A tale of one land as it tumbles down from Vengadamala (Thirupathi Hills) to Kumarimunanbu (Cape Comorin). A tale wherein seventeen centuries slip by to unfold an age when history was young, passions were raw and languages were nascent. Manoj Kuroor’s Nilam Poothu Malarnna Naal is a Dravidian saga that narrates the story of a land and its people before they were divided into states and languages.
This is the story of ancient Thamizhagam, a land bound by the sea on the east and west, and replete with meadows, hills, arid plains, riverine valleys, seashores and verdant farmlands.
It is a unique work in Malayalam in its attempt to narrate a past that has as yet remained uncharted in the literary imaginations of the novelistic genre.
In a rare instance of artistic ingenuity, the story of a land’s literary traditions is made to blend beautifully with the origins of its language. Thus it is as much a history of Malayalam language and its oft forgotten Dravidian roots as it is a chronicle of a bygone era of Sangam literature.
In a soft lilting language evocative of Sangam poetry, Kuroor takes you on a spell binding tour across centuries where space and time become molten and fluid. By making the panar s or wandering bards the main characters in his story the novelist offers a broadening of the thinai concept, a literary device of Sangam poetry where a mood is evoked through associations with a landscape.
The novel’s little heroes and heroines thus traverse different Sangam topographies like the mullai (pastoral), or palai (arid lands), or kurunji (hills). However, in straddling these different thinais the novelist illustrates the need to liberate characters and settings from being mere literary devices to becoming living, aching men and women who carry the angst of their times in their veins.
Romancing with the Thamizh roots of Malayalam language and literature, the novel gently reminds one of the need to go beyond Sanskritising trends across ages that sought to sever the Dravidian roots of the language. As the organic connections between land, language and lives unfold, the narrative begins to pulsate with an energy that is both mythical and metaphysical.
What is interesting is how women connect and hold the saga together. Their words, their songs and their dances give an intensity and cohesion to the legendary landscapes, stringing lives and tales, and weaving magic.
The novel offers interesting vignettes of masculinity and femininity in that age, rules of honour, codes of conduct, rituals and practices. Thus the tale offers a near realistic geographical concreteness, populated by a number of real historical characters like the Sangam poets Paranar and Kapilar among others.
The novel is at its evocative best in recreating the archaic, exotic music of the Sangam age. The narrative is divided amongst three tellers of tales who are the father, daughter and son. What they share is not only a biological strand but a common oral tradition of shared storytelling. In recounting their own memories and the shared histories of the people around them, they step beyond the limits of a family saga to become oral chroniclers of an age of dynastic conflicts.
An era where the Cheras, Chozhas and Pandyas ruled and ordinary people struggled with their daily lives. The novel begins with a journey for subsistence across lands and ends in a voyage into the endless ocean, thus in a sense symbolically charting the numerous journeys that would characterise the Malayali in the ages to come.
This is not a novel for people who are on the lookout for an easy read. A complex work, it requires a certain historical, literary and linguistic sensibility to understand its finely nuanced storytelling techniques.
It offers a fresh beginning for the Malayalam novel, nudging it closer to the soil, its ancient lore, its music and mythology.
In a soft lilting language evocative of Sangam poetry, Kuroor takes you on a spell binding tour across centuries where space and time become molten and fluid.
(A column on some of the best reads in Malayalam. The author is director, School of English and Foreign Languages, University of Kerala)
Nilam Poothu Malarnna Naal
Manoj Kuroor
DC Books
Rs. 175
