in the vein of the legendary
Malayalam humourists, Tholan, Kunchan Nambiar or Sanjayan, one
who occasionally lapses into serious musings on the human
condition. In other words, Pankier is a poet who is not merely
playful, but one who has taken his playfulness seriously and
is never tired of it. It his playfulness seems excessive at
times, it only means that it is his most natural element,
something that comes to him spontaneously and effortlessly as
anyone who has engaged him in conversation would testify. It
is the humour of a man who has a love-hate relationship with
the world around and has observed the world’s ways closely at
times with concern and at times with detachment. When he
observes the world with concern his humour turns into sarcasm,
leading to bitter satire and invective. When he observes it
with philosophic detachment, it turns into Falstaffian irony
that reflects his distance from everything that surrounds him.
Satire intends to change the world; it always involves
commitment while irony comes from someone who has seen the
world and has little hope of changing it. But there are times
too when his human voice transcends both and rises above the
ashes and ruins to celebrate life and the fire that sustains
it. It is perhaps all these put together that makes him one of
the most significant poets of our times and certainly the most
significant innovator of Malayalam poetry in the latter half
of the Twentieth Century.
* This article was originally published in Chandrabhaga edited
by Jayanta
Malapatra in 1981. The concluding paragraph has been newly
added: K.S.
STUDYING THE NARRATIVE LITERATURE OF INDIA
Review by Prof. G.C. Tripathi
The IGNCA feels happy to introduce a scholarly and
fascinating work by Prof. K. Ayyappa Paniker titled "Indian
Narratology". This book is the first attempt of this magnitude
to study, the various forms of the art of narration, which
emerged in the literary circles of India as well as in the
sphere of oral literature. The book makes an interesting reading
and highlights the awareness of the Indian story tellers in
demarcating the various forms and styles of the art of
narration.
India is considered by many as the cradle of the art of
narration which developed into an important and independent
genre of literature in ancient times. It is a well known fact
that the fables of Panchtantra which have now become more or
less a world heritage, were translated as far back as 5th or 6th
century A.D. in Pehlavi language and from that into Syrian,
Arabic, Latin, and later in the medieval Europeans languages.
They have influenced the culture and moral values of many
countries and have enriched their literature. Similarly, some
stories from the Brhatkatha of Gunaadhya (now unfortunately lost
but whose two shorter Sanskrit versions are available) have
whose two shorter Sanskrit versions are available) have traveled
to such distant countries as Arabia and have found an honourable
place among the stories of "Thousand and One Night" (Alif Laila).
The fascinating account of the travels of Sindbad is a nice
example of the westwards migration of these stories and the
traveller Sindbad is none else but Sindhupati of our ancient
tales.
Taking the narrative literature of India as a whole into
consideration and studying their exclusive features vis-a-vis
the narratives produced in other cultures, the author comes to
the conclusion that the main distinctive features of Indian
narratology may be listed under ten heads for which he coins the
following technical terms:
1. Interiorization
2. Serialization
3. Fantasization
4. Cyclicalisation
5. Allegorisation
6. Anonymisation
7. Elasticisation of time
8. Spatialisation
9. Stylisation
10. Improvisation
According to the author Interiorisation is the process by which
a contrast or even a contradiction is effected between the
surface features of a text and its internal essence. The deeper
intent of an Indian narrative is often not visible to a shallow
reader of the text. Only a few take pains to reach the core
because the text has often a multiplicity of layer upon layer of
signification. The cleverer the narrator, the more complex the
inner fabric and the more simple the outer frame. Valmiki's
Ramayana, if read and interpreted properly, reveals a different
story as its core with Rama of the solar dynasty representing
the light of Sun and Ravana the night-walker or the Nisachara
representing the dark forces of night abducting Sita, the
daugbhter of Mother Earth who is later rescued by the forces of
light having received the help and assistance of semi-human
beings who are connected with animal kingdom.
Serialisation implies the structure of the typical Indian
narrative which has an apparently never ending series of
episodes to a unified, streamlined course of events, centering
around a single hero or heroine. For instance, there are
hundreds of independent episodes in the Mahabharata, which
provide a sort of expansiveness to the central story but are not
integral to it. This episodic looseness of the Indian narrative
allows for variations in tone and style in the middle of the
work; even gaps are provided for, as part of the system and a
long description of some beautiful object, nature or even a song
could be interested to fill the gaps, when it is felt necessary.
This feature also makes the Indian narrative highly adaptable.
When these old Sanskrit texts were translated, rather reworked
into modern Indian languages, a number of events and episodes of
local or regional importance were added to them to suit the
tastes of the new reading public, making them living entities
whereas their literal and strict translations done in the recent
past have remained cut off from the common people.
The author further stresses the importance of the element of
fantasy in the narrative writings of India which has all along
its history questioned the nature of reality. Since according
tot he Indian view of creation, the universe proceeds from the
subtle to the concrete and gets merged into the subtle again,
the Indian writers have often found delight in transforming
apparent reality into invisible or intangible legend or myth.
Fantasisation is thus a privileged enterprise in the Indian
narrative. The Vedas, the Puranas, the fairy tales and folk
tales: all these are primarily perceptions of the imagination
and only secondarily those of the rational mind. The highly
subjective nature of the human imagination has been recognized
fairly early by Indian critics and aestheticians.
Another important element of Indian narrative is Cyclicalisation,
the Buddhist Jataka stories are, perhaps the best examples of
this phenomenon. Belief in rebirth and also the notion that
every event may repeat itself some time in future gives the
Indian narrator a handy device for stringing together any number
of tales in a particular narrative formula. The placement of a
single story in a chain of stories is a very natural form of
narrative art in India. To delineate human nature, its
weaknesses, aspiration and intrigues through representatives of
such types in animal world is a device which is so old in India
that it can justly be surmised as the origin of such genre of
tales all over the world. This is a device with which the author
speaks in allegories and transposes human characteristics on
animals' thought to be possessing similar traits of nature.
However it is difficult to agree with the supposition of the
author that this device owes its origin to the animistic or
atavistic beliefs of early times and I would rather think that
it is perhaps a beautiful and clever way of exposing the
weaknesses of certain types of human beings without naming them.
The height of such an Allegorisation is found in the text of
Panchtantra, a piece of world literature now, due to its
translation into all civilized languages, in which the lion, the
jackal, the crow, the crab, the monkey, the hare etc. all
represent a particular type of human beings. We do not perceive
these animals as animals but, as soon as the imagination
penetrates through the thin veil of allegorisation, we start
perceiving them as human beings around us and discern them as
characters with whom we come into contact daily in our lives.
A strong characteristic of Indian narratives is the anonymity of
its narrator. The author of many narrative work prefers to
remain anonymous and witches in some mythical figure or
semi-historical personality as the original narrator or the
inventor of that particular legend or tale. The vast literature
of Puranas with all its disharmony and variedness of content, is
ascribed to one single author named, Vyasa the expander.
Gunadhya, the famous author of now lost Brhatkatha ascribes the
original authorship of his work to Lord Siva, who narrated the
stories first to his wife overheard by one of his Ganas, who
narrated it further.
There is perhaps considerable justification for such a selfless
and self-efficating attitude because the origin of a tale is
often shrouded in mystery and cannot be historically determined.
This is perhaps also one of the reasons why the Indian
narratives are placed in the fluidity of time and not in any
given moment of history. The narrative time in Indian texts,
according to the author, is more psychological in character than
logical. The happenings relate to an undefined area of time
whereby the emphasis from a definite dateline is shifted to an
indefinite infinity opening the possibility of such an happening
any time and any-where in the world. However, the authors of
Indian narratives are a little more specific about the placement
of their stories within certain framework of space which is
obvious by the fact that the author mentions the region where
certain happenings took place. K. Ayyappa Paniker points to the
fact that the Jatakas usually start with the mention of Varanasi
in Kashi region or the fables of Panchtantra with a mention of
the city of Mahilaropya in the southern region of India. He,
therefore, expresses the opinion that the Indian narrative "can
be said to be a spatial one and this makes for a more free
handling of the time factor". The temporal dimension, according
to him, is often underplayed while the space factor gets added
importance. However, this is not very convincing and I would
think that in an Indian narrative the space is an unimportant as
the time and the specific mention of a particular place is in no
way significant to the basic intent of the story. That what
happens in a fable of Panchtantra in Mahilaropya could happen in
the same way and in the same manner anywhere else in the world.
Lastly, the Indian narrative shows a wonderful balance between
stylization and improvisation. The narrator follows certain
pre-established codes in the overall structure of his literary
production yet he also puts a stamp of his personality by
improvising substantially in the motives and the contents of the
story. The basic frame-work and the structure is adhered to,
still a lot of margin is there for personal freedom with regard
to the content and individually invented style. This phenomenon
is very similar to the Raga system of Indian music where the
basic structure is fixed and given but still a lot of scope is
where for improvised variations based on the training and the
talent of the musician.
The author of this work classfies the ancient narrative
literature into ten models and deals with them in one chapter
each, bringing to light their salient features on the basis of
the most characteristic literary representative of that model.
These models are :
1 The Vedic model
2. The Purana model
3. The Itihasa model
4. The Srnkhala model
5. The Anyapadesa model
6. The Mahakavya model
7. The Buddhist model
8. The Dravidian model
9. Multiple model (The Folk/Tribal Narrative)
10. The mixed (miscellaneous) narrative model
The Vedic model is best represented by the oldest of the
Samhitas, namely Rgveda. The author describes this model as
'Encrypted Narrative', where the narrative leaves much to be
imagined and interpreted by the listener to the even because the
whole narrative is not only symbolical but yields multiple
meanings interpreted at different plains. For Purana model he
takes up Srimadbhagavata as a representative text.
This model is termed as 'Saga Narrative'. These are the tales
and stories regarding Gods who are divine beings no doubt, but
behave often as elevated human beings. The Itihasa model,
represented by Mahabharata belongs to the category of the 'Epic
Narrative' which deals with the stories of ancient heroes, the
glorified human beings who are sometimes the earthly
incarnations of various Gods. These heroes, though endowed with
divine prowess and valour, are basically human beings with a
number of human weaknesses. The Srnkhala model deals with such
texts as the Kathasaritsagar, which have an unending chain of
stories. One character of the story narrating another story and
a character in that story narrating one more stories encapsuled
in it. Unless you listen to the last story attentively, you
would not comprehend the significance of the previous stories
and have to work your way up from the bottom to the top, till
you finally understand the content and the intent of the first
story. The Anyapadesa model is the commonly known fables of
Panchtantra and Hitopadesa etc. where animals represent certain
kinds and types of human beings whom we see all around in every
society. The sixth or the Mahakavya model is best represented by
the Raghuvamsa of Kalidasa which deals with almost all aspects
and situations of human life and its unending vicissitudes
centering round the personality of some grand and noble
historical or divine figure. At the same time, it is not
oblivious to the beauties of nature and tries to rope in nature
to express or strengthen the emotions and internal mental set-up
of the character, in question.
The Buddhist and the Jain narratives represented by Jatakas and
also tales in Maharashtri Prakrta have an ultimate goal or
propagating the religious ideals although the stuff of the tales
has usually been drawn from the folk tales transmitted orally
from pre-historic times. The author then devotes a separate
chapter on the nature of 'Dravidian Narrative' and takes
Cilappatikaram as well as Manimekalei (both in Tamizh) as
models. These the Dravidian narratives have significantly
different nature than those of Sanskrit Mahakavyas in as much as
they are much more lyrical in character and have great
exuberance of highly passionate and emotional feelings. They are
full of songs and dances all through the text and have mostly a
female character as their central figure. the multiple or the
'Tribal model' can have very 'non-classical' and even
'non-literary' nature but has a pristine beauty and is perhaps
the richest and still untapped resource of the Indian narrative
imagination. It is basically oral in composition as well as
communication.
It is creation of a community and as such highlights its
collective consciousness with its special individuality. It is
not institutionalized and has a free style with enormous scope
for improvisation.
The last or the mixed (misra) model comprises a number of
miscellaneous types and varieties of narrative like e.g. the
well known Sanskrit prose work Kadambari which contains elements
of chain narration, cyclicalistion, elasticisation of time and
space and much more, making it the most suspense-packed and
interesting novel of Sanskrit; the Campus with their vigorous
and terse prose interspersed with beautiful verses, the
Dutakavyas the emphasis is shifted from the story to the
description of nature and inner feelings of the human beings and
further to the innumerable form of oral narratives with a strong
regional character and their well-known improvisations.
It is basically these oral narratives which form the bedrock of
regional theatre developing sometimes into such classical forms
of dance drama as Koodiattam in Kerala. Oral narratives also
form the basis of such literary genres as Mangalakavyas in
Bengali, the Lilacharitas in Marathi, the Quissas of Punjabi and
Sindhi and the Viragathakavyas of Hindi.
"Indian Narratology" by K. Ayyappa Paniker is the first
commendable attempt by a versatile scholar to categorize the
various forms of the rich Indian narrative literature and to
analyse its content and nature. The book makes fascinating
reading and the interest of the reader is always kept up by the
captivating subject matter presented in a very simple and
readable language and in a simple and direct style. It is an
indispensable book for the scholars working on any aspect of
Indian narrative literature, and also for a common reader who
wants to educate himself on the subject.
Coordinator, Kalakosa
Indian Narratology by K. Ayyappa Paniker, published by IGNCA in
its Kalasamalochana series, Delhi 2003, pp.200 Price Rs.400/-.
The work is an outcome of the project carried out by the author
under the Indira Gandhi Memorial Fellowship award.
Vishu in Paris
‘Enikkavathille Pookkathirikkan, Kanikkonnayalle,
Vishukkalamalle, Enikkavathille Pookkathirikkan’
(I can’t help blossoming. Am I not the golden cassia, Isn’t it
the Vishu season, I can’t help blossoming).
Those lines are from the famous poem Kanikonna, or the Golden
Cassia by Ayyappa Paniker. And this Vishu, he is happy and
proud, because this poem has found a special place in the world
of art and letters. Written in his own handwriting, the poem is
on permanent display, along with other Poetry Paintings' at the
Museum of Contemporary Art at Val Du Marne near Paris.
A section of the Museum, named Paul Eluard suite, has a
distinctive array of exhibits, collectively called ‘Fertile
Eyes’. Poems in different languages from different parts of the
world, all written in the own handwriting of the poets, with
splashes of color by French artists to make them works of art.
Alongside each poem there is a French translation, also set
against colorful art work.
The only entry from India in this exceptional display of
Poetry-paintings from around the world is 'I Can’t Help
Blossoming' by Ayyappa Paniker. ''It was the visit of Rene
Laubies, an Artist – translator from the Museum, to my home with
a large drawing sheet that paved the way for it. I was asked to
write down a poem of my choice on one end of the sheet, leaving
the rest for the art work,” the poet recalled. Laubies himself
did the art work and translated the poem into French. But what
surprised the poet was the remuneration that he received from
the Museum for his poem. The Museum paid Ayyappa Paniker Rs
60,000, which he says, was the highest he had ever received for
a poem.
Last week, the Museum sent him a volume containing reproductions
of all the Poetry-Paintings in the Paul Eluard Suite.
(with thanks from Kerala com news)
Again On poetry-- K Satchidanandan
This is not the time to attempt an
evaluation of Ayyappa Paniker’s contribution to
literature. As a poet Paniker was the very embodiment of the
spirit of Modernism in
Malayalam.His‘Kurukshetram(1960) was the scream of a mind torn
by the contradictions of our
time.Arjuna here is not the character in Mahabharata who is
assuaged and gauded into battle
by the eloquence of Krishna, but the lonely, inconsolable human
being who inherits
the central dilemmas of his age- of hubris and of the
hatred, violence, poverty, estrangement
from nature and the war that it breeds. He does not trust the
truths of religion or ideology
any more as both have led to senseless bloodshed. He finds that
the bodhi and the cross are
redundant if only we will just become human and rise on our own
navels. ‘Kurukshetram’
was a break-through in terms of form and structure too. The poet
mixed meters, took
freedoms with them , coined new expressions and created fresh,
often sur-real, images like
the ripe corpses waiting to wake up in cradles. The poem had also
a sprinkling of black
humour and irony like when the poet asks, do the world banks
hold the key to truth ,or,who will cook and serve the new Veda,
does it need to be fried with mustard? Kurukshetram’ fascinated
the readres of my generation who were waiting for something new,
free from the cliches of
romantic poetry while it angered the champions of the status quo
who rejected it as unpoetic
gibberish.The poet-editor of the famous Mathrubhumi Weekly
returned the manuscript to the
naughty youngster and it was then picked up by C. N. Sreekantan
Nair, a modern playwright
who at that time used to edit the weekly Desabandhu.
‘Kurukshetram’ was followed by many others , each different from
the other. ‘Mrityupooja’(The Hymn to Death) ‘Kudumbapuranam’(The
Family Saga), ‘Pakalukal,Rathrikal’(‘Days,Nights)‘Passage to America’,
‘Gopikadandakam’ , Ivide Jeevitam(Here , life)
and ‘Gotrayanam’ are perhaps his most outstanding works. In the
long poem ‘Gotrayanam’
Paniker returns to his racial roots and recreates history in the
form of a journey while ‘Days,
Nights’ and ‘The Passage to America’ are sequence poems that
deal with the many
contradictions of life in the U. S. where , at Indiana, Paniker
had spent some years pursuing
his postdoctoral research. ‘Kudumbapuranam’ deals, with his
characteristic irony ,with the history of his own family in
Kuttanad in Kerala. ‘Ivide Jeevitam’(Here, Life) is a gathering
of his experiences during his tour to Russia and East Europe in
a sequence of poems, one of his favourite forms, used in all his
travel poems.His dark satires during the years of the Emergency
in India
revealed the conscientious objector in Paniker while his
sarcastic poems on power and
corrruption as well as his series of ‘Cartoon Poems’ and ‘The
Tales of the Maharajah’ used
irony as a weapon to fight evil and as a new tool to comprehend
the tragi-comic human
condition.He went on renewing himself all through his poetic
career that resulted in the
astounding formal variety of his poetry. He tried Sanskrit
metres, the metre of the kathakali
verse and of the tullal verse, various Dravidian metres, free
verse patterns and prose of
different kinds and tones. The range of his verbal resources and
cultural registers was
equally astounding. He liberated the art of poetry from its
orthodox confines giving the
posterity a range of formal possibilities and plenty of
experimental space.
While editing Kerala Kavita Paniker also kept writing and
translating and editing many serieof books.The
four volumes of Medieval Indian Literature he edited for the
Sahitya Akademi is an exemplary collection while he also edited
the Complete Works of Shakespeare and a series of 1 20 world
classics in Malayalam translation. He was nominating editor for Katha, Delhi and consulting editor for The Journal of South Asian Literature,Michigan ( of
which two issues were entirely devoted to Malayalm writing
)besides many other literary publications. Paniker also edited a series of monographs in
English on the English Writers of Kerala.His books on Thakazhi
Sivasankarapillai , V. K. Krishna Menon, Vallathol and Sardar K.
M.
Paniker, his short works like A Short History of Malayalam Literature,Indian
Renaissance and Indian English Literature ,his literary articlescollected in three
volumes, his books on Indian poetics, especially the one on the
principle of antassannivesam
that Paniker distinguishes from intertextuality- all these are
monuments to his stupendous
scholarship and profound grasp of the different traditions of
literature and poetics. His collections of poetry in English
translation, The Poems of Ayyappa paniker, Days, Nights and I
can’t help Blossoming that bring together poems selected from
his four volumes in Malayalam besides the last published
collection, Pathumanippookkal, are a good introduction to his
poetry for the non- Malayali readers.His
students remember him as a committed teacher and a wonderful
communicator, always
abreast of the developments in world literature and literary
theory. His translations of the poems of Mayakovsky , poems from
Cuba, Raja Rao’s Cat and Shakespeare and Jean Toomer’s Sugar
cane are great examples of translation of poetry and prose.
Ayyappa Paniker was also
an excellent speaker, clear-headed, cogent in his arguments,
lyrical in his expressiveness and
always witty and original in his insights into authors, texts
and issues.He was also interested in theatre, both classical and
modern and was an inspiration behind Margi, an organisation to
promote kathakali and classical arts. He also encouraged New
Drama in Malayalam , especially its pioneers like G. Sankara
Pillai and Kavalam Narayana Paniker and was a chief force behind
the Nataka Kalari- a modern theatre workshop- established by C.
N. Sreekantan Nair, another major playwright.He wrote articles
not only about poetry, but on fiction, theatre, cinema , acting
and aesthetics too, many of which are yet to be collected.This
is also true about his essays in English still lying scattered
in various journals across the world.
Paniker never went after awards and recognitions, yet he won
most of the major Indian awards for literature, including the
Sahitya Akademi Award, Bhilwara Award from the Bharatiya Bhasha
parishad, Gangadhar Meher Award , Kabir Samman and Saraswati
Samman, not to speak of the many poetry awards he won in
Kerala.He accepted them with humility, the sole exception being
the Vayalar Award, the most popular award for literature in
Kerala which he refused, probably as it came to him too late.He
was never tempted by power of any kind and politely refused an
invitation to be the Vice Chancellor of a University in
Kerala.His works have been translated into all the major
languges of India besides several forein languages like French
and Spanish.
Ayyappa Paniker was one of India’s best cultural ambassadors to
the world outside as he
knew not only the new, but the classical as well. He was all for
the modern, but had deep appreciation for the tradition,
especially its elements that would inspire new invention in art
and literature.With his loss, India has lost a unique genius, an
integrated human being equally at home and equally creative in
diverse fields of art and knowledge.
by
Rati Saxena
“Kurukshetram”: Through a Third Eye
Time and man are interrelated. When time subdues man, there
is a chance of delusion and when man tries to hold time, time
gets
set to teach him a lesson. A very interesting thing in this
relation-
ship is that time remembers only those who can stand straight in
front of it. Ayyappa Paniker’s “Kurukshetram” illustrates one of
the literary approaches in this direction.
When I was trying to learn about Malayalam literature. I heard
about Ayyappa Paniker’s long poem “Kurukshetram,” which was
considered a very complicated one especially for translation. I
was
told that it was impossible to translate this poem. This made me
interested in the poem to read and understand it and bring it
into
Hindi through translation. Naturally this was a big challenge
for a
person like me, who had only a limited knowledge of Malayalam
language. But good poems cannot be kept within the boundaries of
individual languages. Language is only a medium of expression;
the core of a poem cannot be kept within brackets. I tried to
read this poem with the help of other people. I was careful that
the people who read it for me should not know Hindi very much,
as their interpretation then could misguide me. I wanted to understand this
poem
independently: that was why I read it line byline. Surprisingly
every
line of this poem had a strong identity. They are interrelated,
but at>
the same time they could be read separately. That is why
translation
and correlation between meanings have to go together. That makes
the translator’s job difficult. But at the same time it gives
space for
understanding and reaching the heart. For a translator who is
not
interested in mere linguistic translation, who wants to reach
the core
of meaning, this poem is very significant and challenging.
The period of composition of this poem was
from 1951 to
1957. This was the time when people started realizing the taste
of
discontentment after freedom. The common man was not only
unhappy but astounded also. Naturally seeing all these changes
in
society disturbed a young mind. Yes, a young village boy wrote
this poem on the canvas of the whole world. It is strange, but
not
too strange, as poetry does not honour the boundaries of age and
worldly knowledge. Another specialty of this poem is that it
took
almost six years to complete. At first glance it is a long
period to
complete a poem of about 200 lines, but when you read it
seriously,
every line is able to give a new direction. It is condensed in
such a
manner that a number of ideas are expressed in a few lines.
Above
all, the poem is never loose in its rhythm. Time is concentrated
in
the form of meaning.
Kumkshetra is the batflefield of the fight between the
selfishnesses
of people of the same generation belonging to the same family.
When
a quarrel takes place between ours (Mamakah) and yours (Pandavas),
then humanity retraces its course by a few steps. Poetry is an
attempt
to call it to move forward. “Kurukshetram” is not opening the
path
of sorrows but trying to search for new ways.
This world is a marketplace, where everyone is selling himself
and buying himself. This is the place where roots are eating
branches
and branches, flowers. The life-giver is becoming its eater. In
this
strange time a star of hope goes up in the sky. It is its dim
light that
helps man to see and reveal the sorrows and immoralities of
society1
class="tip" align="justify">
O love star of my life!
look down, this is my world
the drama stage of men
can you hear the sorrows of men
who are dancing and singing
this world is a big market
traders come and go here
they bargain for themselves
roots are sucking flowers
the earth is swallowing corpses.
The earth is the reality and the sky is the expanse of its
imagination. But both of them are interrelated. When man is unhappy,
his
imagination tries to find a way out. Religion is man-made
thought,
which could help him to remain in his humanity. But when
religion
takes advantage of innocent people, when temples, churches and
mosques start hurting humankind in place of helping, where does
the common man go? Who can help him?
Under this sky
temples, churches and mosques
knocking at the chest of man
seem to be happy while
playing with their hearts
The common man is still hoping for some miracle. Innocent girls
like morning sunlight, young girls like the humming evening,
moon- light women with shining cheeks, mothers like clear
days—all still have faith in God. Sweet innocent girls like dawn
light, girls wearing skirts like the evening still opt for
religion. Now, the question arises: are religions really helping
mankind, are religions still sources of peace and harmony? This
poem becomes particularly relevant and significant in modem
times, when the world is divided in the name of religion. All
religious places seem to turn into war-houses. It is a fact that
man is becoming more powerful day by day. He IN controlling
nature too. When man is so powerful that even death IN scared of
him, why is he himself so sad? This question rises in everyone’s
mind, whether power and happiness are interrelated. If they are
not, then why is man blindly trying to gain more and more power’? The poem is raising such questions before the reader:
most
By--
Professor Krishna* Rayan
“The spell of the poetry the
remarkable competence of the
translation It actually reads
like original writing in
EnglishMuchof the
translation, by a miracle,
reproduces, as one can see easily,
the very feel of the Ma[ayalam
text-and the wit, the word play,
the load of feeling in the
original Reading the
translation has been a memorable
experience
by Dr. Paul Love
“Reading Days anti N~q fits is
great fun- in addition to all the
other emotions aroused by this
collection I Inescapably I found
myself reading, these poems
aloud, and involuntarily rocking
to the rhythms they suggested.
Here is a different and exciting
kind of poetry reading
experience. The poems are
addictive. Let yourself go and
you’ II find the more you read
them, the harder it will be to put
them down.
By-
John O. Perry
Kaleidoscopic Perceptions:
An Outsider's Reading of Ayyappa Paniker's
Translated Poetry
Ayyappa Panikerude Kritikal, poems written between 1969 and
1981, was the recipient of the national Sahitya Akademi award
for poetry in 1984. As Days and Nights (Trivandrum: NERC, 2001),
that Malayalam collection is now translated into English largely
by Ayyappa Paniker himself. K. Satchidanandan's 1981 review with
a newly added concluding paragraph constitutes an "Afterword"
that is extensively and deeply informative about both Paniker's
earlier works and some occasionally obscure themes, meanings or
allusions in this 'kaleidoscopic' collection. Turned over
slowly, kaleidoscopes produce successive, but largely unrelated
brilliant patterns. Here a continuing skepticism marks these
enormously varied poems of regret and longing, foreign
adventures (European and American), political and social satire,
homely and humorous satisfactions, lovely and loving dreams,
hellish nightmares, metaphysical witticisms, sweet musicalities.
Following the chronology here, I notice also that year by year,
section by section, the poet becomes more resigned to the social
and metaphysical absurdities he complains about. Over the decade
of composition he becomes more and more able to accept
compromise and a generalized lovingness as not merely a possible
attitudinal choice but a justifiable understanding of how the
world works.
Satchidanandan thinks now that 'the humourist in Paniker has
overtaken the serious, often tragic, poet in him' and that
posterity may well regard him 'as a true humourist in the vein
of
the legendary Malayalam humourists, Tholan, Kunchan Nambiar or
Sanjayan, one who occasionally lapses into serious musings on
the human condition.' When he adds, 'If his playfulness seems
excessive at times, it only means that it is his most natural
element,' I must disagree. I see the playfulness-the puns,
parodies, pastiches, witty ripostes-becoming occasionally rather
manic, but usually increasing rather than weakening the ironic
bite. However, Satchidanandan not only knows and has been
influenced by the entire corpus ofPaniker's work, but he also
translated the initial section, called "Days, Nights." This is a
sequence of twenty-one poems composed in 1969-70 when Paniker
was in America getting his Ph.D. from Indiana University at the
height of the studentpacifist-liberal anti-Vietnam war movement,
a climactic moment for me and for America. Aside from the poem
for October 16 about a major anti-war demonstration, however,
Paniker's comments and criticisms centre entirely on what he,
alone in a strange land, felt as more basic cultural questions
and personal conflicts. Possibly only symbolically or
hypothetically, the protagonist-persona in this section pursues
and painfully relinquishes an intimate relationship with a
virginal, probably Christian, American Indian woman also
studying there.
Vanish, 0 night-scented Sandhya,
disappear, just as you did
close the door, shaking off
the dust of your feet,
even your forgetfulness, hide.
The life you gave,
and the death you gave,
both you carry away, 0 Sandhya!
This is the end, this is the end,
this the final journey,
this is the end, the end.
So concludes the longest poem in this initial section, named and
dated "October 10-15," which began: 'You are life, O Sanshya,/
Death you too are/ It's you who grow dark/ It's You who
disappear/ It's you, it's you, 0 Sandhya!' Even with Sachi's
information about Sandhya (meaning twilight, half-symbol,
half-human) and his Iist of the many dualisms briefly united
there, these incantatory, seemingly urgent lines and their like
throughout this American section (which also kaleidoscopically
includes a few poems of witty social barbs aimed East and West)
do not have for me the emotional weight that the poet apparently
felt and the poem intends. Nor do they gain interest by
exploiting local detail of self, other and society as a
Confessional poem might do. Similar repetitions of sounds,
words, phrases, lines or multi-line refrains constitute
throughout this varied collection one of Paniker's primary
techniques for expressing philosophic conundrums and satiric
ironies as well as romantic longing, elegiac despair, even
domesticated or rationalized stoic acceptances. Poetry,
especially modern poetry, as I have known and admired it
requircs that repetitions of words, phrases or lines artfully
achieve some change in meaning on each occurrence; for Paniker,
embedded in an entirely different poetic tradition, repetition
denotes and achieves emphasis, extends rather than diminishes
the emotion.
Satchidanandan emphasizes the major fact for Malayalam readers
and poets, that for fifty years Paniker has been a consistent
innovator of his own art and has introduced a large range of
poetic forms to Malayalam literary tradition. Though I do see
its kaleidoscopic result~, this crucial modern and innovative
dimension of Paniker's poetic achievement in its Malayalam and
broader Indian context escapes my notice. Often fruitlessly I
have to depend on just the immediate verbal context to grasp
poetic meanings, and my transliterated Hindi-English dictionary
is mostly useless for the occasional words left in Malayalam.
Perhaps because the poettranslator himself recognized their
importance, I, like Paul Love, indeed sense the rocking rhythms
that underline the emotions in many of the poems. But I miss the
echoes and/or transmutations of traditional verse rhythms (noted
by Satchidanandan), catch only hints of dance rhythms. For me
they are merely exuberantly 'rocking,' harsh and ironic,
appropriately negative. In its repetitive rhythms "Poetry
Theatre" mimics positively with a hint of self-reflexive irony a
child-like excitement felt on the coming (to a 'typical'
isolated village, no doubt) of 'a cartload of poets.' The often
politically protesting, clearly socially symbolic "Cartoon
Poems" (1976-7) and numerous others (e.g., some post-Emergency
protests of 1980) mock by staccato sound effects-often with
functionally imitative repetition-pervasive bureaucratic
stupidity and totalitarian oppressions. Local rhythmic
subtleties, however, occur rarely, as must be expected in
translations, particularly when made by a speaker of highly
stress-sensitive English who is used to speedy, non-accented
rhythms in ordinary Malayalam speech. On occasion the rhythms in
conjunction with a simple tale or situation can suggest to my
ear a kind of ballad-like folk rhythm; some of these are indeed
clearly melodious, though most often the melody is harshly
biting, an angry, sobbing, or sharply sarcastic air. Quite a few
are intended to be virtually 'pure' poetry, that is, in the
Nineteenth century French Symbolist way of being verbal sounds
almost drained of meaning. At their best, nearly empty
repetitions of sounds can and do avoid tedium or tendentiousness
when the thematic aims are the slightest. Would a less strict
verbal translation work better than the following conclusion to
a long and long-lined ambitious poem about ecology, where Nature
is made the potential saviour of mankind?
Mouth gaping, nape twisted, eyes bulging,
Tongue stretched out, with unsteady steps,
Faced with the fear that goes bellowing aloud
Around and around the end of the days,
As when the whole universe is shaken up and broken down,
Subjected to the unseen blows of torture, sobbing, Scattered in
spirit, will our earth some day helplessly Roam about like a
mother cow, the only treasure house we have?
Our first gift and eternal wealth, this dear treasure house we
have?
The all-enduring, eternal treasure house, the very mistress of
our soul?
Despite being troubled by low-functioning repetitions and
rhythms, I am mostly satisfied with the idiomatic as well as the
estranging effects achieved in Paniker's English translations.
Yet I cannot judge them as I would other English poems. Still,
Paniker's 'Counter-Romantic' skeptical tendencies set him
securely apart from the kinds of emotional incomprehension from
which, for me, Tagore's self-translated poetry suffers, even
though, toward the end of the volume, Paniker does occasionally
indulge in (or is he experimenting with?) a near-saccharine
sweetness that reminds me of the Tagorean tradition. However, by
not being so ambitious as Tagore to be 'thoughtful,' Paniker's
'pure' poems work well for simple effects, as when they are
merely about birds and butterflies or the culturally resonant
monsoon rains: 'It rained just one / The earth felt cool/An ear
of corn sprouted / The earth grew rich...' ("It rained once,"
1980)
Having once helped translate some quite obscure contemporary
Malayalam poetry that might be termed 'surrealistic' in their
stretching of sense and sensibility, of imaged and imaginary
poetic meanings, I wonder about the originals for some of the
obscurities here, like 'The warmth of an ideal / Overheard in
childhood, as a couplet, / turned into a night / in the fort;
its groans / will not be repeated; the groans gave meaning to
the couplet' ("Nights"). Does the relative opacity result from
this poet's knowing what he originally conceived and assuming
that a straightforward English translation of the words would
render it adequately? In poems like "Mookambika" or "The tirai
dance on Chamundi hill" (1979), I am resigned to missing many
specific cultural allusions unless guided from outside or,
better, by accompanying notes such as Ramaunjan used in his
translations. But it is another level of obscurity that troubles
me in lines like this conclusion (perhaps alluding to the ending
of Emergency and political victory as inadequately experienced
on a New Delhi January day?) from "Indraprastham" (1977):
In midday cold, inside the woollen coat,
My soul writhing and wriggling, I stood burning-
The citizen, grandfather to the century.
Like a curved spear of faith on the slope
Where the cascading locks of hair chum deep pain
Or compassion, victory came at long last.
Men stand in a lengthening line, behind the washroom.
Holding Ganga water in a drinking vessel, nostalgic longing
For home in the pitiless empty eyes.
This discipline is our heritage at all times;
This eternal waiting is our duty,
By selling this immortal thirst we got a life,
This interval is for us the chant for the favourite deity
By this do we, you and I, win or lose in the end.
Doubtless this is one of the most intensely thought and felt
passages in the whole volume. The poet is reaching out to his
compatriots with great moral fervor. The image of the waiting
men is vivid, but I can scarcely grasp the general mood, much
less the other motifs and motives that produce it. Is the
estrangement of verbal as well as cultural translation here too
great for a reader such as I, even one wishing to be stretched
culturally as well as intellectually and emotionally by this
poem but frustrated by a persistently truncated experience?
Paniker's poetry, as evidenced in this large volume, telescopes
materials and methods of several continents to his multiple
aims, so it might be thought in a globalizing world that, to
supplement knowledgeable local appreciations. the work needs to
be questioned from a global perspective, testing how well it
crosses the boundaries it has attempted to negotiate. If that be
so, Paniker's largely skeptical mood and mode of address
(especially early on) is well designed to convince
unacculturated readers that his humorous, ironic, sarcastic, or
manic responses arise from his formally free and imaginatively
open questioning of "earthly life's dilemmas of distress." ("Butterlamp")
Abjuring radical cynicism from the start, Paniker's probing way
forward with poetry has allowed the full range of his feelings
and his doubts to find sympathetic affinities wherever they may
lurk. Since he has overcome his initial dismay with this process
and the world it reveals, we-wherever and whoever we are--can be
grateful for these poetic labours and take heart for ourselves.
(2002)
BEYOND BOUNDARIES OF LEVITY
K. Govindan Kutty
If you call to congratulate him on his being chosen for this
year’s Saraswati
Samman, Mr. Ayyappa Paniker will ask you with an undertone of
mischief:
“Can I accept it?” If you tell him you had expected something of
that kind for
a reply from him, he would give vent to a sense of mock relief:
“I’m glad I rose
to your expectations.” If you ask him why he refused to be a
university vice-
chancellor two decades ago when the powers-that-be nearly thrust
the job
on him, he will lapse in to a self-winning word play: “I don’t
want to be vice.”
Such instant levity is not easily associated with a man his mid
70s, an
English teacher for the best part of his life, striking a
posture of high serious-
ness, a poet who has been at work for half-a-century and more,
nursing a
passionate disenchantment. Someone who wins Saraswati Samman
cannot
be a funny man. And, Mr. Paniker inspires no fun when he seems
to make fun
of you or himself. He is rather serious. Such literature is
rarely produced with such an outrageous backdrop of irony.
That is a new kind of aesthetic cuaclture he introduced when
Malayalam
poetry was playing around with love, disillusionment, mysticism
and, of
course, Communism. Mr. Paniker came with a new idiom for a new
content
with a phantasmagoric range of emotions and thoughts. The love
songs he
wrote in his early 20s were no songs for ritualistic recitation,
their content
being a lot more than, or different from love. A Surrealist Love
Song reads as
fresh today as it was when it was written in 1951, as fresh as a
recent and
widely cited poem, I Can’t But Blossom. In its totality, Mr.
Paniker’s poetry
captures the spirit of what Octavio Paz, in a reference to
modernity called a
‘‘perpetual re—beginning and a continual return’’.
I can’t But Blossom is Mr. Panikers own way of dealing with
reality,
dream and its non-ful-fillment. It is a tragedy of poets that
they are required to
react to every annual event, every act of commemoration,
dedicating a non-
poem to it, Painter and art thinker M.V. Devan, who introduced
and inter-
preted Mr. Paniker’s first collection—who remains his best
interpreterto this
day—had once felt necessary to defend him for not caring to
write about
contemporary incidents like a battle or a birthday or.a big
man’s burial. Oth-
ers have berated Mr. Paniker for not being, contemporaneous in
his content.
for not writing to increase production or inspire people’s
progressive move-
ments. The fact is he has written on annual events, only that it
is in his own
rather mischievous way. The celebration of the new year is an
old affair.
When the new year breaks in Malayalam with a festival called
Vishu, there is
luxuriance of laburnum flowers, casting a spell of golden yellow
all around.
People open the year by taking at daybreak a look at a bunch of
laburnum
flowers. Laburnum trees are in full bloom in the season for this
ritual, they are
required to be in bloom when Vishu comes. It is such a
predestined chore.
Something from which poor laburnum trees have no escape,
provoking them
to wail: “It’s Vishu time, and I’m laburnum, I can’t but
blossom.’
Mr. Paniker inaugurate a new sensibility in Malayalam by
presenting
himself as none too pleasant a poet. In his trail-blazing long
poem,
‘Kurukshetram’, in the 1960s, Paniker confessed that he was not
a lucky
“Arjun who had a Gita recited for his benefit.” Cunning, cant,
bumptious
emptiness, ritualistic rhetoric, existential agony. That was,
and is, his poetry’s
content. In normal people, it is apt to produce a lament, with
all its lachry-
mose details. In Mr. Paniker, it produces a wry sarcasm. So much
so that he
lapses into levity even while reinterpreting the legend of
Kannaki, a popular
deity of Tamil Nadu who migrated to several goddess shrines in
Kerala. In
The Song of The Anklet, he asks if “luck deserted her, or she
luck?” and asserts
every love is self-love, how do we love another, in vain?”
Mr. Paniker merges his metaphor and meaning giving neither any
being
of its own, breaking the rule of the equi~valence between the
word and the
sense, reinforcing Archibald Macleish’s theory that “a poem is
not to mean
but to be.” This made his poetry inaccessible to readers and
critics who looked
for a paraphrase, possibly in half a dozen bullet points. That
affected his sales.
His books are out of print. Mr.Paniker would enlighten us, not
because they
are bought away so fast but because they are not printed.
Conversely, his poetry has flowed onto the tongues of others,
ordinary,
unpretentious people, who would not discuss great questions of
grammar or
esoteric issues of aesthetics, who would simply imbibe the
essence of his
lines. For instance, a primary school teacher,
 Mr. Lonappan
Nambadan, now
an MP, was wont to recite Mr. Paniker’s poems often to prove a
point in the
course of his speech on the inexorable erosion of values in the
State Assem-
bly.
Before the K.K. Birla Foundation chose him for Saraswati Samman,
he
had been chosen for another local award instituted in memory of
a lyricist
whose hugely popular film songs had a poetic flavour. It came to
Mr. Paniker
very late, perhaps as a concession. Mr. Paniker merely begged
for the award
committee’s permission nto to accept the honour. He knew that a
writer
could win double honour by rejecting an award, honour of being
at once the
winner and the renouncer, as Jean Paul Sartre did when he was
named for the
Nobel Prize.
Others have rejected honours for other or similar reasons from
time to
time. Ms. Arundhati Roy rejected a Sahitya Akademi award because
she disapproved of the Government’s ways. An award is worth more when
it comes from someone with whom one doesn't agree, but ‘The God
of Small Things”
does not obviously think so. As for Mr. Paniker, he wanted to
send round a
silent message that he had no use for an award someone somewhere
wanted
withheld from him for long.
In the 60s, when G. Sankara Kurup was chosen for the first
Jnanapith
Award, a committee of Malayalam pandits had reported that there
was no
Malayalarn writer worthy of that hounour. The final arbiters
from other lan
guages were not carried away by that litany. There were some
literary titans
who relished running him down. One of them has long survived
Sankara
Kurup to flourish as a socio-political gadfly. There are also
critics who do not
regard Mr. Ayyappa Paniker as pretty much of a poet. One of them
died last
Thursday.
POETIC EXCELLENCE
A.J. Thomas
K. Ayyappa Paniker, pioneering modernist poet and critic in
Malayalam,
who won this year’s Saraswathi Samman, Single-handedly
revolutionised the
Malayalam poetry scene way back in the late 1 950s.
Known as the ‘Parallel Jnanapith Award’ (anyone who wins it will
not be
considered for the Jnanapith), it carries the biggest purse- Rs.
5 lakhs.
Beginning with his first important long poem ‘Kuruskhetram’
written over
a seven-year period from 1951 to 1957, and published in 1960,
Paniker
introduced into Malayalam poetry the kind of reality broken into
smithereens
at the impact of the inevitable in history.
As he went along, he became aware of the necessity to evolve
suitable
forms to contain such radically char~ged content, and began his
relentless
experimentation with form.
By the early 1 970s, he pioneered what is known as the
‘post-modern’ in
Malayalam poetry, setting free the minds of successive
generations of poets
from the slavish compulsion to indulge in metrical
versification, confined to a
few Sanskrit metres.
His own Style
He kept on changing the mode of his poetic utterance, without
even once
falling into the stereotype of any of the literary movements.
Without using strong verbal expressions and sensuous images, the
poet
employed a naturally flowing syntax and words loaded with
suggestiveness.
Remembers leading Malayalam poet K. Satchidanandan: “His role in
involv
ing all of us in new experiments without our ever being aware of
it-by getting
us to do translations of western models, like he did with a poet
like
Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, who rendered Octavio Paz’s ‘Sunstone’ into
Malayalam, and leading from the front with new models of
poetry—has be-
come history, with even the latest Malayalam poet owing to him a
debt in
some measure. The sense of freedom he imbued in us was
unprecedented.
Paniker has a poetic career spanning over a half-century from
the early
50 of the last century to the present.
His pioneering innovations in form consisted also in bringing
back to
Malayalam poetry the vibrant Dravidian and folk metres, as well
as the an-
cient, grand Sanskritic metres which were hitherto rarely used.
He also experimented with different existing forms like the
confessional
mode, hymns, lullabies, dramatic monologues and classical
ballets.’ Mean
ing took precedence over mellifluous voice; metonymy and paradox
over-
took alliteration and assonance.
With an amazing range from outright romantic lyricism, gentle
irony and
satire, to biting sarcasm, dark humour and shocking cynicism,
Paniker’s oeuvre
is rich in variety of form and content, marking the poet’s
journey through one
of the most eventful epochs of the history of Kerala’s society.
Pan iker, who is also noted as a critic, and as an
internationally known
academic in English Literature, was born on September 12, 1930,
in
Kaavaalam, a small town situated amongst the idyllic backwaters
of Kuttanaad
(now become world-famous by entering prominently on the tourist
map),
Alappuzha district in Kerala.
He took MA degree from the Kerala University and MA and PhD from
Indiana University, US and also did research work in Yale and
Harvard.
Having taught English Literature for 40 years in Kerala
University, he
retired as head, Institute of English, and Dean, Faculty of
Arts. He has pub
lished four volumes of collected poetry (Ayyappa Panikerude
Kritikal, Vols. I
IV) in Malayalam. His collections of poems in English
translation are: I Can’t
Help Blossoming (2003), Days and Nights (2000), Gotrayanam
(1990)
Selected Poems (1985) and Kurukshetram (1960).
Many hats
He has several collections of critical essays in Malayalam and
English. And
has been chief editor of Medieval Indian Literature: An
Anthology (in English
translation) and Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature (Revised
edition) of the
Sahitya Akademi and of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare
(in
Malayalam translation).
Recipient also of Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award and Sahitya
Akademi
Award for his criticism and poetry, Paniker has been honoured
with several
other awards, and honours like the Padmasree.
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