The Great Indian Novel

Associated with the avant-garde magazine Ezhuthu and his own little magazine Kaala Chuvadu, SuRaa is known for his original and incisive literary voice, and his continuous experiments with form and technique.

The self-taught SuRaa, who had to drop out of school because of juvenile arthritis, was to learn Malayalam before he learned Tamil. He was born in Nagercoil, located in the midst of both the Tamil and Malayalam cultures; and his love for Malayalam endured through his literary career in the form of his translations from that language.

Indeed, we encounter the narrator of JJ: Some Jottings, a Tamil writer, musing wryly about a project for the Indian languages: ‘‘Fifteen languages are listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India. When I asked some writers if they have ever seen the script of all these languages at least once, they all replied warily, ‘No’… One of my fellow writers asked, ‘Has any Tamil reader said he’d die if he couldn’t get to read other literatures?’”

If SuRaa has been associated with the Left, the avant-gardists, the progressives, and the little magazine movement, JJ: Some Jottings teems with all the isms, too. Here are such personalities as Mullaikkal Madhavan Nair, Thamaraikkani, and the delightfully sketched Jaipur-bag toting woman writer Chittukkuruvi: all imaginary. JJ himself is the football-playing Malayalam writer to whom the novel is addressed as a kind of tribute.

If the novel outlines the different figures, such as they are, who dwell within the Tamil literary terrain, it pans across that terrain as well. Beginning with the subterfuge of describing the Malayalam literary landscape (JJ begins with a ‘‘scathing criticism of Malayalam poets’’), the novel soon moves into the world of Tamil writing and Tamil ideas: “Let no one imagine that the tree of thought will strike root only in Central Travancore. It will grow even on Tamil soil… Even wastelands have their own flora”. And, in the fictional ‘‘extract’’ from JJ’s diary for November 1950: ‘‘I don’t believe there is another country in this world that has produced books in such a vulgar manner.’’ But there is also this, in a ‘note’ prepared by JJ for the Library Reforms Committee (alas, if only we had paid more attention to our libraries): ‘‘When a reader, engrossed in his book, happens to look up from his reading, only greenery should meet his eye… Libraries too have lungs. When a reader, in search of a particular book, locates it with ease and settles down to read in comfort,the lungs expand and shrink, which activity alone is justification enough for the existence of the library.’’

A thought-provoking and remarkable book about books, and the ideas that shape them.