By Suganthy Krishnamachari

I’ve never had any regard for the advice that we must not complain about our lot in life, because there are others less fortunate. There is something fatuous about this advice. As if none can be happy unless there is some unfortunate soul he can compare himself favourably with. How can someone else’s unhappiness be a reference point for my happiness? And that’s why my all time favourite hero is Jayakanthan’s beggar, in the story Naan Irukkiraen.

The beggar’s body has been ravaged by Hansen’s disease. He has no companion except his thoughts, and yet what happy thoughts they are! He soliloquises about the caressing breeze, about how hunger, food, thirst – everything is so joyful. He is truly a hero, because his happiness is not contingent on someone else’s unhappiness. One day he saves a young man from committing suicide.

The young man’s complaint is that he is lame and is an object of pity, and he hates it when people in buses give up their seats for him. The beggar draws the young man’s attention to his (beggar’s) own condition, and tells him to cheer up. But now, the beggar, for the first time, begins to think about his own life. His happiness is shattered, and he throws himself in front of a moving train. Comparison, something he had kept away so far, ends his life.

And if the beggar is my favourite hero, then the girl in Naan Jannalaruge Utkaarndirukkiraen, is my favourite heroine. She sits at a window all day and watches life march past. She is just a passive observer, except when she experiences the vague stirrings of hope upon seeing her friend’s wedding procession. But her hopes are quashed when her step mother and father shut the window – ‘her’ window. She weeps and promises never to mention marriage again and is restored to her place at the window.

If you can set aside the emotional upheaval for awhile, you realise what a narrative triumph Jayakanthan has achieved. Jayakanthan gives a beautiful example to describe her life. When a train moves, the trees outside seem to move. And so does our heroine live her life, vicariously, like the non-moving, but seeming to move tree, never a participant in anything she is witness to. The incidents in her early years take up most of the story, and before you know it, time has flown and she is a grand aunt, but still at her window.

In Idho, Oru Kaadal Kadai, a bull and a cow are separated, and they part tearfully. The story is actually about what separation can do to lovers. But somehow my thoughts were more about the two poor creatures, which fall prey to man’s whims. One hears of animals having to be cajoled to mate with their chosen partners. After reading Jayakanathan’s story, I began to think anthropomorphically, and wondered if animals felt the pangs of separation too, as acutely as humans did.

Jayakanthan was in disagreement with the anti-Brahminism of the Dravidian parties. But when he tried to speak up for Brahmins at a conference of Brahmin youth in Krishna Gana Sabha, he was asked by the Brahmins, “Are you a Brahmin?” It was the same question the DK and DMK asked him. And so he felt constrained to define a Brahmin. Was a man a Brahmin simply because of external symbols? The modern Brahmin, who had distanced himself from his moorings hardly qualified to be called one, he said. And by the same token, he argued, that if the DK disliked Brahminism, then they should like the present day Brahmin, because the latter had turned his back on his tradition.

At a Tamil writer’s conference, he challenged Dravidian views. He said that to mock the Mahabharata because Draupadi had five husbands, was to miss the essence of the epic. Nor is the Mahabharata only about such unusual marital arrangements. It’s a treasure trove of culture. Simple villagers who worship Draupadi as a goddess know this. But why is it that educated intellectuals do not, Jayakanthan asked. Members of the DK protested to Periyar that they were hurt by Jayakanthan’s words. Periyar told them that those in public life must not be over sensitive. “How many times have we flung questions at people? Did we ever think of how hurt they might have felt?” Periyar asked. Jayakanthan writes, that at that moment, he wanted to fall at Periyar’s feet, because of the latter’s intellectual honesty.

Reading Jayakanthan’s reasoning for his political and religious beliefs, gives us an idea about the rationale behind some of his stories. In Gurukkal Aathu Paiyyan, Viswanathan, the young temple priest, gives a wry smile whenever he sees the Panchayat chief, because the chief reaffirms his atheism by mocking Viswanathan, while the chief’s wife breaks coconuts for Lord Ganesha, when her husband wins the elections. And when Jayakanthan writes about pseudo believers and pseudo atheists in his Aanmeega Anubhavangal, you are reminded of this story.

Through his stories, we hear the voices of the usually voiceless. His heroes and heroines are ordinary people, who are, however, remarkable in some way. For sheer variety of characters, Jayakanthan remains unmatched. And yet he never sacrificed style for substance. He told the most thought provoking stories, and covered a variety of topics, and did all this through cadenced prose.

Courtesy:The Hindu