Renaissance man

First published in The Bengal Post

Of the Marathi author VS Khandekar, it was said that he was better known in Tamil Nadu than in his home state, especially in the 1950s, thanks to the excellent translations of his works by the likes of Ka Sri Sri or KS Srinivasacharya. What the Tamil Khandekar—as CN Annadurai once described him—did for Marathi literature, TN Kumaraswamy and (to a lesser extent his brother TN Senapati) did for Bengali literature. Many of us growing up in the 1950s and 60s owed much of our acquaintance with Bengali literature to Kumaraswamy or Ta Naa Ku, who amazingly enough, learnt Bengali in Madras.

What prompted him to set himself the task of bringing Bengali literary classics to Tamil readers is not clearly known, but he fell in love with Tagore’s writings even as a schoolboy. His son Aswini Kumar—the key person behind his centenary celebrations in 2007—recalls a story Ta Naa Ku often told of how the fiery Tamil poet Subramania Bharati sang aloud his own translation of a Rabindranath Tagore poem, but ecstatic as he was to come face to face with Tagore, was blocked by a sea of admirers who had surrounded him at the Madras Central Railway station in 1919.

Though Kumaraswamy translated Bankim Chandra, Sarat Chandra, Tagore and Tara Sankar Banerjee among others, Sarat Chandra was his favourite. He once said, “When I prepared myself to read prominent writers of modern Bengal, I discovered Saratchandra to be of a different quality of mind. Unlike Bankimchandra, he never intruded himself upon the readers. His aim was not to tell a story to entertain or touch our hearts but to force us to think and understand the deep and hidden significance of the problems of life. He was not of the type of novelist who took liberties to exaggerate, to create a world more beautiful, more consoling than ours.”.

Kumaraswamy took the idea of introducing Sarat Chandra to Tamil magazine readers to Kalki, the editor of Ananda Vikatan, in the late 1930s, when a rather insular mood prevailed in the field. “I read to him (Kalki) select passages from Saratchandra’s various novels and explained to him that the Tamil public would surely relish them, and that it would open a new vista to the future novelists of Tamil Nadu.” Tamil readers soon became familiar with such works as Bindur Chele, Swami and Dena Paona, thanks to the labours of Kumaraswamy. He also wrote on Sarat Chandra’s life and works in the Tamil digest Manjari, and condensed novels like Parineeta, Biraj Bau and Palli-Samaj.

An author himself, Kumaraswamy wrote short stories and novels of unusual sophistication and deep humanism. A keen follower of classical music, he learnt to play the nagaswaram, on which he played both Carnatic and Hindustani melodies. His reading was as diverse as his library was vast, its collection both both Indian and western. He was an earlier translator of Sangam verse into English than AK Ramanujan. A great admirer of Aldous Huxley and Ananda Coomaraswamy, he translated Coomaraswamy’s Gautama Buddha into Tamil.

A Gandhian to the core, Kumaraswamy once gifted an acre of his own land to Adi Dravidars who had lost everything in a caste war. The author of the commentary for AK Chettiar’s well known documentary on Mahatma Gandhi, he was part of a team involved in translating Gandhi’s works into Tamil, a project he quit over a matter of principle. And for all his devotion to Gandhi, he was an ardent admirer of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose as well, translating two of his works into Tamil!

Kumaraswamy loved to read, write and translate, but he was equally fond of discussing books and literature. Many a young writer came under his benevolent gaze and profited from his tendency to talk books for hours on end.

Kumaraswamy was a true renaissance man, of whom it can be said without fear of contradiction: ‘They don’t make them like that any more.”

Queen of Song

First published in The Bengal Post

Thursday was MS Subbulakshmi’s 94th birth anniversary. She has been gone for nearly six years now, leaving a huge void in the lives of thousands of worshippers of her grand music and her near divine aura. Yet, she is ever present in those lives, to go by the number of families for whom the day starts with her Sri Venkatesa Suprabhatam broadcast every morning by All India Radio.

The sheer magic of her voice followed me as I walked through the streets of one of the humbler settlements of Chennai the other day, with home after home waking to the reverberant cadences of her chants. It was but a logical epilogue to a life whose funeral was attended by a remarkable number of mourners from the poorest sections of society, as quietly dignified in their grief as the elite and the cognoscenti among the varied assemblage at her earthly abode.

My earliest memories of MS Subbulaksmi are of concerts at Mylapore, Chennai, back in the late 1950s, when I, Carnatic music ignoramus though I was, could not help being mesmerised by her glorious voice, especially her tremendous reach in the higher registers. She was relatively young, and her voice was still evolving into the majestic form it achieved in her mature years.

The first time I saw her at close quarters was some ten years later at Vasant Vihar, the Greenways Road home of the Krishnamurti Foundation. It was at a mellow, meditative concert for the benefit of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the fortunate few who had gathered there were able to catch a glimpse of greatness up close.

My next memory of MS is from a cutcheri at the Madras University Centenary auditorium in 1969. I was seated next to her grandniece who was to become my wife soon afterwards—though neither of us knew it then.

By sheer fluke, I guessed the name of a raga right—it was a close shave, because I debated between two choices, and mentally tossed a coin before stumbling on the right answer—and that must have impressed my companion.

Marriage brought me into the privileged circle of those fortunate enough to know MS on a personal level. Amazingly, during home visits or at weddings, she would happily sing alone or lead a chorus with no concern for the level of accomplishment of her accompanists.

One unforgettable experience was listening to MS at a simple family ceremony in 1993, when she sang sitting on the rough floor of a house still under construction. She was in magnificent voice and the whole room was surcharged with emotion as her sonorous tones filled the place with an aura of sheer devotion.

My thoughts were full of my father who had passed away months earlier, and it was a rare moment of sublimation such as I had never experienced before.

Like everyone who has come into contact with MS, I was struck by her simplicity. Her essential goodness is foremost in the memories of most who knew her—as much as the sublimity of her music.

Thousands of ambitious parents must have paraded their offspring’s musical talent before her. Not only did she patiently listen to everyone of these amateur outpourings, she never hurt the feelings of the most cacophonic of their authors.
The harshest criticism was a smiling, “You must work very hard.”

She was a simple human being all right, self effacing, shy, anxious to make a good impression, even nervous about her English. But she always rose to the occasion. After practising her lines with Eliza Dolittle-like diligence (“How kind of you to come!” and so on), when Sonia Gandhi came to condole her husband’s death, she melted everyone’s heart by holding the visitor’s hands and spontaneously saying, “What is my grief before yours?”

It was the kind of grace that made her the magnificent icon she was..