Can you believe that an issue arising out of a basic grammatical error in a poem needed the intervention of a police inspector in Coimbatore?
Can you believe that an issue arising out of a grammatical error in a poem needed the intervention of the inspector at R S Puram Police Station over three decades ago?
Malarvizhi Achagam, a printing press opposite Delite movie hall at Variety Hall Road – It was here the problem began, when Maraimalai Elakkuvanar, a Tamil faculty member at the Agricultural College, came across a magazine getting printed with a grammatical error on the title of a poem. As he criticized the author for the mistake, the printer, who happened to be a relative of the author, attacked Maraimalai and the issue went to R S Puram police station. The grammatical error was in the title of the poem ‘Oru Appalathin Maranam’ (The Death of a Pappadam) which according to Maraimalai, should have been ‘Or’ Appalathin Maranam’ since the word ‘Appalam’ begins with a vowel letter. However, the police inspector later settled the matter.
Thrown into a
Deep fryer containing hot bubbling oil
The Appalam bulged
But, when a new wind blew it away,
The fragile one fell and got broken into pieces
And I found nothing inside it.
Reading the above lines in the poem, the police inspector lauded the author, as the modern poet explained to him that he had written the verse to parody the hollow conventional poetry symbolizing it to a crumbly Appalam and the modern verse as the new wind! Got interested in the lines, and the inspector presented him with Rs 100 as a subscription for the magazine and asked him to send further issues without fail!
The poetry magazine was none but Vaanambadi, which was circulated by a movement of the same name in Coimbatore, which democratized Tamil poetry in the 1970s. And, the modern poet, whose verse got snowballed into an issue, was none other than the recipient of the Sahitya Akademy Award, Puviarasu!
“Puviarasu, Elamurugu, Mullai Aadhavan, Gnani, Janasundaram, Sirpi, Mu. Mehta, Gangaikondan, and I circulated Vaanambadi in the 1970s. Our mission in taking free verse to the masses, marked an important epoch in the history of 20th-century Tamil poetry” avers septuagenarian poet Agniputran, who was one of the founders of Vaanambadi movement.
The movement later roped in poets like Meera, Naa. Kamarasan, Abdul Rehman, Erode,Tamizhanban, Inquilap, Salem Tamilnadan, Prabanchakavi ( Prabanchan), and novelists C R Ravindran and Suryagandhan, whose poems too enriched the magazine.
Though the Vaanambaadis later got separated into factions due to differences among themselves, Agniputran recollects how the magazine Vaanambadi was enriched by their beautiful poems.
“While Gnani and Janasundaram interpreted modern poetry with Marxian theories, Puviarasu, Elamurugu, Sirpi, Mullai Aadhavan and I wrote verses”
When asked whether there were no modern poets preceding Vaanambadi, Agniputran informs:
“The credit for freeing verse from strict rules of prosody goes to Mahakavi Subramania Bharathi, as he broke the conventions and wrote in a different form, which later came to be called ‘blank verse’. Following him, between 1940 and 1970, writers like Chellappa, Na Pichamurthy, C Mani, Pasuvayya (Sundara Ramasamy) Nagulan, Gnanakoothan and Pramil wrote modern verse in the two magazines Ezhuthu and Kasadathapara. However, their poems were too subjective and hardly cared about the objective world” winds up Agniputran.
Malarvizhi Achagam, a printing press opposite Delite movie hall at Variety Hall Road – It was here the problem began, when Maraimalai Elakkuvanar, a Tamil faculty member at the Agricultural College, came across a magazine getting printed with a grammatical error on the title of a poem. As he criticized the author for the mistake, the printer, who happened to be a relative of the author, attacked Maraimalai and the issue went to R S Puram police station. The grammatical error was in the title of the poem ‘Oru Appalathin Maranam’ (The Death of a Pappadam) which according to Maraimalai, should have been ‘Or’ Appalathin Maranam’ since the word ‘Appalam’ begins with a vowel letter. However, the police inspector later settled the matter.
Thrown into a
Deep fryer containing hot bubbling oil
The Appalam bulged
But, when a new wind blew it away,
The fragile one fell and got broken into pieces
And I found nothing inside it.
Reading the above lines in the poem, the police inspector lauded the author, as the modern poet explained to him that he had written the verse to parody the hollow conventional poetry symbolizing it to a crumbly Appalam and the modern verse as the new wind! Got interested in the lines, and the inspector presented him with Rs 100 as a subscription for the magazine and asked him to send further issues without fail!
The poetry magazine was none but Vaanambadi, which was circulated by a movement of the same name in Coimbatore, which democratized Tamil poetry in the 1970s. And, the modern poet, whose verse got snowballed into an issue, was none other than the recipient of the Sahitya Akademy Award, Puviarasu!
“Puviarasu, Elamurugu, Mullai Aadhavan, Gnani, Janasundaram, Sirpi, Mu. Mehta, Gangaikondan, and I circulated Vaanambadi in the 1970s. Our mission in taking free verse to the masses, marked an important epoch in the history of 20th-century Tamil poetry” avers septuagenarian poet Agniputran, who was one of the founders of Vaanambadi movement.
The movement later roped in poets like Meera, Naa. Kamarasan, Abdul Rehman, Erode,Tamizhanban, Inquilap, Salem Tamilnadan, Prabanchakavi ( Prabanchan), and novelists C R Ravindran and Suryagandhan, whose poems too enriched the magazine.
Though the Vaanambaadis later got separated into factions due to differences among themselves, Agniputran recollects how the magazine Vaanambadi was enriched by their beautiful poems.
“While Gnani and Janasundaram interpreted modern poetry with Marxian theories, Puviarasu, Elamurugu, Sirpi, Mullai Aadhavan and I wrote verses”
When asked whether there were no modern poets preceding Vaanambadi, Agniputran informs:
“The credit for freeing verse from strict rules of prosody goes to Mahakavi Subramania Bharathi, as he broke the conventions and wrote in a different form, which later came to be called ‘blank verse’. Following him, between 1940 and 1970, writers like Chellappa, Na Pichamurthy, C Mani, Pasuvayya (Sundara Ramasamy) Nagulan, Gnanakoothan and Pramil wrote modern verse in the two magazines Ezhuthu and Kasadathapara. However, their poems were too subjective and hardly cared about the objective world” winds up Agniputran.