I was delighted that this paper’s Lit for Life festival had a day for Tamil literature. The day also celebrated the centenary of the Tamil short story. That story, Kulathankarai Arasamaram , written in 1917 by VVS Aiyar, has him being called “The father of the modern Tamil short story”. Tamil literature, however, is not my field; it’s of VVS in journalism and history I write.
1917 was also when Annie Besant bought an English daily, The Madras Standard, and, renaming it New India, made it South India’s leading paper. Assisting her was M Subbaroya Kamath, who, a few months later, with her help, bought a press and published from it a Tamil echo called Desabhaktan edited by Thiru V Kalyanasundaram. With Thiru Vi Ka’s growing involvement with trade unionism that cramped his time for journalism and his measured editorial language caused differences with Kamath, making him quit in July 1920. One of his loudest editorial campaigns was seeking the lifting of the British ban preventing Bharati, VVS and Aurobindo Ghose from re-entering India from French Pondicherry. When the ban was lifted, Kamath invited VVS to edit Desabhakthan in August 1920.
Thirty-nine-year-old VVS’s background was that, as a young vakil, he went to London in 1908 to qualify as a barrister. While there, he wrote for Bharati’s India, contributed to Desabhaktan. At India House , that London home of Indian revolutionaries, he came under the influence of Vinayak Savarkar, the revolutionaries’ leader. When Savarkar was arrested for trying to overthrow the British government in India, VVS, helped by Irish revolutionaries, attempted to rescue him from prison, while he awaited transit to India for trial. VVS, the rescue attempt failing, fled to France, hoping to succeed in Marseilles. Savarkar pre-empted him, escaping from the ship there but was soon caught and returned to the UK. VVS, in disguise and with false papers, made it to Pondicherry.
Apart from helping with India , which Bharati had restarted in Pondicherry, VVS again became part of a revolutionary cell. In 1911 he taught young Vanchi Iyer to shoot. The target, RWD Ashe, Collector of Tinnevelly, they held responsible for the sufferings of VO Chidambaram Pillai, whose Swadeshi shipping line had challenged British shipping. When Gandhi visited Pondicherry, VVS, under his spell, dedicated himself to non-violence. In February 1920, an amnesty was announced and VVS returned to Trichinopoly, his home. An all-India pilgrimage followed. When he returned to Madras, the Desabhaktan offer awaited him.
Within months, Kamath, in financial straits, sold the paper. Continuous friction between the new owners and VVS made him quit in August. But he was suddenly arrested, charged with sedition for an editorial in May. At the trial, he proved he could not have written it, as he was in the mofussil at the time. The owner and editorialist apologised. But VVS, accepting responsibility as Editor, said he saw nothing wrong in the words written. After serving nine months SI, he came out and turned to writing. His efforts, a monumental study in English of the 4,000 verses of Kambar’s Ramayanam, and a translation in Biblical English of the Tirukkural, were considered “masterly”.
The echoes of music and dance
I was there at the recent release of the 400th edition of Sruti , the premier music, dance and theatre magazine. I was there when the very first copy of the first issue came out of the trimming machine 34 years ago and flipped through it to make sure we at TT MAPS had not made an error while printing. Erstwhile adman Sathyamoorthy, then monitoring the journal’s production, grabbed a few copies and rushed off to N Pattabhi Raman whose brainchild it was.
In black and white, it looked a sophisticated magazine. Its well-written content offered good reading, only a couple of pieces having a technical slant. I have no interest in music or dance, but I knew what Sruti contained; being a conscientious printer then, I’d read every word a client brought in for printing to make sure I wouldn’t get into trouble. The funny thing is that I still read Sruti , except when it gets technical. That’s saying something about the magazine. But I miss Anami’s ‘Whispering Gallery’, its gossip and its outspoken criticism, particularly about the Meccademy, its manda(rin)s and Vasu the Bossu.
It was the Bossu who got me printing Sruti when it started. After asking for a quote for a monthly magazine, he suggested I print it at half the price. Helping a cause, he’d said at a time when CSR had not even entered the vocabulary. When the internal auditors asked questions, it was my baby not his, so I met Pattabhi Raman for the first time a couple of years later, asking for a small price hike. Sathyamoorthy, the Bossu’s Man Friday, found him a new printer. But the former UN civil servant and I kept in touch.
In 1999 he invited me over to ask what I thought of his dream. ‘Samudri’ on 40 acres of land on the OMR is what he intended calling the Subbulakshmi-Sadasivam Music & Dance Resources Institute with archives, library, a collection of different genres of music, facilities for resident scholars, and spaces for seminars, recitals etc. It was a ₹10 crore project then. Sadly, he died before he could go beyond cataloguing much of the collection. It wasn’t mentioned the other evening, but I hope Sanmar, that’s supported numerous causes, including heritage voices like Sruti and Madras Musings, will one day make ‘Samudri’ a reality. I hope Sukanya Sankar too has Pattabhi Raman’s dream of going beyond Sruti .
