T.K Doraiswamy

Nivedita Lall
M A (I)
Presentation :Book Review: Novel
Course : Indian Literature in English
Course Instructor: Prof. GJV Prasad

Words For The Wind (1973)- T K Doraiswamy
With due credit to Google, first the Wikipedia-ish information, and this I confess I have shamelessly plagiarized solely for the reason that I myself could not be as concise.
T K Doraiswamy was born in 1922. He did his M.Phil in Virginia Woolf’s works and retired as Professor of English, Mar Ivanois College, Thiruvananthapuram. Equally distinguished as a poet, translator, critic, anthologist, novelist, and short fiction writer, his publications include a novel and six books of poems in English, and nine novels and five books of poems in Tamil. He received the Asan Memorial Award for Tamil Poetry in 1983. Interestingly most of his English works were published under his real name while the Tamil ones under the pen name ‘Nakulan’. His alter-ego Naveenan in his Tamil novels stands out as a modernist anti-hero who was perhaps the first of his kind in Tamil literature. And this I mention because his only English novel “Words for the Wind” is also a first person narrative by a man named Naveen. I’m curious to know why he edited ‘Naveenan’ to ‘Naveen’ for his English work.
He was one of the first writers to attempt techniques like stream of consciousness in Tamil literature ably. He translated James Joyce, T.S Eliot and K Ayyappa Paniker and as per Wikipedia claims, influence of Joyce was pronounced in his writings but “it was more the metaphysical and religious thrust similar to T. S Eliot and the sparseness of style of a Samuel Beckett that really makes his works stand out”. And I have particular problems with this statement, obviously. Firstly because it reeks of colonial servitude and secondly because it deprives an amazing talent the credit due for its individuality. Again as per Wikipedia, “ he was definitely(italics mine) a late modernist moving into the realm of post modernism. In a review of his short stories published in The Hindu on 30 December 2008, it is mentioned that he was called “ the writer’s writer” in Tamil literary circle because of his experimental writings in poetry as well as fiction and “inspite of being experimental his writings are readable and seem simple at first reading. He never compromised with the contemporary popular literary field going for stereotyped plots to spin his work of art and consciously avoided attractive storylines opting instead for the simple straightforward narration of everyday events in his life as an outsider without any commitments or justifications with minimum words.” A blogger observes that his Modernism was well mixed with the deepest Tamil wisdom. He remained a bachelor for life, taking care of his old parents till their death. He died in 2007.

After this introduction- in which I hope you understand, heavy plagiarism was inevitable- I finally come to my very own viewpoint. I like to imagine that I have rediscovered a valuable piece of writing from a not so distant past of the Indian writing in English. During my first cursory glance of the novel I was stunned that an Indian had written something like this, way back in 1973, an Indian whom I haven’t heard about ever in literature. But then I have been badgered with amazingly stunning discoveries in this class , stunning obviously for an ignorant student like me, which made my first astonishment subside not through the course of the novel but through the course of this course. I realized, Indians had actually written amazingly stunning stuff that I, pitifully an Indian, had grown up being oblivious of.
So. While my dear friends have been coveting the enticingly slim 76 page volume that I chose, I myself reveled in an apparently easy read- which illusion was later shattered. The novel begins with the rather casual, candid opening, “ I want to write a short novel in English. I have been toying with the idea of doing this off and on, these three, four, five years past. But now I have started it. Now that I have started it, I don’t know how I should go about it. Till now the idea of the medium- I mean English- has been the stumbling block. But now I have actually started it I find the real crux is what I should write about. I can start with myself. But they say you should not.” I very well identify with such a strain of writing and therefore it was personally very palatable to me, by the middle of the first page however I was smiling to myself. Here he says, “I have read my share of Joyce, Kafka, Beckett. Who has not?” I smiled thinking, ‘surely Mr. writer, you did not expect such erudition from the wind to which you have ostensibly directed your words. Or perhaps, this wind blows only in literary circles!’ Well, I shamelessly confess being the ordinary commonplace listless wind….happily the very next line read, “But when it comes to the point, I prefer taking my whisky neat.” True for the writer, as for the reader.
I have given such a long introduction of the writer because the novel is heavily autobiographical. It is surely stream of consciousness or as Naveen would have us believe, he plunges his hand in the pocket of memory and takes out whatever comes, but “memory” as in the caveat Naveen quickly adds, “ is a crazy bitch”. The prose is interspersed with very short poetic pieces all over, making the experimental temper evident. The narrative is calibrated into nine neat short chapters which ramble through Naveeen’s musings over his home with his old parents:
“An ill- furnished house. A hole. One two three. Father, mother and me” ;
His listless life:
“I read books. I smoke. Occasionally I drink. I chew pan. I ask myself if this is life. I doubt.” At another place : “ I suppose temperamentally I like it- just lying down, reading Simone Weil or thinking….” ; His shared past and present with an elder brother posted at the embassy at Washington: “ I knew Guru in the sense that my elder brother knows Guru. Yes the Guru I know is the Guru he knows. So it is Guru twice removed.” ; his school; the death of a self-castrated popular Saiva Vellala teacher and how the sight of his corpse broke something in Naveen and turned him to musing and writing; his friend Sivan who is disgusted with life simply because each row with his wife who ill treated his old mother was finally made up with sex : “Man is a pack- animal and the loads you put on him- house, office, wife, children, ambition and not to lag behind his own ideals. Naveen, you know no white man will understand this; it is not the white man’s burden. It is yours and mine. If only I can cut off my penis.” ; and an entire chapter where he is talking to his intimate friend, his dog named Pappa Mia.
The winding narration which seems erratic however is not really haywire. There are recurring symbols revealed at another places in the novel which remind me slightly of “The God of Small Things.” What I liked best in the novel was the balance of the uncertainty in tone with the deep ponderings over the everyday happenings in Naveen’s life, it’s self-indulgent mode, meandering over the metaphysical and the physical, mundane and bizarre, without alienating the reader : “ I don’t know why I write this novel. Self-expression? But I doubt whether I have a self to express at all…..Reader, I am as curious as you are to find out where all this will take me”. Through Naveen’s narration, which often appeals directly to the reader, the novel explores the problem of language, of expression in English, of the image of Indians in the eyes of their fellow countrymen settled abroad, of sexuality, life, God, shadows, reality, relations, old age, politics- literary and social, and even novel writing “as an exciting game”. There shouldn’t however be any misconception about the kind of narrative this is. Here is a forty year old widely read man. He quotes from the writers he has read, but not to flaunt his erudition, for with him “impressions are ideas”. He muses, “because I teach Whitman, just at present, should I steal my ideas from him? Do we steal ideas? Or do ideas steal us? I do not know which is which.” The names of writers that find mention in his narrative range from Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, Proust, James, Stein, Bacon, Shakespeare , Dos Passos, Forster, Frost, Emerson, Dylan Thomas( with whose quote the book ends), Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn to Naipaul, Nirad Chaudhary, Bharathi, Bharathidasan, Ramamirtham, C.V Deshani, Buddhadeva Bose, Mauni and Keshav Malik ( to whom the book is dedicated). Towards the end, during the episode with old man N.N, the narrative becomes heavily philosophical and transcendental. There are unforgettable vignettes that furnish the scape of the life and mind of this interesting man. These include the fleeting mention of an Indo-Anglian sahiba’s comment “apropos of my poems, that I wrote only notes for poems and not poems at all.”, the repulsive episode of the maid Alamu, the reflections over Pappa Mia’s stumped tail, and many interesting conversations like the following with his elder brother visiting from the US:
“ ‘You are a typical Indian stick-in-the mud. So self-satisfied. Have you seen the poor here?’
‘I have read Naipaul.’
‘Do you think our people will ever advance?’
‘I have read Nirad Chaudhary.’
‘ But what do you think?’
‘I think they tell only half the truth.
………..
‘……do you think you can speak the whole truth?’
‘Nobody can speak the whole truth.’
‘ My God, you are a typical Indian all over, spinning words like the spider.’”
And my personal favorite of all his fantastic poetic pieces( this one describing his English teacher) strewn all over the text: “ He was Rotund
Or rather
Orotund;
He was Rubicund
And Round like
A cubical
Homunculus:
Bless me!
The Dear One
Cheered one’s soul!
And the man
Knew English.”
Interesting peeps into the language conflict can be seen as in, “like as here we have coconut trees….”, “I did not exactly know what exactly happened”. Also as he quotes some Mr.D who told him that it is only in English the word “I” is capitalized, which leads him to think, “I don’t know. It may be. And I have only this “I” to go by. So whatever strikes it, finds a place here.” Also as his friend refers to his wife as his “she”, and the spider in Tamil is simply called “eight legs”. Somebody tells somebody, “ you should have gone home instead of standing here and standing.”
Naveen’s views on writing are scattered over the narrative. “I don’t believe in erasing anything I have written. The dustbins wait. What are books but space conveniently contrived to hold garbage?” , “Reader I tell you words are the devil”, and the classic conversation with his dog in which he says “Why should a book be chockfull of words that follow pell-mell, cheek by jowl that hurt you like mad? When will the fellow cease his endless palaver? Pappa Mia, you are right. The real writer never bothered to write. I know it; you know it; yes, which dog did ever bother to set pen to paper?”
For all the theorizing, reviewing and tagging, I will only end my paper by repeating what Sivan tells Naveenan:
“But Naveenan, why a writer writes the way he does God only knows!”
( True for the novel, as for this paper!)