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Articles /Interviews
From Kavalam to Kavalam
A Tribute to Dr. K Ayyappa Paniker
by P. Ravindran Nayar
 In
his poem ‘Kavalam’ in the anthology ‘Pathumanippookkal’ Dr K Ayyappa Paniker
has made a nostalgic reference to his ancestral home and its surroundings.
The poem evocatively recreates from the distant past the rustic ambience of
Kavalam, a part of the water-logged Kuttanad area where the main mode of
conveyance used to be the ubiquitous row boat. Before the road, the bridge
and the cars came, the poem says, the boatman had to be hailed from the
other bank. During day-time visibility was good, but in the night one had to
call out aloud. ‘The lone wick of the small lamp, at times, would reflect on
the ripples as a long moving line.’
The poem is in the form of a
conversation between two people, possibly the poet and his female companion,
who wants to know if she is being taken to Kavalam in this fashion.
‘Is that
the way you are taking me there?’
‘I want to go to Kavalam.
Want to see all the places.
The door of the log chamber, the central court-yard,
The river landing, the basil platform,
The school yard and the riverside.
Will I get
a plot there?’ she asks
and the poet’s
reply is a counter-question:
‘Will it
be sufficient to see the final resting place?’
Dr Paniker had
set apart a plot of land on the western side of his traditional family
house, Olickal tharavad, at Kavalam twelve years ago to serve as his final
resting place. It was here that his body was brought from Thiruvananthapuram
for cremation on August 24, a day after he died of complications arising
from a prolonged lung disorder.
After the last
respects were paid and the body was consigned to the flames, I looked around
for the ‘mantaram’ and the pomegranate planted by his great grandmothers
Laachi and Uppali fondly mentioned by him in his celebrated poem ‘Kudumbapuranam’
(Family Saga). I could not easily locate them as there was an abundance of
trees and plants in the premises where he was laid to rest.
But the basil
platform, the central court yard, the river landing, the door of the log
chamber and the school yard were unmistakable in their identity. They were
there exactly as they had been conjured up in his poem ‘Kavalam.’
Dr Paniker
probably had a premonition of his death much before he was admitted to the
hospital. In fact he had tried to avoid hospitalization for long, to the
point of resistance. He used to say that walking into the hospital was easy,
but there was no guarantee that a person would walk out the way he walked
in. Most probably he may have to be carried out.
But despite such
a bleak outlook, his first phase of hospitalization in April went off well
and he was discharged in a far better condition than he was at the time of
admission. But with his lung capacity remaining very low, he had to be
mostly confined to his room and be on the constant support of the oxygen
cylinder. For a person who loved to travel and meet and talk to people, who
used to regale listeners with his ready wit and repartees, this solitary
confinement was in fact a tall order. It was a miracle that he had not shown
any symptoms of depression.
But his second
coming to the hospital in early August was in a far worse condition. Apart
from the very serious lung disorder, there was an untreatable fracture on
the spine. And with attendant complications there indeed was no hope.
Perhaps aware
that death was stalking him, Dr Paniker had wanted to make many arrangements
in regard to family matters and his literary pursuits much before he went
into the hospital. In respect of the latter, one of the things he did was to
ensure that his voice was preserved for posterity. He said there were video
recordings of readings of some of his poems but a majority of the readings
of his poems by himself was on audio tape. Since the tapes were not
dependable and were liable to damage, he wanted all such recordings to be
copied in compact disc format.
This was a slow
process as he was not sure which audio cassettes in his vast collection
contained the recordings. He and his second daughter Meena painstakingly
went through the collection and came up with the wanted cassettes in twos
and threes. Though readings of almost all of his major poems like ‘Kurukshethram,’
‘Gothrayanam,’ ‘Passage to America,’ ‘Kadevide Makkale,’ ‘Mrithyupooja,’
‘Dukhamo Sakhi,’ ‘Purushanallee Nee,’ ‘Hoogly,’ ‘Sarakoodam’ and many of
the humorous poems were thus rendered to CD format, he was a little unhappy
that the tape recording of one of his personal favorites, ‘Gopika
Dandakam,’ could not be located.
In his vast and
varied output as a poet Dr Paniker had dealt with almost every subject under
the sun: life and death, love and marriage, friendship and enmity, science
and technology, man’s follies and foibles, nature and environment and what
not. As a social critic he was devastating in his sarcasm while as a torch
bearer to the society he was at his illuminating best.
Death, in a way,
finds a subdued presence in many of his poems, as in ‘Kavalam.’ Some times
its treatment is somber and overt, sometimes matter of fact, sometimes plain
funny, depending on the mood of the poet. In the ‘Epitaph’ that he had
written for himself in a poem of the early 1980s he said :
‘Here lies
the body of Mister Panicker
Who at the end of his panicking days
Agreed to lie still for a while.
It is not known what happened to his soul,
If indeed he ever had one.
He was not quite unlike anyone of us while he lived.
His flesh, to tell the truth, often revolted
And upset his delicate sensibility.
Space he could never control to his liking,
His sense of time, you know, wasn’t strong either.
He had of course in his wallet many a theory;
The things he could touch, however,
Told him a different story.
All his life he was patiently
Learning how not to live at all.
Who knows, perhaps
Given another chance
He might do a better job of it than before.’
Perhaps only Dr
Paniker could look at himself and say like this. A consummate artist in the
realm of comedy and sarcasm, he could entertain audiences or readers by
poking fun at himself.
‘I had an
enemy called Ayyappa Paniker,’ he says in another poem.
‘At times he tried to stare at me and frighten me.
When I stared back at him,
He might have felt frightened too.
Some day or other he is likely to come back.
Since he left I have been depressed
For want of someone to frighten.
Why should I frighten anyone
That doesn’t frighten me?’
In the early
1960s when he joined the University College at Thiruvananthapuram as a
Lecturer in English, Dr Paniker had already achieved fame as the main voice
of modernism in Malayalam poetry. His celebrated poem ‘Kurukshethram,’
that sought to re-define poetic sensibilities by freeing poetry from its
romantic mould, had been published by then and was being hotly debated in
literary circles. His students had looked upon him with awe as they realized
that they were in the presence of intellectual brilliance. Apart from being
one of the best teachers whose erudition knew no bounds, he had the aura of
a pioneer of a significant literary movement.
In ‘Kurukshethram,’
among other things, he had made a clarion call for change, in the
sensibilities as in everything else:
‘Around us
The varied visions of a heaven on earth
Grow dim, dwindle and die;
What avails the journeying spirit
In its onward march?
What can self sustain?
Let us, then,
Move into a new frenzy
And wage an endless fight
To shape and re-mould
The world around
Nearer to the heart’s desire.’
While ‘Kurukshethram’
marked a watershed in Malayalam literature, something that provided the
impetus for change, Dr Paniker did not stop with his experimentation with
it. He did not stick to any given formula for writing and continued to
evolve his style in everything that he wrote, whether it is ‘Mrithyupooja,’
‘Gothrayanam,’ ‘Passage to America,’ ‘Kudumbapuranam’ or the ‘cartoon
poems’ or nonsense verse. And he touched upon every subject one could
think of, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the advent of space
travel that opened up new vistas for technological innovation and
ingeniousness to the pleasures of scratching an itch.
When Yuri Gagarin
of the erstwhile Soviet Union ushered in a new era of space travel, it upset
the prevailing notions of time and space. Dr Paniker had a poetic response
to such an epochal event. In his celebrated poem ‘Hey Gagarin’ he said
‘Hey
Gagarin, space traveler,
I come ,a wayfarer, get off my tracks.
Yield today to my mortal concerns,
To my poetic fancy,
To my creative urge
Before you measure out
All these expanses….’
He also called
upon his fellow poets to
‘Grow new
wings to catch up with science
Across the recesses of the outer space.
The pioneers have unfurled their flags on the heights;
Break you your idols and bless yourselves.
Nothing is empty anymore, nothing is outside of us;
The whole universe is filled with subtle sensations.
Where is our telescope, where our thermometer?
Brandish the torch, fulfill the urge to create,
Cut off the barriers of time and space,
Keep the spirit ablaze that will burn up
Every trace of death dealing darkness.
Dr Paniker, for a
long time the Director of the Institute of English of the Kerala University,
had always been considered as a world citizen in the true sense of the term.
Apart from having his doctoral studies and post-doctoral research in the
United States, he had frequently traveled to many parts of the world,
attending international poetry conferences and camps, giving lectures and
projecting Malayalam poetry at all such world fora. He had also utilized
those occasions to imbibe the best of their literary traditions. There is a
distinct segment of his poetic output that deals with his experiences and
observations in those countries.
But wherever he
went, he carried with him the ever fresh images of the village where he was
born. He was a world citizen in outlook, but a Kavalam villager at heart. It
was a relationship he could never snap even if he wanted to. His nostalgic
longings for his village have found best expression in ‘Kudumbapuranam,’
that traces the history of the family from the times of his great
grandmothers. In perfect word pictures he tells the stories of Laachi and
Uppali his great grandmothers, of maternal uncle Kesava Panicker, a heroic
figure who pioneered cultivation of paddy in the waterlogged Kuttanad, of
Sardar K M Panicker, a close relative who achieved fame as one of the most
distinguished administrators and diplomats of the country. Apart from the
tales of such leading lights of his family and the village, the poem also
tells us, in the manner of gossip, tales of many of the village folk, such
as that of hunchback Janaki and how her hump was straightened by neighbor
Kittan though it was Raman who got a bad name.
Nostalgic
references to his village have been made in many other poems as well. In ‘The
Village’ in his latest anthology ‘Pathumanippookkal’ (translated
into English as ‘Poetry at Midnight’), he says:
‘Now when
you go to your village hereafter,
You should meditate for some time
In the incense burning memory chamber.
A river, a river bank and some men.
You take this picture with you.
To villages not like this
You take along these village memories as well.’
And his village
memories will be in tact with him as he is laid to rest in the place from
where he started on his long global journey.
Dr Ayyappa Paniker: A
Biographical Note
Born: Sep 12, 1930 at Kavalam,Kuttanad.
Studied at Malabar Christian Ccollege, Kozhikode, and University
College,Thiruvananthapuram. MA Phd from Indiana University in the United
States. Lecturer in English at the CMS College, Kottayam, University
College, Thiruvananthapuram and Institute of English, Thiruvananthapuram.
Later Director and Head of the Department of the Institute of English.
During 1980-81 did post-doctoral research in the Harvard and Yale
Universities. Had served as Chief Editor of Central Sahitya Akademi’s
compilation ‘Medieval Indian Literature.’
Works: Ayyappa Panikkarude Krithikal -4 volumes. Indian Renaissance, A
Perspective of Malayalam Literature, Indian Narratology , Mayakovisky’s
Poems (Translation), Cuban Poetry (Translation), Guru Granth Sahib (Abridged
Translation).
Awards: Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry, 1975, Kalyani Krishna Menon
Prize, 1977,S P C S Award. 1978,Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for
Criticism,1984,Central Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry, 1984,Distinguished
Teacher Award, 1990,Mahakavi Kuttamath Award for Poetry, 1990,Mahakavi
Ulloor Award for Poetry, 1990,Samastha Kerala Sahitya Parishath Award for
Poetry,1993, Kabir Samman. 1996-97,Indira Gandhi Memorial Fellowship,
1997,Gangadhar Meher National Award for Poetry,1998, Asan Prize(Chennai),
1999,Panthalam Kerala Varma Award, 2002,Vallathol Award for 2004,Padmashree
2004, Sanjayan Puraskaram, 2005,Saraswati Samman, 2006 and Mahakavi P
Kunhiraman Nair Award, 2006.
September 10, 2006
Image courtesy
ayyappapaniker.net
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