Coming back to Tamil Nadu after a long time away has an unusual effect on poet and academic Perundevi Srinivasan. “When I’m here, I become a poetry-writing machine. There’s something in the air and the ambience of Tamil Nadu that makes me write better and with greater understanding, especially when I return after a break,” she says.
An associate professor of Religious Studies at the School of Liberal Arts in Siena College, Loudonville, New York, and at present on a sabbatical in Chennai, Dr Perundevi has published six poetry anthologies in Tamil. She was in Tiruchi recently to attend a seminar on her works.
Writing is a profound yet indefinable process, she says, and while her work and creative pursuits involve different modes of literature, Dr Perundevi feels poetry can be written only when one’s emotions are provoked. “If you write poems within a theoretical framework, it’s like cutting your foot to fit the shoe,” she says.
Her poems deal with a modern ethos, in a world where people commit suicide on web cameras, deal with the many avatars of Sriraman in the cityscape and immigrants yearn for an elusive homeland. “What Tamil literature needs is a critical evaluation and closer reading of the text,” says Dr Perundevi, who also feels that more male poets should write about the problems faced by women.
Excerpts from an interview:
Tell us a little about yourself
I grew up in several places in Tamil Nadu owing to my father’s transferable job. I had my school and college education in Tiruvarur, Madurai, Cuddalore, Chennai, and Annamalai Nagar.
My ancestral family hails from Kodali Karuppur in Kumbakonam, but they eventually moved to Kanchipuram 200 years back.
After working with a government office for more than a decade in Chennai, I ended up in Washington for doing my doctoral research on colonial interventions on goddess worship practices and Tamil discourses of body and subjectivity.
A significant moment in my life that transformed my mere acquaintance with goddesses into a deeper intellectual curiosity about them was when I stumbled upon Alf Hiltebeitel’s phenomenal work The Cult of Draupadi Volume I in 1993 at a small library in Chennai. At the time, I was already engrossed in David Shulman’s Tamil Temple Myths .
I was a little ashamed that I didn’t know any of the folk mythologies and performance traditions related to Draupadi that Dr Hiltebeitel cites in the book.
Motivated by his profound scholarship, I made regular visits to temples of goddesses during weekends and recorded a few narratives.
But I was formally trained in ethnographic methodology or fieldwork only after I went to the George Washington University, where I had an opportunity to have Dr Hiltebeitel as my mentor.
After receiving my PhD, I was a postdoctoral fellow with Rutgers University in America. Presently I teach at Siena College in upstate New York.
How easy or hard is it for a multilingual writer/poet like you to function in a largely monolingual Western space? Do you find yourself interspersing English words into your Tamil work as linguistic rules get more diluted?
As far as poetry goes, when I write in Tamil, there’s no difference in my ideas and their expression. I don’t think I can write poems in English. At the same time, being in America hasn’t affected Tamil writing in general. Some of my poems deal with issues like the immigrants in America and the problems they face.
Tamil is rarely spoken or heard in the United States. But when I hear the rich and varied everyday usage of Tamil here, I write poems with greater depth and spontaneity. In general, writing cannot be confined to limits imposed by geography or language. English words have been used in Tamil poetry by Nakulan, Bramharajan and others. In my poems, I use English words when I write about modern life. Their inclusion should be seen more as ground reality than as a linguistic dilution.
You focus very often on gender relations in your poetry. As a feminist and a woman, how does it feel to learn that India has been named as the most dangerous country for women in a recent study? Does modern literature have a role in changing attitudes, and have electronic media aggravated sexual crimes and gender-shaming?
I feel very upset and immensely angry over this news. It also raises the question if our nation will ever respect and treat its women with the same standards as its men. It is doubtful though, if literature can help to change the situation in any way. If it had that much power, wouldn’t the world have become a heaven on Earth? Isn’t this the same place where epics like The Mahabharatha and Thirukkural have been written, and where greats like Bharathi and Pudumaipithan have lived?
While its influence may be intangible, healthy, alternative viewpoints that are a platform for women’s expression, as opposed to hegemonic worldviews, are seen only in literature.
It can’t be denied that some readers may try to realign their life with lessons that they learn from such ethical writing.
Electronic media work both for and against women. They may have the power to reinforce old, regressive attitudes, but they also help to build resistance and necessary alliances among women.
What are your thoughts about the power of cinema in Tamil Nadu? Has Tamil poetry become imprisoned in its over-descriptive (some would call it lazy writing) song culture?
Films have always enjoyed greater public devotion and patronage than perhaps even religion in Tamil Nadu. Poetry has flourished independently of the melodious lyrics in Tamil film songs.
But of late, some New Age Tamil poets have allowed their style to be influenced by cinema, and got caught in a linguistically careless and hackneyed way of expression.
I’m sorry to see this type of Tamil poetry gain credence, and I don’t like it at all.
As someone who examines and writes about belief systems in an academic sphere, would you agree that mythology is being created afresh through southern Indian films like Bahubali ?
Isn’t South India anyway a land full of stories and mythology? What we regard as ‘new’ mythologies are actually constructed from the constituent threads of familiar, old ones.
For example, the trials faced by Bahubali’s female protagonist have echoes of those undergone by Seetha while in exile in Ramayana. In the film Arundhathi , the heroine is a composite character drawn from goddesses like Durga and Bagalamukhi.
What is the toughest task that a poet faces in a world impatient for answers?
Poetry cannot solve the social, political and other problems prevalent in the world today. It is very difficult to explain solutions to the public through poems. But poets cannot denigrate or dismiss the people who come looking for answers to them, for this reason. It is difficult.
Who are the poets you look up to?
In English, I love the works of Bertolt Brecht, Charles Bukowski and Nicanor Parra. I am also fond of Pudumaippittan and Atmanam in Tamil.
What are your upcoming projects?
Along with Dr Hiltebeitel, I am working on a manuscript on the cult of Draupadi in Dharmapuri region. I am also working on another book manuscript based on my PhD dissertation on the goddess Mariyamman, healing of poxes, and smallpox vaccination discourses in the colonial south India.
