Ulloor Parameswara Iyer (1877-1949)

           Ulloor, the second of the grand poetic trinity of the 20th century renaissance in Malayalam, started his career as a poet under the tutelage of Kerala Varma Valiya Koyitampuran. He was a pastmaster in all the traditional games of classical poetry. He even excelled as the writer of a mahakavya by choosing a story from early Kerla history. Umakeralam, his mahakavya, is a work of great devotion: devotion to the land, to the language, to a poetic tradition and to high moral values. He wrote, like Asan and Vallathol, a number of short narratives or khandakavyas, of which the most famous are Karanabhooshanam and Pingala. In the former he celebrates Karna's infinite generosity and dedication to principles. In the later he tries to portray the transformation of a courtesan overnight into a pious and refined character - almost a saint. Ulloor also wrote quite a large number of lyrics and shorter pieces, now available in various collections. They cover a wide range from eulogies to kings and friends to the poetry of social commitment (for example, arguing for Temple Entry for low-caste Hindus).

          Ulloor was perhaps the most classical and the least romantic of the three poets. One could say either that the romantic in him was stifled by the authoritarian classicist or that the classicist in him was trying to pass for a romantic to suit the changing tastes of the time. It must be remembered that Ulloor was one of the first of our fullfledged poets to achieve the benefits of formal education to the post-graduate level from a University. He was thus exposed to the influence of English poetry through class-room instruction. Asan and Vallathol had only informal contact with English poetry. Neither of them could have, on the basis of their training, written a work like Ulloor's monumental History of Kerala Literature. But Asan through self-study and Vallathol partly by his native gift and partly through indirect channels, became imbued with the spirit of romanticism. All the three began as classicists, graduated into romanticism and finally peeped into realism. All of them wrote their best poems during the second phase. Ulloor cultivated the classical lyric with its were severe discipline over the structure and its ultimate didactic motivation. He could say with Wrodsworth that he was a teacher or nothing. But we know that in his best poems, Wordsworth could not keep up his declared intention of being a teacher. What was important was that the reader should be enabled to experience in full, the wonder and excitement that was the source of inspiration for the poem itself. Ulloor is interested not in the communication of that experience through the senses, but in distilling the abstract moral value of that experience. Thus even in his best lyrics he adds almost mechanically like Coleridge at the end of The Ancient Mariner, a moral. Being suspicious of his subjective evaluation, he would invoke some value approved of by the masters of the past. His master was Sri Harsha, not Kalidasa. Thus Annum Innum (Then and Now), after glorifying the past and visualizing a bright future in glowing, eloquent terms, he adds the last quatrain which is an exhortation to the people of India: "India will become the Paradise it was once, O Indians, if we, pure in body and mind, lift ourselves through hard work". The sensuous experience presented earlier does not, according to him, make it valid enough. There are times when Ulloor could rise to the heights of lyricism for short flights: in Bhoothakkannadi (Microscope) he writes:

"The desire to rise seen in the flying fireflies,
the enthusiasm brimming within the singing cuckoo'
to offer worship to other beings,
the skill of the full-blown flower to entice the entire world,
the expertise of the jumping bird to move its feet.......
I have read ambrosia-like suggestive poetry even in mere rust;
I have heard with my ear sweet veena sounds even in silence".
Ulloor's idea of transcendental love is clearly brought out in his Prema Sangeetam (The Music of Love) which concludes with the poet's total self-dedication to God:
O Thou, Spirit Eternal!
Approached through devotion,
Who can ever see Thee
That has not eyes tinted with Universal Love?
What is happiness for others
Is my happiness, indeed;
What is sorrow for others
Is my sorrow, too:
Thou and I and others:
Are not all these the same in truth?
At your beck and call
Are my body and soul:
Shape them, day and night,
Both for others' sake;
O Lord, I salute Thee!

Vallathol Narayana Menon (1878-1958)

          Vallathol's training was in classicism but his native genius was romantic. The spirit of a renaissance was in the air and Vallathol breathed it in sumptuously. He took part in all the neoclassical games of poetry and even wrote a mahakavya, but his reputation today is firmly based on his middle length narratives like Bandhanasthanaya Anirudhan (Anirudhan in Prison: 1914), Sishyanum Makanum (Disciple and Son: 1918), Magdalanamariam (Mary Magdalene: 1921) and shorter lyrics contained in the early volumes of Sahityamanjari [Literary Anthology: Part I (1916), Part II (1918) and Part III and IV (1924)]. He was the most sensuous of the three poets, most at home in the description of the world we live in and the life we live. National consciousness, set afloat by the Indian National Congress and men like Gokhale, Tilak and Gandhi, gave a contemporary relevance to his poems extolling India's past glory. In poems like Puranangal (The Puranas), Karambhoomiyude Pinchukal (The Little Foot of India), Ente Gurunathan (My Master), Pora Pora (Not enough, Not enough) and numerous other lyrics, Vallathol gave chiselled expression to this newly awakened nationalism both in political and cultural terms.
         But perhaps more than these poems with a political orientation and an immediate cultural relevance, his poems about the less spectacular aspects of every day life in Kerala village will have a lasting value. To the people of his own generation, every word he wrote about Indian culture was a fresh revelation of the nationalist spirit. After 1925 perhaps some of these less inspired poems could not make their appeal as effectively as before. But Vallathol had plenty of other arrows in his quiver and other strings to his bow. He could describe a Kerala landscape more imaginatively than most earlier poets. He could portray women characters in short poems with considerable effect like Usha in Bandhanashanaya Anirudhan, Mariam in Magdalanamariam, Radha in Radhayude Kritarthata (Radha's Consolation), Sakuntala in Acchanum Makalum (Father and Daughter), etc., Usha for instance, defends herself and her lover with no trepidation during the encounter with her father's Minister; she says,

I sent for him and got him here,
My beloved did not come of his own accord.
What, is this the sense of justice in Bali's tribe;
Heaping all blames on one, the other kept as kin?

          It is interesting to note that Asan, Ulloor and Vallathol could do ample justice to their heroines, while their heroes are allowed to pale into relative meekness and insignificance. Only Karna in Ulloor's Karnabhooshanam could be thought of as an exception.
          One of Vallathol's perfect achievements is a dramatic poem based on the Puranic story of Viswamitra and Sakuntala (Acchanum Makulum). Written with the maximum concentration and close attention to every syllable, this dramatic narrative reads like a scene left out by Kalidasa in his Sakuntalam to be written during his 20th century incarnation. The scene is the meeting between Viswamitra and his longlost daughter Sakuntala, now staying at the hermitage of Kasyapa with her little son Sarvadamana, after being repudiated and rejected by her lord, King Dushyanta in a fit of forgetfulness. Seeing that his daughter has been unjustly repudiated by Dushyanta, Viswamitra, notorious for his sudden and uncontrollable outbursts of fury, threatens to invoke a drastic course upon the criminal king. The scene could easily remind the reader of a possible Kathakali setting in which the situation would be presented with tremendous effect. Vallathol was also deeply intrested in the resuscitation of this ancient Kerala art of dance-drama: its resources are indirectly exploited in full in Acchanum Makalum. Here is the scene in the poet's own words.

The mighty Viswamitra had started uttering
in anger, in his chest-
.....................................
If only he were to fling it forward,
it would spell the end!---
It will become the thunderbold that would
annihilate her husband with his entire race.
Fully aware of that dread consequence, she instantly
cultched that dread missile of destruction
with both her hands and cried:
"Father, for my sake forbeat! Let not your
daughter become the destroyer of her husband!
Let her not be consumed by the fire of dire widowhood!
Abandoned earlier by her parents once,
she has now been abandoned freely
by her husband too; that is all;
Let my life be completely destitute,--
but let not my son too become an outcast
on account of my sin!"
The fire of his anger having been quenched
by the tears of his daughter,
the father, now feeling extremely happy,
commended her:
"Fare thee well! Your goodness had pulled me out of moral ruin;
May you, along with your son, soon join your lord!"

(Translation by Kainikkara Kumara Pillai)

           Magdalanamariam is a dramatic rendering of the spiritual conversation of a professional courtesan into the Christian way of life through prayer and penance. This was perhaps the first time an episode from a western source (the Bible, in this case) was exploited in this way by a Malayalam poet. Vallathol, no doubt, orientalizes the whole setting: Christ is almost identified with Krishna, thus the East and the West (one could of course argue that Christ was more oriental than accidental) are made to meet in the ecstatic realm of poetry. Vallathol could not shake off his national heritage and he was more at home in poems like Acchanum Makalum, Sishyanum Makanum and Kochu Sita. His shorter lyrics in Sahitya Manjari are a veritable store-house of memorable world-pictures. Bhaktiyum Vibhaktiyum, Prabhatageetam, A Walk in the Rain, A Boat Journey, Bharatapuzha and A Picture are examples of Vallathol's special talent in evoking a kind of country music by the perfect disposition of word and image. As against the political poet, here we have the real spokesman of Indian culture, the genuine lover of nature, the perfect wielder of words. In other areas he could be intimated and even surpassed: here he was supreme without an equal.