M. ANANTANARAYANAN:
A Creative And Questing Spirit
By A. Madhavan
Note: Madhavan (Rayudu) is the eldest son of Anantanarayanan and Akhila.
Remarkable people defy categories. My father, M. Anantanarayanan, was an intellectually vital man who eagerly ventured into diverse fields of knowledge, bringing to every interest a quick comprehension and creative energy which could surprise the specialist. By career a judge, he retired as Chief Justice of the Madras High Court in 1969, but the law was not his main métier. He was more a votary of literature, philosophy, psychology, Sufism, medicine, traditional as well as modern, and the arts, especially Karnatic music and painting.
His five children called him 'Appa', the common South Indian appellation for 'father'. Mother was 'Amma'. I shall refer to them by these terms.
Appa grew up and worked under the British Raj till he was forty. For the next thirty-four years he lived in Independent India. He was born on May 1, 1907, the sixth child and first son of A. Madhaviah and Meenakshi. The month in the South Indian calendar was Chittirai and his star of nativity Kettai, the corresponding Zodiac sign being Taurus. (We did not believe in star-determined lives). Madhaviah, who was serving in the Excise Department of the government, was better known as a writer in both Tamil and English. His early novel, 'Padmavati Charittiram' (1898), is highly rated as a pioneering contribution to Tamil prose fiction.
Madhaviah came from a village called Perunkulam (meaning 'Big Tank') in Tirunelveli district, deep in the south of Tamil Nadu. His forefathers were Smartha Brahmins of the Vadama sect, Kausika gotram, who originally came from Settalur near Guntur in the Andhra country more than two hundred years ago. This is the family history conveyed to Appa's younger brother, M. Krishnan by their cousin, P.N. Appuswami, (who was Madhaviah's elder brother's elder of two sons: a noted writer in Tamil on literature and popular science as well as a translator of old Tamil poems into English). Krishnan has recorded the genealogy of this clan from the first migrant southward, Anantha Avadhani, five generations prior to Madhaviah and his elder brother, Narayaniah. (Avadhani was a title given to pundits who excelled in discussions on philosophical questions and religious texts). The two brothers moved to Madras to pursue their higher education.
Madhaviah went to the Madras Christian College and took a high-ranking B.A. degree from there. He came under the tutelage of Rev. William Miller, the principal, who taught his class English literature, including Shakespeare. The ethical teachings of Jesus made a strong impression on his young mind, but while attracted to Christianity, he adhered to a vague Advaita credo, coloured by the Gita. His mind was open to English liberal thinking. He read the Koran and learnt about Buddhism too, because of his interest in the Tamil classic, "Manimekalai". He detested Hindu rituals and religious observances and avoided temple worship. All his life he rebelled against superstitions and the social evils which had corrupted Hindu customs, particularly among the orthodox Brahmins, such as the bridegroom's family exacting unaffordable dowry from the bride's family, the conventional ban on widow remarriage, the practice of child marriage, the caste system and its exclusions, etc. In his novels and short stories, he exposed these evils to ridicule and ardently urged the cause of female education. Orthodox Hindus almost ostracised him for his liberal ideas which, nevertheless, he boldly propagated.
He joined the Salt and Abkari (Excise) department of the government after passing a competitive exam. Madhaviah respected the British Raj for the stable governance which it provided, but he was deeply drawn towards the Indian national struggle for self-rule which was gaining momentum early in the 20th century. He was conflicted by the opposing demands of duty and patriotism. As a civil servant he had to be loyal to the British rulers, (ironically enough as an official enforcing the very salt tax which later became the point of defiance of Gandhi's Dandi Salt March in 1930), but as an Indian he felt a strong impulse to encourage if not join the nascent freedom movement.
Madhaviah had career problems in the Excise department, with British bosses who were less than sympathetic to his nationalistic leanings, his literary aspirations and his passion for social reform. An impulsive man, noted for his fearlessness, he loved the countryside. He was a strong swimmer too. In his several postings he toured up and down the Coromandel coast inspecting salt pans, much of the time on horseback, collecting excise levies or apprehending smugglers. He tirelessly pursued learning from books and scholars. He copied quotations and curious bits of knowledge in a large bound notebook called "Nota Bene", which he methodically indexed. He wrote six novels, three in English and three in Tamil, apart from many stories, skits, plays, poems and articles. His autobiographical English novel, 'Thillai Govindan', was one of the earliest by an Indian author to be published in England. He corresponded with personalities like Sarojini Naidu, Annie Besant and V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, besides his mentor, William Miller.
He also devoted an amazing chunk of his time and attention to the upbringing of his children, five daughters followed by three sons. He helped them to read widely, especially the classics of Tamil and English, and encouraged their self-expression in writing or drawing or music, tending their talents. All the children inherited his literary flair and love of books, if not his capacity for sustained study and zest for the outdoors. They wrote little plays and acted them at home and made up a manuscript magazine with illustrations. When we consider the handicaps under which the family lived, moving from one coastal village or town to another, without electric lighting until well into the 20th century, without assured medical help, and irregular or no schooling, we marvel at the care and liberal vision which Madhaviah lavished on them. The mother Meenakshi played a different role, the calm and patient mainstay of the family, bearing with her dynamic husband and his visitors, adapting to adverse circumstances, ever mindful of the need to get the daughters married and settled. Here again Madhaviah was torn between conforming to social pressures and defiance of conventions. He wisely decided to go along with the society that he, as a grihasta or family man, could hardly repudiate.
Madhaviah took retirement when he was about 50 and built his house in Mylapore, Madras, (its old name, Chennai, came into vogue in the 21st century), on a plot of land he had taken on a 99-year lease. He first built a cottage on the site. Here he set up his own printing press, called the Author's Press and Publishing House, to bring out his own books and a Tamil literary journal called 'Panchamritam', wherein he published reformist essays, stories and informative articles, his own and others by scholars he knew. He raised a subscription for the journal. He included contributions by his children who could write Tamil well, the youngest being Appa, then a teenager. One of Appa's articles was on the poetry of Subramania Bharati, remarkably prescient. The journal ran for only two years.
Madhaviah had been chosen as a member of the University's Senate, a distinction he valued, being deeply concerned about education for women and Tamil as a subject for the B.A. degree courses. On October 22, 1925 at the Senate House in Chepauk, Madras, with a view of the beach and the Bay of Bengal, he made a spirited speech on Tamil as a compulsory subject, sat back and died of cardiac arrest. A doctor present at the conclave tried to revive him, but in vain. Madhaviah was only 53 years old. He had crammed his life with literature and action, making his name as an author and pioneer of social reform, especially in the closed community of South Indian Brahmins.
At that time Appa was an eighteen-year old student in the History and Economics Honours class of the Presidency College. The family had to depend for support on Lakshmi Ammal, the second daughter who, after her return from England with a teaching degree, had joined the staff of Queen Mary's College. Appa had to write the apologetic editorial note of closure in the final issue of 'Panchamritam'.
Appa was studious and kept his notes tidy. More than that, he used his mind. He told me how he would study by himself at the beach or library or home, partitioning his time into hourly slots, one-to-two, two-to-three and so on till he was tired. He had good teachers, the best known being Dr. John Matthai, who later became Finance Minister. Another was M.A. Candeth. His classmate Balakrishnan Nair became Principal of the college. The famous Karnatic vocalist, G.N. Balasubramanian, was also from his college, but Appa's junior. Appa's essays in the exam answer papers caught the notice of the lecturers. An epigram he had coined in an answer paper was held up for praise: "The man in the street is the mass in the singular." That a student who had lost his father prematurely should have passed the finals with the top rank of 'university first' in the faculty augured a bright future. Appa applied for and obtained a Tata scholarship to go to Cambridge, a repayable advance that he eventually did repay, perhaps amounting to Rs.10, 000, an ample sum in the mid-1920's.
Appa sailed to England as a youth of 20 and joined Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Appa had shown early promise as a poet. He was exceptionally forward as a child in talking and story-telling. At home he was called 'Pamani', a name chosen by his father. The parents must have welcomed this birth, the first son after five daughters. In Tamil 'pa' means poetry, and 'mani' means 'gem': hence the name stands for "poetic gem" or "gem among poets", a fond literary wish which proved appropriate. Appa's fragmentary memoir of his early years, serialised in five instalments in a Madras-based journal called 'Aside' in 1978, records a passing memory of his precocious play in verse called 'William Rufus', written as a child, after hearing a story about this son of William the Conqueror who became William II in the 11th century, with dominion over England and Normandy. Madhaviah happily encouraged the child's literary leanings. Some of the juvenile poems are derivative, influenced by Swinburne's artfully alliterative, lilting lines, but some images are original too. Appa preserved only two of his Cambridge poems. One entitled 'The Horse' opens with a rhymed stanza picturing a mythical Horse rising from the primeval sea and roaming space, a Puranic allusion. From its golden hoof the earth arises. This image is contrasted in the second stanza with the horse in harness:
"But now his feet must run to will
and law has bound his mounting blood,
and we have lost delight, and still
we have not turned, nor understood."
This early poem presages the young man's resentment of the constraints imposed on the individual by world-life or samsara in the Hindu tradition. It is a clue to Anantanarayanan, the intellectual seeker of lost innocence and joy. I shall refer to this theme later, when discussing his writings.
In the memoir by my brother A. Thyagaraja (Chippy), the youngest of the five siblings, he has recorded some Cambridge reminiscences that Appa conveyed to him. Wilfred Jenks, a young man from a working class background who had made his way upward by sheer grit, became Appa's closest friend there. They kept up their contact over the decades, though neither of them was a regular correspondent. Jenks was a prodigious worker, a scholarly, serious man with an idealist view of international law. He joined the secretariat of the League of Nations in Geneva, (later changed into the International Labour Office), of which he became Deputy Director after some years. I have stayed with the Jenkses in their Geneva apartment for a couple of days in 1958, after my year at Cambridge as a Foreign Service probationer. Appa used to mention another friend, Frederick Pedler, later knighted, who went into the colonial service in Kenya and later became a director of Royal Dutch-Shell. He was from an old Cornish family. I met him in London when I was posted in the High Commission of India there (1970-73). Both these Cambridge contemporaries have told me how much they liked Appa and how greatly they respected his intellect and conversation. Appa knew another English friend who had the usual trouble with his long name, being unfamiliar with the Hindu pantheon and the thousand names of Vishnu. I forget this friend's name, but remember the limerick on Appa's name he invented:
"Anantanarayanan's beaut-
iful name is most certainly cute.
But to say Anantan
Is more than I can,
Without respiration en route."
This, and the much later John Updike poem (1962), which is on this website, should tickle all those called Anantanarayanan. The name, by the way, refers to Narayana or Vishnu, the preserver or sustainer of Creation, who reclines eternally on the serpent-devotee, Adi Sesha in the cosmic ocean. Sesha is called Ananta, which means 'unending' in Sanskrit. 'Ananta' can also refer to Narayana himself. The overlapping ambiguities of Hindu lore enrich them and confuse the curious. Appa was given the name because it was in the family, for Madhaviah's father was called Anantanarayana Iyer or Appavier.
Appa told me about the debates in the Cambridge Union. He must have taken part in them, and certainly did so in the Majlis, a body where Indian students predominated. He recalled that the intending speaker at a debating contest would be given a proposition from a bowl and asked to speak on it impromptu. One evening the proposition was, "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay". This was a line from Tennyson's poem, "Locksley Hall", which I admired as a high school student for its metronomic long-lined couplets. The quoted line simply means that Europe achieved more in half a century than China in ten, a typical boast of Victorian hubris. Appa chuckled as he recounted how an undergraduate pitched into the debate that day, mistaking the meaning, and made up on the spot an elaborate fancy about a bike by a firm called Cathay being worse than fifty years without bikes in Europe.
Appa never spoke much about the strenuously exacting regime he must have set himself when he tackled both the Economics Tripos and the Indian Civil Service (ICS) competitive exam, one of the toughest then known. He got through both, the Tripos in the Two-one division, reckoned as creditable, and the ICS in the first shot, reckoned as superb. I wish I had asked him about the viva voce, the questions the board put to him and his replies. I only know that he had to take a horse riding test, which he managed to do, but not with the facility of Madhaviah the horseman.
Appa's contemporaries included Humphrey Trevelyan, with whom he sailed back to India when both of them had passed the Indian Civil Service (ICS) competitive exam and were assigned to Madras Presidency. Trevelyan was of a Cornish clan of that name, a younger relative of the historian G. M. Trevelyan, who was related to Lord Macaulay. (In the first chapter of his memoirs Humphrey Trevelyan has referred to Appa). Another notable member of that 1929 batch was Penderel Moon, who was working in Punjab and resigned before 1947 because of policy differences with the British. He was later invited by Jawaharlal Nehru himself to return to India and be an adviser in the Planning Commission in the early years after Independence. He wrote a book entitled, "Divide and Quit", about the last phase of the British Raj. It was an apt and succinct phrase for the precipitate partition of India by the British into two antagonistic countries. Another Cambridge Indian Appa liked was M.Hidayatullah, who later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and even later, Vice President of India. I met him and his wife in Tokyo during their visit in 1986. He remembered Appa with affection.
At Caius College (pronounced 'Kees') Appa was a friend of Homi Bhabha, later famed as the father of India's Atomic Energy Commission. Appa was reluctant to renew the association, I suspect because the disparity in their positions put him at a disadvantage in resuming their Cambridge familiarity. Diffidence was not his failing, but sensitivity sometimes inhibited him in relations with others.
The ICS was an elite corps of men dedicated to reliable administration, what came to be called 'good governance' in the late 20th century. They were loyal to the Government of India, which under British rule combined an efficient and fair administration as a norm, for the preservation of social harmony among the plural communities of India. The cadre was called 'the steel frame' and 'the heaven-born service' because of the generous salaries and facilities given to its members, who stood high in society with the magic initials 'ICS' added to their names. Appa and other Tamils in the same service, mostly Brahmins and from middle-class families, were therefore considered lucky.
Appa himself valued the facility called "the Family Pension Fund", which was available for the widow and her children in case the ICS officer died in service. But there was a catch: in the Indian custom, the well-off member of a joint family was expected play the role of benefactor and provide for the education, employment and welfare of the dependent members. In Appa's case, the main sacrifice he was obliged to make was to relinquish his inherited share of his father's property, but he was not expected to support others in the family by regular remittances.
Appa was assigned to the judicial branch of the ICS hierarchies, perhaps because his strong points were intellectual rather than practical. He was hardly the sports-loving executive type who would stomp the district on horseback, barking out orders like Kipling's Englishmen in India. This suited Appa pretty well. But he had to serve a training period in provincial posts like Penukonda, Guntur and Kumbakonam.
Soon after his return to Madras from Cambridge, Appa got married. The bride, Akhila or Aila, was the third of three daughters. There was no dowry, consistent with Madhaviah's principles. Aila's father, R. Narayana Aiyar, was also a member of the ICS, an early Indian entrant into the charmed circle. He had also been sent to the judicial side and had retired prematurely as a district judge. Aila, our Amma, was only seventeen. She was an undergraduate in the Intermediate class in Queen Mary's College, where Lakshmi Ammal, Appa's elder sister, spotted her. A sepia photograph of Amma, which used to adorn a carved table in the drawing room, shows her standing in three-quarters profile, a slim girl in a graceful sari, with striking eyes. Appa was fond of this photo and used to say in Tamil, "Oh, she was slender as if turned on a lathe." ("Uruvi vitta madiri iruppal."). It was an arranged alliance, as tradition would have it, though both sides must have dispensed with the horoscope preliminaries. Amma's eldest sister, Sethu, was also married to an ICS man, also in the judicial branch, posted mainly in Bihar. The next sister, Meena was married to Ramaswamy, a scientist in the Forest Research Institute, Dehra Dun. Meena had a complex about her husband not belonging to the ICS. But she had qualified as a teacher and went to Malaya later on a lucrative teaching job.
The young couple (Appa was only 23 and Amma hardly
18), began life in the moffusil of Madras Presidency. Its privations and
hardships were compensated by spacious houses in sprawling compounds, with
peons to help them in the daily tasks. Amma was ever the manager, decisive
about what she wanted, clear in her instructions to the staff, her own as
well as the office peons, keeping the house clean, ordering the furniture,
packing and unpacking at transfer time, taking prudent charge of the
accounts, avoiding waste, observing the main Hindu festivals with special
menus and some colour at Navaratri and Pongal, in short, relieving Appa of
a huge domestic burden. Since she was also the main prop of the children
in their schooling and their daily needs, Appa could concentrate on his
court work and judgements, often dictated to stenos in his office room at
home, apart from his reading and writing.
The children were well spaced out: the first-born was a
daughter, Vatsala (1931), then myself, Madhavan (1933), the eldest son,
named after Appa's father as he himself had been named after his paternal
grandfather; the third a girl, Sarayu (1936), the fourth another son,
Sanatkumar (1941), named by Amma's father after one of the three legendary
saints mentioned in the Puranas, and the last a boy, Thyagaraja (Chippy)
(1947), in the year of Independence, born in Thanjavur and named after the
great composer of that name who lived in nearby Tiruvaiyyar in the late
18th century, a musical genius venerated by both our parents.
My elder sister Vatsala and I
were separated for reasons of schooling from our parents when they were
posted in Andhra. We were sent to Madras, where Amma's parents lived in a
large house called 'Victoria Bagh'. I was five, my sister seven years old.
She was taken under the wing of Lakshmi Ammal (Chittiamma), Appa's elder
sister, to stay at Perunkulam House ('PH') in Mylapore and go to a nearby
school called St Ebbas. I was put into Class I at Bain's school in
Kilpauk, an 'English' medium prep school, where the children spoke a
bastard 'convent' lingo: talk peppered with "as if" and "you only" and
"Miss only told". The boys called each other 'mun', while the girls were
referred to as 'child' or even as 'mun'. I was a stranger to both written
Tamil and English. There I stayed for four years, until both Vatsala and I
rejoined our parents, this time in Tanjore or Thanjavur in the Kaveri
delta of Tamil Nadu (1943).
I have few memories of the home in Andhra. As a
four-year old, I used to be fascinated by cars and railway engines. I
would disturb Appa and press him to draw a train or a "blue sedan" (as I
was told a car was called). He did so repeatedly, with drawings which I
thought the highest examples of art. I was fascinated by the perspective
of an approaching railway engine puffing away on widening tracks. By
instinct I understood the principle of illusory vision and always had to
readjust my view of Rajasthan miniatures, where the terraces of buildings
seem to be built at impossibly wrong angles. 
Though Appa was neither
demonstrative nor over-indulgent as a parent, he did tell us stories when
in the mood. One was on the Count of Monte Christo, another an improvised
tale about a man who had a serial dream night after night, and a third
about a rich boy who went to school sporting a shiny-nibbed fountain pen
in his pocket. This last detail has stayed in my mind, because I coveted
such a pen as a schoolboy confined to lead pencils that frequently needed
sharpening. Appa also spent time and energy on making a "birthday book",
with hand-written stories and poems in Tamil, for Vatsala when she was
small and a different one, nearly a decade later, for Sanatkumar. Both
siblings have kept these creations all these years. He told us abridged
versions of stories like 'Jekyll and Hyde', 'The Invisible Man', 'The Man
who lost his shadow' and 'The Time Machine'. When I was older, he spoke
about characters from literature like Falstaff, Bottom and Pickwick.
When Sarayu was six, my uncle
Srinivasan persuaded Appa to write a short play called "Julie's Birthday",
where Vatsala starred and the other children also took part. The play
turned on the birthday girl finding that three different 'uncles' had
brought the same book, "David Copperfield", as a present for her. Appa
would sometimes join others in playing word games like Charades. He showed
me a card trick called "Tri-Jacky Yama Darsana", where the cards are cut
in such a way that three Jacks appear one after the other. He had another
trick which used to scare me till he revealed how to do it: the slow,
illusive severing of half the thumb. Not once was he harsh to me. Nor did
he ever deny me the chance to say what I felt about any topic under
discussion. Only once or twice, he gently admonished me to be more
understanding of a point of view different from mine, for example, about
his own illness phobia and anxiety, when I tried to prise him out of a
negative mood.
Appa had to
learn Telugu and pass a departmental exam in it to qualify for his
judicial office in Andhra. He did this easily and learnt the language well
enough to pore over the sahitya (libretto) of
Telugu kirtanas. Later in life, he even composed
a couple of kirtanas of his own in Telugu, which he always believed to be a language better adapted than Tamil to Karnatic music. He would fault Tamilian musicians and teachers who mangled the Telugu text while rendering the songs of Kshetragnya and Thyagaraja. Amma too spoke Telugu fluently with the servants and retained her knowledge of it after their transfer to Tamil Nadu.
My parents liked to escape
for a few weeks from the broiling summer to holiday in a heavenly cool
Nilgiri hill stations. Kodaikanal (Kodi), Kottagiri and Coonoor figure in
my early memories. Amma's parents too liked this escape route. Families
from the plains could rent trim cottages for the summer. They were built
in an Indo-English style, with woodwork and glass panes and fireplaces,
bordered by gardens hospitable to roses, geraniums, hollyhocks, larkspurs,
carnations, Arum lilies and phlox.
In 1942, Appa spent some time in Kodi and descended to
the plains to his post in Andhra, Guntur or Rajamundry
(Rajamahendrapuram), leaving Amma to follow later. He was precipitately
exposed to soaring day temperatures above 100 degrees F. A telegram came,
Amma rushed back, and the next thing I heard as a half-cognizant boy of
nine was that Appa had suffered a "heat stroke" and had nearly died of it.
Amma nursed him back to health. I recall her telling us much later how she
kept applying a relay of ice-packs on his fevered forehead. The attack was
traumatic. He never recovered his self-confidence about health. It led to
a lifelong condition of what he himself called his "anxiety neurosis". He
could not help worrying about any new symptom he noticed in himself,
though he realised that he was luckier than many others, being blessed
with a sound constitution. He knew he was a hypochondriac. It was partly
due to his delving into medical literature of all schools and talking to
both doctors and charlatans. At one time, he experimented with homeopathy
and read up books on it. He had a wooden cabinet of small bottles with
tiny pills. He tried some remedies on himself. He would explain how the
symptoms one noticed had to be noted and analysed carefully. Before a
prescribed medicine could take effect, the patient would suffer "an
aggravation". Luckily, he gave up self-medicating homeopathy after some
time. He needed to consult a doctor he could trust, even a G.P, to assure
him that his symptoms did not indicate any dread affliction.
Appa was at this time in his
later thirties. He was about 5' 7" tall, noticeably light-skinned, wearing
spectacles with high-power lenses, balding, broad of brow, with faint
eyebrows, in expression placid and benign, except when he wanted to convey
displeasure with a grim frown. His nose was rather bulbous. He was neither
stout nor thin. His hands were soft, his fingers long and artistic. His
was a distinguished presence, whether in Western clothes or the South
Indian garb of veshti (the wrap-around
unstitched fabric also called 'dhoti'), shirt
and anga-vastram. He never took to bush-shirts
or T-shirts. By the time he was fifty, he was quite bald.
A fragment of memory I cherish
is a trip down a canal of the Godavari in a houseboat. It must have been a
short one, but it involved the boat passing through a lock. Appa explained
how the lock in a canal worked, with the gate closing behind the boat and
in front of it. I felt sorry for the workmen tugging the rope to pull the
boat downstream with rhythmic shouts. Another memory is of a visit to a
paper mill in Kakinada, a port town on the Godavari estuary. I saw vats of
pulp which were fed into rollers, to be transformed into reams of paper at
the end of the production line. For lack of bleach or some other chemical,
the paper they produced was blue. We got rolls of this blue paper. Amma
had them converted into neat notebooks for our school use. Appa always
loved good stationery, and had large, leather-bound notebooks and the
diaries he received to write in. He would sit in his armchair and cover
page after page in his tidy hand, with little blotting out or scratches.
He was fond of quality fountain-pens with nibs that could be trusted to
write fluently and 'feeders' that did not leak. We must have emptied many
bottles of Quink ink and Swan ink, spurning the office ink, which was used
for the office 'steel pens'.
When I was nine and still in Madras with Amma's parents
and her younger brother, Srinivasan, (Seenu Mama), who had returned from
England in 1941, I saw my parents only when they came on leave. In 1943,
my Upanayanam or brahminical sacred thread ceremony was celebrated in
Victoria Bagh. It was paired with the same rite for my cousin Kalidas, a
year older, the son of Amma's eldest sister, who lived in Bihar. This rite
of passage involved the father imparting to the boy the Gayatri mantra,
literally in his ear. Appa and I were covered by a cloth, with the priest,
Ramasethu Sastry presiding outside the huddle. Appa recited the prayer in
my ear, and also explained the significance. He played the required part
gamely, more to humour Amma and grandmother than from his own belief. This
mantra was supposed to be kept secret within the circle of "the
twice-born" males. It is a noble prayer to Savitr, the Sun, to give us
humans an enlightened intelligence and vision. These days the Gayatri is
democratised, but the orthodox Brahmins of that age would have been
appalled to see the mantra being chanted in a TV advertisement.
After the heat-stroke Appa asked
for a transfer south to the Tamil districts on health grounds, pleading
that he was no longer capable of surviving another Andhra summer. The
request was granted. Some years later, he would have been assigned to
Tamil Nadu anyway, since after Independence there was a crucial agitation
for 'linguistic states' and the separation of Andhra from the old Madras
Presidency. This was reluctantly conceded by Nehru after the sacrificial
death of a fasting fanatic called Potti Sri Ramulu.
Appa's posting as District
and Sessions Judge in Tanjore (Thanjavur) marked the end of my stay with
the grandparents in Madras. For the first time our family was together.
Appa had a five-year tenure there, though midway a rumour of his transfer
was circulated by busybodies, much to his annoyance. Once, when a teacher
told my class that I would soon be leaving that school, I was taken aback.
When I went home I asked Appa if the news was true. The next morning he
took up the matter with headmaster, who pulled up the teacher, putting me
in a false position as a trouble-maker.
But this Thanjavur posting from 1943 to 1948 in the
home of Tamil culture and music was our happiest spell as a family.
Chippy, the youngest child, was born in the judge's bungalow. The high
school I had joined conducted lessons in the Tamil medium, which obliged
me to adjust to textbooks I could barely read in the beginning. But I
became bookish, exploring both the easier books in the bureaus and the new
set of the ten-volume 'Book of Knowledge', which Appa had ordered from
Calcutta, the best present he ever gave me. The sections of this
encyclopedia which I loved were poetry, stories and one called 'Things to
Make and Do". 
The children were never spoilt with
presents and sweets, but our parents gave us things we valued. I liked
building models with the Meccano sets, purchased in advancing grades,
which I shared with my next younger brother, Sanatkumar, who was eight
years my junior. As I left home for the university, he grew much more
adept in handling nuts and bolts, pulleys and gears than I, and became a
senior engineer designing complex mechanisms in the Nuclear Power
Corporation.
Appa had
ordered a book on electricity in hopes that I would learn the subject. But
it was beyond both of us and I never took to technology. I had been
smitten by Jack Fingleton's discursive reports in the sports pages of 'The
Hindu' on the Australian cricket tour of England after the War. Appa told
me about Douglas Jardine, Larwood and the bodyline tour of England to
Australia in 1932-33. I was thrilled to hear of Don Bradman's exploits
with the bat and of the headline from the English press which Appa
remembered from his Cambridge stay, "The Don flows on". An Indian team
under the Nawab of Pataudi went to England in 1946. I. collected the
scores of Mushtaq Ali, Vijay Merchant, Vijay Hazare and Vinoo Mankad from
'The Hindu', ignoring all else in the paper. Appa humoured me by getting
me a cricket bat, linseed oil and ball to play 'cricket' with a peon on an
improvised pitch in our large and dusty compound. But Thanjavur of the
1940's was free of cricket. No classmate could tell me the rules. Appa
thought I might take up tennis, and had the derelict, weed-grown tennis
court restored as a playable red-mud court, with a former 'marker' coming
to give me practice. I liked tennis, and later played it at college, but I
was not a natural sportsman. Appa also played tennis at the officers' club
occasionally. He was not good at it either. Another attempt was made, this
time to have someone teach me swimming. It came to naught in a pool
belonging to a land-owner, when my flailing arms and legs, constrained by
a car tube with a leaky valve, could not buoy me afloat.
It was in Thanjavur that our
home became an informal school of music. Amma acquired a veena, fashioned
for her in the house by local craftsmen with generations of expertise
backing them. I watched how they moulded the black wax for the tonal scale
on the long wooden shaft and embedded the brass metal frets in it to mark
the swara positions in three octaves, spacing
them by the eye rather than a tape-measure, so that the lower notes had
broader spaces than the higher notes between two adjacent frets. The true
tonal quality was patent only when the strings were wound taut on the birudai and adjusted for pitch by ear and not by a
tuning fork. Amma kept up veena practice during most of our Thanjavur
years. Her guru was Vidwan Sundaram Iyer, who used to commute by train
daily from Salyamangalam, a village about twenty miles distant. My elder
sister Vatsala learnt to sing, her teacher being a local musician called
Ramayya. Younger sister Sarayu also learnt the veena after school. I
absorbed Karnatic music by listening to these music lessons and sessions.
Meanwhile, Appa found his
latent affinity with the Karnatic ragas flowering in his imagination. With
some other rasikas he established the
Thyagabrahma Sabha in town. They engaged celebrated musicians and
promising ones of the time to give concerts. I accompanied Appa and Amma
to several concerts. Sometimes the visiting musicians would come home and
spend an hour or two with Appa, talking music, singing snatches of songs
or ragas, discussing subtleties, telling stories of their gurus and other
artistes, spiced with some malice, but adding to the fund of knowledge
which Appa accumulated on classical music, rare ragas, kirtanas, and composers.
I recall Maharajapuram Viswanatha Iyer, an elderly man,
broad of build, with thinning hair in a wispy kudumi (top knot or tuft). He was the highest
exemplar of the Umayalpuram school, which could trace its lineage to a
disciple of Thyagaraja himself. Appa considered Maharajapuram a wayward
genius. His voice was husky, but vibrant in timbre and could startle the
audience with its unexpected flights. He needed a tot or two of spirits
before and after a concert, which was not easy for the district judge to
arrange for in that era of prohibition imposed by the Congress government.
When he was in full flow he would unconsciously tease one end of his anga-vastram, until the fabric was in shreds. Once
he surprised rasikas by singing a kirtana in Arabhi, perhaps forgetting that he had
sung another one in that raga earlier in the concert. Appa loved the
incident and explained how the second rendering took up a different theme
from that of the first. Maharajapuram gave original renderings of the
ragas Arabhi, Darbar. Mohana and Hamir Kalyani (which resembles the
Hindustani Kedar). His son Santhanam became one of the leading vidwans
after the father's demise. Santhanam died in a motor accident when still
at his peak. His son M. Ramachandran carries on the tradition and its
repertoire.
Another famous
musician of the time whom Appa knew was Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer. He once
got into the same compartment of the train we were travelling by to Madras
(Chennai). I remember how he and Appa were absorbed in discussing some
ragas. The musician gave a lecture-demonstration as the train sped along,
distinguishing three ragas with somewhat similar notes, Darbar, Nayaki and
Narayani. Semmangudi once sang for a few of us seated on a jamakalam (a brightly coloured floor covering) in
the verandah of a house in Tiruvayyar. It was close to the tomb (samadhi) of Thyagaraja we had visited for the
annual musical celebration, with the Kaveri river flowing by in the cool
of the morning. It was an unforgettable rendering of Thyagaraja's "Ksheera
Sagara Sayana" in Deva Gandhari.
Other vidwans whom Appa came to know better were M.S.
Subbulakshmi, Ariyakudi Ramanujam Iyengar, 'Papa' Venkatarama Iyer and
Madurai Mani Iyer. O.V. Subramania Iyer was a local vidwan who joined the
All India Radio in New Delhi. His son, O.S. Thyagarajan, is one of the
best contemporary exponents of the Thanjavur school.
For Appa, Thyagaraja was the
acme of Karnatic music. Appa studied the Telugu text and the local
Tiruvayyar context of the composer's kritis. He
would explicate how the words and melodic structure blended into an
integral unity, as if they were born together from the voice of the
saintly Rama bhakta. He distinguished the
different forms of the compositions, the Pancha
Ratna kirtanas, the Utsava tradition kirtanas, the devotional operas, etc. He used to
show us that in some songs, like "Ma Janaki" in Kambodi raga and "Vachama
Gocharame" in Kaikavasi, the longer charanam or
final section allowed what he termed "the delayed crescendo", a graduated
ascent to the higher octave. Sublime music, whether Thyagaraja's or
Mozart's, carries a stamp of inevitability which we instinctively
recognise.
My forte was not
sahitya (libretto) but swaras (notes). Appa noted this and asked me to
work with him in composing varnams in selected
ragas. Neither of us was gifted with a sure sense of laya and tala (rhythmic
system of beats), but this did not impede us. Appa would compose the first
half, leaving me to do the chitta swaram, the
one-line charanam and the set of four swara sequences to complete the varnam. The one in Kharaharapriya, my favourite
raga, was passable though simplistic. Appa had composed a padam in the same raga, which was more pleasing. In
the varnam form he broke new ground with the
"Rishabha Vahini", to celebrate the nuances of the Chatursruti Rishabha,
the second of the six notes following the basic 'Sa' and the higher of the
two 'Ri' tones in the twelve note scale. He chose certain ragas where this
note was an important station of melodic patterns, such as Bhairavi.
Unfortunately, this innovation of his is unknown and unsung. 
We had chamber concerts at home,
where an oil painting of Thyagaraja, commissioned by parents, prominently
hung on a wall. Once Appa engaged Annaswamy Bhagavathar, the foremost
Harikatha exponent of the era, to narrate the life-story of Thyagaraja in
the traditional style (Kalakshepam), threading
his recitative and discourse with appropriate kirtanas by the saintly genius. It was the
Bhagavathar's premiere for the creation, composed for our occasion.
With live music so much in the
air, ("Nada lola" in the apt opening phrase of
Thyagaraja's kirtana in the raga
Kalyana-vasantha, meaning the rapture of Sound, the origin of all swaras and all music), Appa tapped a spring of
creativity in himself which flowed out in a series of kirtanas. He was handicapped by never having learnt
to sing the initial exercises of the octave that every learner has to
master. His vocal range hardly exceeded half an octave. He had to work
patiently with a music teacher or an amateur to establish and formalise
the mettu (melodic form) of his own kirtanas, though he well knew their melodic shape.
The sahitya was in Tamil. He always believed
that Telugu with its vowel endings lent itself to our music better than
Tamil with its accented consonants. Appa wanted to compose Tamil kirtanas with a difference, carefully choosing
mellifluous words to fit the curve of the melody. He considered some songs
of Papanasam Sivan and Gopalakrishna Bharati, the composer of the opera,
"Nandanar", to be euphonic models of Tamil sahitya. He deplored songs which were packed with
words and harsh syllables, with insufficient room for the sangatis or variations on a theme to be bodied
forth by a performer.
The mettu of kirtanas in the
main ragas is usually familiar to rasikas,
leaving little scope for melodic innovation. Such is the hold of tradition
that new kirtanas fall into the same mould as
the earlier models. Appa's compositions conformed to the Thyagaraja mould
of pallavi, anupallavi
and a four-line charanam, the two final lines
echoing the anupallavi. In his sahitya, while he stayed with the standard mode of
plaints to the Lord for personal salvation, he also put in new ideas in a
poetic diction that was close to the spoken tongue. He would explain to
anyone who would listen, the special points in his kirtanas. But as a teenager I was indifferent to
these subtleties and hardly recognised his insight into our classical
music in its fusion of the spirit and the mind in nada, primal sound. Even musicians, while lauding
him to his face, were impervious to the finer points he explained. He
liked flattery, but was ever on guard against it.
His very first composition was
"Muktikkuriya" in Kalyani. Other memorable songs were "Sodanai neelalamo"
in Thodi and "Yar arivar" in Arabhi. He also wrote a set of fourteen songs
in different ragas for an opera in Tamil called 'Kurukshetra', being a
dialogue between Arjuna and Lord Krishna, his divine charioteer on the
battleground. It is the theme of the famous 18th chapter of the Bhagavad
Gita. The philosophical import of the text must have prompted Appa to
attempt this ambitious composition, "on the model of Thyagaraja's 'Nowka
Charitram'", as he wrote in his big notebook. Appa's later work included
more padams. This form is popular in Bharata
Natyam, giving scope to the woman dancer to represent the yearning of the
lady (nayaki) for the lover (nayaka), who is sublimated as the Lord in person.
This conceit has been over-exploited. Insofar as it is men who have
composed the known padams in the repertoire,
they are fake representations of female romanticism and sensuality.
Anyway, at least two of Appa's padams deserve to
be sung and known, "Kanavinil" in Panthu Varali and a late composition
with metaphysical depth, "Seyalaalum Tuthiaalum" in Yadukula Kambodi,
(both of which may be found the webpage devoted to his music). On occasion
he tried to get a musician to learn them, but it was no use. He was
disappointed that his compositions would not be sung.
Among his friends was Sundara
Pandian, whose father, Abraham Pandithar, had produced a huge volume on
his theory of Karnatic music, with his own techniques of composing songs
based on a method he called 'sphutam'
('blossoming', 'bursting open', in Sanskrit). It involved a rather
mechanical assembling of the characteristic phrases of a raga under
analysis. Appa was curious to test it, but wisely ignored it in favour of
his own creative imagination.
Another curious figure in Thanjavur was Sundaresa
Sarma, a scholar and Sanskrit poet, who spent much time on puja to Sri Rama. He implied that he could invoke
divine powers of healing through his devotion. This intrigued Appa, who
wanted to find out if there was any special effect in Sarma's
ministrations. He believed that they could have a beneficial
psycho-somatic influence in some cases. When Sarma was called in to save
Appa's nephew Balu, who was stricken with incurable leukemia in 1948,
there was a glimmer of hope at first, but the end came swiftly.
Appa loved the millennium-old
Chola temple, the pride of Thanjavur, dedicated to Siva as Brahadeswara.
He would take visitors there and walk round the broad prakara (the surrounding stone paving) and point
out the noteworthy sculptural details and the enormous monolithic Nandi
bull. He knew the Chola murals inside the concealed temple passageways,
overlaid by inferior paintings in the much later Nayak period. He liked to
show a sculptured face high up on one side of the tower, of a man with a
hat on. It may have depicted a foreigner, but Appa liked the story that it
represented Marco Polo.
Appa's other cultural focus was the Saraswati Mahal
Library, which the Maratha kings of Thanjavur had set up to house
thousands of palm-leaf manuscripts and rare books. Some of them were
obtained when Rev. Christian Frederick Schwartz, a German missionary of
the late 18th century, was tutor to Prince Serfoji, who later became Raja
with British support. The whole building was in dust and disarray. Appa
contributed to saving the manuscripts by securing government assistance
for renovation and cataloguing the treasures of the Library. He invited
Dr. V. Raghavan, an eminent Sanskritist, to assess the rare works hidden
away in the dingy rooms.
We
went on outings to other places in the Kaveri basin. For me as a boy, our
week long visit to Tranquebar (Tarangambadi) on the Bay of Bengal left an
indelible impression. Appa's father had served there as a Salt Inspector
early in the century. The romantic Danish fort on the beach of this
fishing village was the 'travellers' bungalow' we stayed in. The sea air
gave me a keener appetite than I have ever felt. Slices of bread and cocoa
appeased it in the afternoons. Appa used to walk with us to the old ruins,
the church and the store with wares from Portugal.
Appa could never confine
himself to one or two areas of knowledge. He investigated Siddha medicine,
though he did not pursue it seriously. He wanted to try printing little
things at home and had a black wooden cabinet made to contain leaden
typefaces and stops in different fonts. This too came to a dead end, since
we had neither a press nor the know-how to use it.
Appa's Tamil knowledge gave
him local renown as a speaker who could address an audience in two
languages with equal facility. When Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyar, former Divan
of Travancore State came to Thanjavur, he stayed at our house. His spoke
in English at a public meeting with his legendary eloquence. When he
finished, Appa stood up and gave the substance of the speech in fluent
Tamil, much to the guest's admiration and his own satisfaction.
Plain Living, But Quite Comfortable
Ours was a paradoxical
life-style. At one level, it was enviable, with a spacious house and
servants, but at another level it was austere rather than sumptuous.
The district
judge had a large government bungalow with a compound covering perhaps an
acre. Furnishing it was the officer's problem. So a transfer involved the
packing and transport of many crates and boxes by goods train. Our parents
had furniture made for them by a firm in Katpadi near Vellore. In the
drawing room we had handsome pieces in black rosewood, now a scarce and
costly timber. We had a three-seater sofa and two armchairs, teapoys, a
round centre table on which a large round brass top rested, with an etched
design. There was a sloping desk for Amma with pigeon-holes inside.
Besides these, we had a 'knick-knack bureau' in which Amma kept assorted
objects, such as a porcelain shepherdess, a crystal Buddha, a small box
with a grain of rice on which a craftsman had engraved Appa's long name,
and ornamental boxes.
We had also a couple of long
low carved tables resting on wooden elephants. On these we had placed a
bronze Nataraja crafted in Thanjavur and a companion statue of Devi, both
beautiful. We had a woven carpet made for us to a novel design which M.
Krishnan had drawn on graph paper, depicting four or five stylised
elephants. It was a conversation piece all right. Upstairs we had cots,
wooden ones for the children and a twin-set, 'Slumber King', steel-sprung
beds for the parents. They had rosewood wardrobes too, the larger one for
Appa.
In the middle room
we had a rosewood swing with brass holders and chains which were made to
specifications. It was both an adornment and a convenience which we kept
carefully till Appa left Madras in 1980. A heavy bench of the same wood
was made later for us.
We
had no dining table. We sat down at meals together, cross-legged on the
floor or on a wooden plank called palahai. Our
cook was a Mangalorean called Eswara Bhat, who had taught himself English
well enough to surprise us with a bookish phrase or two. He was orthodox
and performed his own puja. He served us at
meals. We ate off ever-silver plates, except for Appa, who had an oval
silver plate. We never used table cutlery, since we ate with the right
hand in the South Indian custom, washing our hands before and after the
meal. The fuel for cooking was firewood, not gas or electricity. 
This was the
pre-television age. Even when TV came, we did not go in for a set. We had
an old radio with a green magic eye that winked and stared uncannily when
we twiddled with the knob for the wavelength, with the sound trailing off
into faint whispering or crackles every few minutes. Appa and Amma never
took to the gadgets that punctuated the 20th century. Though fond of
music, they would not try out the tape recorder, the large old model or
the shrunken one that superseded it.
Our clothes conformed to the local mode, the sari and
blouse for Amma, the pavadai (ankle-length
skirt) and blouse for my sisters, shorts and half-sleeved shirts for the
boys. Appa went to court dressed in white drill trousers and a jacket,
which he exchanged in his chambers for a black coat, wearing white bands
in an attached collar. At home he wore a veshti
secured by a belt, and a shirt or a half-sleeved bunian (vest) of white cotton. We were unshod
indoors. Children also went to school barefoot in those days.
The morning meal was served
before 10 a.m. We took rice and curds or slices of bread for lunchtime at
school or the court. On return home, there was tiffin, usually a snack
like dosai or vadai
or idli or variations, with a brass tumbler of
cocoa. Around 8 p.m. we had dinner, usually a repeat of the morning meal,
with freshly cooked vegetables. We had rice with sambar or a kozhambu
variant cooked in tamarind or buttermilk or dhal, with assorted
vegetables. The runnier rasam came for the
second course with rice. The last course was curds with rice and a pickle.
Sometimes in hot weather Amma would keep the cooked rice from the morning
in a bowl of cold water and serve it at supper with spinach cooked in a
tamarind sauce. We stuck to a vegetarian diet.
Amma frowned on smoking decades before the
anti-tobacco movement gained force. So the house was a no-smoking zone.
Appa would on occasion accept a cigarette from a smoker friend. But he
never took to it, unlike so many we knew. We too avoided smoking. Appa's
one addiction was pakku or shredded betel nuts
roasted in ghee and mixed with small white seeds. This product was
purveyed by a firm in Madras called Rasikalal. Appa never chewed betel
leaves wrapped around pakku, a deplorable and
unsanitary habit common then. When past middle age, he realised that pakku could harm his gums, and he gave it up
abruptly one day. Our house was free of alcoholic drinks. Appa accepted
the limitation, though he did not spurn a glass of wine or sherry when it
was offered in a party in the post-prohibition era. He did not like to go
shopping. He would send for the few things he needed. He almost never
carried a purse in his pocket. He paid bills promptly by cheque if
possible, or had the cash delivered. He had a brown leather attaché case
which went to office with him every day where he kept his cheque book and
some stationery. He did not want to wear a wrist watch and gave me the one
he had when I went to college in Madras later.
The office room had teakwood furniture from the court,
with identification numbers painted in white in a corner. On one of the
tables we had a HMV gramophone (His Master's Voice), with a handle that
had to be cranked periodically, since otherwise the record on the
turntable would slow down to an atonal drawl. The records were mostly from
HMV too, some of them Hindi film songs of the 1930's, including those by
Saigal and a few Karnatic songs, all played at 78 rpm, each record running
for about five minutes..
In the hall we had a hat stand, now no longer seen. It
had a mirror and pegs for hats, which were superseded even by that time,
though Appa had a sola topi, a khaki covered pith hat with a leather
chin-strap. The stand had space for walking sticks, of which Appa owned
three or four carved ones. But he hardly used them.
We had a Vauxhall car which
Appa had bought and maintained. The personal staff, the cook, the maid,
the sweeper and the driver were also paid for by Appa, not by the court.
But there were peons from the office who came in shifts. Our driver, when
cruising along with us from school on a clear stretch of road, liked the
sing to the hum of the Vauxhall as his base note sruti.
Though the District Judge and the Collector were the
most important officers in the town, Appa as judge had neither a security
guard nor a telephone. Later in his career, when our house had a phone,
Appa was over-cautious about using it. This uneasiness about phone chats
has been my problem too. Nor did Amma feel the need for a fridge, since
our food had to be cooked afresh every morning and partly so in the
evening too.
Around this
time there was a domestic incident which I barely understood then. One
morning, our cook Eswaran rushed to the drawing room and hysterically
complained to Appa about something. Later I pieced together what had
happened. He had gone round the house the previous night and discovered
the maid lying with one of the young peons. Appa calmed him down. The
offenders duly appeared before Appa and fell at his feet, asking for
pardon. Appa dealt with the situation leniently, allowing the maid to go
to her village and sending off the peon for process-server duty. After a
decent interval, the maid came back to our service. Eswaran had left our
employ by then.
Appa took
a liberal, non-judgemental view of such transgressions of the moral code
which society professed in theory but never observed. He disliked the
hypocrisy of condemning and punishing the woman but letting the man go
free. Only recently in 2007, a lawyer friend of mine, C. Ramakrishna
(Ramu), who knew Appa well in his Madras years, recalled that at a small
gathering in his house, when Appa had also come, someone mentioned the
case of a woman who had run off with a man. It reminded an elder there of
a poem about a nun who had left her monastery to join a carnival in the
village square. When the nun slunk back to the monastery, fearful of the
punishment or banishment which awaited her, she was astounded to see that
her duty had been taken up by a senior person in the nun's habit, who
turned out to be the Virgin Mary herself. She had come from heaven to save
the poor remorseful sinner. Appa, recalled Ramu, at once identified the
poem as 'Ballad of a Nun' and proceeded to recite it from beginning to
end. This poem by John Davidson, a Scottish writer, evoked a moral and
religious debate in 1895 after it appeared in a journal of standing called
'The Yellow Book'. Appa never told me about this ballad which had
impressed him so much in youth. Obviously he must have felt sympathy for
the errant nun in the legend. I also recall that he had tried a case where
obscenity was alleged as the offence. He was keenly following the trial of
the obscenity case in England about D.H. Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's
Lover'. Here again Appa was ahead of his times.
Around the age of forty he had
difficulty in sleeping through till morning. I heard of 'insomnia' for the
first time. He was annoyed by the clock downstairs which struck the hours.
At midnight the twelve strikes echoed in the house. He wanted to get rid
of the clock. Amma was attached to it, a handsome clock in a brown wooden
casing. A compromise was reached. The gong mechanism was silenced, but the
clockwork remained. Appa would resort to Soneril, a sleeping tablet, but
he was careful to avoid getting hooked on it. He would relax by lying flat
on his back on the carpet and letting his arms and legs fall inert. This
'Savasana' or the posture of the dead body was the only Yoga pose he
practised.
After five years in
Thanjavur, Appa was shifted to Tirunelveli in 1948, when we had still some
months left to take the annual exams. Though grandfather Madhaviah hailed
from this the southern-most district, Appa was not happy to go there. He
had never known Perunkulam, his "native place". Now with our judge's
bungalow in Palayamkottai, we had to adjust to a different environment.
Even the Tamil spoken here was different. I was in the final year of
school, at St. Xaviers, which was run by Jesuits. The Christian boys
mocked me for my Thanjavur Tamil, while their own dialect seemed
outlandish to me. My sisters also found the Protestant Christians of the
school and college they joined a bigoted lot. We visited Perunkulam out of
curiosity, and were hardly nostalgic for our hidden roots. The land was
dry and the folks we met had a latent suspicion of returning natives.
Appa, I think, had a setback
in his work due to a difference of opinion with a senior ICS man who had
been promoted to the Madras High Court. Appa was moved out in a year, this
time to Salem, but again as district judge. While in Tirunelveli, he made
friends with T.K.Chidambaranada Mudaliar, known as TKC, a renowned Tamil
scholar and critic, who held long sessions of erudite talk with Appa in
the drawing room. It resounded with his booming recitations from the
Sangam age poets and other nuggets of Tamil literature.
This was a period of marking
time for Appa. He was impatient to join the High Court. I was in the
hostel of Loyola College, Madras, separated from home except for the
holidays. I remember a long car trip to Mysore and scenic places like
Simsha, with Appa at the wheel. He gave up driving soon afterwards,
depending on the drivers he employed, most of them unsatisfactory. After
Independence the servants' problem became increasingly acute and bothered
many middle-class homes.
Appa amused himself with his diverse interests and
books, but he was worrying all the time about his promotion. He joined the
Rotary, which was then new to Indians, but avoided the regular clubs where
he would have to consort with dubious types, lest they should take
advantage of a presumed familiarity with the judge.
Appa's next posting, also at
the same stagnant level, was to Vellore in North Arcot district, only a
couple of hours by train or car from Madras. He varied his routine by
visiting Tiruvannamalai, where Ramana, the great rishi lived and died. Appa had met Ramana and
talked to him. The teachings and conversation of the sage had a deep
influence on Appa's mystical aspirations. We heard at home the basic
question which Ramana wished everyone to reflect upon: 'Who am I?' It was
here that Appa began his translation of Ramana's 'Thirty Verses' from
Tamil to English, with his own commentary and introduction. It was
different from the usual run of books on Ramana, suffused by his reading
of the Western philosophers. It was the first book he published.
One more lateral move, this
time to the state capital of Madras, occurred in 1956. As a consolation
for being stuck at the mid-level of the judicial ladder, P.V. Rajamannar,
the Chief Justice made him 'Director of Legal Studies', to head the Law
College. Appa made the best of this academic post, which surprised the
legal fraternity, whose gossip-mongers used to infest the cement benches
of the Marina drive in the evenings. Appa and three or four other judges
from the ICS cadre were all awaiting their turn for 'elevation' to the
High Court, which at that time had a Bench of only ten or twelve judges.
Appa knew, as everyone did, that his birth as a Brahmin was against him at
a time when history had placed the anti-Brahmin political parties and
leaders in power in Tamil Nadu. They were opposed to the induction of more
Brahmins to the higher echelons.
The affected judges sent a memorial to the President
of India. There were senior leaders in government with a Brahmin lineage,
like R. Venkataraman, later President of India, but they had to bow to the
mood of the people, who had long resented and contested Brahmin domination
in the civil services, the academia and all fields requiring superior
intellectual powers. In fairness, some of the leaders of the time who were
from other castes themselves did try to ensure that merit should be
rewarded, even for Brahmins. But they had to take care not to alienate
public opinion.
Appa was
anguished by the uncertainty of waiting, .but he wisely diverted his
attention to show his worth and make a mark in Madras, which had a
snobbish attitude towards entrants to the mainstream from the 'moffusil'.
I asked him why he set so much store by the 'elevation' when his
achievements in other fields beckoned him to greater renown. He gently
replied that I would perhaps understand his anxiety when I was older, with
similar problems to face. When we are caught up in a social setting, he
explained, we cannot escape its values and its estimation of one's worth.
He could not be impervious to the disesteem that would ensue if he was
overlooked for promotion.
His facility with ordering ideas and concepts enabled
him to read up the main authors in jurisprudence and political thought.
The evolution of natural law from Roman times and the establishment of
legal norms for India gripped his interest. He talked to me about Kelsen
and Dean Roscoe Pound, about sovereignty and fundamental rights. He
recalled Lord McNair's lectures in Cambridge. Appa himself gave lectures
to the Law College students on jurisprudence in a stimulating style
different from the routine doling out of text-book abstracts and dictated
notes. He got to know Prof. C.H. Alexandrowicz, visiting professor of
International Law in the Madras University, and contributed thoughtful
papers to the latter's Yearbook. Curiously, when I passed my BA Honours,
Appa dissuaded me from taking up law as a profession, because he felt that
the Bar was unsuited to my temperament.
Appa's cultural talents found scope in the new urban
ambience. He came to know musicians and musicologists, many of whom he
impressed by his inwardness with classical music. He took up painting with
his usual gusto, experimenting with different surfaces, including glass
and furniture, apart from canvas and board, using bold colours and firm
lines with the brio of expressionism. (Some of his paintings are shown in
this website. 'Macaws' is my choice for the best one). He collected books
on art and portfolios of reproductions from the work of masters. His
fondness for the art of Blake and Van Gogh was quite in character. The
Director of the Madras School of Art, K.C.S. Panickar used to visit our
house, for Appa had joined its governing committee. Appa wrote a monograph
on Panicker's art for the Lalit Kala Akademi's series on modern Indian
painters. But the friendship soured, for what reason I do not know.
In the mid-1950's, an English
writer called Monica Felton came to live in Madras. She was on good terms
with us. She was writing a biography of C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji), whom
Appa knew. She produced a book, 'I Meet Rajaji', which is quite
interesting.
Appa did not
go to 'functions', but he did accept some speaking engagements. He liked
to be on time. Only once, to my knowledge, did he slip up, when a
students' association neglected to confirm the programme. He was sorry
about it, but could do nothing to mend the situation. His speeches were
always brief and ex tempore, but carefully planned beforehand to bring out
an aspect quite different from the usual clichés and platitudes. He took
pride in this talent of his, but had to endure the tedium of rambling
speeches by other speakers sharing the dais with him.
He was suddenly called back
to don judicial robes as a special judge to try a murder case involving
the highly influential chief of a clan who was accused of killing an
opponent. It was a politically sensitive case where the judge could be
attacked whichever way his decision went. Perhaps the government intended
to put Appa himself on a spot, if not on trial, to find a pretext to deny
him the High Court he so much deserved. In the event, Appa delivered a
reasoned judgement acquitting the accused chief, and the decision was
upheld by the High Court later.
Appa soon received his long delayed promotion (1959).
It was a wonderful breakthrough, a turn of events that not only restored
him to his naturally sanguine nature, but also showed that Tamil Nadu
could rise above the chicanery of animosity against Brahmins as a despised
caste. Following Appa, the other waiting ICS judges, also Brahmins and
slightly junior to him, were called to the High Court. 
Appa in his fifties was at the
peak of his powers. His vivacity, learning and range in conversation were
appreciated by many who loved to meet him, whether on business or in
friendship, unlike some of his contemporaries with ossified and narrow
minds.
I am not qualified
to discuss his work as a High Court judge. But some lawyer friends of my
generation testify that Appa was noted for his courtesy to the bar, the
fair hearing he gave to both sides and his quick grasp of the cases
presented at his court. He surprised the legal fraternity by dictating
decisions in court in perfectly formed sentences and cogent paragraphs, as
if prepared beforehand for delivery. He disliked the tendency of some
fellow judges to indulge in unduly long judgements. He was critical of
power-holders if they trampled on the rights of citizens or acted
arbitrarily. Even as a District Judge, he had heard election petitions
arising from the first general election of free India in 1952 and set high
standards for deciding them. He stood against the lawyerly tactics of
prolonging trials by seeking adjournments (a common vice in our times). He
equally deprecated the tendency of some judges to postpone their orders by
'reserving judgement'. He held that the legal system of India needed
reform in multiple areas, but did not think legislative prolixity would
solve the basic problems. He conveyed his views to the Law Commission of
the mid-1950's, but the government ignored such recommendations. It is a
mercy that his tenure at the High Court was before the contamination of
the judiciary by the pervasive corruption of public life. He believed that
judiciary was still the last resort in a country where the administration
could easily fall into unconstitutional ways.
Appa's tenure in the High Court lasted a decade. He
retired in 1969 on turning 62 years. He was effectively the chief justice
for much of this period, though he was at first designated as
'officiating'. The government did not want a Brahmin to head the High
Court, especially a judge who was reputed to be independent minded. He
suspected that a couple of fellow judges on the Bench were also intriguing
against him. These worries distracted him, but still he did not swerve
from his artistic and literary pursuits. He took up French, with the legal
system in Pondicherry (now Puduchei) coming within his purview. It was
adapted from the model of France. He was an admirer of the French language
and civilisation. He read up the history of France and of French
literature. As a jurist he studied the Hindu law and wrote an erudite
paper on it for his friend, Jenks, who published it in a volume he was
editing on Sovereignty within the Law. He met and discussed many subjects,
legal and general, with visiting judges from Britain (for the centenary of
the Mardras High Court). I once met Duncan Derrett when I was posted in
London: he was a professor in the School of African and Asian Studies,
renowned for his scholarship in Hindu Law and the Indian legal system. He
spoke highly of Appa's creative application of the law as a judge. He has
cited Appa's name in one of his papers. Appa was keen on Indian jurists
and lawyers establishing noble norms of public life and conduct based on
our own traditional concepts of kingship vivified by the Western juridical
principles. 
Appa's cultural and historical
knowledge enabled him to bring out to distinguished foreign visitors the
high points of the rock face carvings of the Pallava age at Mahabalipuram.
Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls in the UK was one such visitor.
He helped the government to
organise the translation of legal terms in Tamil and headed the committee
for some time. He took interest too in the Tamil encyclopedia which was
under preparation by scholars.
From the time of Appa's move to Madras (1956), I was
out of the scene, except for spells of home leave from the Ministry of
External Affairs, in New Delhi or embassies abroad. Only once, when I was
in Delhi, did he come to our house. Amma never did. Neither of them was
keen on leaving home ground. Appa came on an official visit, his sole
visit to the capital as Chief Justice, for a conference of his peers from
other States of the Union. It was I think in 1967. It was the only trip he
made by air. At this conference he met his counterparts, and discussed
points of common interest with Chief Justice P.N. Bhagwati. The two must
have struck a chord. Bhagwati, when he visited Tokyo in the late 1980's,
remembered Appa warmly. Surprisingly, neither Appa nor Amma visited us
abroad in our different postings. Neither had a passport and neither felt
any need for it. Such abstention from 'the craze for foreign' was an
oddity then and astonishing now.
Appa had bought an old house with a compound shortly
before retirement. Here he spent most of his time, reading or writing, and
sometimes meeting visitors. He fretted about the lack of help for chores
like paying the house tax or contacting offices for basics like the
telephone. He had hoped that the government would call for his services in
at least an honorary capacity for pushing projects like the Tamil legal
lexicon. He did not want the money, but only secretarial assistance.
Gradually he got used to the deprivation and to the dwindling number of
callers. Those who valued his advice and conversation still dropped in or
invited him, like Ramu.
Appa was an avid reader, not
systematic but astonishing in the width of his reading, his grasp and
retention. He read books rapidly, in a strategy he devised, which he
called 'diagonal reading'. He would run his eye through the pages front to
back and vice versa, noting the table of contents, the index and
introduction and getting the gist of a book in a fraction of the time it
took me to plod through the first fifty pages. He would re-read the books
or pages he found worth the second perusal. If challenged, he could
express the substance more correctly than the plodding reader. I recall
the variety of books in different genres that he had collected in both
English and Tamil. There were many more he borrowed and returned.
Literature, philosophy, music and art predominated. It was not a large
library, but a choice one, befitting an eclectic thinker and poet. As an
officer liable to transfer every few years, he had to be selective. His
law books were few, since the court had the law reports and the Acts with
commentaries on the different branches of the law.
He prided himself on his
ability to recite whole poems flawlessly and recall quotations aptly. His
verbal memory did indeed surprise listeners. He would reel off whole
stanzas in English as well as Tamil, and some bits in Sanskrit and Telugu
too. He retained this capacity all his life.
I shall list some authors he talked about during my
youthful blundering explorations in English literature. For him
Shakespeare was peerless, especially Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth; The Merchant
of Venice, The Tempest, and some Sonnets (for instance, "Shall I compare
thee to a summer's day?" and "When in disgrace with fortune and men's
eyes"). He later got a book by Eric Partridge entitled 'Shakespeare's
Bawdy', which delighted him with its excerpts from the bard's frankly
ribald word-play and allusions. He was also enjoyed Elizabethan plays by
Ben Jonson, Marlow and Fletcher; books on Shakespeare's age; Metaphysical
poetry by George Herbert and John Donne, (whose bold address and wit
delighted him). He had in a set of seven or eight volumes by individual
poets besides several anthologies. He was fond of Keats, Shelley's
'Ozymandias' sonnet, Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' and 'Ode on Intimations
of Immortality' (he would write out the whole opening section of the Ode
from memory in his current notebook so as to get into the mood of writing
something on his own), Coleridge, Pope, Blake for his fresh imagination;
Browning for 'The Grammarian's Funeral'; even later poets he preferred
were G.M. Hopkins, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence (also for
his novels), Rudyard Kipling's poem, "If", which he could recite entirely,
and quatrains from Edward Fitzgerald's 'Omar Khayyam'. Among the early
20th century masters, he had picked up in Cambridge a copy of T.S. Eliot's
'Selected Poems, 1909-1925' (this included 'Waste Land'), in the third
impression (1928). He must have been among the first Indians to understand
the import of the modern tone and content in English poetry. When Eliot
published the last of his 'Four Quartets', "Little Gidding" in 1942, later
hailed as a profound masterpiece, Appa bought a copy of its second
impression, in January 1944, from a bookseller in Luz, Mylapore, Madras
called K. Mahadevan. He bought W.H. Auden's 'Another Time' (1940) in 1941.
He liked to read out the lighter poems in the volume and explained the
poem, "Law, say the gardeners, is the sun." He was acutely receptive to
new writing, though he was not trained to be a literary critic. He saw the
worth of poems which became famous much later, like Auden's elegies on
Sigmund Freud and Yeats and 'The Shield of Achilles'. William Empson, like
Auden, was his contemporary in Cambridge. Empson, he observed, was
innovative in using scientific ideas in his clever poetry. Appa discovered
Rilke for himself, and also French, Latin and Chinese poetry, of which he
had anthologies in translation. He was fond of a slim book from the Greek
Anthology, and sometimes quoted the epigrams. It was a form which suited
his own thought, compressed and sagacious, a form which Valluvar's
'Tirukkural' in Tamil excelled in. Arthur Waley's Chinese poems always
pleased him, as his translation of the Chinese story, 'Monkey' also did.
Many years later, when he
was in Madras, I used to bring him books from Delhi or abroad. He loved
the illustrated volume, 'Civilisation', by Kenneth Clark. In it there is a
reference to St. Francis of Assisi, who called his body 'Brother Donkey',
an original phrase which Appa adopted. He also read Erich Gombrich's 'Art
and Illusion', besides several other books on art he got from other
sources.
He loved plays,
enacted not on the stage but in the theatre of his mind. He was a fan of
Bernard Shaw's 'Saint Joan', 'Back to Methuselah', 'Man and Superman' and
'Androcles and the Lion'. He read out bits of witty dialogue with chuckles
and guffaws and explained the social ideas behind some of the plays,
though I was too immature to appreciate them. He introduced me to One Act
Plays like 'The Monkey's Paw' and J. E. Flecker's 'Hassan'. He took to the
three 'Time Plays' by J.B. Priestley, where ideas like recurrence,
cyclical time, alternative timelines and the illusion of "I have been here
before" are imaginatively explored in tight plots. The concept of Time
fascinated him. He got J.W. Dunne's little book, 'Nothing Dies', to look
into the author's theory of Time.
He had little patience with fiction, except for novels
like E.M. Forster's 'A Passage to India', Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary',
Tolstoy's 'War and :Peace', Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick', the stories of
Edgar Alan Poe, H.G. Wells's 'History of Mr. Polly', two novellas by David
Garnett, 'Lady into Fox' and 'Man in the Zoo', Voltaire's 'Candide',
Johnson's 'Rasselas' and G.K. Chesterton's 'The Man Who was Thursday'..
Much later Appa came to Jorge Luis Borges, (whose 'Labyrinth' stories I
gave him). He took to Borges with alacrity and wrote an article on
Mahabharata and the ideas on Time in two short pieces by Borges, 'A New
Refutation of Time' and 'The Garden of Forking Paths'. Appa disfavoured
the voluminous novel (except Tolstoy's masterpiece and Proust's
'Remembrance of Things Past'). I failed to infect him with my own
enthusiasm for Kafka and Nabokov.
In non-fiction, he read Nirad Chaudhury's
'Autobiography' soon after it came out. I remember him praising the
author's erudition and style. But he ignored the later work of Chaudhury.
Nor did he like Naipaul much. He read Nehru's 'The Discovery of India'
even in the 1940's and conceded that Nehru wrote well, but he also called
it "mainly the discovery of the Nehru family". He read Beverley Nichols's
anti-Indian screed, 'Verdict on India' when it came out and was confirmed
in his opinion of British incomprehension about our country and its
culture. In truth, Appa was not pro-Congress. He preferred the promise of
Jai Prakash Narain (before Independence), but kept clear of politics. 
He must have read dozens of other
works, such as H.G. Wells's 'Outline of World History', of which we had an
illustrated edition, Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall', Boswell's 'Life of
Johnson', and later, the delightful 'Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes'
(edited by Sutherland). His penchant for abstract ideas prompted him to
read some of Bertrand Russell's books, like 'History of Western
Philosophy', A.J. Ayer on epistemology (which attracted Appa's attention
when I told him about Ayer's 'Language, Truth and Logic') and Gilbert
Ryle's 'Dilemmas', which I gave him in 1973. He explored mysticism and
what the Western positivists dismissed as metaphysics or nonsense merely
because it cannot be subjected to their verification principle. He
thoroughly read Aldous Huxley's spiritual anthology, 'The Perennial
Philosophy', Aurobindo's 'Life Divine' (several times), books on Ramana's
talk, J. Krishnamurti's transcripts of talks and discussions, William
James's 'Varieties of Religious Experience' and Saint Teresa of Avila's
autobiography. All this reading and thinking about Truth from both Western
and Eastern perspectives, permeated by his own meditations, were condensed
in scattered fragments, his unpublished manuscripts and two small books.
Chippy has written about
his eagerness to keep abreast of scientific discoveries. Journals like
"The Listener" helped him. I also lent him Crick and Watson's "The Double
Helix", which he read carefully. He was of course well up on forensic
medicine,
Appa spent much
time on medical tomes, in particular on psychiatry. He admired Freud and
read all he could find of his works. I brought Pelican editions of H.J.
Eysenck and others on psychology, intelligence, aggression, psychic
disorders and the like. He latched on to the books by Robert Laing, 'The
Divided Self' and 'Self and Others' He even wrote an article for 'The
Hindu' on Laing's controversial view of schizophrenia (1973). He was
always sympathetic to those with mental disorders and critical of the
common tendency to blame or ridicule them.
Did he ever read light fiction and detective novels?
Yes, indeed, but he was choosy. In crime fiction, he liked George Simenon
for his realistic settings in France and his psychological insights. He
enjoyed A.P. Herbert and Hilaire Belloc, spoofs and clever parodies, like
the limerick about a wicked cassowary that ate a missionary and a verse
about a purple cow.
The
Tamil books and the music books were often taken down. He had the poems of
Subramania Bharati, some of which he would read to us. He had a rare book
of Bharati in English verse, translated by the poet himself. He had
'Tiruppugazh' and an anthology of Tamil poems. In the music shelf,
Thyagaraja's kirtanas were consulted most often. He had books of kritis by Dikshitar too. There were some books on
music theory too.
Samples of Anantanarayanan's
poetry and prose will be given under the appropriate headings in this
website. Here I shall convey his views on writing and his own practice as
an author.
He trained
himself to write from childhood onward. He wrote in a style suited to his
purpose, condensing ideas and conceptual reasoning in his distinctive
diction. The books and writers he held up for admiration were indicators.
He found me a ready pupil, but neither of us made this a formal pedagogic
relationship. When I showed him a poem or two I had written as a boy, he
picked out a bright phrase or image, but he never guided me as an
author-in-residence would to a 'creative writing' class. Instead, he would
tell me about the sonnet form, its octave and sextet, its handling by
Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and others. He would tell me how it is concrete
detail that vivifies a poem or narrative. He told me about Walter Pater,
whose novel, 'Marius the Epicurean' was in his library, a gift from his
Cambridge friend, Jenks. He explained how Pater would compose his
sentences clause by clause, to build an architectural effect, with 'a
dying fall' at the end sometimes. He pointed to his brother Krishnan's
articles on nature as examples of a clean-cut, direct style. He told me
how Swift, Defoe and Addison were better models of prose than Johnson with
his Latinate phrases. He would cite Andre Gide's dictum that a literary
work must have "the line", meaning that it is only if a piece of writing
has a distinctive tone and purpose that it will be memorable. He would
read out from his own work in progress as if I were an equal. These
literary chats early on spurred my own interest in good prose and modern
poetry, for which I am always indebted to him.
I now go on to list his main writings, published and
unpublished. He published three books in English, apart from a small
selection, privately printed, called 'Verses and a Fragment' (around
1955).
- 'The Silver Pilgrimage', his only novel, was
published in 1961 by Criterion Books, New York, reprinted as a paperback
by Arnold-Heinemann, New Delhi in the 1975, and again by Penguin Books
India, New Delhi in 1993, and a third time by Rupa & Co, New Delhi
in 2003.
The first edition carried a
preface by the American critic, Harvey Breit, which is carried over in
the subsequent editions. Breit concludes his preface: "Somehow, by
talent, wit and wisdom, Mr. Anantanarayanan has managed a fusion of the
medieval and the modern. He has put his remarkably promising hero though
fire and ice with a straight face; it is reminiscent of the method (not
the style) of Voltaire in 'Zadig', of Stendhal in 'Love', a method of
the would-be scientist insisting on being scientific about things not
susceptible to science; and knowing the resistance yet carrying on, and
making of it something both comic and revelatory. 'The Silver
Pilgrimage' is both comic and revelatory, and something beyond. It has
its own luminosity; it is magic." Some readers have fallen under its
spell. "Very few Indian novels in English can match the variety of
styles and forms which 'The Silver Pilgrimage' successfully attempts."
(G.S. Amur, the respected critic in 'Encyclopedia of Indian
Literature'). But it is a novel that flouts the great tradition of
Western fiction with its defiantly Indian narrative mode, incorporating
something of the satirical novella of the 18th century. Though never a
best-seller, it has established a niche of its own in the post-war
English writing by Indians. More than that, it transcends national
boundaries in its humanistic wisdom.
It was not easy for Appa in that era to find a publisher. None was likely to accept it in India. But he was immensely helped by the enthusiasm of Dharma Kumar, a Cambridge educated economic historian who became a professor at the Delhi University, daughter of Amma's maternal cousin and Dr. K. Venkataraman, a celebrated chemist. Dharma, a young, vivacious intellectual, loved the story when she read it in typescript. She spotted that it was no less original than G.V. Desani's 'All About Mr. Hatterr' (1949) which she had read. She sent the typescript to the writer, Santha Rama Rau in New York. It was through her that Harvey Breit interested himself in the book and had it published. Breit had also helped R.K. Narayan when he was not famous, though later they had a quarrel. Appa's novel was sent to the leading papers and journals for review. It was thus that John Updike, then a promising young novelist and poet, saw the book and was fascinated by the name. (His poem is included in the website).
Another distinction for Appa was that his is probably the only novel that has been the occasion for a Western symphony. It was Mrs. Watumull of the Watumull Foundation who commissioned Alan Hovhaness to write a symphony with the book's title. Thus was born the Silver Pilgrimage Symphony of this prolific composer who died in 2000. (his 15th Symphony)
-
'The Quintessence of
Wisdom' (1955). This book of 50 pages was first published by S.
Viswanathan, Madras and republished by Ramanasramam, Tiruvannamalai in
1968, priced at Rs. 1-50. It has been reprinted recently. The subtitle
is, 'The Thirty Verses of Sri Ramana'. It has a Foreword by Dr.
Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, who was then Vice-President of India. The
author's Introduction of 25 pages is a sparkling exposition of the Sri
Ramana's thought and life. The text is a free rendering of Sri Ramana's
epigrammatic Tamil text, with a commentary which offers counterpoints
from Western philosophers. As Radhakrishnan says, the work "gives us
this religion of the spirit, based on Indian scriptures, and acceptable
to the modern mind. It is an ethical and rational approach, relating the
problems of the external world to inner belief and understanding."
-
'The Renouncer' (1956) is a One
Act play "concerning the great renunciation of the Prince
Siddhartha-Gautama" (published by S, Viswanathan, Madras), just 25 pages
long and priced at Rs. 1 and 8 annas. The Author's Note says, "Prince
Siddhartha-Gautama of my play is not yet the Buddha, the Enlightened
One, though he will be so some day." He adds that he has introduced in
the well known story a psychological interpretation of the temptation by
Mara of the Prince to shake him from his resolve to go away from the
palace, and also "a thread of political dilemma to deepen the colours of
inner conflict." The dialogue is partly in poetry. Mara's tempters are
reminiscent of the tempters in T.S. Eliot's 'Murder in the Cathedral',
but I know that Appa read the latter play after he wrote his. Appa as a
youngster had been deeply impressed by Edwin Arnold's 'The Light of
Asia', and by his later reading of books on Buddhism. He had praise for
Radhakrishnan's lecture, 'Gautama, the Buddha', of which his copy is
still with me.
- Among Appa's other writings, 'The Broken Mirror'
must be mentioned first. It was published as five instalments in a
magazine called "Aside" in the autumn of 1978, when he was 71. It is a
fragmentary autobiography of his boyhood and youth. Discerning readers
have found it sensitively written in a spare style, with self-reflexive
wonderment about life which distinguishes it from other books in the
genre. (We want to put all the five chapters in this website).
-
Appa was a
poet who had missed his vocation. The language of his poetry is highly
compressed and hence somewhat obscure to the casual reader. He gave up
rhymed verse and regular metre, since it cramped the choice of words,
ideas and images. Each poem of his was born out of an impulse to record
some thought, some perception, that he had wrung out from his
cogitations. "Part of the testament (of any poet) is incommunicable", as
he wrote. He did not fall into the temptation of taking a famous poet
for a model. From his 'Verses and a Fragment', the poem 'Introspection'
is presented on the Home page of this website. Some others will be added
in the section devoted to his writings. The 'Fragment' in the title of
his little book is a dialogue in verse between the boy Nachiketas and
Death or Yama. It is an imaginative adaptation of the famous encounter
in 'Katha Upanishad'.
- His miscellaneous articles, some on music, his
experiences and social problems are not many, but require to be edited
and collected. They appeared in 'Swarajya' and some in 'Shakti', a
short-lived journal edited by my friend, Manohar Lal Sondhi and Madhuri
Sondhi. There were occasional articles and reviews he contributed on
request to 'The Hindu', apart from 'souvenirs' brought out by various
societies.
- Of his unpublished writings, covering many years
and notebooks and diaries, the Sufi stories are a set by themselves, a
late work which he considered the sum and essence of his own reflections
on life and the individual self enmeshed in the world. Here he expressed
his own distillation of a meditative lifetime in paradoxical Sufi-like
fables. The framework of these stories is simple: The central figure is
a girl of seven called Jamal (Jamala-un-Nerissa), who lives with her
aunt Shirazi in a small town in medieval Persia, and is recognised by
people to be 'a divine child', a Sufi Master. She behaves naturally like
a girl of her age, playing with friends and attending a clerical school,
but it is known that she can give wise counsel to anyone in trouble who
comes to her, even if what she says is starkly different from
conventional wisdom. Jamal speaks with ageless sagacity as a Sufi to a
fame-crazed artist or a cripple or a woman suffering labour pains or
about herself mourning the death of a dear companion. Her precepts are
an affirmation of life in its multitudinous shadings and shiftings, with
death being part of life. Each episode deals with a separate 'case'
Jamal comes across in the small town. She clarifies the problem by
jolting the accepted value system, enabling the other to see it with
eyes refreshed. The Jamal stories arise from Appa's discovery of Sufism,
in particular of Jalaluddin Rumi (13th century Persian Sufi poet). He
loved Rumi's call, "Sell your learning and buy bewilderment". As author
Appa invented some sayings of Jamal, purportedly transcribed from "the
Dervish manuscripts". Jamal's message is manifest in this 'proverb'
attributed to her: "Do not strain to know, but to feel; do not strain to
reason, but to look. Do not pray, but be still, and Allah's palm will be
on your head."
- There is an unpublished typescript of Appa's,
'Letter to the Grand Seigneur', which is again metaphysical and
philosophical. It was written in his Madras period. It adopts the device
of an epistle addressed to an absentee landlord. The idea is that the
Seigneur who has presumably abandoned his demesnes but is reported to
have been sighted somewhere is none other than God.
His notebooks have to be mined for other writings which should be published, if only there are readers for them.
- Appa's Tamil writings are few. Apart from the kirtanas he composed, he wrote some stories and verses too. There was a collection of Tamil stories by the progeny of Madhaviah, 'Munnila', (1942), where three of Appa's are included, one of them being the title story. One story is a purported diary of Ravana, King of Lanka, justifying his abduction of Sita as a victor's right.
In June 1975, when I was
Commissioner of India in Hong Kong, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suddenly
declared an Emergency, following a judicial ruling which set aside her
election. Appa saw the move and its intent as undemocratic, if not
dictatorial. I had to defend the government abroad, especially in Hong
Kong where the foreign correspondents from the West were largely
pro-Chinese and anti-Indira. I asked for a candid briefing from New Delhi
and got weasel words to justify the suppression of rights and the
imprisonment of many who dissented. I came on home leave a year later and
found the atmosphere in Madras and New Delhi almost clammy with dread and
mutual suspicion of informers. I asked a friend who was an insider for his
sincere assessment: he gave me understand by a whispered hint that the
Western critique against the Emergency and Indira Gandhi's second son
Sanjay Gandhi was justified. "The son also rises", he said, quoting the
Hemingway title that 'The Economist' of London had adopted for its lead
article. Appa was right in condemning the Emergency and the toadies it
bred, the high-handed ministers and their cronies who flouted rules to
enrich themselves. He agreed that as an envoy I had to follow government
policy, even if its propaganda was patently incredible, unless I chose to
quit. I believed that there was indeed at that time a threat to
destabilise the Indira Gandhi government which had to be parried, but I
also knew the Emergency had gone too far in throttling all political
opposition and the adversarial press.
India recovered its balance only with the election of
1977 which Indira Gandhi called, against her son Sanjay's advice, either
in desperation or in atonement. It was a national relief that she along
with her clique were overthrown by the voters. Appa felt vindicated. But
the Janata government under Morarji Desai's leadership which followed was
a disaster of a different kind. They set up the Shah Commission to rake up
"the excesses of the Emergency". Appa was asked to rule on specific
complaints of extra-legal action by the police and other authorities
during the Emergency. He took the assignment conscientiously and gave his
judicial opinion in his Report after due hearings. The government thanked
him for his pains, but his report was buried with the Shah Commission's
main report in the debris of documents swept off the tables when Indira
Gandhi triumphantly came back to power in 1980.
Appa retreated into seclusion.
He wrote his Sufi stories, reminiscences, reflections, epigrams and poems,
but no work in book form. Meanwhile, Amma, who had hitherto been absorbed
in household routines, including dusting the furniture and the windows,
suffered a paralytic stroke or embolism, which froze her left limbs. I was
in the US in 1980-81. She was bed ridden. Doctors and nurses came and
went. Amma never recovered from the stroke. She died in October 1980,
leaving Appa bereft and helpless. She had been the anchor of his life.
They differed in temperament and attitudes, they had their quarrels too
like other couples, but they were a unity to me. Appa was not capable of
living alone and taking care of himself and the house. With meals from the
Hotel Dasaprakash and irregular help from the few he could call in, he
declined in health. He had a heart attack. It was at this sad juncture
that my brother Sanatkumar and Lalitha stepped in to save the situation.
They rightly insisted that he should move to Bombay (later called Mumbai)
and live with them in their flat. He accepted this life-line. The
furniture and books had to be given up, along with much junk.
Appa outlived Amma by a little
more than a year.
He used
to write to me over the years, promptly answering my letters to him from
New Delhi or wherever I was abroad on posting. I have kept some of his
letters. His last letter to me is dated August 14, 1981, on an inland
letter form, when I was at the Ministry of External Affairs on a temporary
assignment, awaiting my transfer to Moscow as the Deputy Chief of Mission
in the Indian Embassy. He had written about his proposal to sell his house
in Madras to a firm, asking if I could possibly go there and get the
transaction completed. (It was not possible). Then he adds, in a final
paragraph, "I don't know why, but I am feeling very strongly every morning
that my living has actually come to an end. It is only some prolonged
physical suffering that I don't like – but I suppose modern medicine can
cope with it better than ever before. There is no particular reason – but
even simple pleasures don't tempt me any more – leave alone anything so
stupid as some achievement. And, so long as a baby is born anywhere,
growing up with the inseparable feeling I-am-this, there is no point at all in liberation for anyone. I only hope it all ends
with physical death, as Mr. Bhat firmly held." (Vaikunta Bhat was the
Secretary of the administration at Law College, Madras. He was a regular
visitor when Appa was Director of the College in the 1950's. Appa liked
him and his soothing assurances about the future when he was worried about
his career ending in stagnancy with no chance to become a High Court
judge. Bhat's confidence was fulfilled a couple of years later, much to
Appa's relief. When Bhat died in 1979, Appa wrote a fine memoir on him,
which I have). In this last letter to me, Appa had added in conclusion:
"Desire is a v. funny thing & I may want to live once more. Love."
I went to Bombay to take leave
of him on November 17, 1981, before my imminent transfer to Moscow. We
talked a fair amount, but I found that the zest for life and eager
intellectual probing had gone out of him. He had lost interest in books,
perhaps due to the onset of cataract. Before I left he asked me a strange
question: "What do you think happens to the Self when we die? Does it
continue somewhere else or will it go with the body?" I chose to be
sincere, not giving him the answer he may have liked better. I said, "I do
not think there is any life after death or that the Soul or Self can
continue intact elsewhere." He nodded gravely and said, "Yes." But he did
not add, "I agree."
I
returned to New Delhi by air and was startled to get a phone call from
Sanatkumar that Appa had died at night on November 18, the day I left
Bombay. In a way, it was an end he had wished for, with no illness and no
hospitals. He had fallen backwards on his head and expired. Was it Kapala Moksham, the soul issuing from the top of
the skull, as the Hindus thought the jivan-muktas died? I flew back to Bombay with
Girija, getting priority seats on the Indian Airlines plane, and reached
Sanatkumar's flat. After the cremation, Appa's Will was opened and I read
it aloud to our family in the sitting room, and broke down when I came to
the part where he named me as his "Literary Executor".
I postponed my departure to
Moscow by a week, and was in that numbingly cold capital by the end of
December. I mourned Appa and Amma in private, but went about my job in the
new country.
This is a personal portrait
of Appa as I knew him. It is frankly subjective, but based on facts and
the testified evidence of his diverse talents. He was known to be a savant
and an intellectual. His writings reveal the man. He was, like some other
remarkable people, a conflicted personality. He was in constant quest for
a state of reality beyond the material life, beyond the world, but he was
aware of being caught up in its trammels with no escape. He played his
part in the world of here-and-now with dignity and calm, though inner
tranquillity eluded him. I think the death of his father when he was a
college student unconsciously inclined him to seek a father figure or
spiritual guru, some benign elder to reassure him in times of stress and
to point the way to 'liberation'. It was a spiritual insecurity perhaps.
He had tasted that epiphanic moment of mystical release when, on a
beautiful day in Adyar, as a thirteen-year-old boy on a year's sabbatical
from school, he had experienced a sudden rapture, a oneness with all
creation, (Wordsworth called it a 'spot of time'), which would never light
upon him again. Appa wrote about that bliss in 'The Broken Mirror'. It
explains his fondness for Wordworth's great 'Ode' and 'Tintern Abbey'. It
explains too his fascination for Buddha and Ramana.
Of his religious feelings I
have little doubt: he was not a practicing Hindu in the sense of observing
holy ceremonies and going to temples. But he was no agnostic. Deep in
himself, he knew there was a divine principle, though, in his own
metaphor, the Grand Seigneur was an absentee. "There is another state of
being", he often affirmed in discussion. He could not make the transition
to that state. It was as if he had found a road map to mukti or liberation, but lost his way to the road
itself. In his last years he believed in Lord Murugan's grace to the
seeker, as Sanatkumar has told me.
Appa had the gravitas of a judge when he was sitting
in court, but he was by not solemn and stern, for he enjoyed company,
lively discussion and the endless delights of art and music. He could
partake of the pleasures that a good life offers, but without addicted
craving for them. He liked attar and scents, but seldom used them. His
tastes were simple. He visualised an imaginary Persia but made no attempt
to go to that country or anywhere abroad, or for that matter, to the
tourist spots of India. He wanted a decent life for every citizen, free of
petty interference from officials and fiscal predators, a life of free
speech, tolerant to all faiths. He was liberal and sympathetic to those
who had 'strayed' or fallen in love with the wrong persons; he detested
the censorious sanctions of the moral brigade when such incidents
happened. He stood for rights to property and did not hold with socialism
in various guises, though he was not for the capitalism of big money and
big companies either.
He
did feel frustrated that his writings and musical compositions did not get
the recognition they merited in the Madras culture of his time. But he
made little effort to get his writings published and noticed by literary
critics. He was gratified when his novel got some good reviews, but it
never sold in large numbers. He accepted that it was inevitable with his
kind of writing. Perhaps he spread his talents too widely in different
genres like poetry, drama, fiction, essays in literature, law, music and
philosophy. Not many knew even three of these areas enough to appreciate
his abounding creativity. In the 20th century of specialised knowledge, he
was a misfit. But I would not have him different. He was not made to be a
specialist of a single field. He liked to quote Austin Dobson's poem,
beginning, "Fame is a food that dead men eat". Whether he has posthumous
fame or not is irrelevant in his own philosophy. His was a compassionate
and creative life. He was the most remarkable man I have known. I was
lucky to be born his son.
---000---
Mysore
May 1, 2007