Book review 'Songs of the cauvery': Culture reminder' at a time of Cauvery distress

Chennai: In the last quarter of the 19th century, the Cauvery delta’s agriculture-based political-economy – as the granary of South India- was by all accounts far more slow moving with liquidity spreads even thinner- apparently no inflation targeting then by a Central Bank Chief-. People and their honest thought processes, even if hampered by hierarchy, mattered more, albeit silently, in shaping our collective destiny in a colonial world.

The paradoxes of a land-holding pattern, as tradition tussled with the first honey drops of modernity through ‘English education’, and amid the first rumblings of dissent post-1857 against the British Raj, all these were like many distributaries as the great river itself, who as ‘Mother’ has deeply impacted the culture of this part of India for over 2000 years.

Unwittingly, there could not have been a more appropriate stage-setting than now, when due to deficient Southwest monsoon we are again saddled with the Cauvery river water sharing issue this year, that a tender and nostalgic romantic-cum-revolutionary tale centred around an orthodox Tamil Brahmin family in Thiruvaiyaru — the confluence of the five tributaries of the Cauvery — should hit the stands.

Yes, Songs of The Cauvery, penned by Kalyanaraman Durgadas, first novel by an entrepreneur nurtured by both IIT-Madras and IIM-Calcutta, is in many ways an understated narrative, eschewing all hype, of how the microcosm reflects the macrocosm.

The underlying message is quite simple: irrespective of one’s station in life, doing one’s duty without being attached to the fruits of action and the willingness to give and take, a kind of self-sacrifice, is sine qua non for liberation from personal suffering and bondage.

Kalyanaraman Durgadas has gently combined the lofty metaphysics of the ‘Upanishads’ and the earthly without any dogmatic fetish. His characters and episodes unfold in a time span of about 34 years from January 1877 to August 1911, within the larger context of how India’s freedom movement had subtly divided space between the moderates and the extremists, but both in the cause of delivering ‘Bharat’ from the yoke of foreign rule.

Structurally, the author plays out the novel’s movement in terms of the different phases of Mother Cauvery herself: from a bubbly, ferocious youth phase, so to say, that one sees in roaring columns of the river at Hogenakkal, the expansive, meditative ‘Akanda Cauvery’ phase with all the life-giving material she carries to a vast multitude of people who depend on the river from cradle to grave, to the final culmination of a self-sacrifice when she disappears into the sands in small rivulets and streams before joining the sea.

The unstated part, though, is that Cauvery is of a much wider cultural significance and as the title indicates there can be no one unitary song. She is ‘many songs’, spanning the entire range of human emotions that trickle down through the lives of millions of people.

The specific location of the story in a particular land-holding ‘Tambram’ family is only reflective of the historicity of those days. The orthodox Vedic scholar Sambu Sastry’s “third house in Agraharam street” is an honest reportage of the cultural elite of those days — much before Periyar’s Non-Brahmin movement gave South Indian society a big jolt.

The author’s chief protagonist is a well meaning individual who is not totally deaf to winds of change, while his brilliant son Panchapikesan, known as Panju, had to cross several hurdles, which involved a marital assent as well, to help get enrolled into the Government Arts College at Kumbakonam, before he is drawn into the freedom movement by a young band of revolutionaries inspired by undaunted souls like V V S Iyer, Sri Aurobindo and Subramanya Bharati. Panju’s equally stellar sister Janaki, who influenced by the likes of Gibbon and John Stuart Mill, quietly fights for the emancipation of women in a traditional society.

At another level, Kalyanaraman’s characters are, without saying in so many words, fighting in their own little-known purposeful and idealistic ways to overcome the stereotyped image of the ‘Tambram’ as being meek, insular and security-oriented who were happy with a government job under the British rule.
Despite being an avowed work of fiction, there hardly seems any ‘kalpana swaras’ in the author’s Songs of the Cauvery, and thus it is an extremely commendable first novel.