Rest in peace, Father Peter Raj!

I’m sorry to hear that Father Peter Raj has passed away. He was my colleague in the Department of English at Andhra Loyola College (ALC) for a long period of time, and my Principal from 1999 until his retirement in 2004. I have just heard from Father Peter Kishore, ALC Principal, that he died of multiple organ failure at 4.00 pm yesterday.

Fr Raj was a multi-talented person. He was a gifted teacher, an accomplished singer, a skilful keyboard player and an eloquent speaker whose oration at Father Gordon’s funeral was ringing in my ears months after the funeral. If he was so sparing in his use of these talents, it was because he wanted to keep out of the public eye; he preferred, instead, a life of splendid isolation.

There were other gifts, by no means of less value. One of them was his legendary level-headedness. Staffroom conversations often centred round Fr Raj’s uncanny ability to remain unprovoked in situations in which anybody else would fly into a fury. For all his awesome “high seriousness,” Fr Raj had a great sense of humour. He often cracked jokes and told funny stories with that sphinx-like expression of his never disappearing from the face. But, alas, not many got his jokes! For one thing, they were far too subtle. For another, they were couched in Johnsonian seesaws and so eloquently expressed with Miltonic sublimity. Not surprisingly, they sounded rather like the oration he had famously delivered! Soon, however, the sensible humorist stopped telling jokes. But he continued to read PG Wodehouse. I wonder what he enjoyed most in PGW – Bertie’s Mayfair slang or Jeeves’s Wardour Street of which he himself was a master, or both.

‘A place sheweth the man,’ said Francis Bacon. A truer word has never been spoken. The real nature of a person – his “true colours” – comes out most when he holds a position of authority and exercises power. Power has shown some people to be better and some worse. ‘People would have deemed him fit for emperor had he never become emperor,’ said Tacitus, the ancient Roman historian, about Galba. That was never said about Fr Raj. In power or out of it, he was always his own true self, to wit, a gentleman.

Rest in peace, Father Peter Raj!

From the sidelines

A few days ago, I was at the barber’s for a hair-cut. When I entered the narrow, air-conditioned salon, a programme had been on on a Telugu TV channel. It was a musical show on which different groups of young people were presenting a series of music-cum-dance performances, and the competition was being judged by a panel of judges consisting of a Tollywood star of yesteryear, a music director, and two playback singers. The show was being anchored by a pretty young girl in bridal outfit. All the eyes inside the salon were fixed on the TV screen. The three barbers were no exception: they managed the cutting and the shaving with one eye firmly fixed on the TV screen and another eye on the head or the chin where the hands were dexterously at work. Time and again, the anchor, the participants, and the judges were screaming out exciting exclamations in half-Telugu-half-English, and this provoked giggling inside the salon.

All of a sudden, the anchor screamed, ‘Come on, guys, time is running out.’

I asked my barber, ‘Ammayi cheppindi meekku ardhamayinda?’

‘Emi cheppindi, saar?’

‘Time is running out.’

‘Ante, time ayipoyindi katha?’

‘Ayipoyindi kathu; ayipovuthunnadi.’

‘Time’s running out. Cheppu,’ I said.

My barber is not the type that would take shelter from a rain in a school. He may have been “conscripted” into a Telugu medium school for a couple of years, but the school itself and the English language would have been poles apart. With some difficulty, he said, ‘Time’s running out.’

The programme progressed. The anchor, the actress and the participants kept squealing with excitement, either individually or all of them at the same time, and this generated quite a lot of English expressions. I noticed a perceptible change in the barber’s behaviour now: he seemed to be listening carefully rather than casually, as he had been earlier.

All of a sudden, the anchor screamed, ‘”Oh” momentnurchi ippudu manam “wow” momentkku vochamu!’

Now, the barber asked me, ‘Sir, “wow” ante enti?’

‘Oh” kooda annaru katha? Adu meeku ardhamayinda?

He gave a sheepish smile.

I said, ‘oh ante ascharyam.’

‘Wow ante?’

‘Wow ante chala ascharyam

The first round of presentations in the series was perhaps the “oh” moment for the anchor. They were in the last round now, and the sense of surprise, from the anchor’s point of view, had reached a crescendo. Hence her description of it as the “wow” moment.

Film-based dance-and-music shows of this kind take place almost every day on television channels, and they are keenly watched by young people like my barber. But, hereafter, when he watches these programmes, he will do so with yet another purpose added to his watching: he will not let go of the English-language expressions in the exclamations being screamed out without thinking about them and making sense of them because his attention has been focused on this particular aspect. And, given this attention, he will have little difficulty in understanding those expressions in their context. In other words, what I did with the barber was consciousness-raising, and I believe this works eminently in adult language learning.

Perhaps the basic principles that operate in the barber situation should be the guiding principles behind our instructional efforts on a foreign language programme meant for adult learners – namely, motivation, consciousness-raising, a certain amount of teaching followed by practice, with the rest of the responsibility for pursuing and consolidating their learning in an ongoing way -- throughout their lives – being left to the individual learners.

 

Visiting Kayarambedu after fifty years

When Rahul, who lives in Toronto, said he wanted to visit his ancestral village and worship at the temple where his ancestors had worshipped, I was pleasantly surprised. ‘There is something to be said for exile,’ I thought, remembering R. Parthasarathy. ‘You learn roots are deep.’

We set out for Kayarambedu on the penultimate Saturday of the holy month of Purattasi. With me were Shanthi, Rahul, and his family consisting of his wife, Sripriya, and his six-year-old daughter, Srishti. None of them had seen the village before; in fact, I was visiting the village myself after about fifty years.

The car pulled up at a square where there was a crowd of villagers. The surroundings were dotted with shanties and awful-looking roadside eats with a rough narrow road with crumbling edges meandering behind an Ambedkar in a blue coat. Behind us, horns honked impatiently.

I lowered the window and was hit by voices, music, horns, sirens and tobacco smoke. ‘Kayarambedu…’ I shouted, ‘Can you tell me the way to Kayarambedu?’

‘Kayarambedu?’ queried an old man after blowing a puff of smoke into the air. ‘Go this way,’ he said, pointing to the rough road behind the Ambedkar statue, ‘and turn right where the road forks.’

From the fork, the path wobbled above, up on an old embankment from which a herd of buffaloes was climbing down. The sense of déjà vu was overwhelming. I said, ‘Certain things don’t change.’

‘What doesn’t change, Thatha?’ asked Srishti.

I pointed to the buffaloes and said, ‘A herd of buffaloes climbing down this tank bund after a nice bath. I used to watch this day after day through the classroom window when I was a child like you.’

‘So, there is a school here?’

‘On your right.’

‘You studied here, Thatha?’

‘Sort of. I spent a couple of years here. There were only two teachers for the whole school, and they were busy chatting.’

‘And you were left to watch buffaloes.’

This evoked a peal of merry laughter.

We drove past the school and a Shiva temple. The car gingerly moved into a narrow street, slowed to a crawl and came to a halt in front of the remains of what must once have been a temple. ‘Google Map says this is Kariamanikka Perumal Temple,’ said the driver.

‘But it doesn’t look much like a temple,’ Shanthi complained. ‘It doesn’t even have a gopuram.’

‘This is the place,’ I reassured her. ‘Of course, it’s worse than it used to be in the past. But, even in the past, it never had a gopuram, but it didn’t seem to cause any unease to our ancestors who worshipped here.’ I twinkled and added, ‘And they were quite well-to-do.’ I chuckled at the astonishment on her face.

I turned my attention to the temple now. It looked much smaller than it was when I was a child, shrunken and pathetic. The dhvajastambham had disappeared, and so had the thirumadaipalli (sacred kitchen). But the balipeetam and the sacred well remained intact. So did the pradakshina patha which, to my surprise, was well laid out.

We went into the temple. Moolavar thirumanjanam was going on, and the “priest” performing it was a young man (who later told me that he was the archaka’s son and a student of MBA in an engineering college in a neighbouring town). Milk, curd, turmeric water, and plain water were pouring in a steady stream over the stone idol unaccompanied by any kattiyam (‘Kattiyam? What’s that?’ the young man later asked me). Every now and then, the young man waved his hand, and the congregation outside the sanctum responded with a rousing chorus of ‘Govinda, Go-vinda!’ It was an unconventional way of performing an abhishekam, but quite impressive, and the Lord was smiling enigmatically as if amused by this new ritual. Whenever there was a Govinda gosham (roar), his eyelids flickered open and he looked at the crowd winsomely!

The archaka arrived now. It turned out he was a Telugu pantulu belonging to the smarta tradition and was unacquainted with Sri Vaishnava sampradayam. There was, therefore, no chanting of ‘Tadviṣṇoḥ paramaṁ padaṁ sadā paśyanti sūrayaḥ…’ at the time of the aarti; there was no ‘Pallaandu, pallaandu…’ either. There was only an invigorating chorus of ‘Govinda, Go-vinda!’ and the Lord listened to this namasmarana with an expression of pure rapture on his face. Karumanikka Perumal is an undemanding god; he knows that the key to happiness is being easily pleased. One of the villagers had brought some naivedyam cooked in her house, and the pantulu had no hesitation in offering it to the Lord. The temple didn’t seem to be captive to brahminical traditions any longer; it had become egalitarian!

I came out of the temple to explore the street. It looked small and shrunken with abandoned or neglected houses on both sides falling apart. Didn’t people live in this street anymore?  Broken beams hung down from the tiled roof of Rangaswamy Ayyangar’s house. I looked wistfully at the raised platform adjacent to the entrance which had been reduced to rubble now. On this thinnai, Uncle Chinnappa, who was a gifted raconteur, used to regale us, children of the agraharam, with delightful tales, so full of adventure, emotion, adult content, and scatological humour, from Tamil folklore, especially Aaayiram Thalaivaangiya Apoorva Chintamani.  The house I grew up in used to be just opposite this house. I turned back and found in the place of the house a bleak and desolate landscape.

Now a group of villagers came. They were curious to know who this old man was, and why he was surveying the agraharam. I introduced myself. None of them knew me, but my father’s name worked like magic. ‘I’m Natesan’s son, Sami,’ said a 75-year-old man. ‘Your father was a great person. We miss him.’

‘Sir, not swamy,’ I corrected him, but he shook his head.

More people came now, introducing themselves as Aiyaavu’s son, Veerabhadra Naicker’s younger son, Gopalu’s elder son, Ponnuswamy’s daughter, somebody else’s daughter-in-law, and so on. They all spoke about my father with affection.

‘Can you recognize me?’ a shaky voice asked. I shook my head.

‘I’m Kasi.’

‘Meenakshi’s son?’

His dark face beamed with delight when he nodded his head. ‘You remember my mother!’ His eyes grew moist with tears of joy. ‘I am 82 now.’

I gave him a hug and said, ‘But you don’t look so, Kasi.’

The crowd watched this scene with fascination. ‘It’s like being with your father again,’ said an old man. ‘It feels so good.’

An angry, raspy voice spoke from behind. ‘What your relatives did to your family was terrible. I was here when they came to sell the property. It was rough, aggressive… the action and the language. The Lord…’

‘Oh, no,’ I turned round and protested. ‘I don’t want to hear about it. I just wanted my granddaughter’s feet to touch this soil, and I’m glad they did so. Today, three generations of my family stood together and worshipped at the temple where several generations of the Asuri family had worshipped in the past. It’s a great feeling, and I want to savour it to the full.’

As the car wound around the tank bund, I said to Shanthi, ‘I’m glad I came here at least now. I owe it to Rahul. The visit gave me an opportunity to come to terms with my father with whom I had not been on speaking terms for over a decade until his death in 1986.’

 

 

A yathaartham issue provoked by one of my stories

https://solvanam.com/2021/11/28/%e0%ae%aa%e0%af%81%e0%ae%a3%e0%af%8d%e0%ae%a3%e0%ae%bf%e0%ae%af%e0%ae%ae%e0%af%8d/

Set against the backdrop of the sufferings of teachers on account of pay cuts and job losses in the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak, this story, titled ‘Punyam,’ is about an uncomplaining language teacher who has started working as an archaka in a temple to earn some extra income, and the support he receives from a trading community which lives in an apple-pie world, comforting but limiting, with black-and-white notions about papam and punyam, and a furniture merchant for whom helping the poverty-stricken teacher was a means of gaining some punyam.

The story has unwittingly thrown up a yathaartham issue. Soon after its publication in a US-based – or, so I believe – webzine last month, one of the members of the editorial team was so candid as to share with me the discussion the team had had on the story as part of their selection procedures. It appears that a team member had felt that the encouragement for Hindu ritualistic practices the story presented was against the reality (“yathaartham”) of what he believed to be the increasing denigration of such practices in our times. In other words, what he/she meant was that my story presents a fictionalized and romanticized view of a benevolence which is rather anachronistic.

I’m afraid this assumption is ill-informed. Many retail outlets in places like Vijayawada are owned by people from traditional trading communities. A priest visiting these business premises in the evenings to perform a pooja is something quite common. In some, especially big shops, this takes place every day, while, in others, it is done on Fridays. A priest visits a corporate hospital in my neighbourhood and does pooja; this takes place on a daily basis. And the hospital is by no means an exception.

As a teacher educator, I am associated with a number of schools, colleges and universities in this country, and, sometime ago, I did a survey of the conditions of private school teachers, who had been rendered jobless within months of the Coronavirus outbreak. They were doing all kinds of odd jobs, not excluding online teaching on a part-time basis, to earn a living. Among them was a group of language teachers, well up in Sanskrit and Telugu. Given their home backgrounds, which had led to their initiation into Sanskrit and anushtanam in their childhood, it was possible for them to carry out priestly functions after some training and work in temples also as archakas or poojaris. One of those teachers, who seemed to be doing this with the utmost competence, claimed that his monthly income was five times the amount his school had been paying him. Not all language teachers were so lucky, of course; many of them fell by the wayside for want of competence. But those who were good at Sanskrit quickly acquired the stock-in-trade necessary for successful functioning in this field and were doing well. This is true even of Tamil Nadu where traditional Hindu religious practices have not been overridden by “secular” and anti-Hindu – not anti-religious, I must hasten to add! – movements and the overt or covert encouragement they draw from public intellectuals. In other words, traditional Hindu religious practices and the denigration of those practices co-exist, and the “support” they draw from each other is indeed paradoxical.

This, in my perception, is the contemporary reality which, I must point out, is a complex mixture. From within this reality, one can choose the kind of yathaartham one wants depending upon one’s purpose, and express a sensibility one wants one’s readers to experience. I believe that there is no such thing as hard yathaartham or soft yathaartham in literary representation; those who insist on a particular kind of yathaartham are only pontificating, using easy, dismissive, push-button expressions. When the yathaartham question was brought to my notice, I felt like asking, ‘Which yathaartham? And whose yathaartham?’ I believe that what is important is what a writer does with the yathaartham s/he has chosen.

What have I done with my choice? To a superficial reader or listener, my story, set against the backdrop of the sufferings of teachers on account of pay cuts and job losses in the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak, is about an uncomplaining teacher who has started working as an archaka in a temple to earn some extra income, and the support he receives from a trading community and a furniture merchant for whom helping the poverty-stricken teacher was a means of gaining some punyam. But a careful reader will find that the businessman with a simplistic view of papam and punyam is subjected to an ironical treatment and that his uncharacteristic act of benevolence is treated with some complexity. So is the trading community which pays a measly Rs 10,000 for an entire month of work in the temple, though the teacher thinks that it was a magnanimous gesture. If one looks at the title (“புண்ணியம்”) in the light of all this, one will find it suggestive. At first, I chose a literary catchword for the title but rejected it on second thoughts, and settled for the simple ‘புண்ணியம் ('punyam'), hoping that the reader would reflect on its appropriateness. On a lighter note, considering that reading – or listening – has by and large become a casual affair, one may even insist that free-and-easy reading is the yathaartham, and that literature should be conducive to that kind of reading!

P.S.: One of the problems with a teacher-writer is that s/he often becomes a virtual bhashyakaar (भाष्यकार) of his/her own creations; the temptation is irresistable. Interestingly, one of the names of Sri Ramanuja, founder of the Vishishtadvaitic thought, after whom I am named, is Bhashyakaara.

Bad tidings, glad tidings

February didn’t start on a good note. Or so I thought. As dawn broke over Indrakeeladri and the city yawned awake, I writhed and twisted as pain wracked my body. It was Omicron of a harsher kind striking down with force without any advance notice. Apparently, Omicron doesn’t think much of Cleopatra’s advice: "Though it be honest, it is never good to bring bad news; Give to a gracious message an host of tongues, but let ill tidings tell themselves when they be felt."

Well, it was evening, I had still been down with the infection and barely got out of bed, when the phone rang.

‘Dr Parthasarathy?’

‘Yes, this is Ramanujam.’

‘I’m Anatara Dev Sen.’ The accent was unmistakably British.

‘You mean, Prof. Amartya Sen’s daughter and the founding editor of TLM?... Ms Sen, this is a privilege.’

‘Call me Antara, please.’

‘If you could call me Ramanujam.’

‘I would. I hope you read Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature. I am the editor of the journal.’

I had last read an issue of this journal some fifteen years ago. When I said that – how I wish I hadn’t! – she sounded disappointed.

As it turned out, Indian Literature wants to carry an English translation of one of my Tamil stories published over three decades ago in a literary magazine called Kanaiyazhi, which was a little magazine devoted to serious and even avant-garde writings in Tamil when Mr Asokamitran and Dr Indira Parthasarathi were the editors, and Mr K Kasturirangan, a veteran journalist and a former correspondent of The New York Times, was the publisher. The story was re-published as a special story in a webzine just three months ago.

Good tidings indeed – amid the clouds of the Omicron gloom.