At Kayikara, 30 miles from Thiruvananthapuram, a building has gone up in memory of Kumaran Asan, Kerala’s bard of love, who was born there in 1873. On the left side of the stage in the auditorim of ‘Asan Bhavan’ may be seen an oil painting of the poet, and on the right, of an Untouchable woman pouring water into the palm of a Budhist monk, a scene from the poem Chandala Bhikshuki (The Untouchable Sanyasini).
Papers with the final versions of Asan’s last poems covered with mud were retrieved from the canal bed at Pallana, far north of Thiruvananthapuram, where he met with his tragic end in a boat accident in 1924. Young Bhanumathi, his grieving widow handed over her husband’s mud-soaked papers to the printers who published them for a mourning audience.
Even now, seven decades after the poet got pushed into his watery grave and stopped singing, stage performances of his poems continued to reverberate and uplift multitudes in the caste-ridden state of Kerala. The message from Chandala Bikshuki is touching through quotations from it, such as this one:
“I don’t ask your caste, my sister. I ask for water to quench my thirst”.
Brahmin objection: The story of Chandala Bhikshuki may be briefly stated. On a hot summer day, Ananda, a disciple of Buddha approached a woman, Matangi, at a well for water. The woman is shocked at the question, because she is an Untouchable, habitually shunned. On being asked again, she pours water into Ananda’s palm. She feels disturbed. After spending a restless night, she goes out in search of him following his footprints. She finds herself in a monastery, and is received by Buddha himself. She gets initiated, and is taken into the monastery as bhikshuki (sanyasini).
There is a commotion among Brahmin monks and people in the city against pollution by an Untouchable. A complaint is made to the king. The king presents himself along with his council of ministers before the Buddha. In the course of this meeting, Buddha delivers a great sermon:
Whatever we say, whatever we think, Caste is but humbug, O Prince! The angry beast would fight Even against the echo of its own cry. Whence is the twice-born one, the Brahmin, born? Is it from the shoot of a plant or from the cloud? Or is it from the yogi’s sacrificial fire? Is his caste inborn in his blood, his bone, his marrow? Is the chandali’s untouchable body infertile for the Brahmin’s seed?
( Translation by C. Narayana Reddy, a Telugu poet)
Namboodiris & girls: With great anguish, and with great force, Asan plunges his literary sword into Kerala’s heritage. Historian Elamkulam writes about the historical moral code of Kerala’s ruling community:
“About this time the priests also began to propagate new doctrines of morality. One such law was that all beautiful girls should be socialised and assigned to the temples for the service of the gods. In Kerala, women who took the livery of the gods and became the public property of the Nambudiris came to be regarded as honored members of society. Another moral doctrine was that ‘only through Nambudiri seed would good kings be born’. The Nambudiris were able to get the kings, chieftains and nobles to accept this doctrine. The women of the royal and noble houses had no need for Brahmaswam property. All they wanted was ‘Nambudir seed’. The law of droit du seigneur (the right of the peer) characteristic of the feudal system in Europe was not enforced by the Nambudiris among their tenants. There was no necessity of any such law. Not only on the first night of the marriage, but even before and after it, the tenants’ women were but the play things of the jenmis (landlords). A foreign traveller has recorded that as Nair women could get enough Nambudiri youths, Nair youths found it difficult to get women who were not old. (Elamkulam P.N. Kunjan Pillai: Studies in Kerala History, 1970).
Tormented Mind: It is amazing how a distant poetess, distant in point of time and space, Judith Wright from Australia, could echo sentiments similar to Asan’s, with equal passion, as in her lines below:
Twisted are the hearts of men – dark powers possess them. Burn the distant evildoer, the unseen sinner. That prayer to Agni, fire-god, cannot be prayed. We are all of us born of fire, possessed by darkness.
This poetess who was also well-known as a lover of nature and human rights activist was awarded an Asan prize, along with Sugatha Kumari and Srikant Verma on the birth anniversary of Asan at Kayikara in April 1984. As the octogenarian poetess could not be present, the prize was received on her behalf by a representative of the Australian High Commission at Delhi. What Judith Wright wrote recently offers a key to understanding the tormented mind of Asan:
“Poems, like all literature, are written from within a social, historical and personal context and bearing. The poems in this selection emerged from my own life, from the early days of World War Ii when fear, loss, displacement and destruction filled lives in Australia as elsewhere, to today when we are in even greater peril of losing the very world we live in, through the results of ignorance, greed and immensely increased power.”
(Foreword to A Human Pattern: Selected poems by Judith Wright, 1989).
Love and compassion run through most of Asan’s poems, reflecting his Advaita and Buddhist vision. They worked like balm to Asan’s mental anguish. Poet Asan questioned the morality of the ruling community in Buddha’s time, with its obvious relevance to Kerala under brahminism in the recent past. Ali Sardar Jafri, an Urdu poet, calls Asan “The Nightingale of Tomorrow”, goes into ecstacies over the Chandala Bikshuki. He quotes extensively from an English translation of this immortal poem, which ends on a message of love from Buddha:
Love which flows in the mother’s veins And transforms blood into the nectar Of her breast’s milk.
“I have enjoyed this poem and read it many times”, he says, “but I have missed the real beauty of the Malayalam language and its music and rythm. It is my fault that I have not studied Malayalam”.
