A timeless poem that caught popular imagination

Sugathakumari’s Krishna Neeyenne Ariyilla continues to inspire musicians and dancers

Soumya Sathish vividly remembers the first time she listened to G. Venugopal rendering the poem KrishnaNeeyenne Ariyilla. The Kochi-based dancer was overwhelmed, her eyes moist.

That was in 2010. Sugathakumari’s poem, however, had been having a similar effect on people from an earlier generation; they hadn’t listened to it, but only read it.

Krishna Neeyenne Ariyilla (

Krishna

, you know me not ) had caught the imagination of readers right from the time it was first published in 1977.

It remains a classic in Malayalam poetry, for its sheer beauty and intensity. Rarely has unexpressed love been portrayed so expressively.

The poem is about a gopika who is so unlike others. Lord Krishna does not know her; she hasn’t looked at him with eyes lined with kohl of love; she hasn’t danced with him; her clever friend hadn’t told him of her love for him.

Yet, on the day he leaves Ambadi for Mathura, his chariot stops in front of her hut, he smiles at her, making her ask, ‘Krishna, do you know me?’

What makes the poem special is that it has attained a unique stature in popular culture too, taking it beyond the relatively small audience that poetry appeals to.

A lot of the credit for that goes to Venugopal, who sang it so expressively, and composer Jaison J. Nair, who gave it perhaps the most appropriate tune possible, in their 2010 album, Kavyageethikal II .

“I had read the poem first when I was a student at the Swati Tirunal College for Music, Thiruvananthapuram,” says Jaison. “It had made a deep impression on me; I was moved by the sweetness and the pain of love. I could not have imagined that I would one day be tuning it and the song would reach out to so many people.”

Soumya didn’t imagine either that her dance on the poem, which was posted on YouTube, would become so popular that she could perform it in front of Sugathakumari on a State School Arts Festival stage.

“It was because of Krishna Neeyenne Ariyilla that I became a performing artist once again, long after I won the Kalathilakam title at the Calicut University arts festival,” she says.

Soumya’s choreography – which isn’t largely based on any classical style of dancing – and performance are among the finest on the poem. Many dancers, including Mohiniyattam guru Kalamandalam Kshemavathy, and her students like Usha Suresh Balaje have done it.

And Jaison isn’t the only composer to tune it. Suresh Manimala and Rajeev ONV have given it different tunes, for singers K.S. Chithra and Aparna Rajeev respectively.

Ayyappa Paniker had written a kind of reply to the poem, with Gopika Dandakam , in which he said, Ariyunnoo gopike nine njaan …( I know you …).

Such things haven’t happened often with many Malayalam poems. But, then, there aren’t many poems like Krishna Neeyenne Ariyilla .