'Megharoopan'

A semi-arty Malayalam film is in the making - a biopic on late poet P.Kunhiraman Nair (1906-'78). The poet, known as just "P" (that makes things easy to those non-Mallus who may find his name a twister!), was famous as much for his uniquely Bohemian lifestyle as for the vividly colorful evocations of Keralan landscapes and culture (folk and classical) that fill his work - he was particularly besotted with the Nila river valley and never tired of painting word-landscapes of this idyllic region. The film is titled 'Ivan Megharoopan' (in crude translation, "Behold, a Cloud-like Man!"). A promotional blurb for the movie goes: "What manner of man was this?.... He was no ordinary man, He was Megharoopan!"

I am sort of familiar with the work of P; my involvement with classical Keralan culture - Kathakali, festivals, caparisoned elephants, the works... - is limited albeit real since most of my life happens far away from all that. Whatever, I have to record the making of this movie here because...

Due to a coincidence (as is usually the case with me!), I read, just the otherday, a Malayalam poem by Attoor Ravivarma - 'Megharoopan'. The poem is a celebratory evocation of heroic virtues - loftiness, generosity, joyousness, elegance, invincibility,... congealed together in the immense thunder-cloud like presence of a mighty bull-elephant. The poem gives the tusker, a much-beloved and oft-repeated image of Keralan and Indian tradition, a novel spin, and turns a very famous Kalidasan metaphor inside out: ("the love-lorn Yaksha happened to see a massive thundercloud; it approached, bursting with unbridled power like a tusker toying with a riverine mudbank").

Attoor prefers to hint and suggest rather than describe - 'Megharoopan' never mentions P but his restless spirit is unmistakably present. Beginning "Stature excelling the Sahyan (mountain), generosity greater than the gentle Nila's, virtues of noble forbears assume form and expression in you!", 'Megharoopan' subtly reworks images and metaphors P used to revel in (the vast sand-banks that flank Nila, the moonlight of 'thiruvathira'...), excavating them for deeper epiphanies.

To my knowledge, the makers of 'Ivan Megharoopan' have not mentioned Attoor's poem as the source of the film's name in any online document on the movie. It is possible, the word 'megharoopan' was originally coined by P himself; but I do feel Attoor deserves an honorable mention.

On a personal note:

Here is the last stanza of Attoor's poem in the original Malayalam (a reference to the famous parable of the "blind men examining the elephant" and the Keralan practice of twisting strands of hair from elephant tails into simple finger rings (mothiram)(*)

"Andhar nin tumbiyum kombum
pallayum thott-idanjitaam;
enikku kothi nin valin
romam kondoru mothiram!"


I would rather have 'vambar' (worthies) instead of 'andhar' (blind men) there; here is an approximate translation of this personalized version:

"Let the worthies carry on their learned disputes over your tusk, trunk and bulk. But I crave only for a little 'mothiram' (finger-ring) from your tail"

And that articulates, to perfection, my credo vis-a-vis Mathematics and Mathematicians.

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(*) Elephant tail rings and bracelets are worn even in Africa as talismans, I am told.

'Chignon' And 'Kuduma'

I recently acquired a copy of 'Tales Once Told', an interesting and laudable attempt to render into English selected episodes from the Keralan classic 'Aitihyamala' (transliterated somewhat inaccurately therein as 'Ithihyamala'). The author is Abraham Eraly, whose earlier works brought back the charm of narrative to ancient and medieval Indian history - a welcome change from (but NOT an alternative to) the austere rigor of Irfan Habib and the academic desiccation of Romila Thapar.

I won't attempt a broad critique of 'Tales Once Told' here but will only briefly examine a word I encountered therein - 'chignon'. The specific context is the 'punishment' meted out by Saktan Tampuran, King of Cochin around 1800, to a guard from the 'Thandan' subsect of the Ezhava caste for an amorous act that threatened to violate caste-taboos. The king grabbed the Thandan by the latter's chignon and .... let me leave the grisly story at that. Note: Vivekananda, by no means an exponent of the understated remark, was actually being euphemistic when he described Kerala's caste-practices as "right out of a madhouse"!

Merriam Webster says: chignon = a knot of hair that is worn at the back of the head and especially at the nape of the neck. While the word (new to me) is smooth and musical, given its French origin, it is inappropriate in this story. The Keralan caste system had assigned each community its own style of 'kuduma', a readily-identifiable-from-a distance (this was necessitated by untouchability and unapproachability restrictions) knotty coiffure (ha, another French word!). Ezhavas used to (indeed, were forced to!) shave their head except for a portion around 4-5 inches across at the very top and tie the hair there in a topknot. Ergo, what the unfortunate guard sported could not have been a chignon! Note: The title character in the acclaimed movie 'Perumthachan' (though not an Ezhava) wears an Ezhava-style top-knot.

Indeed, hardly any Hindu community in Kerala sported a proper chignon (although many in neighboring Tamil Nadu did). The Nambuthiri Brahmins and some other 'upper' castes used to shave most of the head but for a little tuft *in front* and keep it in a knot above the forehead to a side; the Nairs did not shave their heads at all and tied the whole mass of hair as a knot to a side and so on...

In the unlikely event of Prof. Eraly seeing this post and seeking references, let me mention: 'Jativyavasthitiyum Keralacharitravum', a remarkably original and idiosyncratic (I had to learn the precise spelling of this word for this post!) work by author-scholar P.K.Balakrishnan. Aside: Balakrishnan christens the 'Ezhava top-knot' the 'chakkara-kuduma' for unspecified reasons - let me leave this phrase untranslated!

Note 1: Eraly refers to the Thandan as a leader of a set of 'Thiyya guards'. This is somewhat inaccurate. The event takes place in Trichur in central Kerala. While 'Thiyya' is indeed a synonym of 'Ezhava' (well, more or less!), it is used only in North Kerala.

Note 2: In another similar instance, O.V.Vijayan, in his own English rendering of the masterpiece 'Khasak', (inappropriately) used the technical term 'phoneme' for 'aksharam'. 'Syllable' would have been a much simpler and neater fit.