Imayam does not beat about the bush. No literary frills, no self-indulgent reveries, no fantasies are on offer in any of this Tamil writer’s novels or short stories. As he lays bare the dilemmas of people emerging from entrenched ideas of caste and gender into a fiercely competitive environment, the question ‘What happens next?’ fades into the background. His is an aesthetic that springs from a self-evident ethic.
Imayam takes on myths old and new in two stories in this latest collection. In the lead story ‘Dandakaaranyathil Seethai’, he continues the tradition of retelling that is distinctive about the epics. The Ramayana continues to be retold in countless ways. In his version, Sita revels in the unspoilt wilderness to which the exiled royal couple has been banished. Full of curiosity about every living creature, her sharpest question is aimed at Rama: why is he ‘clearing’ the Dandakaranya jungle of its Adivasis and wild animals? Why must he protect the rishis? By what right do they evict those original inhabitants and conduct their rituals? What proof is there that these rituals benefit the cosmos, as they claim? Fumbling for answers, Rama finally dodges her with a seemingly profound statement about the relativity of human emotions and experiences. When he takes up his bow and arrow and strides away to do his ‘duty’, we are left with Sita, and her sombre conclusion.
Another is the myth of machismo as celebrated in the manly sport of bull-taming known as ‘jallikattu’, when a young bull is released into a crowd, and ‘bulls among men’ attempt to grab the raging animal by the hump. The twist in the story’s tail comes when a paraiya bullfighter defeats an upper-caste champion, and his community faces a bloody backlash. Jallikattu is said to date back to the Indus Valley period and attracts huge crowds in more than twenty towns of southern Tamil Nadu during the Pongal festival. In 2006, the sport was banned when a young man was gored to death, but the ban was lifted by the Supreme Court in 2017.
‘Aasaigal’ has a hands-on feel on what it means to dig up millet-bearing land, pull out all existing vegetation and prepare it for a cash crop. It needs a tractor now—their aging plough bull won’t do. This story of the frustrations of an aspiring farmer family struggling to fulfil school-going children’s needs is a nitty-gritty account of the upheavals in the agricultural eco-system.
Exposing and confronting sexist contempt, ‘Pottachi Manasu’ is a story with a virtually untranslatable title. Throbbing with the anguish of a Sangam love poem, it sends a shiver down the spine. A father who has invested heavily in his son’s education, which has failed to yield a job, reacts to the youth’s love for a girl from a rival caste by spitting out an obscene curse. A sentence of living death on the two young people, it rings all too true, from the many reports of ‘honour killings’ here and elsewhere in the country. In ‘Veembu’, the fury of a woman betrayed and the emotional blackmail she confronts leads to a bitter stalemate. ‘Iyanthirangal’ (Machines) graphically illustrates the gruelling time and energy-management problems of an aspirational working couple. ‘Sontha Veedu’ (Her Own House) shows that the age-old dilemma of growing old and helpless has not yielded any quick fixes.
What is striking is the absence of a conscious ‘style’. Imayam writes as people think, and speak, and about what they are doing in no-nonsense Tamil prose bristling with metaphor and idiom. His microscope zooms in on the viruses in the collective psyche, his telescope on the context of psycho-social history. Perplexing questions arise in the reader’s mind, but he doesn’t provide any diagnoses or remedies. Just a compelling prognosis about Tamil society. If he has a sense of what blights relationships, he also detects the pragmatic streak that heals hurts, as in ‘Mugam’.
In one unforgettable story, ‘Adangaatha Azhugai’ (Uncontrollable Sobs), a child stands in front of her teacher, a newcomer who wants to get to know his sixth-class pupils. He cannot get her to come out with the name of her village. When he finally gets it out of her, after holding himself back from giving her a thrashing, that place name—Paraiyan-kulam—comes with a burst of uncontrollable sobs. An outcaste hamlet. So what, demands the teacher, coming out with the name of his village—Vannan-kudikaadu—Washerman’s Jungle. Another outcaste place name. And he reels out several other place names that reveal the caste of the inhabitants. ‘What’s in a name?’ he declares. Like Shakespeare.
It’s true, but not true enough. For the teacher is one of those whose education and exposure to the wider world have kept his caste consciousness from diminishing his self-confidence. A place name for him is just an address. Not so for the girl, who is one of the few in her community to have made it to that middle school full of ‘other’ children from ‘other’ villages. Ironically, her name turns out to be Arivoli—the Light of Wisdom. Her parents have given her the name of the literacy movement—Arivoli Iyakkam—of the 90s, which drew people from every nook and corner of Tamil Nadu to raise the literacy level to 85.5 per cent. But Arivoli did not do away with the caste system. On the contrary, the political eco-system has exploited the self-awareness of the newly-literate to intensify inter-caste rivalries everywhere. In this part of the world where the jostling clouds of caste and community hang over a place, its name can become an etched tattoo of identity on those who live there.
People know Imayam as a ‘Dalit’ writer, but that slotting is too narrow for this clear-eyed observer. His razor-sharp writing slashes away at that slot and widens it, until the Dalit narrative gushes out as a revelation of the fundamental human condition. Yes, there are no neatly tied final knots in Imayam’s stories. The mind of the reader is left holding the strings—and looking at the world afresh. Dealing with the loose strings is up to him or her.
Vasantha Surya, translator of ancient and modern Tamil poetry, novels and short stories of Tamil writers, has written three volumes of poetry, one of them a translation from Bundeli Hindi, and some 300 articles and reviews for major publications, as well as a children’s novel.