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BOOK FACTS
Fragments of a Life by Mythili Sivaraman; Zubaan, New Delhi; pages 207, Rs.395.
BOOKS were Subbalakshmi's constant companions, her gateway to knowledge and discovery. Everything evoked her curiosity and she learnt to celebrate the universe and its wonders. Her reading was wide-ranging and vast. She read fiction and literature both in English and Tamil, and her other interests and included literature, philosophy, psychology, science, history, visual arts, religious texts and health information. The six years spent in Madras in the prime of her youth were a period of hectic book hunting and reading. And even after she returned, and till much later in life in fact, she kept up her contact with the bookshops that she had frequented, and regularly sent for the titles she wanted. She left behind notebooks and papers containing detailed notes culled from books and full of descriptions of the places of historic importance that she was able to visit. A ruled notebook, tattered and yellowed with age, full of copious notes from the Upanishads is one of the few records of her intellectual pursuits the family still has. To our regret it is missing several pages.
Her diary of 1924-26 records the few books that she bought as gifts for her family in Madras: Aurobindo Ghosh's Essays on the Gita and Yogic Sadhan, Tolstoy's play, Tagore's Letter from Abroad and Gandhi's Guide to Health. There were a number of other books that she had bought too, including those by J.H. Cousins, Annie Besant and Harindranath Chattopadhyaya. A long list of books under the title `Books from Library' is evidence of the wide range of her reading that was completely unfettered and unconstrained by the narrow bounds of curricula.
Subbalakshmi carefully preserved these lists of books which she would painstakingly write down in her notebook, or on the reverse side of used university loan slips given her by the library staff. These included Satapatha Brahmana, Max Mueller, Art and Architecture of China, Africa in Transition etc. It is ironic indeed that someone who spent most of her life in remote forlorn coastal villages, far from civilisation, had read so many travel books. Among these were On Alexander's Track to the Indus, Across the Gobi Desert, Central Asia and Tibet Towards the Holy City of Lhasa, Marco Polo by Benedetto, Picturesque Nepal by Percy Brown, Java and Sumatra: Dutch East Indies by Cabaton etc. She had similarly preserved a list of Buddhist anthologies. Pankajam told me about her mother's keen interest in Buddhism and the list of books she had read includes anothologies, like The Heart of Buddhism by Saunders, Buddha's Teachings by Chalmers, Buddhism: Long Discourse of Buddha by Bennet, etc.
How did someone who had never been to school in her life come by so many university loan slips? While in Madras she was fascinated by the wealth of books in the university library and the Connemara Library and she wanted to be able to access them. One of the valued possessions she had, and which lay secure in her trunk, was the letter she had received from the librarian, S. R. Ranganathan, dated October 16, 1927 stating "... I have pleasure in informing you that the Library Committee has sanctioned your request to become a member of the Library.... " She managed to do this without help or intervention by anyone but by merely impressing the librarian with her passion for learning, a privilege that had been denied her by Hindu orthodoxy. She kept up her contact with the librarian wherever she was and inquired about subjects that interested her. For instance another letter from the Librarian to her dated 12 July 1940 says, "There are more than 1000 books on psychology. If you can send somebody here, I should be glad to give him facilities to copy the list." I am amazed as much by her thirst for knowledge as the librarian's seeing it as his duty to satisfy it by doing more than what was strictly required of him.
Occasionally Subbalakshmi also bought books. Mostly, it seems, with money she had been gifted by her mother or her sister, her own resources being very limited. Self-education to her — not hedged in by a rigid school curriculum — meant enriching her life. Having exhausted her desire for novels rather early in life, she was now intent on coming to terms with more challenging, stimulating and, for her, unfamiliar subjects like science. And so she tackled An Outline of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalysis by Tridon, History of Creation by Hackel, Textbook of Psychology with Games by W.Games, Discourses, Biological and Geological by Huxley.
It was a pleasant surprise for me to find a bunch of papers in which PRG had taken extensive notes from Sigmund Freud. He had often spoken of his dreams — strictly the godly ones — to me, he must have had many others which he'd perhaps wanted to decode for himself! That Subbalakshmi would be easily the winner in any reading contest with PRG became clear to me when I saw Meaning of Relativity and Out of My Later Years by Einstein and books titled Cosmic Dust listed in her notebook. Perhaps these books formed part of the 47 and 28 books she had managed to read in 1925 and 1926 respectively.
One of the books found in her box was the first edition of Edger Snow's Red Star Over China. How she reacted to the book remains a mystery. Her list also contained Karl Marx's Das Capital. We have no way of knowing if the presence of a book or a title on Subbalakshmi's lists means that she had some interest in, or was familiar with Marxist and revolutionary ideology and politics. It does seem reasonable to assume, however, that her friendship with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya may have stirred her curiosity; by this time Kamaladevi had met several Marxist revolutionaries like her brother-in-law Virendranath, who was wanted by the police, in Berlin. Kamala had also learnt about the communist party in China from Agnes Smedley, an American who participated in the Red Army's Long March in China, and who was living with Virendranath at the time of her visit to Berlin.
It is not possible that in the course of her regular reading of journals like Visva-Bharati and Modern Review, Subbalakshmi had missed out on the new vision of human relations and the pursuit of common good, the movements against class oppression experimented with in China and the USSR as well as Agnes Smedley's dispatches from China in the twenties. Smedley had gone to China to report on the "conflict raging between Kuomintang's secret police under Chiang Kai Shek and the communists, the terror let loose by the Koumintang's secret police... and the emergence of the communist state in Kiangsi." Smedley also visited Yennan, the communist headquarters and met communist leaders. This enabled her to report on the Red Army's Long March described in her epic, Red Army Marches.
As for the politics of the socialist USSR, Subbalakshmi's favourite Tamil poet Bharathi had hailed the Soviet Revolution as "the earth shaking revolution of the epoch". The journal Stri Dharma had commented upon the revolutionary changes in marriage rituals and ceremonies brought in by the fledgling Soviet state. Claiming that real equality in marriage was the aim of the new Russian marriage laws, Stri Dharma wrote that family support could not be evaded by men since even "permanent marital relations without ceremony constitute valid marriage" and the "work of the wife in the home is recognised as a contribution to family support." Further, it added that "divorce is simplified and obtainable on the same grounds by either husband or wife." (December 1925)
If Subbalakshmi had read this issue during her Madras days she might have felt proud that even before the new Russian Revolution allowed the wife to keep her maiden name, she had been signing only as S. Subbalakshmi, taking her father's name as her initial all her life.
After a visit to Russia, wherein he was greatly impressed by all he saw, Tagore had also written extensively on his visit in Visva-Bharati in 1930. This was later published as Letters from Russia. These would not have escaped Subbalakshmi's attention, fond as she was of Gurudev's writings. A folder on the `Tagore Centenary 1861-1961' prominently displaying the book Letters from Russia was also found in her trunk, carefully preserved... .
Tagore's aristocratic upbringing and his creed of individual freedom and choice notwithstanding, he was greatly struck by the Russian Revolution: "If I had not come to Russia, life's pilgrimage would have remained incomplete. Before judging the good and the bad of their activities here, the first thing that strikes me is: What incredible courage!" Having been a victim of tradition whose "innumerable doors are guarded by sentries whose number is legion", Tagore is awed by the Russians having "torn it up by its roots: there is no fear, no hesitation in their minds... " All these comments regarding Russia and socialism would probably have been read by Subbalakshmi although we have no evidence to suggest that they made any impact on her... .Subbalakshmi's book list in Tamil is also impressive but since most of the books on issues of interest to her were in English, that list is certainly the more exhaustive of the two. The notations in her diary regarding the books she had borrowed from the library are systematic and well organised. The sparse material we get on her range of interests in Tamil literature contained in a few notebooks, catalogues of publishing houses, some papers detailing lists of authors, and advertisements of books, is revealing.
In her notebooks she had copied down poems and songs as well. The two songs she had written down are popular folk songs. One, `Muthu Virayi' which is about a woman who raises her voice against the oppressive system and the other, `Ooraan Ooraan Thottathile' (in the garden of a native inhabitant) deals with the economic exploitation of the colonial power... .
The other texts that she listed are Andal's Thiruppavai and a few Sangam poems from Natrinai and Aingurunooru. It is not out of place here to dwell on the discovery of Sangam texts and their impact on Tamil culture. It was not until the last two decades of the 19th century and the early 20th century that the existence of the Sangam texts came to light, thanks to the efforts of a few scholars. These texts were then retrieved from palm leaf manuscripts and they effectively challenged the common notions of the supremacy of Sanskrit as the most ancient language of India. Debates raged among the intelligentsia. Two broad trends of constructing them as an anti-colonial strategy to establish pre-colonial cultural supremacy on the one hand, and reading them as providing a fillip to the Aryan-Dravidian divide on the other, emerged. In a way, they shaped the cultural politics of Tamil Nadu into a complex nexus of questioning the Indian nation-state, as also the linguistic purity and classical status of Tamil language. Subbalakshmi copied down these texts in continuous lines, the line-breaks indicated by full-stops. In fact, she also used the Tamil numbers from the old editions of the texts and also wrote down the numbers of Aga Nanooru songs, another ancient text.
There is, however, no information on her response to these texts or on what drew her to them. There are no studies undertaken to show how common Tamilians dealt with these new discoveries of old texts — with a past suddenly unravelled! She seems to have followed up on their publication and has preserved the catalogues of Saiva Siddhantha Noor Pathippu Kazhagam, a leading publishing house of these texts.
She had also copied out the advertisements for two books. One is Manimekalai by G. Krishnaswami Iyengar, a pioneering critical interpretation of the 6th century Buddhist epic in Tamil... .. The other advertisement copied by her is for Penn Mathi Malai, a collection of poems by Mayuram Vedanayagam Pillai, written as a didactic treatise on women's lives. She has given us no clue about whether she actually read these two texts or not.
We also found another scrap of paper listing several other authors and texts. This list contains Bharathi, Muthu Thandavar (an early 19th century poet, who wrote Tamil hymns), Valmiki Ramayanam, Arunachala Kavirayar (famous author of 19th century text, Rama Nataka Keerthanai), Gandhi, Madhavaiyah and Rajam Aiyyar (early Tamil novelists), Premakala Vaidthyam (a novel by Guruswami Sharma), Nalaayira Divya Prabantham (Vaishnavite devotional poetry of the 7th century) and Nandanar (Goplakrishna Barathiyar's Keer
This list clearly indicates her involvement in the Keerthanai tradition of Tamil and the new genre of Tamil fiction. Tamil literary history documents pre-conceived opinions about female readership: popular novels like those of Vaduvoor Duraiswami Iyengar were meant to be read by women during `those three days of each month'. Subbalakshmi's reading preferences, however, offer a counter-discourse on female reading practices. They challenge any stereotyping of `women's taste' as a faceless entity. In her choice of books, one sees a world-view which resisted restrictions, and managed to grow wings unseen or unnoticed, a universe which is alert to brewing changes though not centre-staged in terms of active participation. If knowledge is power, the process of knowing becomes a struggle and Subbalakshmi waged a relentless struggle.
Perhaps her meticulous record was an indicator of the centrality of reading to her life... It was the way she saw her self: indifferent to her physical appearance but fastidious about fine-tuning her critical faculties by reading widely. That, for her, defined the texture of her life.
... All her grandchildren associate her with books. Lalitha reminisces, "When she opened her big wooden chest full of her precious books ordered from Santiniketan or Madras, the way she handled them, dusted them and put them back after taking out what she wanted was a lesson on the value of books... ."
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