Perinad, Beside the Ashtamudi

Perinad is a village in Kollam district, set in the green and watery country that fringes the Ashtamudi lake, where coir work, fishing and cashew processing long provided the livelihood of ordinary households. Thirunalloor Karunakaran was born there on 8 October 1924, to P. K. Padmanabhan and N. Lakshmy. The landscape of his childhood, its backwaters, its boats and above all the labouring people who lived along its shores, would return in his poetry throughout his life, and one of his most loved poems is set precisely on those banks.

His education began in an older manner than that of most of his contemporaries. He was taught Sanskrit in the traditional way, by recitation and close attention to grammar and metre, before he ever entered a primary school classroom. That early immersion left a permanent imprint. Even when he wrote about strikes, poverty and political struggle, his verse carried the cadence and discipline of classical prosody, and he never regarded the old learning as an obstacle to modern commitments.

Scholar, Teacher and Editor

He took a degree in history at S. N. College in Kollam and then pursued advanced study of Malayalam at the university college in Thiruvananthapuram, where he came under the influence of the historian Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai. Elamkulam's rigorous, evidence-driven approach to Kerala's past, which unsettled a good deal of received legend, was a decisive influence on Thirunalloor's intellectual formation and confirmed in him a lasting preference for demonstrable argument over inherited assertion.

Teaching and editing occupied much of his working life. He served as editor of Janayugam, the cultural weekly associated with the Communist Party of India, a position that placed him at the centre of Kerala's literary debates for years. The role suited a man who was equally at ease discussing Sanskrit poetics and the practical politics of a trade union, and it gave him a platform from which he encouraged younger writers. In 1973 he travelled to the Soviet Union as part of an Indian writers' delegation to the Afro-Asian Writers Conference held in Kazakhstan.

The Poetry

Thirunalloor belonged to the generation that reshaped Malayalam poetry in the middle decades of the twentieth century, when verse became a vehicle for social argument without abandoning lyric beauty. His narrative poem Rani, first published in 1955 in the Onam special issue of a Kerala newspaper, remains his most widely read work. It tells of Rani and Nanu, two young people from the labouring poor living on the shores of the Ashtamudi lake, and of their struggle to hold on to a dream of a better life against the weight of circumstance. Its combination of tenderness and social realism struck readers immediately, and lines from it entered common speech.

His collections include Manjuthullikal, Soundaryathinte Padayalikal and Greeshmasandhyakal, and he also wrote a long poem on the poet Vayalar. Across this work certain preoccupations recur: the dignity of manual labour, the beauty of the Kerala countryside observed with a naturalist's exactness, the pain of inequality, and a persistent belief that human beings can improve their own condition. He wrote without cynicism, and even his angriest poems retain a musical, unhurried surface.

He was also an accomplished translator, and here his double training told. He brought into Malayalam work from Kalidasa, the quatrains of Omar Khayyam and the poetry of Alexander Pushkin, holding to the sound and shape of the originals to a degree that translators rarely attempt. These versions introduced generations of Malayalam readers to poets they could not otherwise reach, and they are still admired as poems in their own right rather than merely as serviceable renderings.

Convictions

Politics came to him early. Contact in his youth with the labour organiser R. Sugathan and the Communist leader M. N. Govindan Nair drew him towards the working-class movement of Travancore, and he remained a committed sympathiser of the Communist Party of India for the rest of his life. Unlike many literary fellow travellers, he did not treat this as a matter of slogans. His argument was intellectual as well as political: he held that the Indian philosophical tradition was, at its root, materialist and non-religious, and he defended that reading in essays and lectures with the textual evidence of a trained Sanskritist.

He was an atheist, consistently and without theatrics, and he carried the position to its conclusion. When he died at Kollam on 5 July 2006, he was buried without customary religious rites, in accordance with his own instructions. The absence of ceremony was itself a final statement of what he had spent his life arguing.

Legacy

Recognition came steadily in his later decades. He received the Asan Award in 1984, the Vayalar Award in 1988, the Muloor Award in 1992, the Abu Dhabi Shakthi Award, and in 2000 the Kerala Sahitya Akademi's honour for lifetime contribution to literature. These were awards for a body of work rather than for a single sensational book, which is a fair reflection of a career built on steady craftsmanship over more than half a century.

Since his death an annual cultural festival, the Thirunalloor Kavyolsavam, has kept his memory and his poems in public circulation, drawing writers, students and readers together in the district where he was born. His importance to Malayalam rests on an unusual synthesis. He proved that a poet could be steeped in classical Sanskrit learning and simultaneously stand with coir workers and fishermen, that formal beauty and social conscience were not rivals, and that translation could be an act of generosity towards one's own language. Perinad, a modest village on the edge of a lake, remains inseparable from that achievement, because the people and the water he grew up among are present on almost every page he wrote.