by M Krishnan
On Christmas Day 1995, I was on Edward Elliots Road once more. Except that it is now Radhakrishnan Salai, and I was visiting, by appointment, another Madras institution, the son of the man who gave the road its (new) name. My visit ended, I walked out onto the pavement and saw, in the near distance, the board of the Rajeshwari Kalyana Mandapam. In minutes I was with Krishnan. He had forgotten our last meeting, but took me into his study. Surrounded by books, a half-filled page scrolled into his typewriter, a cigarette in his hand, he talked for an hour. He still wore the red lungi, a dress which, in retrospect, seems to have mocked the pieties of Tamil Brahminism, the safe middle road of the white starched veshti, the white banyan, and the off-white poonal. Six weeks after this second meeting Krishnan was dead.
Krishnan could be savagely dismissive of those who failed by his own standards. Consider these three judgements, which I recall from our two conversations. On a famous Tamil writer: ‘That man was so unsure of his worth that he wrote under twelve pennames, using one to write a book and another to review it.’ On a well-known ornithologist: ‘I told him when the government appointed him to the high-powered committee on environmental protection, “Don’t join, you’ll make a fool of yourself. You may know something about birds, that does not make you an ecologist.”’ On a respected editor who dared change one word of his copy: ‘I had written of my father A. Madhaviah as “the Tamil scholar, poet and novelist”; it was changed to “a Tamil scholar, poet and novelist”. My father was the most celebrated Tamil writer of his day, better known even than [Subramanya] Bharati; this fellow in Delhi has made him an also-ran.’ And also one, in print, on the observational skills of a once celebrated poet: ‘According to Sarojini Naidu the koel sings, “Lira! liree! Lira! Liree!” I have not heard this call. Nor has anyone else.’
The contemporary meaning of ‘civilized’, writes Krishnan in one of his essays, is ‘hypocritical and polite’. Here are some more delightfully uncivilized remarks, gleaned from his letters:
[Writing to the newly appointed director of the India International Centre in New Delhi]
I remember the India International Centre as a rather heavily built boarding house with a large lecture hall attached, frequented by all sorts and conditions of culture vultures and bores. I sincerely hope it has improved since.
[After reading a pamphlet, in Tamil, on the sayings of Mahatma Gandhi]
The rendering does not mask the dictatorial tone of the pronouncements.
[Commiserating with a friend posted to Japan]
I believe that Japanese English is a language even more difficult to follow than Jap Japanese.
[On an influential environmental organization]
The World Wildlife Fund, that hotchpotch of truly fine and truly distinguished wildlifers and pretentious charlatans, to which both Peter Scott and Duleep Matthai belonged.
VI
That Krishnan cared nothing for what the world thought of him must be a matter of regret. A Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship (the first), a Padma Shri, a place in the Global 500 Roll of Honour of the United Nations Environment Programme—all these meant naught to him; but a dozen collections of his work could have meant a lot to us. As a chronicler of the natural world he was unequalled, yet his work is to be found, for the most part, only in his now inaccessible newspaper columns. He published only two slim collections: Jungle and Backyard (National Book Trust, 1963: reprinted in 1993 by Oxford University Press), and Nights and Days (Vikas, 1985), the text embellished in the first instance by his superb pen-and-ink drawings, in the second instance by his photographs. He also wrote a book on elephants for children, as well as an ecological survey of the mammals of peninsular India, Indian Wildlife, 1959–70 (Bombay Natural History Society, 1975), the fruit of his Nehru Fellowship. There were also some charming stories about a forest contractor named Dawood Khan, but the book where these appeared is not with me now. His last book, an original detective novel in Tamil, was published in 1995.
When I was introduced to his sister Muthu (the recipient of that 1994 New Year card) as someone interested in Krishnan, the sprightly old lady demanded, ‘Which Krishnan? The artist, the writer, the photographer, the storyteller, the scholar, or the naturalist? You must know all the Krishnans if you wish to understand the man.’ This anthology, alas, has to make do with only some of those Krishnans. The twin burdens of technology and finance allow it to reproduce but a handful of his sketches, and none of his photographs. But the book does, I believe, provide a wide-ranging and on the whole representative selection of the work of the writer, the storyteller, the scholar and the naturalist. I have chosen sixty-eight pieces, out of more than 2,000 that he wrote (and I, with an indescribable pleasure, later read). These range in length from 500 words to 5,000. The earliest of these essays was published in 1938; the latest, posthumously, in 1997. To the best of my knowledge, not a single piece has previously appeared in another book.
To ‘edit’ the works of Madhaviah Krishnan is an assignment fraught with hazard. In the 1980s, when a group of naturalists in Madras wished to begin a journal, they asked the doyen for a contribution to the first issue. He set one condition: ‘Do not edit or change a comma in the text.’ They didn’t, but now that he is gone, I have been more meddlesome. By contemporary standards my editing has been light, but were I to have done in his lifetime what I have done here he would never have spoken to me again. I thought it pointless to gloss every Tamil word or literary allusion likely to escape the younger generation. But about a fifth of the essay titles are mine, not his. I have corrected some misspellings: and inserted some necessary commas, reassuring myself that these errors were those of some incompetent sub-editor, not his. I have corrected one of his own common mistakes, which was to insert a redundant concluding ‘s’ to Himalaya (I have not dared, however, to insert a definitive ‘i’ at the end of that once widespread but now antiquated usage, ‘Madura’).
A word also about the sections into which the book has been structured. ‘Nature Venerated’ brings together essays on the representations of animals in our religious and cultural life. ‘Nature’s Marvels’ highlights encounters in the wild with large, ‘sexy’ species such as the tiger and the python. ‘Nature in Miniature’ turns the spotlight (and microscope) on dainty or dangerous little things such as lizards and butterflies. ‘Nature’s Wars’ features battles both inter-and intra-specific, small cats fighting each other and big cats being beaten back by a buffalo. ‘Nature Theorized’ illustrates the analytical side of Krishnan, as he punctures widely held theories of the vengefulness of cobras and the larger size of north Indian animals. ‘Nature Domesticated’ displays Krishnan’s interest in and knowledge of the plants and animals that live with humans: goats, cows, dogs, the neem tree and others. ‘Nature Desecrated’ showcases some particularly gross examples of man’s destruction of species and habitats. ‘Nature Protected’ prints documentary and exhortative essays on the methods by which Indians may come to cherish and conserve their unparallelled richness of natural diversity. The concluding section, ‘Nature Transcended’, selects examples of the ‘non-nature’ Krishnan, essays and stories placed wholly in the world of humans.
The selection of articles for this anthology was difficult, given the number of options and their consistently high quality. In my choices I have exercised a slight bias in favour of literary quality over scientific worth, but the reader will find plenty of both. Their organization into named sections was equally problematic. The sorting has been done according to the dominant theme of individual essays, but the polymathic Krishnan resists being sorted anyhow. The pieces slotted under ‘veneration’ speak also of domestication and desecration, and vice versa. The only truly sustainable distinction one can make is between the first threefourths of the book, which deals in one way or another with the natural world, and the last quarter, which does not. These essays can be read in any order. The reader might start with nature’s marvels, if he so wishes, then move backwards to nature’s veneration or forwards to its desec
ration.
Begin wherever you want, and wander which way you wish. The anthology can be read at one sitting or piecemeal. It begins with a short piece, from 1952, on the landscape of love in ancient Tamil poetry. It ends with a long disquisition of 1995 on the culture of patronage in late medieval Tamil poetry. This choice of bookends has a twin rationale: to push the argument that while Krishnan was a great naturalist he was also an outstanding writer, and to underline that while his natural allegiances lay with India as a whole, his cultural affinities were more circumscribed. Krishnan himself felt of this last essay that it was ‘one of the best things I have written and wholly original’. The men and women he was writing about were, in fact, ‘my personal literary ancestors’. Might we not single out among them the figure of Kaalameghappulavar, an ‘out-and-out freelancer’ who seldom approached a patron, a man ‘renowned for the spontaneity of his poetic verse’, an ‘acknowledged master of instant repartee [who] has written some foul-mouthed insults and curses in immaculate metres’. Krishnan’s compliments and insults were offered in prose and by photograph, but otherwise the resemblances are striking. May his work live as long as that of his adored poets of the Tamil country.6
Ramachandra Guha
* * *
1 And later the author, in his spare time, of a well-regarded novel, The Silver Pilgrimage, originally published by Criterion Books, New York, in 1961, and reprinted in 1993 by Penguin India.
2 M.Y. Ghorpade, writing in Blackbuck, quarterly journal of the Madras Naturalists Society, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1996. I am grateful to T.R. Shankar Raman for alerting me to this special Krishnan issue of Blackbuck.
3 On this theme, of imported versus native floras, see also the essays ‘Gilding the Lily’ and ‘Nature Study’ in this volume.
4 On the field of play Krishnan was a fiery fast bowler, with a temper to match. My friend Anand Doraswami tells the story of a match in which Krishnan took two wickets in the opening over. Out came the next batsman, wearing a blue shirt and brown trousers, his leg guards tied up with handkerchiefs. It was too much for the fastidious Krishnan. ‘What is your name,’ he demanded of the batsman. ‘Thirunavakkarasu,’ came the answer. ‘I refuse to bowl to a man with that name,’ said Krishnan, and tossing the ball to his captain, left the field.
5 I owe this information to S. Theodore Baskaran.
6 This introduction has greatly benefited from the comments and criticisms of M. Harikrishnan, A. Madhavan, and Gopal Gandhi. I remain, of course, responsible for any remaining errors of fact and interpretation.
Arctitis binturong: Binturong—also called bear-cat. East Indian prehensile tailed carnivore, akin to the civet.
—Chamber’s Twentieth Century Dictionary
B
PRESERVING THE BINTURONG
I sadly fear the binturong
may not be there for very long—
it is a Threatened Beast.
So experts now suggest we catch
a dozen bear-cats in a batch,
to breed in zoos, at least.
The trouble is the binturong
is very wild and very strong,
and being caught defies:
it kicks and claws and spits and bites,
and howls and growls and snarls and fights
until it’s free—or dies!
How then shall we preserve the fast declining
beast? But now, at last,
they’ve given up the cages—
instead of arsenical soap
they plan to use a modern dope
to keep it there for ages!
Nature Venerated
1
The Landscape of Love
In English poetry of the recent past, love has a lowland bias. Tennyson’s shepherd sings, ‘What pleasure lives in height, in height and cold, the splendour of the hills?’ and, redundantly again, ‘Come, for Love is of the valley, come, for Love is of the valley, come thou down’, and Meredith’s ‘Love in the Valley’ will endure when his lesser poems are forgotten.
Climatic differences may account for it, but in the traditions of classical Tamil love belongs predominantly to the hills and mountain slopes. Not that there was no love in the sun-baked plains and coastlines of the Tamil country, but it attains its fulfilment most typically in the hills. In fact, love has a specific ecology in the poetic traditions of Tamil, almost as old as the language itself, and it is of this that I write.
Classical Tamil is peculiar in its division of the land and specification of the attributes of each terrain. No doubt other languages, too, have such territorial leanings in their literature, but Tamil is unique in the detail of its literary ecology. The land was divided into five main tracts, in this order—hill crests and hillsides, plain-land jungles (including scrub jungle), agricultural tracts, the coastland, and lastly the barren, parched strips that lie between these four. Anyone who has studied Indian plant ecology will appreciate the justice of these divisions.
Traditions set out in elaborate detail the appurtenances of each tract. The soil and the water, the fauna and flora, the people belonging, their occupations and recreations, the food crops and other natural resources, the season most typical of the place, the characteristic melodies and drums, the presiding deity, the trend of young love there—all these are listed, and were followed by classical poets with studious regard.
Many of these details are physical and based on actuality. Therefore their specification did not impose an insufferable limitation on poetry—on the other hand it invested amatory poetry with a conventional but naturalistic realism.
We are here concerned only with the course of love in these tracts, but, where they will help to provide the setting, I shall mention physical features very briefly.
Love was, in those days and in poetry, mainly an open-air pursuit. The land was less congested then, and lovers could find privacy not too far from the settlement.
In the first tract, in the hills, love was illicit and triumphant. Here, where there was adequate cover in the rank grasses and undershrubs of the slopes and in the abiding gloom of rainforests, a young man and his lass met and loved, in secret. It was a literary feature of their love that it was illicit, but do not imagine, in terms of contemporary law, that it was adulterous. It was just that they took the law into their hands and consummated their love without the sanction of social codes and regulations.
It was not sanctimonious, married love, but the more puritanical of my readers might feel relieved to know that marriage was less formal, and more varied and factual, in those days. To the ingenuous question, ‘But why should youthful love have been illicit in its climax?’ I can only say that the Tamilian grammarians of ancient times had a fine feeling for the poetic—and knew human nature, as many ancients did. ‘Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.’
Think of the setting envisaged by tradition. The hillsides were clad in great forests of teak and eagle-wood, red-streaked kino and the graceful, dark-leaved sandalwood—the time of the year was October and November, with the monsoons spent, when the air is cold and the dew early. The lovers met by assignation after daylight had failed; it was dark and cold and dangerous. Could legalized, domestic love have been in place here?
One English poet has had the imagination to visualize a similar setting, though he could have known nothing of the erotic grammar of Tamil. I admire Browning more for his cunning with words than for his poetry, but no one can deny the authentic poetry in this passage, where Ottima recalls to her paramour an illicit assignation in the pine forests:
Buried in the woods we lay, you recollect:
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead:
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burnt thro’ the pine-tree roof …
As if God’s messenger thro’ the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me …
In the lowland jungles, shepherds grazed their
cattle and grew pulses and millet and a fine feral sort of rice. The setting was much less open than in English pastoral poetry—it has been specified, by the learned author of a Tamil–English dictionary published in 1908, as ‘woodland’, but I think he is mistaken. The south Indian level-land jungles, where cassias and the blueflowered Memecylon edule, the savage-red lily, Gloriosa superba, and the sweet-scented jasmine grow (as they still do, conforming to classical description), are not my conception of tranquil woodland.
Anyone who has ventured into the jungle’s outlying life in the plains will know the tract—goatherds and cowherds still graze their herds here. Rainy August and September were the months, and evening the time of day, chosen by literary traditions for love here, and here love was chaste and forlorn. I cannot describe the situation better than in the words of the lexicographer mentioned above: he terms it ‘continuing solitary’. Especially did the young shepherdess continue solitary, waiting for her lover’s return, while youth danced hand in hand around her or played the flute (traditional recreations belonging to the place).
Perhaps some gawky goatling nuzzled up to her as she sat by herself in the twilight, with that wonderful, spontaneous sympathy of beasts for forlorn humanity. There are many passages about the expectancy of the waiting maid (often she was a newly married bride, awaiting her husband’s return), but it is futile attempting translation; they allude to literary conventions that need tedious explanation in English, and nothing so explained can be poetry.
The agricultural tracts featured disharmony in love—lovers’ tiffs, partings in a huff, accusations. Often enough the situation was triangular, for then, too, there were ladies of easy virtue waiting to ensnare the errant lover or young husband, and at times it happened that news of such snaring got abroad.