C.V.Raman Pillai (1858-1922)

          The great renaissance that started in Malayalam literature towards the end of the 19th century found its most effective spokesmen in two great novelists and three poets. The two novelists were O.Chandu Menon of Malabar and C.V.Raman Pillai of Travancore. C.V.Raman Pillai was eleven years junior to Chandu Menon. Both benefited from English education, but consistent with their respective gifts and temperaments, they achieved near perfection in what they tried to do. Their high position as supreme masters of the novel remains unchallenged till date. Chandu Menon is the greatest novelist in Malayalam, and C.V.Raman Pillai's Ramaraja Bahadur is the greatest novel. Chandu Menon's attention was focused on contemporary social reality and through it he discovered the eternal springs of human character.           C.V.Raman Pillai used history as a means of unfolding the intricacies of human life, both on the socio-political plane and on the psychological plane. It is difficult to say whether he ever tried to explore history as a means of redemption. But it would be wrong to say that he does not concern himself with social reality: he does speculate on the role of leadership in society, on the fortunes of families through generations and on the conflict between character and destiny.
         C.V.Raman Pillai's major contribution to fiction consists of Martanda Varma (published 1891), Dharmaraja (1893), Premamritam (started in 1915) and Ramaraja Bahadur (1918-20). Martanda Varma is a very early work, written under the direct influence of Walter Scott's Waverley novels, especially Ivanhoe. The history of Travancore (earlier Venad) -strictly speaking, the formationof the State of Travancore and its teething troubles - had caught and captured C.V.Raman Pillai's imagination from his student days and it continued to be a haunting obsession for an entire lifetime. Centring around the love affair or Ananthapadmanabhan and Parukkutty, the entire political conspiracy of Pappu Tampi and the Eight Nayar Houses against young Martanda Varma, the rightful heir to the throne on the matrilineal model, is hatched, unravelled, and foiled by the clever machinations of the prince and his able supporters. And yet outside of the involutions of the plot, the reader gets very little from the work. Most of the characters are either types or unfinished studies: the exception is Subhadra, that flickering wick of love and loyalty beaming through the solid darkness of intrigue and treachery enveloping the main plot. History appears here as a fairy tale where our wiling suspension of disbelief is the author's chief asset. The author himself makes it clear in the preface that he was writing historical romance. But the style is adequate, the narration is bold, and the plot is ingenious.
          The work shows, even as Kerala Varmas Akbar tries to demonstrate, that the style for a novel of epic dimensions is a combination of Sanskritized diction, repeated rhetorical flourishes and heavy dramatic juxtapositions. The colloquial or contemporary language might be judiciously used for certain characters in certain scenes, but must inevitably merge in the larger sweep and must swell the chorus for the final effect. This principle is kept up in C.V.Raman Pillai's maturer novels also Dharmaraja, published twenty two years later, reveals what a big stride the author had taken during the interval. This is an unusual gap, but the glory is that C.V.Raman Pillai was able to bridge it and now with redoubled vigour and heightened imaginative power he ransacks the archives of Travancore history. Raja Kesava Das and the royal family, whose fortunes he consciously chose to espouse, recede into the background; even the nominal love story of Meenakshi and Kesavan Unnithan pale into relative insignificance. The psychology of revenge and personal ambition and the ultimate triumph of moral power are the things that neo come into the foreground. It is the tragedy of the Kazhakkoottam House- high tragedy overtaking the scion of that "family of the unflinching heart" - that holds the attention of the novelist as well as the readers.

         Ramaraja Bahadur, C.V.Raman Pillai's masterpiece, is conceived on an epic style: the little love story of Savitri and Trivikraman cannot loom very large on this cyclorama of history where the clash of wits and the crash of arms overwhelm the readers. If there is an epic for the people of Kerala, it is perhaps Ramaraja Bahadur. The high seriousness of the work is unmistakable. What is at stake in Tippu's invasion and the battle that follows is the fate of millions, not of just a king or a royal family. But within the nerve centre of this conflict of historical forces, there is the delicate situation of the two Kesavas: Kesava Pillai Dewanji and Kesavan Unnithan. The resolution of this two-fold war on the domestic front stirred up by Unnithan's jealousy and war on the country's frontier - is brought about at one stroke at the end. The inscrutable destiny of man - of both the individual and the masses - is the central theme of Ramaraja Bahadur; the structure of the plot, the skill in characterization, the narrative and descriptive skill: all these are merely the means to the ultimate end of unravelling this mystery. Ramaraja Bahadur has attempted this more successfully than any other Malayalam novel written so far. Its imitators succumbed to an easy and total collapse because of their failure to understand this essential feature of C.V's art.

The Romanitc Movement

         The high tide of renaissance was brought into Malayalam literature by a variety of influences. The familiarity our poet acquired with British romantic poets was one of them. There were in 19th century Kerala, as in 18th century England, a number of precursors of the Romantic movement. One of the most gifted of them was V.C.Balakrishna Panikkar (1890-1915)-"the marvellous boy" of Malayalam poetry. In his short life he was able to make a tremendous breakthrough in the language and sensibility of Malayalam poets. His most important poems are Oru Vilapam and Viswaroopam. The former, "A Lament" is a major elegy in Malayalam. The lover who is lamenting the death to his lady in an epidemic of cholera is the focus of our attention here. The opening quatrain presents him "as seated facing a lamp that continued to burn while he could not even push its wick". One quatrain must suffice to illustrate his intensity and power of phrasing:

The freshness that comes of beauty,
The frame arising from poetry,
The prestige due to scholarship,
The pomp on account of martial skill:
All virtues so described knock at the same gate
And merge at the end into the same ultimate
Source of all.

N. Kumaran Asan (1873-1924)

         The poet who most clearly symbolizes the poetic revolution in the first quarter of the 20th century is Kumaran Asan. His early discipleship of Sri Narayana Guru and his Sanskrit studies at Bangalore, Madras and Calcutta were important influences on his poetic development. The three and a half years he spent outside Kerala provided him with a kind of board outlook and deep sensibility which would perhaps have been impossible if he had stayed at home. A deep moral and spiritual commitment became part of Asan's personality and when after a spell of writing devotional poetry he turned to secular themes, he could produce something without any precedent in the language. Oru Veena Poovu ( A fallen flower, 1907) combines the lyrical and the elegiac with the romantic. Yet the relaxed discipline of a classical training was always there to add a deeper tone to his close investigation of the meaning of life as seen in the brief career of a flower. The infinite delicacy of touch in passages like the following was rare in Malayalam poetry at that time (Translation by G.Kumara Pillai).

The mother-plant with loving care
Enfolded your infant charm in calyx soft;
The gentle breeze came rocking you to sleep
To the lullaby of the murmuring leaves.
..........................................................
Your lovely body told a moving tale
Of golden days of fulfilled youth;
Your days were brief, and yet so rich and full;
You had your woes; and yet your mind was steeped in joy.

         The same close attention to detail may be found in all his poems, which authenticates and thereby enhances their spiritual glow. Asan did not try to write a neoclassicist mahakavya: instead he specialized in the narratives of middle length. Nalini (1911), Leela (1914), Chintavishtayaya Sita (1919), Duravastha (1922), Chandalabhikshuki (1923) and Karuna (1923) are eloquent testimony to Asan's powers of poetic concentration and dramatic contextualization. Occasionally the call of social pressures lured him to try a different strain, as in "Reflections of a Thiyya Boy".

Why shouldst thou wail, then, O Bharat?
Thy slavery is thy destiny, O Mother!
Thy sons, blinded by caste, clash among themselves
And get killed; what for is freedom, then?

          Asan is often described as the poet of love: many writers have written about love, but Asan's love is of a transcendental kind and in poem after poem. Nalini, Leela, Chandalabhikshki, he demonstrates it. For him it was identical with ultimate and absolute freedom, as he explains it in "The Song of Freedom". In Sita his reflections on love turn a bit bitter as the situation perhaps deserves it. In Duravastha it achieves a slight transformation, since he tries to seek love's meaning in terms of contemporary reality. It is set against the historical background of the Moplah Rebellion, but Asan the poet is basically concerned with the establishment of the idea that all men belong to the same caste and same religion, as he was taught by Sri Narayana Guru. Here is a representative passage from Duravastha which reveals the social reformer and prophet in Asan:

Wake up O you gardeners,
Wake up and toil, spring is at hand.
In this garden enriched by beautiful blossoms
On high bough and low,
Remember there is not a single flower
Which does not delight the Lord.
Come forward-
And replace the laws,
Or else they are sure to displace you.
There is a raging wind
Unceasingly reverberating with this utterance in today's Kerala
Time from all the four directions declares the self-same thing
And even the earth beneath your feet resounds with the din of unrest.

          Asan as a poet was a great synthesizer. He wrote two major poems on Buddhist legends; Chandalabhikshuki and Karuna (Compassion). They were his last works, written before his untimely death in 1924. Love Freedom and Equality are his basic concerns. The last lines of Karuna sum up all these in concrete, context-based terms:

Salutations to thee, O Upagupta: without getting lost in
'nirvana' come back again to serve the world.
Mother Earth today needs more of such sons as you whose
compassion reaches the lowliest and lost.

          Asan's career illustrates in full changes that were taking place in the Malayalam poetry of his time. His earliest works were mainly hymns employing Sanskritized diction and Sanskrit metres. With Oru Veena Poovu (1907) his sensibility registers a change: the diction is simplified, and although Sanskrit metres are used, they have a closeness by now to the easy and flowing Dravidian metres. The pessimistic note is replaced by a more strident note in some of the later poems. The use of a focal character - most of such characters are women like Nalini in Nalini and Sita in the poem named after her - as protagonist helps to dramatize the whole experience of the poem. In the shorter poems and in Prarodanam, an elegy with a splendid and reasonant orchestration, the style fluctuates, but in his last three poems Dravidian metres are used, the diction is simple and natural. Karuna is the culminating point of this trend.