19  The Prose Of Today

The lack of literary criteria of any sort was—and to a great extent still is-one of the most striking characteristics of the modern Tamil literary scene. A true, strict, and severe literary criticism is still wanting, in spite of some very promising beginnings in this directions, as, e.g., T. M. C. Raghunathan’s evaluation of Putumaippittaṉ, his essays on literature, K. Kailasapathy’s work, a few articles by K. N. Subrahmanyam and, especially, the activities of C. S. Chellappa (b. 1912) and two groups of writers, one gathered round Chellappa’s review Eḻuttu, another the Kurukṣētram group.¹

¹ Eḻuttu (Writing) was founded by C. S. Chellappa in 1959 as a critical review. It is to be regretted that it has ceased publishing. Chellappa also publishes books in his Eḻuttu Press in Madras. His is undoubtedly the most important singular attempt to introduce solid literary criticism into the Tamil scene; and, more important than that, Eḻuttu opened its columns to everything new, creative, experimental and fresh in Tamil writing. Its influence was decisive, but its impact was unfortunately very limited. It was read and discussed among writers and intellectuals, but it did not reach the general reader who is influenced rather by such mass-magazines as Anantavikatan, Kalki or Kalaimakaļ, though their literary face and taste are of immeasurably lower quality than that of Eḻuttu.
    Also, a few publishers have made attempts at more ambitious undertakings. Apart from Chellappa’s Eḻuttu Press which was responsible for such extremely important publications as N. Piccamūrtti’s Kāṭṭuvāttu (Wild Duck), the excellent anthology of “New Poetry”, Putukkuralka! (New Voices), and the highly interesting collection of interviews Etarkāka elutu- kiven (Why do I write), there is e.g. the experimental publishing house based on the principle of a reader’s club called Vācakar vaṭṭam or Book venture, which has published such very interesting and outstanding books as Jānakirāman’s novel Ammā vantāl (Mother came), Ramamirtham’s novel Putra (Son), an anthology of contemporary Tamil prose and poetry, etc.
    In 1968, a group of Tamil authors belonging to Trivandrum published a collection of essays, stories and poetry (including a “short novel” and a play) entitled Kurukṣētram. Most of these literary pieces are original Tamil writing, a few are translated from Malayalam. The editor of the anthology is Nakulan, himself a noted Tamil author. Some of the prose is of high quality (e.g. N. Padmanabhan’s story, and of course Mauni’s stories); so are some of the essays, e.g. D. Satyanesan’s evaluation of Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar. Probably the most important contribution to this volume are the 43 poems by Shanmuga Subbiah (Saṇmuka Cuppaiyā) and the three poems by Hari Sreenivasan. S. Subbiah’s poems are straightforward, powerful, witty comments on everyday life; some of them probably too simple; but a few at least have no equal in modern Tamil poetry in the forceful and yet graceful straightforwardness.
    N. Padmanabhan (Nila. Patmanāpan) who has a fine short story (Nān, “I”) in the collection, published in June 1968 an ambitious novel, Talaimu- raikal (Generations, 408 pp.), a rather involved but truly realistic piece of prose with a lot of local couleur, no doubt one of the most important contributions to Tamil prose in recent years.

Apart from Chellappa’s established and influential review, there are a few other magazines which have more serious ambitions than just to entertain and make a profit. To these more serious journals belong some of the left and Marxist-oriented magazines (Tāmarai, Ārāycci, Saraswathi) and such periodicals as Ilakkiyavaṭṭam, Tipam and Katir. A recent and very promising but short-lived addition to the number of modern-oriented, critical journals was the quarterly Naṭai (G. Krishnaswamy, Salem), the eight or nine issues of which were of a high critical level, and the monthly of the “angry young men”, Kacaṭatapara (Madras).

However, the best known and the most widely read is still accepted as the best; the immediately successful as the truly good. Hence, e.g., the novels of Akilan are recommended as outstanding literature, which they certainly are not-they just make entertaining, sometimes interesting though sentimental reading. On the other hand, any treatise on an old text like the Tirukkura! or the Rāmāyaṇa, any thin, dilute, and very familiar rhapsody on the Cilappati kāram or the bhaktas are considered, too, great literature.

In a vague sense, almost all Tamil writing of the pre-Independence period was in a way realistic, in that its subject-matter was just real life around, and humanistic, idealistic, and mildly progressive in its message. Also, it was most often rather sentimental, very domestic, and very middle-class type of writing. Compared to the neighbouring Kerala, there was practically no battle of ideologies, almost no group activity, no live ferment, no clash of ideas, methods and techniques of writing. Mutual reconciliation, full conformity and meek adaptability-these were the main features of Tamil writing, and they were considered virtues; Tamil writing itself was like a pool of stagnant, malodorous water. And the awesome exultation over the past glories of Tamil was common almost to all, and it progressively increased.

We may take as a typical instance of an immensely popular writer of mid-century R. Krishnamurti, better known as Kalki (1899-1954). Even such fairly critical scholars as T. P. Meenakshisundaran compare Kalki’s rather poor novel Alai Ōcai (“The Tumult of Waves”) to Tolstoy’s supreme masterpiece “War and Peace”, “though on a lower level”.² And C. and H. Jesudasan (1961) speak about Kalki very warmly, almost in superlatives, with almost no really critical remarks on his very fundamental inadequacies.

² A History of Tamil Literature (1965) 182.

³ Ka. Naa. Subramaniam, “What is wrong with the Tamil novel”, The Sunday Standard, Nov. 20, 1966. Compare this severe but absolutely just evaluation with the Jesudasans’ false statement (op. cit. p. 266): “It is a style with a distinct individuality. It sparkles in the dialogues of his characters. It is quite probably the best part of his work”. Contrary to this, Subramaniam says very correctly: “His style was certainly not the man in a literary sense”.

Kalki was the most influential and prolific journalist of the day, and he dominated the literary scene from the middle thirties to the early fifties. His fame and reputation rest on his voluminous novels. The best- or rather the most successful of them are historical romances like the Chola Ponniyin celvan or the Pallava Civakāmiyin capatam. Both these, and more so his writings based on contemporary life like Alai Ōcai are just crammed with sentimentalism, melodrama, false romanticism, and tediously long descriptions of love-birds in their love-nests. It is all very sweet, or, rather, sugared. His characterisations are weak and shallow, his dialogues lively but often naive, the descriptions of sculptures or dancing very detailed but very trivial. His style is “fluent but colourless, clear but has no individuality”.³ He was a great adaptor: in his humorous writings of his earlier period, Kalki based his stuff on the works of Mark Twain, Jerome Klapka Jerome, and other authors, almost unknown to the unsophisticated Tamil reader, the situations and characters of his historical novels come mainly from Alexander Dumas, Lord Lytton and Sir Walter Scott.

In spite of all this–or probably because of all this-his appeal to the masses of readers was extremely powerful. Why? Because the average Tamil reader, who was rather “weak-minded” (to quote K. N. Subrahmanyam), was not prepared for anything else. The way in which Kalki plays upon the responsivenees to the sensational and to seemingly well-built and complicated plots is truly admirable. No matter that some of his plots are quite unreal or plainly impossible; he is always able to excite. He also responds masterfully to the sentimentality of his readers, chiefly frustrated women. His social and historical fiction was written week after week (in Anantavikaṭan, and later in his own journal Kalki) “with just that element of mystery and suspense that are necessary for the serial reader in Tamil” (K. N. Subrahmanyam).

To be just, in Kalki’s writings there also are some praiseworthy features; he almost always succeeds to work up an atmosphere in his historical romances, so that the dead past comes back to life in truly vivid colour. He never wrote a line without a careful study of the history of the particular period with which he was dealing, and often he went painstakingly directly to the sources, to inscriptions and ancient texts. His impersonal and colourless style is, on the other hand, smooth and polished and reads well. It is easy to read Kalki, even for a beginning student of Tamil. And, naturally, the Tamil reader needs minimum effort to understand his writings. This was in fact considered Kalki’s greatest virtue: that he did not burden and fatigue his readers. He also has a kind humour, which is never loud or vulgar; his prose may be probably in one short phrase evaluated as innocent entertainment, though, of course, its innocence is questionable if one agrees (as I do) with Subrahmanyam’s strict pronouncement that “Kalki’s Alai Ōcai, the Sahitya Akademi winning novel, is still unrivalled in the number of words used to square inch of sentimentality on the human scene”.⁴

⁴ Though probably some of Akilan’s writings ooze a greater amount of sentiment and engender a heavier stream of words.

As far as the short story in Tamil is concerned, I must again quote K. N. Subrahmanyam who is one of the few courageous and uncompromising critics of modern Tamil writings. The short story “continues in its sedate pattern, with the defined plot, the leisurely narrative and the stock situations. Perhaps because traditional thought in Tamilnad leans more towards a personal philosophy than to psychology, we have in the Tamil short story little of character probing or analysis of a situation”.

The first to have written short stories in Tamil literature was V. V. S. Aiyar. Some of them were his inventions; some others just adaptations; the result was the first notable collection of modern short stories in Tamil called Maṅkaiyarkkaraciyiṉ kātal, called thus after its title story which is based on some events in Tamilnad of Kulōttuṅka Chōla III. It is a lovely romance. Another story of his is even based on modern life (Kamalavijayam). V. V. S. Aiyar died in 1925 and with his and S. Bharati’s attempts, the Tamil short story writing made quite a good start.

With Putumaippittaṉ (1906-1948), between the thirties and the forties, the Tamil short story achieved a decided status. For a long time after him there was almost nothing which could be compared in standard to his writings.

Around the thirties, a group of writers gathered round a shortlived journal called Manikkoṭi, under the leadership of a brilliant stylist, V. Ramaswamy (Va. Rāmacāmi Ayyaṁkār, † 1951, “Va. Rā.”). Putumaippittaṉ was one of them. Their achievement, in prose-writing as well as in poetry, must be considered as the peak of Tamil literary development between the two great wars. It is quite obvious, today more than ever, that almost everything which is truly creative and promising in modern Tamil belles-lettres has its roots in the short-lived (ca. 1930-1940) but powerful Manikkoṭi movement.

Putumaippittaṉ has been recognized as a real force in Tamil writing. He was a strange and unbalanced man and writer. He probed with fearless and ruthless frankness into the failings of the society around him. The method of his writing is truly realistic and truly critical at the same time. “Innocent” and naive romance of the Kalki type never did come his way, simply because there was no pure and naive romance in the life which he so sharply saw, so powerfully described and so bitterly criticized. He also reinterprets mythological stories in modern light. There is humour and pathos, but more often biting satire and much distress and harshness in his prose. Of about two hundred short stories he wrote, about a dozen are indeed first class; they are the first fruits of modern Tamil fiction which one may compare with highly developed story-writing of world literature. On the other hand, there is a lot, especially among his early 1925-28 productions which is second and third rate, imitated, even plagiarized (Maupassant, Chekhov etc.). In his late years he wrote things which leave behind nothing but bitterness, frustration, and even disgust.

Several anthologies of Tamil short stories were published more or less recently, in the original as well as in English translation; and one would expect them to be fairly representative. Let me critically evaluate the one collection which is probably the most ambitious⁵. It was published in 1963 under the name The Plough and the Stars (Asia, London), edited by K. Swaminathan, Periaswami Thooran and M. R. Perumal Mudaliar. It contains 26 short stories. However, the anthology is not a careful and truly representative one since it does not include some of the best short story writers like Mauni, L. S. Ramamirtham or S. Ramaswamy at all; it does not include any of the left-oriented realistic writers (with one exception) who were a real force between 1945-1960, like Raghunathan or Selva Raj; it does not include some of the other rather important writers like Vallikkannan, but it does include some very poor writers like Kumudini or V. S. Subbiah; and it does not always include writers on the merit of their literary excellence or importance, or the fact that this or that writer would be typical for one or the other aspect of modern Tamil writing, but just because they are politically or otherwise influential (Rajagopalachari, K. Santhanam).

⁵ There is a relatively very good collection of Tamil short stories, published by the Sahitya Akademi in 1959 under the editorship of the late A. Chidambaranatha Chettiar, entitled simply Cirukataik kalaňciyam. Why has not this short-story collection been translated in toto into English and published rather than The Plough and the Stars, is beyond my comprehension.

However, even though not representative enough, this anthology may be used as a point de départ to discuss at least some features of contemporary Tamil prose-writing. In terms of themes, the majority of the stories deals in some way with children (one whole third of the total of the stories): the child appears in all those stories as emotionally and ethically superior to the adult; we have here a lame child, a blind child, a number of poor children, and motherless children. Also patriotic children versus their not-sopatriotic father. Child-and-father relationship occurs more frequently than child-and-mother relationship. I think that this preoccupation with children is an important and rather typical feature of modern Tamil prose-writing.

Four stories have a distinct social theme in terms “the rich” contra “the poor” (beggar, rikshavalah, and a poor writer). No story, however, preaches revolt or revolution, though there are such stories in Tamil. The so typical and almost inevitable prostitute does, surprisingly so, not appear.

Another major group deals with problems of marriage and family-life; three stories deal with widowhood. There are no love stories in the Western sense: the relationship between man and woman develops either within marriage (if it at all develops!), or, if there is some attachment and affection outside marriage, the two will inevitably part. Another very typical and significant feature.

Apart from these major themes, there are some more or less interesting minor themes. Two or three stories teach some morale: in one, it is “bad day-dreaming” versus “good reality”, in another, patriotism is praised, in yet another, renunciation is extolled. There is a story with an anti-atheistic message. All of these “didactic” stories are very poor as belles-lettres, in terms of aestetic evaluation; and they are rather conservative in outlook.

Finally, there is a story about animals, quite a charming one.

The focus of attention of the authors is thus mostly on children, on married couples, on a few socially degraded and economically poor individuals. As an exception, two swamis (portrayed with humour and irony) figure in one of the stories.

In terms of characterization, I would classify as many as fifteen stories as poor. In two or three cases, I would say that the characterization is not bad, and in five cases it is good. In one case it is very good. The children are often better characterized than the adults.

As a rule, there is not much of a plot. A poor or a weak plot is found in about twelve stories. Four stories have no or almost no plot. In two stories, the plot is solved tragically, the central figure dies. Sometimes, the plot is rather forced and “romantic”. In one or two cases, it is plainly silly. In most cases, it does not at all develop well. None of the plots is highly dramatic or striking; nothing really surprises us. Some of the plots are rather banal.

Style: first of all, the translation into English is mostly poor, and as I know from some instances (of the stories which I know in the Tamil original), it has often damaged whatever good there might have been in the original. However, even a bad translation cannot entirely kill a very good original. Four or five stories can be said to have good style, though with one or two exceptions nothing to be compared to a Ramamirtham or a Bhave. Thus we see that style seems to be the weakest point of these short stories. Some of the themes are interesting enough; some of the plots are at least promising; some of the characterizations is not bad; but in terms of style and diction, not even one fifth of the stories is really good.

Thus there are only three or at most four stories in this collection of twenty-six pieces which I would characterize as good in terms of all four features–theme, plot, characterization and style: Jeyakanthan’s “Staff of life”, Pichamurti’s “Blind girl”, probably Shankar Ram’s “Wound Can Heal Wound”, and maybe Janakiraman’s “Exultation”.

The three writers which were selected to be treated in detail in this chapter were chosen as typical, as characteristic for certain kinds of modern Tamil prose-writing. The fact that these three names were chosen as representative does not mean that these three authors represent the best in Tamil contemporary prose, or the whole gamut of modern Tamil prose-writing. Each typisation presumes selection; and each representative selection means that, while a number of features or items is chosen as typical, as characteristic, a much greater number of features or items must necessarily be ignored. This is the reason why this chapter is not full of greater or lesser names and titles of books. It is a pity that it cannot be (naturally) quite anonymous.

Three authors were selected as typical of almost the whole range of modern Tamil prose–or rather, of that in contemporary Tamil prose which is valuable and full of promise for future development.⁶

⁶ Since this is a delicate issue, let me repeat once more: the fact that I have selected three authors for detailed discussion does not mean that there are no other good or even very good prose-writers in Tamil. Being well aware of the fact, I am inviting the wrath of many readers upon me (not to speak about the writers); yet I shall still boldly declare that I do not consider writers like Kalki, Akilan or Vallikkaņṇan as first-rate or even great writers. On the other hand, I have a great respect and admiration for such truly honest writers as N. Pichamurti, probably the most awe-inspiring and impressive single figure in Tamil writing today, both in the field of prose and poetry (see Chapter 20). I also admire writers and critics like C. S. Chellappa and K. N. Subrahmanyam, if for different reasons. I am also aware of the extremely promising younger writers and poets like Sundara Ramaswami (b. 1931), probably one of the most talented authors of the younger generation (cf. his excellent short novel Oru puḷiyamarattiṉ katai, The Story of a Tamarind Tree, 1966).

The first one to be discussed is T. Janakiraman. Most Tamil critics, and probably most readers, too, would agree that Janakiraman’s writings are good that he is a good and interesting story teller. According to my opinion he is typically one of the best representatives of the prevalent, realistic, humanistic and mildly progressive trends of modern-day Tamil.

T. Janakiraman was born on June 8, 1921 in Thevangudi near Tanjavur. He is a Brahmin by caste and knows Sanskrit and English well. For years now he has been working in the All India Radio (Madras, Delhi), and has published a number of short stories, novelettes, novels, dramas and travelogues.

The best known short story collection is probably Civappurikṣā “The Red Riksha” (1956). The two novels one should read are Mōkamu! “The Thorn of Passions” (1961) and Ammā vantāl “Mother Came” (1965). A charming travelogue about Japan was published by Janakiraman in 1967 (Utaya curiyan “The Rising Sun”). One of his more engaging dramas is Ṭākṭarukku maruntu (1965) “The Medicine for the Doctor”.

Janakiraman is a calm and composed writer. His themes are taken from everyday life of the middle-class families in the towns of Tamilnad. His most progressive piece is probably a short drama called Naluvelinilam “Four velis of land”. But his short stories are usually not concerned with social reforms or social revolution. He speaks about social evil with mild disapproval, with a kind of dolorous smile and a sort of gentle reprimand. “This should not be done”, that is what he seems to say, “because it is sad, painful, and ugly”. But more often he is concerned with the family, with the relation between husbands and wives, between fathers and their children (a very strong motive). Beyond the family, the unit within which his characters live-and they usually do live-is the very near neighbourhood, a house with a common courtyard, a block of houses, a compound, one single narrow street of a small South Indian town, a railway compartment.

When asked why he writes he says: “It is as if somebody asked me Why do you eat? For a number of reasons: because I am hungry, because I enjoy it, because this or that tastes good, etc. etc. I write for a number of reasons: for fame, for fun, for money; a little for myself and a little for you, or just because I want to manifest the fact that I am here, and sometimes just for my own amusement -well, for a number of reasons, really, and, in fact, it is quite simple… Writing gives me much pleasure; it is composite pleasure -like the pleasure of love: there is the thrill of expectation, the pain of disappointment, the joy of union–but altogether it is a pleasure … And I write about matters I know. I never write about things I do not know”. This is the one great thing about Janakiraman and his writing: his honesty and the absence of any kind of pretense. There is no affectation and no ostentation in him, no untruth.

His style is vivid, plastic, his language rich and colourful, though always temperate and subdued; he is not afraid to use, in the dialogues, a written reflection of the colloquial which usually happens to be the Brahmin colloquial with him.⁷

⁷ The Plough and the Stars (1963) includes Janakiraman’s story “Exultation”, pp. 76-87, and Mahfil (IV. 3-4, 1968) has an English version of his story “The Temple Light”.

Mōkamuļ (1961) “The Thorn of Passion” is a distinguished novelone of the best ever published in Tamil. The plot, the theme, the story, even the style-almost everything in the book is really good. And yet it is not an excellent novel altogether. It suffers from the one fault that some of his writings display: verbosity and loquacity. “An otherwise good piece of fiction . so thinly spun out that it runs to about 800 pages; it could have been more effective if it had been done in about a couple of hundred pages” (K. N. Subrahmanyam).

In this respect, Ammā vantāl (1965) “The Mother Came”, is definitely better. This is, in short, the plot: Appu, a Brahmin boy, is sent at the age of eight to a Sanskrit seminary (pāṭacālai) to learn the Vedas. He stays sixteen years to master them, living on the banks of the Kāviri, in a beautiful, serene atmosphere. Appu alone does not know that his handsome, overbearing mother who appears to his mind’s eye as a luminous vision, is unfaithful to his father; in fact, she seeks vicarious atonement by turning her son to a Vedic scholar. After sixteen years Appu returns home to learn the devastating truth: Appu’s affectionate younger brothers and sisters turn out to be bastard half-brothers and half-sisters, his mother an adulteress. The short, explosive novel describes the reaction of the ardent, puritanical young Brahmin idealist to this emotional catastrophe. Seeing that his resigned, withdrawn and compassionate father ignores the aberration of his wife, Appu rejects his home and goes back to the pāṭhaśālā whose founder and benefactoress on her death-bed makes him the joint heir to her property. Appu ends by living “in sin” with her widowed niece, a lovely and sensual woman by name of Indu.

The book’s theme is highly interesting, even great; the plot well conceived, the characterization of some figures excellent: Alankāram, the sinful mother, is indeed overwhelming. Some descriptions are lovely—e.g. at the very beginning of the novel the description of the Käviri. On the other hand, the novel has a few basic drawbacks: it has not quite escaped the curse of sentimentalism; its author, though brave enough to choose a delicate and explosive theme, is not courageous enough to be entirely frank-e.g. in dealing with Indu’s sensuality, with sex in general. There is almost no verbosity in this book, and there are some truly exciting passages; but there are also some flat and colourless parts, and some descriptions are not concrete enough. I give below the English translation of a passage which describes the first confrontation between Appu and Indu, before Appu goes back to Madras and learns the truth about his mother:

“She gripped his shoulders with both hands, the fingers digging into his flesh.
Her palms were hot, but the rounded, soft forearms cool on his shoulders  and chest, like a tight-woven garland of chrysanthemums… He was overwhelmed by a staggering feeling of astonishment.
Indu’s hair rubbed against his cheek, then her brows, her forehead, her lips.
A lizard clucked from the wall. Appu stood abruptly up, pushing her aside. She got up, too, but held his shoulders tightly.
”No, Indu!”
“No to what?”
“No! No to this sin… When I think of your aunt, I feel ashamed”.
“Even now it is only aunt you can think of! Not me! Why do you keep bleating ‘sin, sin’?”
“Because this is sinful”.
“It doesn’t seem sinful to me. What is a sin? To do and say things against one’s conscience. It is you, you that I have been thinking of all these years, you that I’ve been living for! Now you know. Is it so wrong? Shouldn’t I have told you what I feel?”
“It doesn’t seem right to me, Indu. I think of you as I do of your aunt. When you touch me, I feel as if I was touching her…” Appu closed his eyes.
“You always think of her, how great she is. And you turn away from me in disgust as if you had trodden on a dead worm. If you could only realize that I am a human being, too but that you can’t!”
“I do not even think of my own sister at home as so near to me as you, Indu! I think of you as one born with me…
”But don’t you realize now that this is not true?”
“No, I still think it is true. Nothing has changed”.
“Appu!”
“…”
“Appu!”
“…”
“You talk and you don’t understand, even now after I have told you all this. I swear on the Vedas you study-without you, my life has no meaning at all”.
He stood aghast, hurt; he could not bear this goading, this oath on the Vedas.
“Never talk like this again, Indu”.
“Why?”
“Don’t drag in the Vedas. They are like my mother to me. They are my god, my mother, they are like my mother who is god to me. Pure gold I knew Parasu. Don’t think he is dead. He is there, listening to all that you say. Doesn’t it occur to you how his soul will squirm in agony hearing you? You don’t think of him at all—and not only that, you dishonour him and degrade yourself, and I cannot bear to hear you babbling like this, ignoring him! And when you, in addition, swear on the Vedas, it is as if my mother had been dealt a blow, as if dust had been thrown in her face! Look here, Indu, I’d have left by now, but for your aunt… I am just waiting for her to say good-bye… You know, when I look at you, think of but I feel like crying, I feel happy you, too… Don’t be angry with me, Indu. When I go back to my mother, I should go clean in body, clean in mind. She must never think that I went to study the Vedas, but really smeared mud on my head. When you return after a bath in the Kaveri, you should not drop into a roadside tavern and drink kallu. I couldn’t stagger in my mother’s presence with a mud-stained face! When you look at me, it is as if she was looking at me! Send me home safe, Indu!”
He moved away from her and there he stood, afraid that she would follow and hold his shoulders.
Indu stood facing the wall, with the light of the lantern falling fully on her. She was not looking at the wall. She was not looking at anything. Her nose was shiny, the skin sagged beneath her eyes. She was standing there as if she was some dead body that had been stood up. Even on the face there was a deadly pallor, as if life and blood had been drained. She was like ashes.
For minutes the corpse-like apparition stood there, unmoving. Then she knotted up her hair, and raised a finger to scratch her cheek and lip. With the look of utter blankness she crawled from one place to another, picked up the lantern, set it down by a pillar, and sitting beside another pillar, she buried her face between her knees.
Appu glanced at the door, and then went quickly up to her; she heard his footsteps and raised her head, but he did not look at her. He laid himself flat on the ground in front of her, in a full-stretch namaskāram. Then he rose and walked into the pāṭacālai. He spread his towel on the floor and laid down.
He was listening to suppressed sobs and moans and snivellings.
A gecko clucked from the darkness: kik-kik-kik.
He closed his eyes and could see, in the shadows, the face of his mother.”

T. Janakiraman is a well-established author, who has always something to say, who does not want merely to entertain or to please. The message he has to convey is always a message of goodwill, an exhortation to more humane humanity. There is a lot of misery in the world and in man’s life. Do not multiply this misery. The world needs decency, charity, common sense and a lot of goodwill. This is the message of Janakiraman, a good, solid and enjoyable writer.

Jeyakanthan is quite different. A robust, energetic, and passionate man. So are his writings: robust and passionate. An angry writer, when he began to write in the fifties. Only lately his style has mellowed and reached some stability; he was and still, to some extent, is the enfant terrible of Tamil literature, a writer whose purpose is to shock the readers-the shock being intended as a therapeutic device. He is definitely a man with a message. Things are bad and they should be changed, violently if necessary, without violence if possible.

He belongs to the young if not to the youngest generation of writers. He was born in Kadalur on May 2, 1934, and is a prolific writer who has published a large number of short stories and quite a number of novels of very unequal quality.

Jeyakanthan seems to care much more about what he has to say than about how he says it, which does not mean that his style and language is disappointing. But he is, out of the three writers dealt with here, the least careful stylist, though some of his pages show that he is capable of formal excellence. He is always direct, quite simple and quite powerful. It is the topic, the theme, the plot, and the ideas, opinions, beliefs, the judgements which are important to him. In the best of his short stories, one feels a sure stroke of a stylist who has succeeded in getting rid of everything superfluous and redundant (quite opposite from Janakiraman). But sometimes his way of describing things is crude and raw.

He belongs to the line of critical realism symbolized by the names of Puthumaippittan and T. M. C. Raghunathan. He does not hesitate to handle themes that were recognized as taboo, startling, even embarrassing his readers. In his early years as writer, there was much talk about his “immorality”, which was, with him, nothing but absolute frankness, deadly serious; and crudely realistic, even naturalistic narration.

For the urge to write there is always some reason with Jeyakanthan. He is a rationalist who sees the chain of causes and results in the whole sphere of life. The ultimate measure and reason of everything is Man; even for nature, and more so for art. Art, for him, is always full of purposes; it has always some meaning, some sense, some message. In the story Illātatu etu (“What is lacking”), he describes man, symbolized by a proud and successful scientist, approached by God, who had given him too much and wants to take back one of his senses. The man is free to chose which one he would· agree to lose. He thinks for a while and then proposes a bargain: “You can take back any sense you want, but you will give in return something which I don’t have”. God—who intended to take away the man’s mind is embarrassed: “If I take his mind, what can I give him in return? Can I give anything? What if the thing I give him turns out to be even more powerful? What is it that he doesn’t have? … I should not have tried to talk with man in his language”. And he disappears. The man wins.

As the scientist says to God, God has no business with man; man has work to do which may, in the end, touch God.

Life is a struggle. Especially the life of the working classes. Jeyakanthan wants to take part in the struggle. He always enjoys taking part in any fight.

Some of the truly Marxist ideas and methods of approach remained in him from the period (about 1956-1962) when he was a passionate and orthodox Marxist. He has lately left the camp of Marxists and ultra-left rebels who as he says “show only the cēris” in their writings. He is now refusing that kind of literature which wallows in the morbid description of filth, misery, poverty and vice to the exclusion of everything else under the pretence of being realistic and revolutionary. According to Jeyakanthan of today (though a decade ago he would have talked very differently, and one can hardly predict how he will talk a decade later), these writers who deny that there was a past in India, who see the past as something false and absolutely rotten, are blinded fools and perverts (kuruṭarkaļ, acaṭarkaḷ, vakkarittuppōnavarkal). He recognizes the ideals of the past, “the pride of Indian wisdom and the power of Indian soul But the soul of India broke into pieces The life in India became an image of falsehood. In cursing the life and pleasure while at the same time enjoying them, the Indian became a hypocrite …” (Maunam oru pāṣai, “Silence is a language”). Thus he refuses to join the lines of those who see only the past glories of India, for whom life is a thing of the past, and the present time means death and decay. For him, India lives, as he puts it, both in temples and in the cēris (low caste villages); the sanctity of the temple lives in the cēri, and the filth of the cēri lives in the temple (a truly dialectical approach). True literature should reflect the facts of all aspects of life in its fulness, here and now; what is important, is the present moment, the here and now of India in all its complexity. And, above all, doing away with all kinds of hypocrisy and pretence; revering the old high ideals just because they are old, and at the same time following, in practice, loose, derived, second-hand and diluted modern values. The future culture of India must reformulate ancient, traditional Indian values in the new context of social change.

Jeyakanthan prefers to think about himself as a truly critical realist, which he probably is, a fighter, not afraid of blows. Probably always sure of himself, always convinced that he is right, he most often is. He is always on the move. Figuratively he speaks about himself as a lover of Sarasvati, the Goddess of Art, and a son of the Goddess of Society. He has a very keen sense of future, including his own future as writer. He says about himself: “I am a small drop in the great ocean which creates the world of tomorrow. My writing is just one wave in that ocean”. It certainly is a powerful wave.⁸

⁸ However, the development is very uneven and full of potential dangers and pitfalls.

Contemporary Tamil prose-and I certainly do not enjoy writing this is, on the whole, emasculated, flat, colourless, as if most of the writers were afraid of conveying their own experience of life, as if they were strangled by inhibitions when talking about matters like body and sex. Unfortunately one finds this flat, unidimensional and castrated writing even when reading a description of nature, of a street, of a room, of a human being, of an event. As if these writers, as A. K. Ramanujan very happily put it during a private conversation, were devoid of the five senses of seeing, hearing, touch, smell and taste. One is indeed almost bound to ask if there is something wrong with the sensoric perceptions of these writers—or is it just utter lack of the pertinent vocabulary and stylistic skill?

Fortunately, there are exceptions. Some of the writings of N. Pichamurti, K. Alagiriswamy, R. Shanmugasundaram, T. Janakiraman and a few others are plastic, vivid, multidimensional, sensitive to shapes, colours, sounds and smells. And a writer like Jeyakanthan is capable, in the best of his prose, to produce descriptions like the following: “He coughed again, having sat up, and then expectorated. You could really not say how old he was: he seemed ageless as eternity. His head was bare, his face silvery with unshaven hair, his forehead wrinkled. His grey eyebrows were so luxurious and drooping that they half-closed his eyes and only the pale whites were visible. His beard and the drooping flesh on his cheeks covered his face, so that one could not see where the deep wrinkles on either side of his nose began and where they ended. But his nose, broad and pointed, stood out prominently”.⁹

⁹ “The Staff of Life”, The Plough and the Stars (1963) 88-89. The original is much superior to this translation. Mahfil (IV. 3-4, 1968) 81-99, contains English renderings of two of his short stories, “The Dispute” and “Ages Meet”.

It is hardly possible to imagine two so different authors as Jeyakanthan, the robust fighter, and L. S. Ramamirtham, the shy, reticent Brahmin with the face of Sir Laurence Olivier. And yet both of them, like T. Janakiraman, and a number of others -C. S. Chellappa, K. N. Subrahmanyam, N. Pichamurti, K. Alagiriswamy, Chidambara Subramanyam, S. Ramaswamy, K. Ganeshalingam-have something fundamental in common: apart from the fact that these writers, all of them, to a greater or lesser degree, possess, no doubt, a talent for creative writing, they mean it when they write. That is, writing for them is work, and, unlike so many contemporary Tamil “writers”, they approach writing with a sense of responsibility, and with some definite intent and purport. But whereas, e.g., Jeyakanthan is more attentive to what he says than to how he says it, and while Janakiraman probably tries to be equally careful about what he says and how, Ramamirtham, so it seems to me, is always or almost always much more on the look out for how he says it than what he says. Hence, he is probably the best Tamil stylist of our days; also, some of his short stories at least seemingly so-turn round banalities or trivialities. And reading Ramamirtham may become an intellectual exercise.

Both Jeyakanthan and Ramamirtham are each possessed by a particular kind of basic lunacy (I do not think Janakiraman is; he is too sensible and too well-balanced for that). Jeyakanthan is obsessed with the future of the world he believes he is helping to mould; more specifically, with the here and now of the India he sees and wants to change. Ramamirtham’s obsession is very different; it is the mystique of the word; in other words, he is always preoccupied with the problems of language, diction, style and writing techniques. “… words, once spoken, have become cinder. But the Word that defies capture is the flame that purges. Oh, I can feel it, don’t I realise the ridiculousness of this attempt to pick out the Word from words—as ridiculous as trying to operate on the brain with a butcher’s knife or a rusty doornail? … He who has been touched by the flame of the Word, he carries the fire in his heart If you will have the Word as water, he has drunk from the Pool of Eternal Thirst And he walks alone on his—endless way to the Word”.¹⁰

¹⁰ The Illustrated Weekly of India, Nov. 20, 1966, p. 27.

¹¹ Personal communication.

In a personal interview, granted in January 1968 in Madras, he told me: “I am obsessed with words. I listen to every word, contemplating its meaning and form, and the place it has in the web of life and the patterns of speech. Every word is like a precious stone. There are moments, just before the ideas, the thoughts take the final shape of words, which are like a shimmering on the brink of some explosion I try to choose words which will bear repetition. Repeating them makes me happy. The reader should also read my sentences like that: repeating them, listening to them”. L. S. Ramamirtham was born on October 30, 1916. He has a wide and deep English education. He began in fact writing in English; his English writings were recognized and published by Manjeri S. Iswaran. “I love English like a woman. I think I was happy to have read the right authors at the right moments. As far as Western writing is concerned, I might have been influenced by Tolstoy and Knut Hamsun … and Hemingway …”.¹¹

It was T. J. Ranganathan (b. 1901), one of the influential prosewriters of the older generation, who induced Ramamirtham to write in Tamil. “I have been writing for thirty-three years now. For the last ten to twelve years I have not been reading almost anything. All those three decades I was repeating myself … There is nothing new to tell …”.

Ramamirtham has so far written more than one hundred short stories and two novels (Putra, 1st part 1965, Apitā, 1970). The collections of short stories comprise Janani (1957), Italkaļ (1959, ‘Petals’), Paccaikkanavu (1961, ‘Green Dream’), Kaňkā (1962), Añcali (1963 ‘Gesture of Worship’) Alaikaḷ (1964 ‘Waves’) and Tayā (1966). He works in the Punjab National Bank in Madras. He is very shy, very difficult to talk to.

The world of Ramamirtham’s stories—most of them describing the life of middle and lower classes-is often limited to just two persons: it may be husband and wife; parent and child; two friends; sometimes two people who just meet casually and a relationship develops between them-that is always of fundamental interest to Ramamirtham: the relationship between two, rarely between more human beings. Sometimes, he draws a whole family into the magic circle of his writing. But the family seems to be the limit for him. Only rarely does he deal with the relations of an individual or a group of individuals toward society, or with some total social problem. Where the problems of Jeyakanthan’s heroes are primarily social and political, arising from such phenomena as poverty, caste, social status, class struggle, occupational features, nationality, religion etc., the problems of Ramamirtham’s individual heroes are psychological; they arise from the depths of their hearts, from inner conflicts, suppressions, obsessions, passions and falsehoods. The subconscious workings of the mind, the conflict within an individual that is a frequent theme in Ramamirtham’s stories, which sometimes have only one single hero.

“What is my method? Introspection. I seek for the truth in things, for the true nature of things, for the truth in myself”.

In this respect, Ramamirtham’s method is very Indian indeed. But then he says:

“I do not believe in anything really-perhaps I am an atheist . . . Yet, I believe in the continuity of the race, the parents who begot me, my mother she lives very much in me… I do not identify myself with my characters. They have a life of their own. But at the same time, I write chiefly about myself. I am very much occupied with myself. Almost all my writing is in some sense autobiographical. Yes, indeed, Putra is strongly autobiographic… And I am writing very often about my mother. She was a very unusual person. Something of a queen and yet a subject … Unapproachable…”.

The texture of his plots is really not very intricate but sometimes it is difficult to understand at once the full implications of the interactions between the characters. “Green Dream” (1961)¹² describes, for instance, the complicated net of emotions evolving between a blind man and his wife. Parts of the story, thanks to the diction and style, have a dream-like quality of fantasy and illusion. But even single dialogues in this story have a unique force and charm:

¹² Mahfil IV. 3-4 (1968) 55-62.

“Other memories arose at the word”moon”. Memories of midnights when he had lain waiting on a camp cot on the veranda, in the moonlight the awaited hand clasping his-the many times it had led him to that stagnant pond amidst the four hillocks, at the turning of the roadthe dusty earth of the street sticking to the soles of his feet-the green dress fluttering against him in the wind-it was like this moment.
“Is moonlight green?”
“Green? Anyone would say it’s white, wouldn’t they?”
“Completely white?”
“Can you say whitewash is completely white? It’s a sort of whitish green”.
“Ah, I would say so”.
If it must be so, let it be whitish green. To give him the slightest occasion to imagine it completely green is enough. It was satisfying for him to imagine moonlight flowing down, green upon green, over the hillocks, the grassy fields, the lotus tank-like sap wrung from a leaf. Immersed for a moment in the thought, he then asked
“What is sunshine like?”
“Oh dear, why are you such a type today? Sunshine is white. Come inside”.
“Completely white?”
“Completely white”.
Yes, even as far as he could remember, sunshine was only white, and besides that, it burnt. If sunshine were only green!”
(Transl. by Donald A. Nelson)

In “Ganga” (1962), the husband, out of disgust with everyday grey life, chases after a love-dream of childhood and adolescence. After a drastic disappointment, he returns to his wife who is the symbol and guarantee of security and sound reality. “Tarangini” (1963) describes a barren woman’s attempt to keep the affection of her husband; she loses his love at the very moment when she becomes pregnant. In “Talking Fingers” (1961) two people, a man and a woman, meet casually on a deserted road in the fields; he, a Telugu-speaking peddler selling bangles; she, a young and buxom Tamil peasant-woman, whose husband is a drinking ruffian. There and then an inner relationship arises between these two strangers– nothing develops between them in the physical sense; only his fingers speak and a few bangles remain crushed in the dust of the road but the story, five pages in all, is a masterpiece of Tamil prose. Who has ever seen a dusty road in India, with a hot sun in the zenith, and a strong and shapely peasant woman walking on the road in the hot dust, under that sun, will feel the immense tension pervading the story.

“Clay” (1961)¹³ describes the relationship between a family of low caste potters and the community they work for. The central idea behind the theme of “Stained Leaf”¹⁴ is the madness of poetry, the higher, super-realistic, trans-realistic vision of the poet against the earthy, fully realistic plane of the profane, of the vulgar. And of course the higher, ideal plane is destroyed by the vulgar. This is part of Ramamirtham’s “aristocratic” convictions and “idealistic”, Plotinus-like philosophy. The setting of the story is extra-tradionally Indian: on purpose, the reality is transformed-to some extent even grotesquely (the bizarre is not strange to Ramamirtham) ―into very traditional visions of the poet: sun-scorched fields into moonlit pleasure-garden, stinking canal into lotus-pond, a Pariah woman into an apsarā etc. The plot is of course melodramatic, traditional, and, with a lesser writer, it could be disastrous. But here the climax and anticlimax technique is used very skilfully: after a double murder, an old woman with a broom gathering rubbish for fuel; and the burning of the leaf, stained by blood. The irony of the whole event: the poet and the woman (both quite innocent) are killed with the poet’s own stylus (used for writing his verses) held in the hand of a vulgar ignoramus! Diction and style is, as always with Ramamirtham, the best feature of the story. The whole is based on contrast: the basic contrast is that of the dreamer-poet and the Pariah man of action (the poet dreams, writes down his visions, forgetting reality completely: the Pariah shouts and acts. “He came, he saw, he decided, and he killed”.). In the eyes of the Pariah, the poet is not a sensitive, innocent being, but a mad good-for-nothing idler, just squatting on the bank and grinning like a fool. The whole story is a series of flashes: how the world appears to different characters. For the Pariah woman, e.g., the world is made of sweat and sunshine and cooling, soothing water. The same reality, symbolized by the banyan leaf, appears differently to the four actors: what is a piece of poetry to the dreamer and intellectual, is some four scribbles for the illiterate Pariah belle, and dry rubbish, a piece of fuel, for the old hag. And the style! The whole “physical history” of a leaf is contained in just one short sentence: “It withered in the heat, it was soaked by rain, it shivered in the wind, and became stiff with cold”. This is the description of the young woman, who “untied her sari, put down the bundle with rice, and slipped into the water… Her mind and body were entirely immersed in her bathing. In the frenzy and intoxication caused by fresh cool water crawling across her body, she beat the water with her hands and raised a curtain of raindrops, hiding behind it; and laughing like mad, she thrust herself down upon her back into the water. Her hair untied, the flag spread and immersed in water, she flung open her arms, pressed her legs together and was floating like a cross. Her eyes twinkled, dazzled by the glare of the sun; her lips smiled; her body shone and darted beams of light like a black crystal”.

¹³ ib., 63-67.

¹⁴ ib., 52-54.

Ramamirtham’s language is extremely rich. He has at his disposal a great number of (so-called) synonyms: e.g., in just four lines of “Stained Leaf”, the story just discussed, he uses four “synonyms” for “water”: veļļam, punal, tanṇīr, jalam, each with slightly different connotation and function. This in itself need not be a sign of art, just of skill. Whenever necessary, he is able to use highly classical (and “pure”) Tamil words, e.g. tivalai for malai, “raindrop, rain” (in the same story).

What is more important is the type of new and striking metaphors he employs. Two instances (as random illustrations) taken from the short story “Ganga” (1962): hearing the name of the girl Gaṅgā in a unexpected and surprising context, this is what the boy in the story feels: kattiyutan katti cantittup pori pirantatu pōl ennu! ētō nērntu viṭṭatu (p. 14) “Something happened in my heart, like the birth of a spark when a knife strikes another knife”. And a few lines further we may read: avaliṭamiruntu enakkuk kanivāy oru värttai varin atil kanavin alaku milirntu ennaiyum kaṇavākkiyatu “(and) when a tender word came to me from her, it was all aglow with the beauty of a dream and I, too, was made like a dream” (p. 15). He is equally able to deal with the beauty of nature as well as with details of human portraiture; cf. the two following instances: “From the hair, arranged like two curved armlets on both sides of the middle parting, two loose locks parted and played on the hillock of the forehead in the swift wind of the electric fan. floating round mark, above the spot where the curves of her irregular black brows began, melted in sweat, shedding its red kunkum and casting a glow on the face” (Tayā, p. 6). “Green pastures On the grass-tips stood drops of dew. A golden bow sprouted and spread upon the indigo above. Silver laces of water rose and descended up and down the grass-stalks, rolling about and smoothing the bends” (Curuti, p. 34). Alliteration seems to come naturally to him as well as a particular cadence and a powerful rhythm-cf. such utterances (taken at random from the novel Putra I) as ūr ōram āra amara amilntu kuļikka ōṭum jalam illaiya (p. 33) “Isn’t there running water (for me) to bathe in, to be cooled and refreshed and appeased, at the side of the village?”; or inta ennattai ennum nērattukku pālaiyil pūtta pūppol, enṇattin paccai neňcu kacintatu (p. 45) “Like a flower, blossoming in the barren soil, within the span of time necessary to produce this thought, the heart melted, by the tender freshness of the thought”.

When asked what are the sources of his rich, sometimes rather profusedly Sanskritized Tamil, he says: “It was all in my family. It is my family heritage. My grandfather was a Tamil pandit. And then, of course, experience: richness of experience produces wealth of language. The nature and extent and depth of my involvement, that is decisive for my diction. My emotions Sanskrit? But I do not really know Sanskrit. I do not know it, but I love the sound of it. It is like heavy jewellery. It has also been in my family for ages …”

His writing is not very popular. Sometimes he is rather difficult to understand. “Often, one gets lulled into a trance while going through the verbal permutations he indulges in with magic effect … This seemingly undue dominance of verbal designs stands in the way of communication when the reader is not familiar with the technique Ramamirtham employs in expressing himself”.¹⁵

¹⁵ P. P. Sundararajan, “The Short Story in Tamil”, Indian Writing Today, 4, p. 61.

His Putra (“Son”), a novel full of Macbethian twilight, reminding one of Spanish baroque, Italian “marinism”, and the English “metaphysical” poets of European seventeenth century, was called “tongue-in-cheek experiment” and to some extent this is true. The search after new forms, the strife after technical innovations, the obsession with the “word” drive Ramamirtham, from time to time, to the dangerous brink of pure formalism, and he is almost ready to sacrifice the subject, the theme, the meaning, on the altar of the form, uru. This has indeed happened to some extent in Putra, especially in the first half of Part I. In the prose-poetry passages he seems to have carried his experiments too far. The novel is the story of a curse, hurled by the mother upon her son.

“I am an utterance.
Am I male? Or am I female?
Am I she? Or he? Or it?
‘Listen! To you, a son will never be born!
And even if he were, he would rot!’
This is, then, my lot; that is my destiny;
I am a curse.
…..
I shall not be locked within one place. I shall be everywhere.
I shall not be squeezed into one form; all shapes are my shape, my
being.
I am a WORD:
the meaning of the word;
the action of the meaning;
the three merged and blended into
one trident”.¹⁶

¹⁶ At the time when this is being written and re-read (December 1969, Sept. 1972), we still wait impatiently for the second volume of this experimental and breath-taking novel.

Reading a story by Ramamirtham is always an experience; sometimes a harrowing experience; often the reader is left with painful and very disturbed feelings; sometimes he is lost; sometimes, he feels that there is a certain amount of affectation, of ostentation present in Ramamirtham’s writings; he may wish that the author be more simple, more straithtforward, and more sincere.

However, Ramamirtham is a many-sided genius. He is capable, even within a single comparatively short novel as the first part of Putra, to evoke an entirely different picture:

“Blue, saffron, violet, deep yellow, green, black-she had a figure which agreed with any colour.
Aunt would open the long trunk which she used during the day as a board and take out one by one the diffeBrent sarees. This was indeed their chance.
‘Wear them every day. I shall only be pleased, looking at you. I can’t. I am beyond the age of wearing them. They cut into my flesh at the waist. You wear them-one by one. You may wear them as you wish for some time to come, that is. One day you will be like me’.
While she was pointing out to her the beauty of a fullbodied saree, Aunt would say: ‘The Goddess of Anaikkal’. And as she was showing the texture of another piece, she would say: ‘Kamakshi of Kanchi’.
Uncle was sitting on the veranda, stroking his beard. She felt that he was watching her with his eyes like live embers hid in the forest of his sloping brows. Nowadays he would not talk to her. His forehead was all in wrinkles. What was the trouble now? What new worries were vexing him? Was he putting her under a test? Or rather himself? What did he search for? What was his true intention among those thousands of thoughts hidden in his beard?”

I have yet to read another passage in modern Tamil writing like the one which follows: the sense of the passing of time is so urgent and perfect here.

“In November, a curtain of rain descending heavily upon the mango groves.
Rain is streaming down everywhere, and clouds in crowds hurry across the sky.
At dawns in December growing clusters of dew-drops.
In the soil of the earth, long tracks left by crawling snakes.
Under the sacred fig-tree in the monastery, ant-hills grow daily out of its hollows.
In the wells, in the spreading darkness of night, the waterlevel stands motionless and still, hiding its depths under a milky surface.
Pungeant unripe fruits hanging hidden in the midst of mango leaves.
A flock of hawks, wings widely spread, floats in the dark blue skies.
Grating and scrapping of coconuts, huge heaps of fibres under the scrapers growing day after day.
The earth overgrown with green grass like a colour engraving.
A white feather flashing on the green earth, fallen from the wings of a flying flock of cranes.
The hissing descent of a falling star.
The gentle sweet sound of the Evening Star, as she slips and falls down and springs up.
Big bellies of calving cows.
A solitary drop of life, oozing out of the udder and trickling down along the teat, as the eyes grow tender looking at the calves.
A column of fire hot and fierce, filling to the brim the hollow of the center of a wild jumping and romping dance.
The quivering and shivering heat of Summer”.

My feeble attempts at alliteration cannot revoke Ramamirtham’s perfect sound magic (cf. kanru kaṇṭu kaṇ kaṇintu “the eye, growing tender at the sight of the calf”, or karu puraļum pacuvin peruvayiru, lit. “big belly of a cow in which the embryo rolls”); observe also the technique of association, used in the passage with such skill.

But reading Ramamirtham’s prose is also always a revelation. Among other things, a revelation of the possibilities of the Tamil language. It is Ramamirtham who has shown us what Tamil is capable of. According to the author himself, the writer and the reader, they both make the book, they both create the literary work. Ramamirtham-according to his own admission―does not write in the easy way. Sometime-so he told me he searches for the right mood, the right rasa, for a long time; it takes him often three, four months to finish a story.

But once you read one of his stories, you will never forget it; you want to re-read it, again and again. And that is something which can be said only about very few Tamil authors of our days.