Vairamuthu, the Jnanpith, and the question of merit

The choice of Vairamuthu for the Jnanpith Award 2025 has provoked a fierce debate within the Tamil literary community. The controversy revolves around four main arguments.

The loudest of these arguments is that Vairamuthu is a lyricist rather than a litterateur. The Jnanpith guidelines explicitly state that the award is for outstanding literary contributions that illuminate human values rooted in Indian philosophy, present a broad vision, and contribute new perspectives to the Indian literary canon.

Does Vairamuthu’s oeuvre meet this demand? A vast body of his works consists of film songs (over 7500) which were written to suit a specific scene, melody, or commercial demand; while they can be “literature-adjacent,” they cannot be part of a literary canon. What is more, his film songs, his critics argue, often objectify the female body, crossing from the sensual into the vulgar. Whether objectification takes away literary merit is a long-standing debate in criticism, but the fact remains that, in Vairamuthu’s songs, the objectification is often gratuitous rather than a thematic choice adding depth, and this diminishes the artistic value of the songs.

Neither does the substantial body of work Vairamuthu has produced outside cinema – novels such as Kallikaattu Ithihasam, which won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2003, and Karuvachi Kaviyam in which he treats agrarian crises – matches the high standards required for the Jnanpith Award.  As Jeyamohan rightly points out, Vairamuth’s “rural aesthetic” consists of lyrical melodrama–a cinematic mode to amplify the sentimental value of a crisis–that relies on rhetorical flourishes. In the process of this “poetic” elevation or romanticization, the village emerges as a stage for a great tragedy rather than as a living, breathing entity, as it does in the works of Poomani and Ki Ra, who are authentic chroniclers of the soil.

Secondly, the Jnanpith is no longer given for a specific outstanding literary work of an author; the entire body of work produced by them is taken into account. Vairamuthu’s work fails on this count, too, as his primary body of work consists of film songs composed for commercial purposes and pandering to commercial tastes. In fact, Vairamuthu’s fame is firmly rooted in film lyrics.

Thirdly, Jeyamohan’s language may be unrestrained (e.g. Vairamuthu is “not a poet at all” but merely a “ridiculous film lyricist”), but his argument that Vairamuthu’s work does not represent the depth of contemporary Tamil literature is valid. In selecting him for the award, the Pravara Parishad has unwittingly created a wrong impression about the Tamil literary landscape, as it did in 1975 when Akilan was selected for this award for his Chithira Pavai (a novel that represented pulp fiction with a shallow story-telling device), largely thanks to the widespread popularity it had gained during its run in Kalki magazine.

The fourth argument rests on moral grounds. Carnatic musician TM Krishna and playback singer Chinmayi Sripaada have questioned how an institution representing national cultural authority can honour an individual accused of harassment by multiple women. This shifts the focus to a broader question: Can a person’s artistic achievements be considered in isolation from their personal conduct when conferring a nation’s highest honours?

While a nomination is often influenced by popularity, the Jnanpith guidelines explicitly state that the award is for “creative literary writing” that fosters commitment to “higher values of life.” That is what makes the choice of Vairamuthu so controversial. His critics suggest that the committee’s judgement was swayed by his commercial success and political clout rather than literary standards.

 

From Hierarchy to Homogeny: The AI Takeover of Voices

“I read your message more than once before responding, as I felt it deserved that pause,” GRK’s email began. Was this truly from him? A quick check of the “From” field confirmed it was—GRK’s display name alongside the email address left no doubt.

Surprise was giving way to amusement. The tone was uncharacteristic of GRK. It carried several cultural risks in a hierarchical environment, and GRK, like many other Indians, was a quintessential product of such a culture.

I reread the line. My message “deserved that pause,” it said, as though evaluating my words. In high-power-distance cultures like the Indian social and professional environment, it is generally the superior’s role to evaluate the quality of communication, not the subordinate’s. GRK, being far below me on the professional ladder, was stepping out of line by positioning himself as a judge of my message. His implied equality was, in a sense, a break from the hierarchical culture he was raised in.

And then there was the over-familiarity of the line: “…I felt (it deserved that pause).” Professional communication in India typically remains formal and indirect. A subordinate telling his superior about his “feeling” in a certain way about the boss’s email can be seen as overstepping professional boundaries. GRK would never be one to cross those boundaries.

Next, the subordinate’s candid statement that he had to “pause” and “think” before responding. A subordinate, in a hierarchical professional environment, pausing and thinking about a superior’s message! Was he being critical of the superior’s email? Didn’t this at least suggest he was defensive?

In other words, GRK was evaluating my message which, though a positive transformation, would be perceived as presumptuous in Indian professional and social culture, where professional interactions are often dictated by rank rather than collaborative merit. If at all a subordinate shows their “deep thought,” it should be to demonstrate their diligence and respect for the superior’s expertise.

Why was GRK being so “impudently reflective” rather than respectfully thorough, as was his wont? The truth dawned on me: it wasn’t GRK speaking—it was an AI writing agent at the helm. The AI had used GRK’s prompts and delivered an email whose directness and over-familiar tone were beyond GRK’s understanding. In the pre-AI age, GRK would have written something like, “Sir, your email offered valuable insights…”

This is the case with the emails I receive from my colleagues nowadays: they are “voiceless.” In the past, their voices were distinct. GRK’s emails, for instance, were indirect and over-polite. But their characteristic quality was a huge gap between intention and expression, and the struggle was touching. PR’s emails were long-winded, and his overly formal apologies—a la Jane Austen's Mr Collins—always stood out. NB’s were lengthy, rambling, illogical, and extremely painful to read. LV was fond of obsequious vocabulary and hyperbolic praise, but his diction was distinctly different from NG’s unctuous language, which was greasy to the touch, as it were. The emails of all these colleagues shared some common qualities: they abounded in tense mixing, false inversion, double past, syntactical non sequiturs, overuse of the definite article, and weakening intensifiers, among others. But they had a touch of individuality: each email writer had a signature style that was distinct, consistent, and recognizable. You could “hear” each writer’s “voice,” and this lent a touch of authenticity to the emails.

I miss those voices now. All of them use generative AI, which “sanitizes” their overuse of “softeners” and indirectness, placing their ideas in a generic template with acceptable English. In the emails of the pre-AI age, the ideas and language were often laughable, but the writers spoke in their own voices. Even now, when they make oral presentations, I hear their voices. But when they write, they all sound uniform, indistinguishable, and intellectual. Even when they—the AI Writing Assistant, I mean—use the personal pronoun “I,” it sounds distant and impersonal.

“Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll / Who wrote like an angel and talked like poor Poll,” wrote David Garrick about Oliver Goldsmith (“Poll” was a common nickname for a parrot). While my colleagues continue to sound as they have always done when they speak, they now speak in borrowed voices when they write, sounding like Oxbridge or Ivy League scholars.

AI writing ill-fits them. Two descriptions from literary criticism come to mind. “Matthew Arnold in a sari,” remarked Gordon Bottomley, reacting to Victorian sentiment and style being awkwardly dressed in Indian themes in early Indian English poetry. “Shakuntala in skirts,” said an amused Gokak, who found the English translations of Indian poetry as stiffly Western.

The tapas of self-promotion

KIA practises the philosophy of self-adulation to perfection. But no doctrine of self-importance can survive without external validation, and that, in turn, requires captive audiences. KIA is fortunate on this count. Given his leadership position, he can always summon a meeting and be assured of an indulgent audience. He can also stop employees in corridors and buttonhole them about his greatness – stories often laced with epic adventures such as grabbing a quick bite well past lunchtime, heroically enduring the delay, and returning home late in the evening after a day-long quest for the “holy grail.” Preaching a me-first doctrine requires the self-assurance of a Don Quixote, the self-righteousness of a Malvolio, and the intelligence of Paramanandayya’s sishyulu. KIA possesses these qualities in generous measure.

 

“I couldn’t go home for lunch today,” KIA said to me when I met him yesterday.

 

I didn’t ask him why. I knew that a long tale about this great event lay in wait like an ambush, ready to spring. But the guns did not fire at once. There was a long reflective pause – something uncharacteristic of KIA. I dropped my defences and began to relax when he ruefully shook his head and said, “Yet another hectic day!”

 

“Oh really!” I said, almost involuntarily – and instantly regretted it. It was a foolish breach, enough for KIA to charge through with a familiar tale, narrated in vague but portentous terms, about how busy he had been.

 

His monotonous intoning was suddenly overlaid by a deep rumble as a Bandar-bound train approached the crossing, sounding two long blasts. The chugging slowly faded, and silence returned. KIA droned on, unmindful of the interruption. Somewhere a mobile phone rang. On the road behind us, a car screeched to a halt and a dog let out a series of howls. Someone cursed in Telugu. Nothing disturbed KIA. He was a picture of dedication. Lost in his self-promoting tapas, he was oblivious to all competing noises.

 

“So, I asked my wife to pack it and send it here, and she did so,” he concluded, a self-satisfied smile spreading across his face. Then, as though recalling an important detail, he added a rounding-off statement: “When I finished eating, it was quarter past two.”

 

My instincts urged caution; another boast was brewing. "Isn’t it time for the meeting?" I cut in. "It’s ten to three. Let’s go."

 

I stood and marched towards the door. If KIA was rattled by the abrupt exit, he didn’t show it. We had scarcely cleared the threshold, however, when he launched into a new saga of self-importance.

 

"I have completed thirty-two NPTEL courses," he said, craning his neck to force eye contact.

 

I ignored the expectant look and walked on. This line of defence proved no better than the first. The NPTEL narrative continued but did not conclude; it had interwoven storylines and a non-linear progression. KIA promised to tell me the rest after the scheduled event.

 

KIA started the meeting. His speech was concise and respectful of the audience’s time. He retold the NPTEL story just once, taking no more than five minutes, and made only a passing reference to his delayed lunch, sparing the audience details such as the phone call to his wife and the meal arriving from home. Without much ado, he announced me as the guest speaker, invited me to speak, and stepped down.

 

When I finished, he was back on the podium—and, sure enough, back on that familiar NPTEL-refrain. Time was now available in plenty; the scheduled event was over. It now dawned on me that my guest lecture had merely been a pretext. Self-promotion, I realised, was the de facto agenda.

 

Let me end this vignette on a reflective note. How do vainglorious bores rise to positions in which leadership skills ostensibly matter?

 

The question is best answered anecdotally rather than in black-and-white terms. In the television series, Maharani, streaming on SonyLIV, Gauri Shankar Pandey—a degenerate politician as adept at bootlicking as he is at bullying—is reincarnated as the Governor of Bihar after successfully engineering a series of diabolical intrigues.

 

In the final scene of Season 4, he makes a dramatic entrance at the Raj Bhavan in a chauffeured black Mercedes-Benz. Equally at ease in a Bandhgala suit as he once was in a haphazardly wrapped dhoti, he saunters in, seats himself majestically in an ornate push-back chair, and casts a supercilious glance at Navin Kumar, Prem Kumar Chaubey’s confidant, before curtly rejecting his plea for Chaubey’s release.

 

“You will meet the fate of Bhima Bharti,” a furious Navin Kumar warns him. Pandey’s response is telling: “Even if the whole world is destroyed in a nuclear blast, there will be a cockroach deep down in the rubble.” With a fiery gaze blazing from beneath luxuriantly tousled eyebrows, he tears up the appeal, flings the pieces at Navin Kumar, and declares, “I am that cockroach.”

 

Like Pandey’s cockroach, the KIAs of the world are the ultimate survivors, thriving in the rubble of corporate or academic boredom.

How many roads?

What with the demand for faculty outstripping the supply of competent teachers, academic hiring often ends up somewhere on the spectrum between absurdity and farce, with nonsensical dialogues and ludicrous endings. In the past ten years or so, as a subject expert, I have been a silent onlooker in hundreds of absurd and farcical faculty selection dramas in which my role has often been hijacked by KIA to my great relief.

 

In one of the latest of these dramas, KIA, who is as distant from English literature as Donald Trump is from good sense, asked a candidate, who was a postgraduate in English with several other academic qualifications and plenty of experience as a teacher, if she had studied Shakespeare in her MA. She nodded wanly. The reluctant nod encouraged KIA to drivel on about the Bard.

 

“Do you read Shakespeare even now?”

 

She both shook and nodded her head.

 

“What’s your favourite Shakespeare play?”

 

“Paradise Lost, saar” she said in a hushed voice as though she was naming a serial murderer.

KIA looked confused. He turned in my direction for a confirmation. I kept a blank face. Shakespeare or Rajamouli’s father – how the hell would the authorship of this book matter in an engineering college?

 

Never one to give up, KIA decided to address the subject without any expert guidance. “I know,” he said fixing the woman with an intimidating gaze, “Shakespeare wrote Helmet. Did he write Paradise also?”

 

“Oh yes, saar. Paradise Lost, saar, not Paradise. It’s a famous book.”

 

“Drama?”

 

“Of course, drama, saar. Shakespeare wrote only dramas.”

 

KIA has a deeply suspicious nature. “Who lost paradise in the drama?” he persisted, leaning forward as though pouncing.

 

“Angels, saar,” she said in a bright and clear voice. “They were in paradise, and they lost paradise.” Her eyes gleamed with confidence now.

 

This seemed a convincing explanation. KIA leaned back and nodded in satisfaction. “Okay, teach a demo lesson now.”

 

She got up and moved slowly like a detached wagon being shunted on to a side track in the Vijayawada railway yard. The wagon stood between the two boards, one white and the other black, on the other side of the hall, thought for a while and decided to use the white board.

‘The Road Not Taken’ – she wrote this in tiny letters on the board and started talking to the board itself. She said something about some Robert-something who wrote the poem.

 

KIA wouldn’t allow this. “Write on the board, without doubt, but speak to the students behind you. Don’t you know this? You are an experienced teacher, aren’t you?”

 

She smiled with a piteous look on her face and continued her teaching. It was a dialogic process with KIA making it as interactive as possible.

 

“There were two roads, and the traveller took one of them.”

 

“But there was only one traveller, so he could have taken only one of the roads. How could he take both roads?”

 

“Yes, saar. But there was another road also, saar.”

 

“But he did not take it. Why bother about it? Tell us what happened on the road he took.”

“Nothing happened, saar.”

 

“What are you saying? There were two roads. He took one. And nothing happened on that road. Is that what the poem is about? Funny.”

 

“Yes, saar. But no, saar. He talks about other roads also.”

 

“Other roads! You said there was only one other road, but now you are saying there were more roads. How many roads were there? Be clear about the number.” Then he turned to the subject expert and asked, “How many roads, sir?”

 

KIA is a facts-and-figures man. So, I decided to do justice to his question. “Actually, there are three roads,” I said approaching the question with deep reflection. From 2014 to 2023 I took the road on the Addada-Gudlavalleru route. When it became broken up and unusable beyond Penjendra, I took that serpentine one on the Chirichintala route – the road that takes you through several run-down cemeteries, full of tumbled tombstones, before it crosses the railway line and touches Angaluru. A few months ago, even that road become impassable. Then I went beyond and took the unfinished flyover near Dokiparru. The flyover hasn’t been opened to traffic yet, but I use it. It’s a roundabout way, of course, but it doesn’t hurt my back much.”

 

It was a moment of enlightenment for KIA – a eureka moment in which all illusions are shattered and one sees things as they really are. “Is that what the poem is about?” he asked the woman who, both shook and nodded her head, as was her wont, especially when deeply confused, and that concluded the lesson.

 

‘The pain ends when you let go,’ as the song goes.

There's something in a name

"I love the story, but why don't you add some colour to the title?" said a longtime friend with literary interests when, a couple of days ago, I asked her to read a short story I had just finished writing and give her opinion. "Doesn't the title fit?" I asked her. "Oh, it does," she said. "There's no doubt about it. But, well, isn't it rather simple?"

It was. Not just simple but banal. And far from being evocative. After a good deal of futile discussion, the title I chose was 'The Smoky World of Aravamuthan.' It was clever and descriptive, but loud and lengthy. If I settled for it, it was because I had grown weary of the title discussion, and I wanted the story to be taken off my hands as soon as possible.

Now that the story has left me and become part of the editor's headache, I can look at the issue of naming with some detachment -- without being distracted by my own story, I mean. A good number of literary masterpieces have very simple titles. Tolstoy's tour de force, which is recognized as one of the greatest novels in world literature, has a plain title: War and Peace. Pasternak's Nobel-Prize-winning novel, Dr Zhivago, is plainer than that. Animal Farm and 1984, the titles of Orwell's famous novels, are matter-of-fact. Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are some of the most fascinating books in world literature, but their titles are colourless.

It is difficult to find a title that is fitting as well as evocative. The Grapes of Wrath, the title of John Steinbeck's famous novel, is at once both. The title, taken from The Battle Hymn of the Republic, is richly evocative of the Apocalypse of John in the Bible. Similarly, If It Die, the title of André Gide's memoir, is reminiscent of St John's Gospel: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." The title of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory brings to mind the doxology chanted at the end of the Lord's Prayer. Here are a few other titles that are evocative: A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sound and the Fury, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The God of Small Things. And, of course, 'The Smoky World of Aravamuthan'!

“What's in a name?” asked Juliet. While we never tire of quoting her, we believe that there is something in a name. Many of us even believe that there is so much in a name.

Like father, like son

 "My son!" he said grinning from ear to ear. "I want you to meet him."

The young man flashed a big and bright smile that outshone his nanna's grin and put out his hand to shake mine. He looked bent and frail, and his lean and hungry look reminded me of Cassius. The father left us with an expression of accomplishment on his face.

The young man didn't seem to believe in exchanging pleasantries beyond a perfunctory handshake. He didn't even allow me to introduce myself. He got down to business. He spoke about himself. He spoke about his wife. He spoke about his job in Germany. He spoke about German society of which, he was at pains to point out, he was part. He spoke about German culture vis-à-vis himself. And he spoke about the German language -- his own mastery of it rather.

The monologue went on, and it seemed like an eternity. Somewhere a cell phone rang. Behind me a car screeched to a halt, a dog yelped as if hurt, and someone cursed. Now the electronic bell from the control room let off a piercing scream announcing the lunch break, and students spilled out of classrooms. There was an outbreak of riotous laughter in the corridor in front of me. Teachers were pushing their way through the crowd. The attendant came and asked me if he could close the door and turn the AC on. I shook my head and smiled ruefully.

But nothing disturbed the young man's tapas; he spoke and spoke, completely absorbed in himself. "In any given week," he was intoning when I turned my attention to him, "I find myself at the Frankfurt Airport waiting to catch a flight to London or Paris or New York or Abu Dhabi."

"Or Vatican City or Monaco," I added two airportless cities. He paused reflectively for a moment and then smiled in affirmation.

"You're just like your father," I said, determined not to lose that opportunity. "The yarns you spin are as enchanting as his."

This was completely lost on him. Just as I had expected. He picked up where he left off and launched into yet another lengthy account of his work. "In my company, my..."

Ten minutes passed and the speaker was still gabbling away. I rose from behind my desk, stretched my cramped limbs, yawned wearily, and checked my cell phone. But the gasconade continued. I gazed fixedly at the huge clock in front of me on the wall and said in a firm tone of voice, "If you will excuse me..."

This worked. The speaker suddenly remembered an online meeting he was scheduled to address in a few minutes. He didn't, of course, leave without blabbering about the importance of the meeting.

"How did you find my son?" asked the father when he met me in the evening expressly for this purpose.

"Oh, he's just like you," I said. "A great speaker," I added after a moment's pause.

 

 

 

A nightmarish wedding pandal

The rituals in Hindu weddings are complex, elaborate, noisy and even messy. A large apartment complex in which most of the residents are Hindu families is a nightmare world. Shanthi and I live in one. There are seventy families in our complex and most of them are Hindus. Needless to say weddings are a recurring nightmare in the community.

In the nightmare we are currently experiencing, we are direct victims. Seven days ago, at 7 o’clock in the morning, I was reading the newspaper on my balcony on the first floor when I heard some noise coming from the driveway below. I looked down. A decorated bamboo pole with a knotted piece of cloth at the top was being planted by two workers in the shrubbery along the driveway. The people around them, who were members of a family living on the third floor above my flat, were giving them instructions. Once the ritual planting was over, the family offered prayers to the consecrated pole.

‘What could this be?’ I asked Shanthi

Pandakkaal, she said. ‘But that’s Tamil. I think they call it raata pathatam in Telugu. A pre-wedding ritual to ward off the evil eye – to banish the demon of Drishti, you know.’

‘So, there’s going to be a wedding.’

‘Tomorrow.’

Once the raata muhurtam was over, the family turned to us. With them was a fellow-resident I knew well. ‘Sir, we’ll set up a pandal here.’

I smiled sheepishly without fully understanding what he was saying.

By 10 o’clock, the whole landscape had changed. Bundles and bundles of bamboo and casuarina poles and lorry loads of dried palm leaves had arrived. While some of the workers were unloading them, the others were planting poles for a wedding pandal.

It was then that I realised that I had made a mistake. The pandal ran along the entire length of my balcony from one end to another, with casuarina poles and palm leaves crudely jutting out onto the balcony. It was a crude shelter, a vestigial feature of our primitive past. And it looked positively ugly.

Just for a couple of days, I said to myself; once the wedding was over, they would dismantle this primitive structure.

At quarter past four next morning, the residents woke to heart-stopping beats emerging from the third floor. In a small enclosed place, a tavil drum can produce enormous, explosive noise. It was accompanied by deep, high-pitched, disharmonious sounds from a nadaswaram, making a poor attempt to capture Thyagaraja and Annamayya. The pellikuthuru ceremony had started! The apartment complex kept trembling for hours. At 9 o’clock, when I went downstairs, I found that vehicles had been cleared from the parking lot in which there was now an over-decorated pandal where the bride was being given mangala snanam. Needless to say that the parking lot was a mess.

I went back to my apartment. Shanthi asked me to open the balcony door, and I did so. There were swarms and swarms of insects, especially ants, crawling down the balcony wall from the pandal roof. What’s worse, the domestic help told us that the pandal would stay for ten or fifteen days.

I spoke to the secretary of the owners’ association, a former student.

‘It’s a delicate issue, sir… Religious sentiments…,’ he stuttered and stammered.

‘Sanatana dharma, I suppose.’  I sighed wearily.

Now, Deepavali, the festival of noise and noxious smoke, among other things, is approaching. A few days from now, sanatana dharm
is will be busy firing crackers. If one of them falls – accidentally, of course – on the pandal, there will be a massive fireworks display on my balcony.