Kalyan Raman کلیان راماں · @kalyanasc
25th Nov 2014 from TwitLonger
On ND Rajkumar's poetry and the Nagercoil incident
I came across ND Rajkumar's work for the first time in early 2007, when Dr. Susie Tharu, who was then co-editing a volume of Dalit writing in Tamil and Malayalam for Oxford University Press (India), got in touch with me about translating a few of Rajkumar's poems for that volume. (Navayana had not come into existence yet.)
I agreed readily, and had the chance to read several anthologies of his poetry. His work was stunning and like nothing I had read before, not especially in contemporary Tamil poetry. There were three constituent elements of his poetry: a celebration of male desire, unalloyed by sentimentality; militant revolutionary politics; and, literally, a sorcerer's imagination. All this was expressed in the fresh and earthy language of a learned subaltern. It was heady stuff Here was an original poet.
The anthology edited by Susie Tharu and K Sathyanarayana was published by Penguin in 2011. I translated a few more poems by Rajkumar for another anthology of Dalit writing edited by D Ravikumar and R Azhagarasan and published by OUP in 2012.
The fact is, NDR has been discriminated against in the Tamil milieu for a long time. There were many who dismissed his work as not-poetry. I recall being shocked at how a wide-ranging anthology of Tamil poetry, Kongu Ther Vaazhkkai, edited by the late Rajamarthandan, had pointedly excluded Rajkumar. But he continued to be published and read, and through translations, he came to be valued very highly even by those outside Tamilnadu who were inclined to celebrate the emergence of new voices in both art and politics. @WriterRavikumar's anthology of Rajkumar's selected poetry, Kal Thoongal was an important milestone in this journey. (Ravikumar was also associated with Navayana in its initial years as a co-founder.) Today, by the sheer force of his talent, ND Rajkumar is winning greater recognition among the wider public. His prowess as a singer and his recent contributions to television and cinema have served to extend his reach.
Now, to the incident. While the insult to Rajkumar should be condemned unequivocally, it is also important to understand it in the context of the larger milieu in Tamilnadu. With the mendacity that is so typical of political discourse in Tamilnadu, Sahitya Akademi has been made the villain of the piece. The person in charge of the SA event is certainly responsible for his failure to manage the eruption of casteist violence at an event hosted by it, resulting in insult and humiliation for the poet, the real damage was done by the intolerant and casteist mob at the meeting. Increasingly the institutional spaces in Tamilnadu, both within and outside government and politics, have been taken over by a new casteism that is bent on keeping Dalits in their place through insult and intimidation. This is almost a daily affair in our offices, colleges and other public spaces. That's the horror Tamil society must deal with in the coming years.
As for the protest against Sahitya Akademi by the worthies of Delhi, I suppose it's a thing they do and it makes good sense from their perspective. I doubt that it will be of much consequence otherwise.