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Journalism of Courage
Tamil writer Jayakantan has shot into fame on the pan-Indian scene following the Jnanpith award announcement. Most persons who are en courant with contemporary Tamil literature had to suppress a yawn. When it comes to a seminal, larger-than-life, Cervantes-like figure like Jayakantan, it is the award that is honoured, not vice versa. Despite my rudimentary Tamil, I consider it one of the brighter spots of my life that I have had decent acquaintance with Jayakantan and his work.
Sometime in the ’60s I was introduced to his hypnotic short story Agnipravesam. It is the story of a young woman, a victim of sexual seduction, who could in the normal course have been destroyed by trauma and guilt. Instead, she is ceremonially cleansed by her mother who sprinkles Ganga water over her and proclaims her “pure and untainted”. The young woman presumably overcomes her sense of shame and victimisation and goes on to lead a happy, harmonious life. Jayakantan’s short story set off a spate of protests which seem implausible forty years later given the history of the women’s consciousness movement. Readers, critics and defenders of nativist culture were all upset. How could anyone agree that Tamil chastity (presumably a unique kind of chastity?) once violated could be restored to the pure state of vestal innocence! Jayakantan’s reaction to this was characteristically feisty. He altered the ending of the short story and re-wrote it as a novel, the haunting Sila Nerangalil Sila Manidargal (Some People in Some Situations). In this complex psychological novel the victim is humiliated by her mother. Her private trauma is publicised and all and sundry acquire the right to look down upon her as some kind of tainted criminal. The protagonist goes on to become a successful career woman. And in a case of bizarre coincidences that happen in novels as well as in real life, she tracks down her seducer and actually ends up making friends with him. She also comes across a short story about a young woman who was seduced, but whose mother encourages her to forget her trauma by sprinkling Ganga water on her and proclaiming her purified! The victim now confronts her mother as a cruel and unthinking parent so different from the loving sensible one in the short story.
Agnipravesam and its altered sequel have both attained cult status in the Tamil country, especially after the release of a well-made movie based on them. Jayakantan reached far back into Indian literary and psychological traditions in order to derive his themes and structures. The story within a story with the narrator entering as a character is of course well-known as the technique of the great Valmiki in his Ramayana. The idea that the female victim of an act of sexual aggression may or may not deserve sympathy, but certainly deserves contempt and ostracism is an idea with a hoary past. The gullible Ahalya who is seduced by someone who successfully impersonates her husband is cursed and turned to stone making her a barren asexual object. Her fate is shrugged off as inevitable for a fallen woman of her kind!
Jayakantan, however, is much more than the mere aggregation of his inherited traditions. He is, above all, an individual with a sense of the future, one who makes his or her own future, a future which is usually coloured with hints of an optimistic dawn about to happen. His masterstroke is to revisit the past and examine the possibility of different futures. There is a future which resembles the past: the mythic and historic pasts of the people of India, that involve the physical subjugation and psychological suppression of women. There is another future where individuals can act differently, can exercise free will as thinking persons informed by gentleness, charity and forgiveness, not by sterility, hardness of heart and stupidity. The mother who helps her daughter forget and the daughter who forgets are symbols of this new attractive future inhabited by promises of infinite possibilities. Jayakantan himself has
argued that there is nothing revolutionary about the futures he has imagined. He insists that the mother and the daughter have a rebirth into the land of forgiveness and purity precisely because they believe in the sacral, magical qualities of the waters of the Ganga! It is their implicit faith in their traditions (perhaps those traditions that they choose to believe in) that makes possible a sanguine future.
My friend Radhakrishnan who teaches literature and criticism in California today, remarks somewhere that Jayakantan once told him “Saar, why do you ask me if I have read Sartre. Has Sartre read my work?” Only a person with a secure weltanschauung and a clear-eyed sense of humour could have come up with that priceless quote. In the late ’60s, Radha and I visited Jayakantan a couple of times in his Mylapore home. I still remember an entrancing discussion where he told us that “music is a natural human instinct… drama is an unnatural artificial construct”. He went on to explain: “people sing spontaneously while taking a shower; if a person were to act in front of a mirror, you can only call him or her a lunatic”. Jayakantan’s insights into the universal human condition are almost always like this gem — brilliant to the point of incandescence, clothed deliberately in the vocabulary of extremism, simultaneously provocative and heady.
Public discourse on Jayakantan and his writings has focused on his evolution from Marxian dogma to what can only be called an intensely personal idiosyncratic neo-Brahmanism. Like all Tamilians of our times, Jayakantan has drunk at the well of cinema. His Unnaipol Oruvan recounts the events of a night viewed in the light cast by a gas-light — a hurricane lantern or a “buddi deepam” in Tamil. The movie was a mighty flop and lost money. It is now making a comeback as a classic in its genre.
He has made other movies, written much across a wide range of themes and forms. Unlike most of us, he has been able to transcend the limitations of geography and time. He has received a measure of recognition and praise in his lifetime but I seriously suspect that this praise is a mere fraction of what the future holds for him and his creative output.
The writer is chairman and CEO, Mphasis. Write to him at jerryrao@expressindia.com
