It was Founders’ Day at the Madras Book Club recently and the special lecture for the occasion was by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Civilian, Diplomat, Governor, Author and Member of the Madras Book Club. Its subject suited the occasion in its own way. ‘Dedications in Books — Tradition and Trends’ was a dedication to the Founders of some 20 years ago, K.S. Padmanabhan of EastWest, N. Parthasarathy of Oxford, Abdullah of Longman’s and S. Krishnan of USIS — four who’d get together regularly at the Presidency Club — and also to the couple who help resuscitate the Club about 15 years ago, Susheela and Kumar of the British Council and the Madras Library Association. Each of them had a fine sense of humour and they would have enjoyed Gandhi’s talk, its earnestness frequently laced with let’s-laugh-a-moment moments.
Contrarian that I am, more than the talk I was interested in that pile of books on sale at the entrance, Gandhi’s latest offering, and wondered what the dedication in them was. “To the conflicted yet interwoven memories of Chakravarti Rajagopalachari (1878-1972) and Periyar E.V., Ramamsami (1879-1973)’, I soon discovered. That’s as typical a Gopal Gandhian glance as you will get, as much commentary as expressive of their views on the subject of his book, The Tirukkural . After all, “the moralist in” Rajagopalachari, and Constantius Beschi before him, ignored the third part of the Kural , ‘The Book of Love’, whereas Periyar revelled in discussing it and Gandhi now presents it in all its candour. As he recalls, “Domestic censorship is the surest allurement to a ‘home kid’ and so as a grandson, albeit nudging seventy, of the veiler, I had to turn to Book III in Pope’s version like to forbidden fruit”, to discover “woman a figure of curious sensuality”.
But though Gandhi turned to Pope — and I’ll get to that — it was his maternal grandfather who opened Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s mind to the Kural when his grandson was about 20. Rajaji, then Chief Minister of Madras, was talking about the speed of assistance rushed by his officers to the flood victims in 1954 (rather appropriate 61 years later that evening!). “How would you describe the speed of help that comes the very moment it is needed?” he asked his grandson. “The speed of light?” “Yes, but Tiruvalluvar had a better description… the speed of the hand that moves the very instant a garment slips, to halt its fall… You must one day read the Kural , a great book,” he advised. Advice not taken at the time.
Then, in 1969, a Sub-Collector told Gandhi the Probationer “The Gita is a great book, but the Kural , in my view, ranks higher. Whatever else you read as a trainee in Tamil Nadu, you have to read that masterpiece.” A couple of years later, Assistant Collector Gandhi heard an MLA at a school function quoting Tiruvalluvar on learning: “Men of learning have eyes, blockheads have two sores.” Recalls Gandhi, “The 393rd kural seemed to have been tailor-made for the man himself but I let my wicked thought pass.”
And then came the fourth nudge, a decade later. As Gandhi listened “entranced” to the baby talk of his two little daughters, his mother quoted what he later found was the 66th kural and which he included in this book as follows:
The flute can please, the harp appeal to those and only those
Who haven’t heard their infant’s lisp in which the sweetest music flows
As so began Gopal Gandhi’s journey to this book.
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…. in the language of today
Taking my interest in that pile of books further and wondering about Gopal Gandhi translating a Tamil classic into English, I asked what his mother tongue was. Going by a mother’s tongue, it should have been Tamil, but she, well read in Hindi, made it Hindi and I eventually became equally fluent in Hindi, Tamil, English and Gujarati, he responded. But, anticipating where I was headed, he narrated the story of translating the Kural, when his publisher suggested doing a translation of it “in modern English, accessible to the general reader”. Gandhi felt he had to know the text better than what his only reading of it had been, Rajaji’s English version written in the 1930s.
And so he started with G.U. Pope’s 1886 translation, considered “the definitive version” in English. Continuing his story, Gandhi related that, “reading Pope’s renderings, matching them with the Tamil verses and then dipping into Beschi’s Latin equivalent (1730) and the rephrasings of F.W. Ellis,” he got hooked by the “exhilaration” he felt. Pope also had a Lexicon and Concordance at the end of his work and that gave Gandhi, additionally, a “word-to-word” meaning. Then it was back to Rajaji’s original version republished in 1965 by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and a later selection of his , “a much more interesting one” published by Rochouse & Co, Madras (1937). Add to that ‘Sujatha’ Rangarajan’s simplified Tamil version in 1995 and P.S. Sundaram’s translation in “economic English” in 1991 incorporated in a version by the International Tamil Foundation, Illinois, USA. Add half a dozen other Tamil versions and commentaries. And Gandhi was on his way.
And if that wasn’t enough studying, there were hours of discussion with Prof. B. Mathivannan of Bharathidasan University, Prof. A.R. Venkatachalapathy of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, K.V. Ramanathan, a former Civilian who passed away recently and who was a walking encyclopaedia on a host of subjects, and K.N. Varadarajan another government servant who was a scholar. I wonder how many others put so much effort into a translation; even a simple translation needs background knowledge and that was what Gopal Gandhi spent time on accumulating. The result is a brilliant “new English version” of Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural that even I could understand — and, no lover of poetry, appreciate.
Someone in the Madras Book Club audience the other day said at the end of the meeting that Gopal Gandhi’s language kept her so spell-bound that she needed a re-run or a script to read to appreciate the content. Let me assure her that anyone reading aloud from Gandhi’s Tirukkural version will have her simultaneously understanding both language and content.
David Davidar of Aleph might have published this in his Classics series but I would think it should be a book read in every school — especially in English classes.
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A walk in Royapuram
Walks in Madras — not only on heritage trails — are getting popular. Their popularity began about a decade ago with several being organised during Madras Week and since then any time of the year has been a good time for a walk, if you have a good storyteller to lead it and can get a dozen people to follow. Hoping to be successful with an area he planned to shortly explore was a young man who met me the other day and wanted to know what he should include in a walk in the Royapuram-Washermanpet, north Madras, locality. Thinking about it, it struck me there’s much in that area to note, but it doesn’t at once strike most heritage buffs that there are so many landmarks to see there. Listing some of them to my visitor, I told him I could only name several of them, but he’d have to work out his route. I haven’t heard from him since, so perhaps he thought it was too much of a chore, but perhaps someone else would like to work on my suggested list.
The Royapuram railway station, the first in South India and the oldest surviving station in the country, still boasts vestiges of its Regency styling and is a good starting point. Heading north from it is what I call ‘The Street of Perfect Harmony’, starting with St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church and continuing with, on West Madha Street, a Protestant church, a Hindu temple, a Parsi Fire Temple, and a Muslim dargah . Just west of here are three hospitals of long lineage, the mission-established Christina Rainy Hospital, the M.V. Hospital for Diabetes which has an all-India reputation and the R.S. Ramasamy Mudaliar Lying-in Home, a significant charitable contribution. Near the Lying-in Home is a ‘Must See’, the Ramanujan Museum, in the Avvai Kalai Kazhagam, with a fine collection of the mathematics genius’s memorabilia.
South, between this block and Old Jail Road, which can be taken as the northern boundary of George Town, is Robinson (Anna) Park where the birth of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam was announced by Annadurai on September 18, 1949. Near it is the home of Sir Pitti Theagaroya Chetty, one of the founders of the Justice Party in 1915. His house and his brother’s neighbouring one are, interestingly, connected by a bridge over street level. And south of here is Stanley Medical College and Hospital, the city’s second major Government medical institution, and Monegar Choultry, one of the city’s earliest — if not the first — charities, dating to a famine in 1781/82.
Then you are at what’s left of the Old Town Wall, a protected heritage monument, whose width at the top is sufficient to host a park, Maadi Poonga (First floor Park?!). Across the road from here is Bharati Women’s College, developed in the Old Jail campus and which till recently had several of the old jail buildings surviving. And not far from here are Seven (really 10) Wells that once supplied water to Fort St. George, and, once a Catholic bastion, St. Roque’s Church, with its cemetery much explored by visitors from overseas trying to trace kin.
Have I missed out anything? Even if I have, surely there are few places in the city which offer more for a heritage trail.
