Koveru Kazhuthaigal turned Imayam into a Tamil literary icon. First published in Tamil in 1994, the novel celebrates its silver jubilee this year. Publishing house Cre-A has marked the occasion with a table-top copy of the novel that includes plates of paintings and sculptures by seven Tamil artists. The seven insets reveal how evocative the text is. To commemorate the jubilee, the book’s English translation by the renowned Lakshmi Holmström, called Beasts of Burden , has been reprinted by Niyogi Books this year. It was first published by Manas Publications in 2001. The celebration of the novel’s 25th year is as much a celebration of the book as of the storyteller as witness.
Women of agency
The novel, considered a classic of modern Tamil literature, is a landmark in Dalit writing. It tells the story of a family of washerfolk who clean the clothes of other untouchables. They are paid not in cash but in kind, with rice, grains, vegetables and so on.
I have always been a fan of Imayam’s writings, even though my responses to his views have very often been quite contradictory. He claims that as a creative writer he can observe his world impartially. But his writing
speaks of a heart that melts, bleeds and howls at injustice. In fact, it’s the nightly chant of the washerwoman begging for grains at the top of his street that made Imayam write Koveru Kazhuthaigal, which literally translates as pack mules, the animals on which laundry used to be carried. In the book, of course, the writer is visualising the washerfolk themselves as the mules.
What moves me the most in Imayam’s works are his women. Though most of them come from the margins, they are never presented as victims. However small their role, they exercise agency, and one admires them for that. The grit with which his women face life is amazing — captured in Tamil for the first time with an everydayness that goes almost unnoticed.
Absent presence
In Koveru Kazhuthaigal , for example, Arokkyam the washerwoman wonders:
“Is there a single person in this town whose pollution I have not cleaned?
Is there a woman who has not had trouble suckling her child?
Is there a woman whose umbilical cord I have not cut and buried?”
The scene where she helps an under-aged mother suckle her child churns your stomach.
Imayam has resisted being labelled as a Dalit writer and with good reason. His affinity to the DMK, one of Tamil Nadu’s leading political parties, supersedes the question of his identity. Tamil Nadu has a long and continuing tradition, inherited from Periyar, that has focussed on building the self-respect and dignity of subaltern classes. ‘Identity’ politics, therefore, is problematised in the State in more ways than one. Poomani, a senior Tamil writer, also opposes the labelling and slotting of writers on the basis of their caste. While I understand this position, I also think that it remains the luxury of a privileged few to actually ‘transcend’ identity questions.
Azhagarasan’s introduction to the English reprint draws attention to a key feature of Imayam’s work — the seemingly minor and absent characters. One of them is Savuri, Arokkyam’s husband. This absent character, “who is in collusion with the witnessing narrator”, functions as the “central principle of Imayam’s fictional universe,” says Azhagarasan, adding that this gives the narrative “the impact of a narrative painting”.
Azhagarasan surmises that this absent character is as helpless and invested a witness as the storyteller, and this probably points to Imayam’s preference of anonymity over identity. The impact of a text, however, depends on the way it speaks to each reader’s individual consciousness.
Imayam’s work emphasises the stark reality of caste in all its ugly forms. By exposing its dark underbelly, the writer builds an implicit argument for its eradication. As a writer with keen powers of observation, he also complicates his fictional universe with questions of religion, with education as social agent, and the onset of modernity. Arokkyam’s family being the only Christian family in the village, she fears that her son might become a priest. Her fears, the setting up of a barber shop and ironing shop in the village, and the failing monsoon are all interconnected.
Everyday language
Imayam critiques the continued existence of dehumanising caste practices while wishing desperately that things will change. His brilliant novella Pethavan (translated into English as The Begetter ), which almost uncannily predicted the honour killing in Dharmapuri that would happen in 2012, captures the tension and helplessness of castebound lives in tragic detail.
Imayam’s writing has remained firmly rooted in the real. Not swayed by fashionable isms,
he tells his story in a disarmingly everyday language, replete with rich folklore, folk music, proverbs and with the musicality of sheer repetition. What keeps ringing in my head is the voice of Arokkyam asking for food each night as she walks from doorstep to doorstep. “‘Don’t forget the vannati woman, saami’/ ‘It’s your paraya-vannatti, saami’/ ‘Yes, yes, saami’/ ‘It’s your paraya-vannatti Arokkyam’/... ‘Where else can I go and stand except at your feet?’”
In the new Cre-A edition, artist Narendran has evocatively visualised this section as a deaf ear. And don’t forget, it is in Arokkyam the washerwoman’s household that millets and grains would have been stored for winter once upon a time.
The writer is a theatreperson and academician.
