Abstract:
When the developing world seems to be swayed by the late currents of modernity
overlooking the environmental concerns and climate change, Sundara Ramaswamy's
Tamil novel Oru Puliyamarattin Kattai (1966), translated by Blake Wentworth in
2003 as Tamarind History in English explores the themes of the changing
interaction between humans and nature in a fictional Indian town in the context
of historical and social-political changes. It highlights nature nurturing not
just life at earth but also facilitating the imagination of the creative spirit
of the mass of humanity. The novel also looks at nature as the ‘Subaltern’
becoming the victim to the games of the power-hungry-race of humanity. The paper
analyses the telling of the life story of the specific tamarind tree at the main
crossroad of the narrator's hometown in the novel as the author’s attempt at
telling anthropocentric history in a novel earth centric way.
Keywords:
Ecocriticism, Anthropocentrism, Earth-centric, Nature and Human relationships,
Modernity, Ecocide.
Sundara Ramaswamy’s Tamil novel Oru
Puliyamarattin Kattai written in 1966 and translated by Blake Wentworth as
Tamarind History in English in 2013 is a narrative based on the life and death
of a tamarind tree. Sundara Ramaswamy was a
novelist, poet, translator and literary critic, widely considered to be a
pre-eminent figure in post-Independence Tamil literature. Tamarind History is
the first novel of the author and has been popular long after its publication.
It has been translated into Malayalam, English, Hebrew, and Hindi. It is
written in a narrative voice that projects sustainable living and environmental
concern to be vital to Tamil culture, civilizational survival, and individual
ethics.
It is estimated by scientists around the
world that global warming and climate change will rapidly leave a major part of
the earth uninhabitable for both humans and other living organisms. Historically
the rampant destruction of environment by “progressive” imperialist powers has
led to a shift in people’s (and communities, cultures’) point of view from a
bio-centric view into an anthropocentric one, more centred even then around an
exclusive group of people and communities. Scholars and artists thus need to
assess the current threats to environment through their interactions with the
scientific community to change the anthropocentric understanding of history and
the world to form a more earth centred worldview i.e., taking the non-human and
nature in account while actively challenging human supremacy on nature. To
counter anthropocentricism, Eco-criticism embarks upon the project of
reconceptualizing nature, not as an object of observation or interpretation, but
as an active agency by articulating the silence of nature, and exploring the
nonhuman world in literature and discussing how it gets marginalized or silenced
or incorporated into the romanticise-idealized form, or as hostile wilderness
reasserting a binary way of thinking that justifies the present the catastrophic
abuse of nature
The verbal constructions of nature,
either in its romanticized ideal form, or as hostile wilderness, especially in a
form of allegory is sometimes used to not just raise the issues of the
environment but also to touch upon the ideas, beliefs, issues and the problems
of humanity and its inter-connectedness with nature. Contextualization of
ecological themes such as the environmental pollution, deforestation, vanishing
of the animals and species, deforestation, toxic waste contamination, and
destruction of forests, in the literature would lead to enhancing the process
towards developing a more comprehensive perspective on the subject.
Critical Theory in general can be said to
examine the relations between the text, author, reader, and the world, in which
the world is synonymous with the social sphere, Ecocriticism then expands the
notion of the world to include the entire ecosphere. It explores the way
literature interacts with nature. It
looks at ecological issues and nature as a central force in the literature and
deals with these environmental problems like pollution, global warming,
deforestation, pollution, climate change and exploitation of land and forest in
literary text. As the theory is still in its development phase, critics use this
approach as per their own way. Critics like Glotfelty state that “the movement
needs to become a multi-ethnic movement when stronger connections are made
between the environment and issues of social justice, and when a diversity of
voices are encouraged to contribute to the discussion”[1]
While Nature is the prime category in an
interpretation of any literary work, elements such as gender and culture are
studied in relation to the former. It also analyses the cultural construction of
nature. Jonathan Bate in his book The Song of the Earth (2000) suggests
significant questions Ecocritics should ask such as, what is the place of
creative imagining and writing in the complex set of relationships between human
kind and environment, between mind and world, between thinking, being and
dwelling? The answers to all these questions can be found in the layered
narrative of Tamarind History.
Tamarind
History can be easily considered one of the first novels in Tamil as well as in
Indian literature written with an environmental consciousness. The novel is not
extraordinary for its times but perhaps reflecting a proto-ecocritical
consciousness in readers, authors and critics much ahead than the Western
authors had intended to do so in their own languages and literature. The great
Indian literary tradition of Kalidas and Valmiki, the Vedas and Puranas and
running down to the poetry of the anticolonial consciousness embracing mother
nature for its warmth that guided the emerging nation to walk into freedom, to
the modern Indian writers whose works have also recognised nature as a
regenerative force in the corrosion and disillusionment of the modern age,
nature has infused meaning to the land since the land and its language has
existed.
Celebrating
nature, evoking the spiritual aspects of nature, the intertwining of the path of
nature and man, comparisons of nature with women and mother, personification of
nature, theses have been recurring themes in Indian epics, Puranas, and its
ancient oral tradition.
The Tamarind
history is not just tracing that very tradition but it also infuses the
eco-critical consciousness in the text, which according to William Rueckert,
involves “application of ecology and ecological
concepts to the study of literature”[2].
The anonymous narrator of the novel lives in a
busy fictional town in Travancore. His first memory of the town where he grew
up, is standing at the tamarind tree junction, bustling with life and activity.
The narrator describes how the tree had been the living ancestor of the
townsmen’ and women, who had grown up under its shade. The storyteller Damodar
Asan, who was the oldest man of the narrator’s town, the custodian of the town’s
history and many legends, had passed on the stories of the tamarind tree through
many generations of the town
Ecocritics in America celebrated nature
and wilderness in literary writings. Inspired by nature, writers like Ralph
Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Margaret Fuller (1810- 1850) and Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862) published works which believed in the inherent goodness of man and
nature and were to be the founder of a new movement known as Transcendentalism.
Though Tamarind History neither borrows its theme, nor was meant to be directly
influenced by the movement, as a text it does parallelly what the
transcendentalists intended. Damodar Asan’s stories
in the text recorded a shared past of the town in which interactions between
human and nature were deeply intimate.
Every day, the children of the town, including the narrator as a young child
would collect near his resting spot to listen to his amusing stories of the town
and the tamarind tree. He told the children who
listened to each word of his that the place and the tree had always been like
that ever since he was a young boy. He would go back in his memories to describe
how in his youth, the herding boys, would drive the buffaloes to the tamarind
tree tank then head off to the casuarina grove and rip the place apart with
their antics:
In those days they romped around the
place like monkeys. The dependable aura of serenity lead to the grove becoming a
spot for exchange of ideas, a rare luxury. The boys screamed out whatever curses
came to their mind, and whether it was in the pleasure of inventing new
obscenities or enjoying how good the curses sounded when said aloud.
[3]
They talked and discussed the mysteries
of sex amidst each other, making it a space of shared solitude in the heart of
the town in a carefree past. Chewing areca nuts and betel leaves, he always
hailed the past as the golden age, romanticising nature in its pristine form.
His experiences with nature shaped him to be man rooted to not just the earth
but rooted to a distant past and its ways:
Back when the tree was there the
darkness closed in from every direction. A spiteful wind was always hissing
through the trees making them groan like a bellows. For Damodar Asan however the
grove of Casuarina tree, at the south of the tamarind tank was the closest thing
to heaven. Whiling away the time there under the lone dictatorship of solitude,
was an ultimate delight for him.[4]
R Saritha suggests in her ecocritical
reading of the text,
“The novelist presents the old man
with a biocentric view, considering nature as part and parcel of his life.
Damodara Asan’s association with nature can be seen as that of the deep
ecologists’ claim for self-realization where his identification with the
nonhuman world is going beyond narrow selves”[5].
When the modern mechanised and
materialistic culture turned unbearable for him, he escaped the town to be only
found as a dead body lying in the foothills of Himalaya. He truly belonged to
nature. To him the strong winds which blew the tamarind tree ‘hard’, were merely
‘friendly’. Asan would reply, “and oh, does not it feel great. It is like being
‘stroked’ with pure silk, like baskets of jasmine being dumped over you”[6]
Tamarind tree is known for its tangy
Tamarind pods which are used as an essential element in the cooking of
traditional South Indian food such as Rasam and Sambhar. Tamarind is also used
in many herbal medicines and traditional remedies for digestion, nausea and pain
relief. At the same time, it is also believed in tribal myths and folk cultures
that the canopy of the tamarind tree is home to ghosts and haunted beings and so
they are never planted in the vicinities of temples. Though Tamarind pods are
very important in tribal and poor households which use them in cooking their
staple meals, they are still considered inauspicious in religious beliefs.
Similarly, in the narrator’s town, the
tamarind tree at the crossroads had many myths growing around its existence. The
tree provided Damodar Asan, the town’s healer tamarind pods to make medicines
for treating many ailments of the towns’ people.
The narrative in Tamarind History seems to
consider the old tamarind tree to be a significant observer to the town
witnessing all the
changes in the environmental, historical-social
context of the town as well; from the pre-colonial times when the tree was just
a bud sprouting in the town’s cremation ground and had witnessed the flood of
1890s and stood for 3 days in water up to its neck, “the tamarind tree had
barely begun its life back then; so much more growing it had to do”[7]. Growing up it witnessed many seasons, many ups and downs, living as a
secluded life form with the water of the tamarind tank all around it. As the
town grew, the tamarind plant also became a fully grown tree.
“This place used to be a jungle, it swallowed up corpses! 4 people a day were
put to the stake here. One breath from the righteous king Pooram Thirunal and
poof! A cremation ground becomes a paradise.”[8]
When the king Pooram Thirunal could not bear the stench coming from the Tamarind
tank when he had gone on one of his travels to supervise his kingdom, the town’s
whole population had to come together overnight to clean the tank. They cleaned
the tank and sowed bushes and aromatic shrubs around the cremation ground to
overpower the nauseating stench coming from it. After it the
whole area glowed with a wonderful sense of fulfilment:
How beautiful the tamarind tree
looked, it stood like a hundred bright green parasols set on a single line,
flying out all over the sky and being pulled back down. The shimmering lights
that stretched out as far as the eye could see, the streets filled with gaudy
stores, shoppers packed in row after row, trucks creeping past bumper and
humanity’s sheer noise, the roar of the winds that rocked the tamarind tree
still rings in my ear[9]
This also stands for the deep ecological
standpoint of the novel. Deep ecology is one of the environmental positions
which are founded by Arne Naess. Deep ecology postulates about the integrity of
all living things on earth and the values of their lives irrespective of their
relation to human beings. It claims that every existence is having “intrinsic
value.”
[10]
The tree brought a great deal of advantage for the British govt. which auctioned
the tamarind pods every year and filled its coffins. The tamarind tree brought a
good harvest every year. Nobody ever stole the tamarind pods as there was always
a commotion around it. Nobody wanted to be caught stealing tamarind pods with
others watching them. As transportation evolved and bus travel became
widespread, the area where the tree stood was converted into the bus stand, rows
of stores and couple of restaurants sprang up around it. In course of time, it
became a central junction. A cinema hall was also built near it. After
independence, the intersection was crowded with traffic and changed
significantly:
The
tamarind tank was long gone. The milling crowd and the loud roar of traffic
tried to drown each other out. For most people seeing the Casuarina trees right
next to all those proud displays of modernity must have looked inappropriate as
seeing a fashionable woman going off to college with her grandmother’s jewels in
her hair. People got caught up in the idea of good taste, and looked forward to
the day when the tree would be gone.[11]
Ecocide is a primary concern of the
Ecocritics. According to Collins Dictionary ecocide is defined as “the
destruction of the natural environment, especially by human being.” It is a
purposeful and intentional killing and destruction of the environment. Man-made
ecocide, as the term suggests are possible to prevent, while natural ecocides
are inevitable. Ecological imperialism is also a form of manmade ecocide, which
involves the destruction of natural resources on the large scale by introducing
commercial, foreign, and non- indigenous variety of plants and trees. In The
Tamarind History, manmade ecocide led to the killing of the Tamarind tree as
well as the loss of livelihood for traditional healers like Damodar Asan who
were dependent on the trees for making medicines and remedies for small
ailments.
The towns’ elected government promulgated an official decree to clean the grove
of Casuarina tree to the south of the tamarind tree to build a brand-new park to
develop the place into a modern city. Hedges were to
be grown all over the place while the trees were cut one by one, witnessed by
most people of the town who stood silent like the narrator at a collective loss
of their generation. The author exclaims that though the same place befits
modern fashion and the shrubs and flowers growing in that enchanting place are
bathed in cool glow of fluorescent tube lights, the town still had its
collective memories of the trees alive.
In the crowd that had gathered to witness
the killing, an old man of the town had cursed the fate of the town and the
changing nature of its situation. The narrator is hopeful observing the event
that someday other people too will ask questions about the intent and reasons
behind those killings and think of the futility of the whole act.
A threat on life also started to dwell on
the Tamarind tree.
In the tussle between Khader and Damu, 2 of the powerful business owners of the
town, who each wanted to establish their supremacy, the Tamarind tree
accidentally got placed at the centre of their rivalry. Khader’s shop which was
situated right opposite to the tamarind tree was damaged by ragpickers and some
school boys who were trying to collect the tamarind pods by throwing rocks at
the tree that fell on Khader’s shop too and it led to the escalation of the
rivalry between the two due to a misunderstanding.
The Tamarind tree from thereon became the talk of the town, The municipal
corporation made a committee to investigate the stealing of the tamarind pods
which had disappeared from the tree before being auctioned and many established
and powerful men of the town were part of the committee. The committee suggested
in its report that since there is sufficient reason to conclude that Khader’s
shop had been smashed by unidentified vandals who threw rocks at the tamarind
tree in retaliation for the tax levied by municipality on posting advertisements
there, the best course of action would be to get rid of the tree to prevent any
untoward accident in future. On the other hand, Isaki, the provocative
journalist of the town had created a movement of the people, making an abrupt
demand before the municipality that the tamarind tree needed to be cut down. He
researched the tree’s long-lost history like an expert historian:
“It appeared that the tamarind tree had been damned by fate. Cursed, an
inauspicious omen.”[12]
The legend of how Chellatyi had hanged herself from one of its branches was
given artistic touches by him for political gains, in his column in Travancore
Nesan, he distorted the story of the Tamarind tree tank, which according to his
fictitious narrative had started to spread a rotten smell in the air as the
withered branches and leaves of the tamarind tree had fallen in it, ruining the
procession of Maharaja Pooram Thirunal. In truth, the tank was located near a
cremation ground and hence it smelled so rotten. Isaki tried to polarise the
town by questioning the safety of the people who worked or who would hang out in
the place:
How
could any authority in the world provide just compensation if a branch happened
to fall from the decrepit old tamarind tree and land on some needy little girl?
He went on to pit the tree against the people by saying that the tree was old
and may fall down any unfortunate day on a crowd gathered near it or those
standing under it since it was close to the marketplace of the town and the
cinema hall was also located around it.[13]
Through distorting the facts around the tree’s past, Isaki and some powerful men
of the town were trying to kill the tree for their own selfish interests. The
killing of the tree was yet questioned by many common people in the town, who
organised a goddess festival in front of the tree to raise its stature from an
ordinary Tamarind tree to the town’s sacred tree. A group of folk musicians had
also turned up to perform near it and a meeting was held under the tamarind tree
to promote Hindu dharma, and to protect its tenets which called for protecting
the natural environment, respecting all life forms, and living peacefully with
them.
By Aiyappan’s act of poisoning the tree, the town had lost not just a spiritual
space of coexistence of man and nature in its most intimate form but also erased
the history of the town that had been passed on from generation to generation in
the stories of the Tamarind tree of the town told by Damodar Asan whose own
disappearance marked an end of an epoch.
The tragic end of the novel is
painted as a lesson by the writer. As the world faces the global challenges of
climate crisis and tries to look for measures to reduce its carbon footprint and
return to sustainable ways of living, the tamarind history as a text also
becomes significant in its portrayal of the vacuum created by the absence of
nature and wilderness in the everyday lives of individuals and communities.
The concept has become one of the
foundations of the deep ecology movement. Just as the aim of traditional
philosophy is to present Sophia or wisdom, ecophilosophy or ecosophy would mean
ecological wisdom. It is often associated with indigenous religion and culture.[14]
The Tamarind tree is looked at with suspicion owing
to its frail structure and old age along with the rumours of Isaki about its
inauspicious presence. During this Kambaramayanam Anandan Pillai opposed the
municipal committee’s report to cut the Tamarind tree by evoking the ancient
Hindu and Tamil tradition of worshipping nature:
This is a holy place; this town and the tamarind tree is sacred to it. True it
cannot speak and its frail but it is a living being all the same. He dismissed
people who argued that the tree should be cut may as well kill those who cannot
speak for themselves, the handicapped or missing a limb.[15]
For Anandan Pillai people those who wanted to cut the Tamarind tree were cold
materialist and he cited the research of the botanist JC Bose to demonstrate
that tress are sentient beings and launched into a sweeping recitation of
classical verse to show how the Tamil people had long worshipped trees as
divine. He also compares the Tamarind tree with the symbols of marriage adorned
by married woman, “If you really want to wipe the tilak off a married woman’s
forehead, then go ahead and do it, I just hope that god forgives you.”[16]
The author critiques the urban modernity that has replaced age old tradition of
sustainable and shared living, overlooking the environmental and ethical values
towards nature. He exposes the hypocrisy of powerful men when they talk about
development and who ignore a land and its people, their past and culture for
self-interest:
Immersed in their ambition for country, money, women power, or fame did people
really think that they would let the tamarind tree alone while they played their
game? Games with stakes so high that go all the way to the end. The tamarind
tree was destroyed[17]-
The tamarind
tree was poisoned by Aiyappan, a benefactor of both Damu and Khader who wanted
to seek revenge for his miserable state due to the two. Aiyappan was himself
stabbed to death by 3 of the campaigners of Damu. The tree gave no sight of
injury on the first day but on the fourth day a doctor came and stripped a patch
of bark from the trunk and tested it, and declared it dead. After it the town
was no more the same:
As soon as
the people got to know the tree was dead, one of the devotees, an old man jumped
up as if possessed and ran over to Khader’s store where he threw against it,
screaming curses. A crowd gathered in front of the store and smashed open the
windows and hand rushed inside, tearing the place apart… fights later broke out
all over the town. The whole area seemed to be on the brink of descending into
outright communal war. The government imposed a strict curfew.
[18]
The narrator
felt a terrible emptiness in his heart after the incident and missed the tree’s
presence every time he walked by the tamarind tree junction. He felt quite sure
that many people in his hometown felt the same way. He states:
Even today,
with the tamarind tree dead and gone, the name for the crossroads is still the
Tamarind tree junction. The name is stamped on our tongues and people cannot
forget it. That habit is the only memorial to the life of the tamarind tree.[19]
By throwing
light at the life of the specific Tamarind tree, the novel also highlights the
role of communities and individual artists like the storyteller Damodar Asan in
engaging with public in understanding the significance of protecting the
environment. The storyteller who repeats the same
stories of the town and the tamarind tree day after day to generations of the
town could not have done so had he kept the past buried within himself. When the
whole town moved with the currents of modernity, Damodar Asan, continued to find
peace and recluse in the ‘solitude’ found under the ‘friendly’ tamarind tree.
The text also deliberately projects him in a contrast to the fashionable masses
of the town. He preferred the smell of the earth after rain than the many
pleasant smells of ecstatic flora ‘beautifying’ the town’s modern parks.
The novel does
not talk about the impending climate crisis or forewarn about its future impact
backed by scientific data but it subtly warns the readers about the chain
reaction that is set in motion with the smallest harm caused to the ecosphere
leading to irreversible loss, both physical and personal for communities and
individuals in a specific time in history. As for the tamarind tree junction,
the bazaar at the junction was slowly deserted once the tamarind tree was gone.
The novel as
its title suggests is the history of the Tamarind tree but it is also an
obituary for the Tamarind tree, acknowledging and cherishing its intrinsic value
in a comic cum tragic narrative style. The narrator’s hometown which is home to
many stories of the Tamarind tree, nature, the town’s inhabitants, their
history, their relations and conflicts with each other, their interactions with
nature was at a crossroad between its past and present but with the memories of
the Tamarind tree who had touched the lives of the narrator countless others by
giving shade and tamarind pods to people irrespective of class, age, gender and
caste, hope for an egalitarian world lived on even after its death.
1.
Bate, Jonathan.
The Song of the
Earth. Harvard University Press, 2000.
2.
Drengson, Alan, et al. “The
Deep Ecology Movement: Origins, Development, and Future Prospects (Toward a
Transpersonal Ecosophy).”
International
Journal of Transpersonal Studies, vol. 30, no. 1–2, 2011, pp.
101–117.
https://doi.org/10.24972/ijts.2011.30.1-2.101.
3.
Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold
Fromm, editors.
The Ecocriticism
Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. University of Georgia Press,
1996.
4.
Saritha, R. “Nature at
Cross-Roads: An Ecocritical Analysis of Sundara Ramaswamy’s
Tamarind History.”
Language in
India, vol. 17, no. 8, 2017.
www.languageinindia.com.
ISSN 1930-2940.
5.
Rueckert, William. “Literature
and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.”
The Ecocriticism
Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty
and Harold Fromm, University of Georgia Press, 1996, pp. 105–123. Originally
published in 1978.
[1]
Glotfelty xxv
[2]
Rueckert William.
Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism. p
107. 1978
[3]
Ramaswami Sundara. Tamarind History. trans. Blake Wentforth. 4th
edition. Penguin Books. Haryana. p-54. 2013.
[4]
ibid.
[5]
R Saritha. Nature at Cross-roads: An Ecocritical Analysis of Sundara
Ramaswamy’s Tamarind History. p-8. Language in India
www.languageinindia.com.
ISSN 1930-2940 Vol. 17. 2017
[6]
Ramaswamy Sundara. Tamarind History, 53
[7]
Ibid. 206
[8]
Ibid. 37
[9]Ibid.
50
[10]
Drengson. The deep ecology movement: Origins, development, and future
prospects (toward a transpersonal ecosophy)
[11]
Ibid. 55
[12]
Ibid. 185
[13]
Ibid. 186
[14]
The term ecological wisdom was introduced by Naess in 1973. It poses the
fundamental questions about the way in which men should act towards
nature, what relations should they establish with nature in order to
build and not lead to certain destruction of natural environment.
Ecosophy emerged as a response to the destruction of the world, which
leads directly to ecological disaster.
[15]
Ibid. 187
[16]
Ibid. 207
[17]
Ibid. 2
[18]
Ibid. pp: 204-205
[19]
Ibid. 207