OPEN LETTER TO THIRU.

VAIRAMUTHU from an “Unknown Sri Vaishnava”

Dear Thiru. Vairamuthu,

At the time of writing this, you are already facing a virtual tsunami of public protests and demonstrations
against you for the ill-timed, ill-advised speech in Rajapalayam you delivered a few weeks ago that
besmirched the fair name of one of the most beloved poetess of Tamil Nadu, Sri AndAl of Sri Villiputtur.

I know that despite all the vociferous public demand for you to tender in a heart-felt apology to Sri AndAl
at the temple of Sri Villiputtur, you are not definitely not going to relent. I can surely state two clear
reasons why you will never submit: (a) your own poetic pride and the (b) the patronage and support you
enjoy from a couple of the most powerful political parties in Tamil Nadu.

Let us look at the second reason (b) first. If you tender in an apology, it will not only be a loss of face and
standing for you personally as poet but, more importantly, it would also signal a big breach in the very
ideological foundations of those same political parties whose largesse has contributed so much to your
success as a cinema song-writer. Those parties will simply never brook any expression of remorse or
reparation on your part, whether genuine or token. You are not a poet who is master of his own soul. You
are a prisoner of your political masters… and being a mere “poet-laureate” in their court you know well
enough that you will never be able to bite the hand that has fed you.

So then, let us turn to other reason, (a), why you will not tender an apology to the poetess AndAl.

In dragging the fair name of AndAl the poetess of Sri Villiputtur, and trying to associate it with the
community of “devadAsis”, is a callow personal attack on a fellow-poet whose literary fame has been
shining bright as legend on the firmament of Tamil Poetry for well over a millennium now. Poets
everywhere in the world are extremely decent and dignified souls…. Poets might criticize one another’s
works of poetry, or the literary merit, felicity or quality of output, but rarely have truly great poets of the
past ever cast personal slur on each other’s parentage or occupation. By uttering what you reportedly did
about the poetess AndAl, there is no doubt you broke that unspoken but sacred pact amongst all the true
poets of the world. You ought to feel very ashamed. But your poetic pride will blind you to your shame.

It is your poetic pride indeed that makes you now very defensive in offering an extraordinarily inventive
but utterly unconvincing claim that the word “devadasi” which you attributed to AndAL was not used by
you in its contemporary and pejorative sense but in the ideal or platonic way it was first coined and
generally known in some distant historical times.

As a poet (or, even as song-writer of your now shrunken eminence), you ought to know basic rules of
grammar. The import of a word in any language undergoes several shifts over long periods of time, such
transformations being wrought by changing social mores and structures. In the English language for
example, 50 years ago, the word “gay” was the adjectival form of the noun “gaiety”. Today, in the society
of LGBT-rights, to say “this man is gay”, conveys an entirely different connotation. In the same way, the
word “devadasi” has over several centuries of usage in Tamil society, undergone drastic change in what it
seeks to convey. Whether one likes it or not, the old platonic meaning of the word viz. “paramour of God”
has shed all semantic association with sacral pristineness; instead it has morphed into its rather unsavory
present-day popular usage which we all know only too well what exactly it is.
A good poet, who is a true master of his craft, will always be discriminative in choosing words to avoid
even the slightest trace of equivocation. While employing a certain word, a lesser poet such as you would
be expected to be even more mindful about whether such a word does accurately reflect the common
parlance as it prevails today, and whether it is understood in the way it ought to be by your ordinary
readers; only inept and sloppy poets end up conflating some archaic usage of the same word in some
remote period of history.

If you had really intended to convey the old platonic meaning of the word “devadasi”, and never indeed
intended, as you now aver, to invoke its current and popular unsavory sense, you would have chosen
either an entirely different term or expression --- “deva-nAyaki” or “deiva-kanni” or some such special
term, for example ---- or ensured at least that even while using the term “devadasi”, you sufficiently had
qualified it --- loud and clear --- to elicit its old historical sense of a “maiden who sought union only with
the divine”. A good and true poet would certainly have done that. You did neither. And now your poetic
pride will not let you see where you badly slipped up with words and meaning.

That your poetic intentions were not wholly platonic or noble also became very apparent when the
context in which you employed the term “devadasi” gave you away badly. In the public speech, you gave
at Rajapalayam, you reportedly cast dark and subtly sleazy doubts about the parentage of Sri AndAl; you
wondered if Peria-AzhwAr, the father, knew about the real facts of AndAl’s pedigree but deliberately
chose to shroud it in religious mystery by adopting her as his foster-daughter.

You then went one step further in your personal slurring spree: you committed a grievous faux-paus that
was unpardonable coming as it did from a two-penny song-writer professing to be a poet! In your defense,
you quoted some book written by some non-descript academician from “Indiana University, USA”, in
which another Indian scholar of 1923, you said, has drawn inferences to show that Peria-Azhwar may have
(virtually) abandoned AndAl in the temple of Sri Rangam where she lived as a “devadasi” thereafter all
her life. It however turns out that you have got all your facts wrong. Both your source at Indiana University
as well as the original source of 1923 were utterly mistaken and maliciously misquoted by you. You relied
on a source of historical fact that turns out to be patently untrue and because it went unverified by you,
your poetic license now stands exposed as poetic licentiousness.

You have thus seriously compromised your poetic integrity. But then your poetic pride now will not let
you see the irreparable damage your integrity has suffered.

*******************

It is well known that your political supporters and payroll-masters in Tamil Nadu belong to a viciously
atheistic ideology whose socially divisive political agenda and propaganda have kept Tamil Nadu for the
last 50 years in a state of perennial casteist turmoil. It is in the service of their malevolent ideology that
you have been lending your poetic voice all these years. You have even made a very successful public
career of it and, therefore, I say why should anyone expect anything better really from you? After all, you
must remain loyal and grateful to those who have given you so much in life.

But even atheists do sometimes appreciate poetic “rasa”, don’t they? If only that natural faculty of
aesthetic feeling is applied, your masters and you too would not fail to understand that Sri AndAl is more
than just a mere person belonging to a historical era or religious faith. For ordinary Tamilians like me, she
is a great symbol! She represents a magnificent idea. She embodies a towering human ideal. That idea is
called “Sublimation” and as a poet you ought to know that all great poetry of the world, be it in any
language, has only one great purpose viz. to help man sublimate his deepest nature.

Human beings are gross creatures, a bundle of crass emotions, vain desires, animal urges and primal
instincts. Most parts of us is all nothing but biology. It is only a very small but essential part of us that is
yet all spirituality. While our mortal senses and desires drag us down, our immortal spirit aspirates and
prods us onward in the opposite direction …. to elevate ourselves somehow in life. Every human being
thus experiences life only as a ceaseless and tense inward struggle between what is gross and empyrean
within ourselves, between what is “saatvik” in us and what is “un-saatvik”, between what is banal and
that which is unique inside us. It is this constant tension that great philosophers describe as the “schism
in the human soul”. As a poet, I am quite sure, even you might have yourself felt the same schism in your
heart in your deepest moments, perhaps, of creative endeavor when you resolved to put pen to paper.

But no one needs to be a great philosopher --- or a Vairamuthu --- to be able to perceive and appreciate
the both the personal and poetry of Sri AndAl being symbols of exactly that common human struggle all
we human beings go through in life…. the agony of self-battle between the gross and the sublime within
us. In the beautiful verses of the Tiruppavai, she raises the call of awakening in all of us (“tuyilidai”) of
such a quintessential human struggle; she beseeches us to recognize that there is an elusive divinity that
lurks within us (“mannathinAl sindikka”); she urges us to exert our body, mind and spirit towards the goal
of spiritual exaltation (“neyyunnOm, pAl unnOm”); and finally, she exhorts us all, the lumpen mass of
mortal dross that we are, to never stray from the true course of human evolution… i.e. keeping ourselves
eternally pledged (“yettraikkum yEzh yEzh piravikkum”) to the path of sublimating ourselves, heart and
soul, to the plane of a higher destiny in life (“matrrai nam kAmmangal maatru….”).

Poets like you, Sir, should be striving to match the lofty poetic standards set by AndAl! Your words ought
to be those of inspiration and sanctity… You should be seeking to elevate and render sublime everything
that is gross and earthen in us. Instead, in saying whatever you did say on public stage about Sri AndAl on
that black day in Rajapalayam, you only dragged all of us ordinary mortals down, once again, into that
very pit and gutter of petty human experience in which we find ourselves daily mired and out of which we
are desperately keen to climb out of only to cleanse and liberate ourselves.

Poets are often hailed to be “unacknowledged legislators of the world”. In desecrating the fair name of
AndAl, you have legislated against one of the most cherished ideals of human kind. It is unlikely that
history will ever accord you a place in the hallowed company of Tamil poets. It seems to me that, at best,
you might earn the sobriquet of a literary “devadasi” who lived out his time serving the aims of venal
legislators and senators of his time. In my book, a poet you shall never be.

Yours truly,

M.K.Sudarshan
(Lover of Poetry, Blogger on Sri Vaishnavite Philosophy and Literature, Author and Chartered Accountant)

Chennai