Suchitra Ramachandran – “Nobility and evil don’t come in segregated packs”

What does this recognition mean to you?
I am certainly happy about it, both in a personal capacity as well as what this augurs for South Asian literature more broadly. I feel a sense of gratification that my translation was read and shortlisted by judges who are so far removed from the culture in which The Abyss is set. To me, that demonstrates, once again, the power and appeal of literature, and the perennial relevance of good translation. I always feel humbled before that.
It is also remarkable that this is the second year in a row that a Jeyamohan work is getting shortlisted for an ALTA prize – last year, his Stories of the True translated by Priyamvada Ramkumar was shortlisted for the ALTA’s National Translation Award. I think that it is a growing testament to the universal appeal of Jeyamohan’s works.
Ezhaam Ulagam, the title that Jeyamohan used, means “the seventh underworld”. What made you choose The Abyss? How did you feel about letting go of the layers of Hindu cosmological and mythological associations packed into the Tamil title?
Book titles are often chosen for their ‘ring’ – how they sound, what associations they recall in their language. It is a very subjective thing. The Tamil title Ezhaam Ulagam not only carries the literal meaning – recall of the seventh underworld – but also evokes in its utterance the feeling of a far-off, foreign, remote place – ‘the seventh world’. A reader couldn’t be faulted if they heard the name and thought it was a work of fantasy or science fiction. It is chillingly ironic, since the ‘far-off’ place the book refers to, which appears so removed and strange to the reader, actually exists all around her. The title works because all these associations are packed into the name, and because of its peculiar sound, or poetic ring.
In my experience, literal translations seldom make for strong titles, especially if they sound explanatory. I would’ve never chosen The Seventh Underworld as the title; it doesn’t have a poetic ring to my ear. I considered The Seventh Abyss to preserve the mythological association but my editor and other people I tried it on felt it didn’t have the right ring, so we settled on the plainer The Abyss. The starkness of the title has ended up working better in English. I didn’t particularly feel like I had let go of the Hindu cosmological and mythological associations of the original title since those are worked into the text.
Pothivelu Pandaram, the protagonist of this novel, runs a business that benefits from the vulnerabilities of people with disabilities who are placed outside temples and made to beg. What did this premise evoke in you when you read the novel for the first time?
I remember that my first instinct was one of revulsion and horror. It was not so much with Pandaram’s choice of trade, as it was with the matter-of-fact manner in which he indulged in it. He is a good husband, a caring father, a pillar of society, who very sincerely goes to the temple to offer thanks because he now has a fresh new ‘item’ that he can exploit and profit off! The casualness of it horrified me. It is what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”. It was when I realised a fundamental life-truth — nobility and evil don’t come in conveniently segregated, labelled packs. That is the very nature of life, as it is. It was a moment of revulsion with life itself.
The stigma associated with disabilities in India comes partly from the idea of karma. While translating this novel, did you acquaint yourself with the work of disability rights activists, and literary scholarship on the depiction of disability in fiction?
No, I did not. And I don’t think Jeyamohan did either when he wrote the novel. I think it is important as a member to society to familiarise oneself with disability rights, to use preferred language and create social spaces that are equitable. But I think that when it comes to writing and translating fiction, it is a different process.
I have had some conversations with Jeyamohan on how he came to writing the novel, and on his philosophy of literature, and I will paraphrase that here. Literature is born from the power of the imagination, from the ability of the writer to live the life of someone different from themselves through their observation, imagination and entrenched empathy. The insights we get into human nature when reading creative fiction come about not because the writer has engaged in scholarship about their lives – not because he ‘knows’ and repeats what he has learnt – but because the writer has sensitively lived as them in his imagination – he has ‘felt’ it and is able to articulate his feelings in language. That is why the creative writer has wholly fresh insights, he is able to go beyond logic, beyond what everyone can see, and articulate something new. It is that deep-felt empathy and identification that results in wholly formed, memorable characters like Kuyyan or Ramappan.
The novel does not set out to depict a picture of disability. Rather it philosophizes it, and questions ‘what is disability’. What we get is a picture of the many ways in which humans are fundamentally disabled and abled. Pandaram, for all his bluster, is impotent in the face of naked violence. He is unable to save his daughters from their fates. The temple priest, ostensibly of an ‘upper’ caste, resorts to trickery and begging to keep his trade going. Even Murugan is satirized as a beggar. On the other hand, regardless of their physical infirmities, Ramappan and friends create a feast for Kuyyan. Mangandi Samy seems to live beyond our notions of ability and disability. What is high, what is low, what is ability, what is disability – the novel in an almost anarchic way jumbles up all our received notions about these things. That is what a well-constructed novel can do, that any number of academic studies cannot.
I agree with that philosophy of literature. As a translator, I followed the same spirit, by trying to imbibe those characters and feelings myself and bring them out in my language.
The kind of Tamil that people speak is often influenced by their geographical location, religious affiliation and caste background. Since the plot of Ezhaam Ulagam unravels mainly through dialogue, how did you rise up to the challenge of translation? What did this process reveal about your own relationship to Tamil?
I grew up in southern Tamil Nadu, and was exposed to various dialects growing up, but my ear for dialect was actually sharpened by reading literature. A lot of Tamil literature after the 1980s was written in dialects particular to specific landscapes and castes. When I started reading in Tamil, I was fascinated by the many Tamils I was reading, and one of my favourite things to do was to flip through vattaara vazhakku sol-agarathigal – dialect dictionaries – for fun.
But literature is not written in the exact dialect that people on the street speak. A good work of literature bends and shapes the language to reflect the inner language of the novel. It is that inner language that the translator wants to be clued in to. Dialect cannot exist in a cross-language translation. It is one of those things that willy-nilly will be lost. But one can be sensitive to registers, moods, undercurrents, subtexts and other such nuances that are conveyed through dialect, and articulate those in translation. Often it is such subtleties that make up the emotional landscape of a novel. I enjoy putting my finger on these cues, and the process of translating the work made me keener to it.
This means the translator needs to broaden their own cultural and linguistic worlds. That is one of the pleasurable educations that literature has to offer. We can inhabit other worlds, become totally different people, larger than ourselves. For instance, I was delighted by the sheer variety of swear words that I encountered in Ezhaam Ulagam. Much of its humour is not what I would use in my everyday conversation.
I think that a writer or translator acquires a self through language that is far bigger than the selves they were born with. My own relationship to Tamil is no longer a static thing, because as a translator I am not a static being.
The novel is based on Jeyamohan’s experiences in Tiruvannamalai and Pazhani from the time he left his home, wore ochre robes, and lived among mendicants and beggars. Did you wonder whether a woman in Tamil Nadu or elsewhere in India might get to have similar experiences and write about them? Jeyamohan says, “Begging is often a prescribed part of the spiritual journey.” Do women get to go on such journeys?
Some time back I read Vicki Mackenzie’s Cave in the Snow, about the life experiences of Tenzin Palmo, a British-born Tibetan Buddhist nun of the Drukpa-Kagyu order. Reading her account made me wonder why there are no such popular biographies of Indian women who have undertaken similar journeys. Are such women so few, or do they not get books written about them?
If this is about the life of an ordained nun, the begging life is even more unusual for spiritually inclined women in Indian society. Yes, such freedoms and joys – if you could call a life of begging one of freedom and joy – are not easy for women to experience. There are many reasons for it. Perhaps it is not often that even spiritual women have the inclination to set out on a wandering path. Their inner impulses may be different. Their conditioning could be a part of it. Saffron-clad wandering men are generally more easily accepted by our society than a saffron-clad wandering woman. Perhaps it is the absence of visible examples that plays a role. Male wandering sanyasis often travel and live in communities. There are very few such visible communities of wandering women. Perhaps – if I allow myself to be cynical – the life of the average Indian women caught fast in the cycles of body, family and society already resembles beggarhood to some degree that there is no motivation to seek it outside.
However, any spiritual quest is an out-of-the-ordinary journey, and I feel it takes a very unusual kind of person to decide to set out and live a free life surviving on what comes their way. There have been examples of such women in history. Akkamahadevi is a popular example. There was Avudai Akkal, an 18th century Brahmin widow-turned-spiritual poet from Senkottai who, in some oral tales, was said to have led a wandering life. She influenced the poet Subramania Bharati. An early biography of the spiritual leader Narayana Guru mentions that he was initiated into the Advaitic tradition by a wandering yogini called Ammalu. In more recent memory, there is Mayamma, a beggar and saint who lived in Kanyakumari, and was always known to be followed by a pack of dogs.
Spiritual journeys and quests, by definition, are of the spirit, and not material, of the flesh – are not and need not be manifested in materiality. It is an inner journey. So I also feel that it is possible that one can wander, one can suffer, one can empty oneself and ‘beg’ – while all the while never leaving one’s home.
You call Jeyamohan “a classicist in the tradition of Ilango and Kamban”; a writer who “is not so much a storyteller of our times as he is a quasi-historical, even mythical figure, a pauranika, who just happens to be passing through our times.” What makes you think so? To what extent does his essay collection Purappadu play a role in this?
I made that remark with reference to his larger body of work. His major works like Vishnupuram, Kottravai and Venmurasu are novelistic reimaginations and re-narrations of history. There is a subjective aspect in any historiography. But poets and novelists – in olden times, the pauranikas and bards – have historically had greater imaginative freedom since they were clearly writing in the poetic, fictional idiom.
So when a modern poet reimagines history, what they write is an emotional history that observes and builds on links and undercurrents in objective recorded history. This allows them to recast history in the light of modern knowledge, to bring in voices that objective historiographical methods might otherwise ignore, and bring to the fore stories and perspectives that are not ‘mainstream’.
This is the kind of writing that Jeyamohan is best known for. In Vishnupuram he uses the image of a temple and the recumbent deity enshrined in it as an icon for an unknowable truth that has come down history, in various guises – now in the form of Vishnu, before that in the form of Buddha, and even before that, in some unrecorded historical period, as an ancient primordial tribal folk deity. In depicting the rise and fall of the temple, he questions the holiness of the idols that nationalists want to build a nation upon today. In Kottravai, he writes a matriarchal history of Tamil. In Venmurasu, he re-imagines the Mahabharatha as a historical war, not between two families, but between two philosophical schools and social orders. In this process, he recasts the epic in the voices of the peoples who were later disenfranchised – nagas, asuras, nishadas as well as their women and children.
Jeyamohan’s extensive travels and first-hand observation of India informed many of the perspectives that went on to build his novels. Purappadu has personal, fiction-tinged essays that describe many of those experiences.
Bala’s film Naan Kadavul (I Am God), which released in 2009, is based on Ezhaam Ulagam. What did you think of the cinematic adaptation?
The film was actually how I first heard about Jeyamohan. My husband watched the film first. He was highly moved, and recommended it to me, but at that time I felt a reluctance to watch it. However, I learned that the film was based on a Tamil novel, discovered Jeyamohan and eventually started reading his other works. It was not until 2015 that I read Ezhaam Ulagam. It was only after that that I watched Naan Kadavul.
Over time it has grown to be very close to me. Bala understands the vision of Ezhaam Ulagam. He has created a film that is his adaptation of it. His adaptation, while including characters that are not there in the novel, still belongs to the emotional and spiritual universe of the novel. I feel that an adaptation is also a kind of translation, and therefore feel very close to Bala and to the film.
Ilayaraja’s monumental music for the film is his translation of Ezhaam Ulagam’s vision. Some of the songs from the film often played in the background when I was translating the novel. It is now to me inseparable from the mood of the novel.
You were raised in Madurai, a temple town. What similarities did you notice or sense between the setting of the novel, and the surroundings you grew up in, at an apparent and visceral level? Did the process of translation help you see things in a new light?
When I visited Rome a year back, I felt a strange affinity to the city. It reminded me a lot of Madurai. Rome too is a ‘temple town’, with grand towers above and beggars at its feet. The beggars of Rome viscerally reminded me of the beggars of The Abyss.
Unlike the gods of capitalism, organised religion has a very different sort of relationship with the poor and the disenfranchised. Organised religion often offers itself as a succour and solution to poverty, while simultaneously exploiting the poor.
However, poverty and deprivation are always closely aligned to the experience of religious feeling. Spirituality begins with a sense of dissatisfaction with life, a hunger for something more, something unreachable. The devotee who feels the presence of God, somewhere beyond, wants to experience him, yet cannot, feels the abandonment and abjection of a beggar. He is constantly stretching his hands out. The spirituality of Christ lies in his identification with that feeling – he was one of the simple folk too – while simultaneously embodying compassion towards the forlornness of his brothers. This is why monks in religious orders, like Saint Francis of Assisi, took on the robes of the mendicant and lived a poor life – to live as they felt inside.
The tension between these two experiences, the material and the spiritual, can be seen apparently in any temple town. Many of those layers revealed themselves to me over the years, partly through experience and observation, but certainly through the act of translating and living in this novel.
The interlibrary loan programme in American universities introduced you to a lot of modern Tamil literature in your twenties. What were you studying in Pittsburgh back then, and who are some of your favourite modern Tamil writers? If you were invited to teach a course on Tamil literature in translation, which texts would you include?
I was doing my PhD in neuroscience in Pittsburgh, I was studying learning and memory. I read at night and on weekends. My favourite modern Tamil writers from the previous generations are Pudhumaipithan, Ki. Rajanarayanan, Jayakanthan, Thi. Janakiraman, Poomani and Ashokamitran. Ashokamitran has also translated some short fiction into English – of all the translations I have read from that era, his is the best. I think a survey course of modern Tamil literature will include works by all these writers.
Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist and book reviewer.