A poem and an error
Vishnunarayanan Namboothiri, a Malayalam poet and a professor in English Literature, often wore just a dhoti, and a thorth (traditional coarse cotton towel from Kerala) thrown across his chest, over his left shoulder. The sartorial simplicity appealed to the cynical Malayalee; yet in full view was Vishnunarayanan’s sacred thread, the tradition, which he could not but honour but was not quite correct in India-outraged.
On February 25, Vishnunarayanan, 81, died at his home in Kerala. He had come a long way since graduating in Mathematics and Physics (he continued to be interested in science throughout his life, and wrote poems like Einstein’s Guest. Also adept at the scriptures, Vishnunarayanan believed the Vaisheshika school of Vedic thought anticipated Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty, that perception changed reality. Heisenberg is the ‘guest’ in the Einstein poem). Vishnunarayanan switched from science and took his Master’s degree in English Literature before becoming a professor in the early 1960s, when he also started writing poetry.
Modern Malayalam poetry came into its own in the early 20th century with Vallathol Narayana Menon, Ulloor Parameshwara Iyer, and Kumaran Asan. From the 1930s, shaped by the freedom struggle, the Communist Party, and other progressive movements led by men like Narayana Guru, in close to 100 years, Malayalam has produced a crop of great poets. Vishnunarayanan, like some of his contemporaries, the late Vylopillil Shreedhara Menon, Akkitham Narayanan Namboodiri, and Sugatha Kumari (the last two died recently) found a way to sing new songs in old cadences.
Ezra Pound said poetry should never stray far from music. In the best of Malayalam poetry, some of which Vishnunarayanan wrote (for example, The Nights and Days in Ujjain: an invocation of the spirit of Kalidasa’s Meghasandesh; a prayer for rain on parched earth), the meaning is nothing without the music. This is one reason why translating poetry is often a lost cause. Much of great Malayalam poetry is so inextricably entwined with native culture, symbols, and tropes that an attempt at translation is an act that may wrest simpering suicide from what began as raucous murder.
Existence is absurd, Albert Camus said, because Man must make sense of a universe indifferent to that enterprise. It is against this hard, unforgiving fact that the poet must build his fiction. This was possibly why Vishnunarayanan found an ally in Hindu traditions, besides his birth and upbringing in a brahmin family. And it summoned to him situations beyond poetry that he was not fully equipped to handle.
In 1993-1994, when he had retired from academics, he had taken up the priesthood of a Vishnu temple near his ancestral household in Thiruvalla, by way of a spiritual obligation to his family. At the time the progressives/liberals of Kerala had campaigned against him. Later, when he had travelled to England for a lecture, the conservative elements did their bit in maligning him because he had crossed the sea, a taboo for the orthodox temple administration.
What Vishnunaryanan, though much-awarded, went through for a short period was perhaps equivalent to the exilic stage mythically consistent with any great poet’s career, starting prominently, say, with Ovid, who was banished for ‘a poem and an error.’ A poem and an error sums it up nicely.
Beyond groups, Vishnunarayanan continued to be himself, a poet trying to contain his many contradictions in a turn of phrase. His poetry invoked an inclusive democracy, of kindness, of the coexistence of humans, animals, things. Equally, he thought the ideal was not approachable, neither in poetry nor in politics, without the yoking of the past and the present.
Vishnunarayanan was aware of the dangers of relapse. Yet how does one disown the sea that brought one, battered and breathless, to the rock-strewn shore? Each of his incantatory phrases, therefore, reaches into the old and new at once, the poem bound fast and secure with the sacred thread of the past.
(Acknowledged with thanks: Selected Poems of Vishnunarayanan Namboothiri, translated into English by PKN Panicker, published by Authorspress.)