I wonder how many of those who read this column remember the old radio plays. I wonder too, whether they were as popular in other languages as in Malayalam. By a wonderful concatenation, the old radio plays broadcast by All India Radio have grabbed our attention. To begin with, AIR is broadcasting a week of old plays with great actors like Kunhandi and Thilakan and others. The Sangita Nataka Akademi has brought out an issue of their periodical Keli with stress on this form of theatre, if one may call it that. There are remniscences, interviews and scholarly articles including a study of the genre in BBC vying for attention. And the memories of the children of two AIR greats, Uroob and Thikkodian too talk of those heady days of the beginning of the Malayalam broadcasts, when a song on a theme or a play had to be prepared within minutes, on the wing so to say, actors found, and the whole thing on air with hardly time for a read-through. Interesting reading all of it, and interesting listening, the plays.
Translations from the European poets by Balachandran Chullikkad have
appeared in a couple of periodicals — one is a poem by George Seferis from Greek and another from Italian, by Guiseppe Ungeretti. The translations
remind one of his great skill with words as some of his recent poems have not. It would be great to have something on the lines of the European Poets in Translation that we got (from Penguin?) in the Seventies, in Malayalam.
Have you ever thought of Rabindranath Tagore as a feminist? Notebook, which appeared in Madhyamam, was the translation of a Tagore short story. It talks of the (successful) attempt made by the patriarchal society to snatch away a precious notebook in which a young girl scribbles lessons, thoughts and words of songs she liked. Though undramatic, the only violence being the snatching away of the notebook, the story was very moving. The translation, by VM Girija, is excellent, using Malayalam children’s poems and a song where Tagore used Bengali rhymes and song. Another short story, this time an original, Charathoovala by Pramod Raman was frightening too. Tightly wrought, it has a simple story line, of a girl abandoned by her lover in a theatre showing blue movies, being gang-raped. Once again, the very lack of drama makes one believe that such things are only too likely to happen. Oddly enough, both by men, separated by one and a half centuries.
Using the lines “Oru veetinte ormakku orammayude ayussu matram” (the memories of a house live only as long as a mother) from KG Sankara Pillai’s poem The pyre and the scattering and reproductions of Whistler’s portrait of his mother, S Gopalakrishnan pays a moving but unsentimental tribute to his mother in Bhashaposhini.
A lot of trees are cut and a lot of ink flows in the name of special Onam
issues of all the periodicals. The basic function of the special issue, one recognises, is to collect as many advertisements as possible. To fill the other pages, Mathrubhumi has gone to cinema for inspiration, while Madhayamam had interviews with people who practised professions that are now disappearing — like the village midwife and the blacksmith. Samakalika Malayalam had a discussion on poetry.
A book that is not part of mainstream writing which appealed was Rajavamsam-Tripunithura Smaranakal by RT Ravi Varma. Gently humorous, this
insider’s look at the greatness (sometimes) and peculiarities (almost always) of the members of the Kochi royal family, the various people whose lives
revolved round the royal family make for interesting reading. A king who wanted only two almanacs per year as recompense for his kingdom is obviously not an ordinary one.