Emerging from deep within the land
Like trees, politics and culture too grow from deep within the land. What is allowed to grow on the topsoil; who can own a field; who will plough it; to whose home goes the larger share of the grain are questions that life takes centuries to resolve, if at all; a novel or a short story can settle it faster. Edited by writer and folklorist Ki Rajanarayanan, this anthology of 20 stories from the Karisal or the “Black soil” region of Tamil Nadu’s southern districts has not tried a quick-fix.
In Along with the Sun, the black stays black: caste, cattle and moneylenders decide the fate of the underclass; the sun is a scorcher; people cannot escape drought, and women must negotiate their position in the family and in the village with age-old weapons. But even as that blackness is sprinkled clay-like over all the stories, art and the eye has gone everywhere. These are stories in which imagination and empathy has clearly gone to work on the authors’ lived experiences.
Along With the Sun is a tremendous collection written by the best minds of Tamil literature. It is specifically focused on “country writing” of the 1970s, the capture of people going about their everyday lives, living, loving and fighting with their meagre powers in their village habitat. This was a movement as much as it was the “house style” of the writers of this region, beginning, as the foreword points out, with Sundara Ramaswamy, one of the most important Tamil writers of the post-independence period. Most of the writers included in this anthology translated by Padma Narayanan continue that tradition. Some striking examples: In SA Tamilselvan’s story, Along with the Sun, which gives the anthology its name, a young girl’s affections for a man she grew up loving lasts beyond her marriage and his and the change of seasons till she comes face to face with “her machchan’s” wife. Then, a dam bursts and her tears soak her husband’s chest, drowning his words of a good day at the market where he has sold all his coconuts.
In A Muththanandam’s tale, Bullocks, the same sun beats down on Ponniah Pillai, a farmer now fallen on bad days. He goes, one day, to the house of cattle-owner Perumal Konar. Here, the relationship is measured by memories of buffaloes – Pillai’s and Konar’s. Remembering past generosities, Konar gifts Pillai a pair. These dumb animals and Pillai are ultimately at the mercy of the same fate. The respite that came their way was meant to be shortlived.
In Credibility Established by Ki Rajanarayanan, the violence that Periya Modalali metes out to Masanam, his servant, is meant to assert Modalali’s right over the boy’s body, mind and soul. In a delicious irony, Masanam turns the tables on his master when the village rediscovers him as a ‘holy man’. When a family member falls ill, Periya Modalali has to appeal to Masanam; when the rain does not come on time, it is Masanam again who is called upon to rescue the village. People now lay caste aside and throng his hut to offer him milk as one would a god. “Then Masanam, who usually drank without his lips touching the glass, now put it to his lips and sipped the milk…”
Concerns of social justice don’t always sit well with literature. The Karisal stories are an example of how, when done right, such concerns give birth to words of power and a truly alternative imagination.