Abstract
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Udaya Kumar’s book explores a wide range of fictional and historical self-narrations by the nineteenth and twentieth century male Malayalam writers. The autobiography, for the author, is not an isolable genre of self-expression but shares its quality of self-articulation with fiction and non-literary writings, which suggests new and shifting styles of self-articulation and inhabitation in a modern world. While providing an outline of the book, I wish to highlight some of its major themes that resonate with the world of modern Tamil letters; a world I am more familiar with. The book’s first chapter discusses the anti-caste writings of Sree Narayana Guru, which drew from Advaita, Saiva Siddhanta and Tamil Siddhar writings. Like some of his Tamil contemporaries, most notably, Ramalinga Adigal, the body, for the Ezhava anti-caste leader Narayana Guru, was both susceptible to sensual indulgence and an instrument of self-realisation. The embodied subject could be the site of a new discursive relationship with the self if it was shorn of unnatural markers of caste and ethically oriented towards others in the spirit of non-violence and compassion, which for Guru was a fundamental human quality that preceded social and institutional norms and ideals. For his disciple-poet, Kumaran Asan, the body is displaced by desire, which is ultimately related to language and inner experience. There is a gendered asymmetry in Kumaran Asan’s poems where the female protagonist’s articulation of desire is within the terms of a masculine economy that enables the man to disavow his desire for the woman and renounce earthly ties. He turns into a witness who mourns the death of the woman and her passion, which evokes his compassion. This gendered asymmetry resonates with the writings of some early modern Tamil writers where male subjectivity is elaborated and destabilised through a male imagination of assertive female sexuality, compelling the reorientation of male desire towards asceticism and altruism.
The autobiography, as Udaya Kumar argues, has to be understood not as the expression of a private self but on the contrary, as an ‘inner’ world that is inscribed on the surface of things and objects in the modern world. This becomes a major concern in the book: the construction of what the author calls ‘perceptual economies’ where new forms of subjectivity and visibility are produced in the dynamic correlation between objects, history and emotions, and the characters who perceive them. The two chapters that Udaya Kumar devotes to C.V. Raman Pillai’s novels are linked by the motif of ‘untimeliness’, where the contemporary moment shares an anachronistic relationship with the past. In his discussion of C.V. Raman Pillai’s satirical novel Premamritam, Udaya Kumar draws attention to the impact that new forms of technology like photography had on painting and fiction, which produced unstable regimes of visual perception. In the second chapter on C.V. Raman Pillai’s historical trilogy, which was centred on the royal court of Travancore, Pillai imagines the consolidation of the Travancore state as a function of the Nayar dewan’s loyalty to the King Martandavarma. The focus of these novels is Nayar sovereignty rather than the king who, in reality, brutally exterminated the Nayar chiefs who tried to overthrow him. There is a constant disavowal of this violence and mourning for the loss of these chiefs. The novels have a curious relationship with the past as they are already set in a distant past from the present but then represent an older, mythical past of Nayar sovereignty.
The second last chapter ‘Incomplete Inhabitations’ discusses self-narrations by Ezhava and Namboodiri men who have different responses to the perceived opposition between a traditional caste-ridden past and a modern, colonial present. The first and lasts sections of the chapter analyse autobiographies by men, some upper-caste Christian converts, for whom the divine is invoked as a form of self-revelation and a call for social service. The second major section of the chapter is a comparison of two autobiographies by two Namboodiri Brahmins, K.S. Namboodiripad and V.T. Bhattatiripad. In these texts, the life of the individual is embedded in and draws its relevance from transformations in the social life of the nation or community to produce the idea of a shared public. Both writers are concerned with the dull monotony of Namboodiri lives; while K.S. Namboodiripad believed his life was typical, it was precisely this typicality that, as Kumar observes, further grounded him in tradition and enabled him to narrativise his unease with modern transformations in society. V.T. Bhattatiripad’s autobiography, on the other hand, welcomes a shift from traditional learning practices to modern ones; he was initially illiterate and trained to memorise and recite the verses of the Rig Veda but later learnt to read and write Malayalam to produce a new discursive understanding of the modern self.
The wide scope of the book that straddles both fictional and non-fictional texts enables the articulation of a broad and multi-dimensional sense of the modern self. Although the attempt to blur boundaries between literary forms yields rich interpretive possibilities, there are moments in the book where there could be clearer conceptual linkages between chapters that would lend it greater coherence. I also believe that the author is at his best when he reads literary texts for their insights rather than the non-literary ones he has chosen, which are historically important but ultimately make academic commonsense. Finally, the literary chapters of the book would have benefitted with more quotations from the texts to further instantiate the argument.