From Circe in the Odyssey to Sita in the Ramayana, characters from the classics have been revisited, and their stories retold time after time. Meena Kandasamy — poet, novelist and translator — believes that participating in the classics is not only a literary act, but also a political responsibility of writers.
In Kandasamy’s poem “Ms Militancy”, Kannagi, the main character of the Tamil classic Cilappatikāramreleasing the garb of the wife avenges the death of her husband with the power of her innocence to reveal a raging woman whose unflinching belief in justice brings down the empire.
In the translation of the third part of Tirukkural – title Inupattupal or The Book of Desires – Kandasamy trains a ‘Tamil Decolonial Feminist’ lens.
“It is important to tell our own stories, stories from the margins that have never been told, stories of women’s experiences that for some reason have never been considered part of high literature or high culture. It’s a big responsibility,” he said.
The acclaimed author was recently in Bengaluru to deliver a public lecture at St. Joseph’s College of Commerce.
“If you don’t change the story or the area, then the story becomes fixed and permanent until one end. It tells us that if a woman has a desire, it will end in tragedy. The predetermination can only be removed by returning to this classic,” said Kandasamy who believe that going around the classics is also an act of assuming space in history.
Meena Kandasamy Photo Credit: Custom arrangement
Drawing on the works of Carol Ann Duffy, Margaret Atwood, Periyar, and Ambedkar, all of whom have engaged with classical texts to train a non-conformist lens on them, Kandasamy argues that classics and mythology are living texts that do not belong to any particular set. people, but for the universal imagination.
“We can’t erase the myth. That’s not how popular consciousness or cultural memory works. The way you can make an impact on people’s consciousness is by being transgressive. To give new meaning and interpretation to these texts is how transgression is done in literature.
In conversation with The Hinduwriter-activist spoke about the need to revisit the classic, Western view of literature, and the need to defend language from being taken by modern oppressive forces.
One of the protest marches was held in Kolkata over the rape and murder of a doctor at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital. | Photo credit: photo file
Does the fact that the classics are constantly being revisited by writers also mean that the text leaves the possibility and space to tell the story?
I think the flexibility is there because this story is universal, and they offer a great template where you can move around the building blocks and come up with other interpretations.
Retelling, in some sense, is also a natural process. Your operating system has been upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 11. Man himself has moved towards industrialization and mechanization. The same applies to stories as well.
What, as a writer, you want to do because some of these stories are used as beats. His grip was so strong, and he forced you to conform.
At the same time, we cannot be anti-cultural philistines. It is an extreme step. So, the place for real cultural change is to interpret the text. We should not allow the text to implement hierarchies, hegemonies or oppression. So, we need to rotate the text.
Do you choose the third part of the Thirukkural to translate?
I am the third most cleaned. Men have tried to contain it in the patriarchal world, and many erasures have happened – the erasure of women’s presence, women’s desire, women’s energy… Language itself has been held back.
Other texts are more didactic. I feel it The Book of Desires require more immediate intervention.
When I HitYou there is breakthrough success, however Gypsy Goddess did not immediately find a large readership. In the interview to The Guardian, yYou’ve proven frustrated with publishers who say people can relate to women’s stories… (When I hit you is Kandasamy’s account of an Indian woman in an abusive marriage. At Gypsy Goddess he tells the story of a group of oppressed caste workers fighting for justice)
I don’t necessarily distinguish between my children, but I comment more on the industry. People like the stereotype of the battered wife. It also appeals in some way to the Western idea that Indian women are enslaved.
While the neoliberal capitalist market does not want the story of women fighting and claiming to be communists, it is not marketed. People in the West also don’t know what to do with stories that aren’t at the heart of the story.
Meaning of When I Hit You which is to deal with the big events in India. But the Western gaze sees the ‘trapped Indian woman.’
At Gypsy Goddessno Western view. The center of the world is a small, obscure village, and they don’t know how to relate to each other because the West wants to be the liberators or the oppressors. In both senses, they want to have the energy of the main character. When you remove him from the story, he doesn’t know what to do.
But does this also happen in Indian cities, when people only stand for what they can relate to? The horrific rape and murder of doctor RG Kar has sparked rallies across the country, but not all incidents of violence against women – for example, two Dalit girls found hanging from a tree in Farrukhabad – have not received the same attention. .
This has happened all the time. Hathras is less angry compared to Nirbhaya in Delhi. Caste is a big and predetermining factor.
But another factor is that we have all come to believe that the city is a safe place, a space that hides our identity and allows us to merge into the civic body of the city. When something like that happens in the city, it destroys our idealism. We always look at the village as a regressive place, a place of banal violence where the old order exists. But the city is a new place. Especially in the Indian imagination, the city is a construct where we all come together, a democratic place. Moreover, in the case of RG Kar, it is not only about the city but also about the workplace.
The second thing is that people always want good victims. In RG Kar we know the victim’s story – he is a doctor. In Farukkhabad, we don’t know the stories of the young girls, what happened to them, what their dreams are… Journalists don’t invest enough in these girls’ stories to make them relate.This is again a narrative question.
You have said that the site of all subjugation is at the level of language, and that political poetry has a responsibility to ensure that language is not at the mercy of the oppressors…
yes already. In Israel, they use words like evacuation and neutralization when that doesn’t happen. They don’t allow you to use the word genocide.
Today, the word decolonization is used by the Hindutva faction to imagine India as a place where everyone is happy, a land of milk and honey.
We have to be very careful about who uses what language.
The forces of occupation and neoliberal capitalism use language. I think, in that sense, the poet has a responsibility to hate the preservation of language and also to use language to show what happened and to show how language is hijacked.
