Thursday, October 18, 2012

Kalki's imagination


Constructing / Contesting Cultures: the fiction of Kalki



This essay analyses the way the Tamil writer Kalki contested and constructed cultural attitudes in his fiction. It takes up for analysis the historical romance of Kalki, Ponniyin Selvan.

One would wonder why a Tamil writer is taken up for analysis in a post colonial framework as only Indian writing in English is treated generally as postcolonial. The Empire Writes Back puts this scenario of regional writing like this:

More than anywhere in the post-colonial world, perhaps, the possibility of writing in vernacular languages other than english exists in India  as an immediate and practical choice (P. 121)

The regional literature at the colonial period had its own space of addressing the people in its well defined space. It was sure of its readers. It had the great role of redefining the self against the other. It had to use strategies to proclaim its representational powers of perceived reality. The political mood of the era put imagination in a straight framework that structured the writings.

Kalki knew what could be the thematic structures and thought processes that would attract his readership. There was no conflict in the minds of the writers as to how to translate the local idiom that is faced by the Indo-Anglian writers across the subcontinent. Writing was active and the responded quickly to its activist mode.

Analyzing a regional work of the period will tell us what were the constructions / deconstructions that took place in the social / cultural space of society. When the regional writer is extremely popular like Kalki, the study can further reflect the qualities of the social ambience. Kalki’s novels were serialized those days in the 1940s and were an enormous success. Even to this day that popularity has not died. Being a master story teller, he knew what themes to choose and how to handle them to keep up his readership intact.

Certain questions emerge at this juncture: What was it that made people devour his fiction – especially, the historical romances? How did Kalki know the pulse of his people and what are the strategies he employed to materialize that into the art of writing? What is it that he fed into the minds of his readers that they felt elated reading him again and again? Did he reflect the society Or did he lead his readers into thinking like him?

Before tackling these questions, let us look at the contributions of Kalki.

Kalki R.Krishnamurthy (1899 – 1954) has to his credit 120 short stories, 10 novelettes,  five novels,  three historical romances,  editorial and political writings,  hundreds of film and music reviews.  He was an active freedom fighter too. When his novel Thyaga Bhoomi was filmed, the people responded so well that the British government banned the movie after some time. They felt the movie indirectly aroused the freedom spirit and instigated them against the British. It is very interesting to note his historical romances are considered bestsellers even now. Each time these novels are serialized in the magazine Kalki, the number of copies increases by many thousands. There are internet fan clubs for Kalki. The historical novels were serialized originally and Kalki had by this time mastered the art of story telling in a serialized form. He knew this new idiom well and used it to construct his ideologies along with his story telling.

It would be appropriate to accommodate the works of Kalki within a modern cultural framework given by Homi Bhabha.  Kalki’s fiction has many moments of interstice and hybridity as it captures a period that came into acute inter-social movement and cultural clashes. There is a lot of negotiation taking place in the works of the novelist. The writer is under pressure from the forces of society. His creative art is shaped by the then current aspects of social thought that had the presence of intense cultural, political, regional, linguistic clashes.

On one side is the new concept of nation and state. The literary imagination of India had taken up this issue of constructing the  nation / state quite forcefully and Kalki couldn’t have escaped this structure. Yet on the other side, the historical structure of geopolitics of the earlier kingdoms also existed in the mind. There were many “others” in the then society in terms of region, religion, languages, directions, and the latest colonial presence. The writer could not negate these influences. He had to tackle the various conflicts in society, as well as provide a new framework to tackle them. There is reconstruction of value system creating a hybridity of cultural accommodation. The resistance takes place strengthening the self against so many “others”.

The society is in its interstitial moment of giving in to new ways breaking open older structures of rigidity, assimilating the new and removing certain processes of the old. High learning takes place at such moments and wee Kalki processing these moments as a strategy to handle the multiplicity in the human situation. Contestation goes side by side of constructions of new systems of thought.  Art acquires a volatile nature at such times of acute moments of tension. It starts aiming at hidden messages and creates extra meanings specially conveyed through allegory and creating forces of energy. The self strengthens itself when pitched against the other in the fear of being lost or suppressed.

The people have to be told about their glorious past. The historical fiction becomes an allegory of the past glory. The people have to be kept up in their morale. Kalki says:

Those days the people who lived in the Chola kingdom were confident of themselves. They were not lazy. They were never tired. Otherwise they couldn’t have built great monuments that are the wonders of the world, isn’t it? (Ponniyin Selvan, Part V, 450)

The construction is obvious. Kalki tells the people a story as if he is talking to children. He is teaching them a moral that is typical quality of postcolonial writers. Don’t be lazy, Kalki is telling his readers. Wake up, he says. The activist message is well hidden within the fascinating historical romance. Wake up against whom? Who is the other here? And then, the people in the Chola kingdom were never tired. So, why does Kalki n say that? Did he the people around him tired and exhausted? Had they given up hope? Against what? What is he raising his people from?  How could the people have built great monuments if they had been lazy and tired? Therefore the people have to be alert, work hard and build great monuments themselves, is the authorial message.

The novel Ponniyin Selvan is about the great Chola King Raja Raja Cholan who was an emperor of great valour and courage. His son Rajendra Cholan wins over the North Indians. But the novel does not talk about the victories of the king. Instead it talks about the sacrifice the king makes. Kalki creates thought processes for the king who was known as Arulmozhi Varmar:


Till now Arulmozhi Varmar was wondering at the sacrifice of the great Buddha. Now his thoughts shifted to histories that describe Siva Perumaan as a Lord of sacrifices. He had heard about the son of God who was considered a messiah, and who was killed on a cross. The more he thought about these things, the more he understood the greatness of sacrifice. (PS, Part V, 456)  

Very carefully Kalki handles the available knowledge systems. The king is presented as a tolerant person, who is aware of two other religions. Also the fact is emphasized all religions teach similar concepts. The king had “heard” about Christianity too. This is a crucial scene in the novel where the king takes a climatic decision. He decides to sacrifice his kingship to his uncle. This is a model of thought presented by the writer to society. We can be hybrid in our approach to value systems offered by different religious systems, Kalki says. Culturally we need not reject any thought process, if it involves higher virtues like “sacrifice”. At this moment sacrifice is accommodated as the self and something else becomes the other. What is that?


Kalki is for the political ideal of the period ahimsa and sacrifice. He construes the characterization in such a way that he makes a warrior king appear like a man of great sacrifices. Kalki continues in the same vein discussing the king’s frame of mind to sacrifice:


He realized it is sacrifice that makes a man Godly. He began thinking how to refuse the kingdom that was offered to him in Thanjavore. People around him wanted him to become the king because they loved him a lot. How to escape from this prison of love he began planning. (PS, Part V, 456)

Apart from this construction of the king’s character, Kalki also ventures to weave an analysis of his western education’s contribution of knowledge. The teaching of his people continues. He wants his readers to be more rationalistic. He wants them to make use of opportunities:

Opportunity is another name for God, says a contemporary scholar. When God does not want to do things directly, he takes the pseudonym of opportunity, it seems.  When we read the history of the great warriors in the world, the great souls who did rare things, we understand how they have been helped by opportunities. (PS, Part V, 461)

A rational analysis of the concept of “opportunity” follows. We should learn to make use of the favourable circumstances that are thrown in front of us. This kind of writing is part of the rhetoric of the self respect movement in society at that time.  Westernized intellectuals created the social space to discuss these ideas of the west in a society that was steeped in social hierarchies. Reading the histories of the world, the people understood the way the others thought through their knowledge of English. Kalki is accommodating this knowledge into his texts. He takes a conversational tone shifting from the main story, creating space for himself to include these perceptions of the world.

Kalki moves between a tradition attitude and a new questioning attitude resulting in a kind of hybrid thought. He has learnt to ask questions of the existing customs and their validity. In fact he is now looking at his own culture through the eyes of the very “other” that he wanted to resist. This kind of mixed impact of the colonial domination becomes part of the people’s growth fixing themselves in a new reality. Kalki argues:

Some people say such great people have been helped specially by God. They might say it is the power of their horoscope, the destiny designed by Brahma, the result of their previous birth etc. People construct various reasons for favourable opportunities in life. (PS, Part V, 461)

He is taking about social constructions of thought systems. It is time we changed our outlook, he says. Let us move with times, he says. Tackling these social reformatory ideas in a historical framework becomes the strategy of Kalki. Hence the resistance and the construction become indirect. It is done casually, even looking unconscious. Thus these constructions become powerful. They enter the reader’s mind where he may not realize exactly how these thoughts entered his head. New thoughts are negotiated fluently using the story as a support of content. Art at this juncture becomes the weapon of ideology carrying messages of reformation. These ideas are not thrust on the readers. Instead they are slowly negotiated reflecting the negotiating ambience of the culture.

Space creates the framework for negotiation. The cultural representation of this ambivalence of modern society Kalki’s fiction discusses the space  of the ‘Other’. The ‘Other’ shifts between the angles of vision. Fiction takes up the positioning of difference in society to present arguments. Space provides a site for negotiation and contestation. Thought processes get shaped into concrete concepts with the social space provided in a particular context. Thoughts are products of time. They are fixations of certain angles of situation.

The angles shift and are an influx. They keep moving from various fixations decided by historicity. During a time of cultural clashes the multiplicity of the “otherness” increases creating a complex social order. Kalki has tried to tackle these social presences in his narrative models using strategies of negotiation. He has negotiated one with the other instead of negating the other. In a way that reflects the society’s mood as it has wanted to retain certain elements of colonialism all the while retaining its past value system intact.


Bibliography


Ashcroft, Bill. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.

Bhabha, Homi K.  The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994

Kalki. Ponniyin Selvan (Parts 1 – 5)  Chennai: Saradha Pathippagam, 1999.



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