From Circe in Odyssey to Sita in Ramayana, characters in classics have been revisited, and their stories retold from time to time. Meena Kandasamy — poet, novelist and translator — believes that engaging with classics is not just a literary action, but also a political responsibility of writers.
In Kandasamy’s poem “Ms Militancy”, Kannagi, the central character of the Tamil classic Cilappatikāram, sheds the garb of a wife avenging her husband’s death with the power of her chastity to reveal a raging woman whose unflinching belief in justice brings down an empire.
In her translation of the third section of Tirukkural – titled Inupattupal or The Book of Desire – Kandasamy trains a ‘Tamil Decolonial Feminist’ lens to it.
“It’s essential to tell our own stories, stories from the margins which have never been told, stories on women’s experiences which for some reason have never been considered part of high literature or high culture. It’s a massive responsibility,” she says.
The acclaimed writer was recently in Bengaluru to deliver a public lecture at the St. Joseph’s College of Commerce.
“If you don’t change a story or its terrain, then the story becomes so fixed and permanent that it will have only one ending. It tells you that if a woman has desire, it is going to end in tragedy. Such predetermination can only be subverted by going back to these classics,” says Kandasamy who believes revisiting classics is also an act of laying claim to space in history.
Meena Kandasamy
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Invoking the works of Carol Ann Duffy, Margaret Atwood, Periyar, and Ambedkar, all of whom have engaged with classic texts to train a non-conformist lens towards them, Kandasamy argues that classics and mythologies are living texts that belong to no particular set of people, but to universal imagination.
“We cannot erase these myths. That’s not how popular consciousness or cultural memory works. The way you can make an impact on people’s consciousness is by being transgressive. To give new meanings and interpretations to these texts is how transgression is carried out in literature.”
In a conversation with The Hindu, the writer-activist spoke about the need to revisit classics, the Western gaze in literature, and the need to defend language from being captured by modern oppressive forces.
One of the protest marches taken out in Kolkata over the rape and murder of a doctor at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital.
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Does the fact that classics continue to be revisited by writers also mean that these texts leave the possibility and space to retell these stories?
I think that elasticity exists because these stories are so universal, and they offer a great template where you can move around the building blocks and come up with another interpretation.
Retelling, in some sense, is also a natural process. Your operating system has upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 11. Humankind itself has moved towards industrialisation and mechanisation. The same applies to stories as well.
Why, as an author, you want to do it is because some of these stories are used as beating sticks. The stranglehold is very strong, and they force you into conformity.
At the same time, we cannot become anti-culture philistines. That’s an extreme step. So, the space for actual cultural change would be to reinterpret these texts. We shouldn’t allow the texts to enforce hierarchies, hegemonies or oppression. So, we have to play with the text.
Why did you choose the third section of Thirukkural to translate?
I think the third was the most sanitised. Men have tried to contain it within a patriarchal realm, and a lot of erasure has happened — the erasure of female presence, female desire, female energy … The language itself has been held back.
The other texts are more didactic in nature. I felt The Book of Desire needed more urgent intervention.
When I HitYou was a breakthrough success, whereas Gypsy Goddess did not find a wide readership immediately. In an interview to The Guardian, you had expressed frustration over publishers saying it was because people could relate to a woman’s story… (When I hit you is Kandasamy’s account of an Indian woman in an abusive marriage. In Gypsy Goddess she tells the story of a group of oppressed caste labourers fighting for justice)
I shouldn’t differentiate between my children, but I think it was more of a comment about the industry. People like the stereotype of a wife who is beaten up. It also appeals in some ways to the Western idea that Indian women are enslaved.
Whereas the neoliberal capitalist market doesn’t want a story where women are fighting and claiming to be communists, therefore they don’t market it. Nor do people in the West know what to do with a story where they are not at the heart of the story.
The intent of When I Hit You is to address something huge happening in India. But the Western gaze sees ‘trapped Indian women.’
In Gypsy Goddess, there is no Western gaze. The centre of the world is a tiny, nondescript village, and they don’t know how to relate to it because the West either wants to be the liberator or to be demonised. In both senses, they want to have the main character’s energy. The moment you remove them from the story, they don’t know what to do with it.
But is this the case in Indian cities, too, that people only stand up for those they can relate to? The horrific rape and murder of the RG Kar doctor has triggered massive rallies across the country, but not all instances of violence towards women – for example, the instance of two Dalit girls found hanging from a tree in Farrukhabad – do not get the same attention.
This has been happening all the time. Hathras got less outrage compared to Nirbhaya in Delhi. Caste is a huge factor and a predetermining one.
But the other factor is that we have all come to believe cities are safe spaces, spaces that hide our identities and allow us to merge into the body of the urban civic. When such incidents happen in the city, it breaks our idealism. We always looked at villages as regressive places, places of banal violence where old orders exist. But the city is a new space. Especially in the Indian imagination, the city is a construct where we have all come together, a democratic space. Also, in the RG Kar incident, it becomes not just about the city but also about the workplace.
The second thing is that people always want ideal victims. In RG Kar we know the story of the victim — she was a doctor. In Farukkhabad, we don’t know the stories of those young girls, what happened to them, what were their dreams… Journalists don’t invest enough in the story of these girls for us to relate to it.This is again a question of narrative.
You have said that the site for all subjugation is at the level of language, and political poetry has the responsibility to ensure language is not at the mercy of oppressors…
Yes. In Israel, they use words like evacuation and neutralisation when what’s happening isn’t any of that. They don’t let you use the word genocide.
Today, the word decolonisation is used by Hindutva factions to imagine India as this place where everybody was happy, a land of milk and honey once.
We have to be very careful about who is adopting what language.
Occupying forces and neoliberal capitalism resort to capturing language. I think, in that sense, a poet has the responsibility to fiercely guard language and also to employ that language to show what is happening and to show how language is being hijacked.