Romance of dance and melody

THILLANA MOHANAMBAL - Volumes I and II (Tamil): ``Kalaimani'' (Kothamangalam Subbu); Pazhaniappa Brothers, ``Konar Maligai'', 14, Peters Road, Chennai-600014. Rs. 250.

``KALAIMANI'' (KOTHAMANGALAM SUBBU) kept readers of the Ananda Vikatan spell-bound during the early 1960s when he was writing his serial, Thillana Mohanambal, the romance of a celebrated dancer and Shanmugasundaram, a Nadaswaram maestro. If it was a story of true love never running smooth, it was because of Mohana being a courtesan - or a ``devadasi'' which is the proper Indian word though it would sound very painful and revolting today - with even her mother, Vadivambal, seized by a determination to live up to the tradition of having to seek and retain the patronage of the wealthy. She is aghast when her daughter and Shanmugasundaram are irresistibly drawn towards each other and tries very hard to wreck the romance until she discovers that she could never succeed. (Of some interest to the readers of today is the writer's narration of the performances in Jaffna in which the pair had participated). The novel, running to a little over 1,300 pages, ends with the lovers happily living ever after waiting for the birth of their child - who emerges in the last page as the narrator of the story. The announcement by the editor of the periodical about the congratulatory telegrams which were pouring in immediately after the fictionalised lovers, Mohana and Shanmugasundaram, got married was a revelation of the gripping interest which had hypnotised the readers - they must all have been sentimentally very silly - into believing or wishing to believe that it was a real happening.

Kalaimani gives no indication about the period at which he had placed the incidents in the novel. It must have been in princely and feudal India dating back either to the first decades of the 1900s or even the closing years of the earlier century since there is a reference to Queen Victoria in one chapter. The majestic four-wheeled horse-driven phaeton which preceded the car and took the rich on their rides to their courtesans-turned mistresses is among the presences in the novel about an Indian aristocracy of the past.

Chavadal Vaithi, the glib-tongued liar, who is always planning his strategems for staying as a parasite on the rich and tries very hard to wreck the romance of the lovers is a long-lingering presence in the novel. The quality of the author's writing is superb and presents him not merely as a well-versed and lively connoisseur of music and dance but also as a highly observant chronicler of the mores of a lost milieu of the rich and the privileged who could not tolerate the disdain and the disregard they had to suffer from the bold and talented like the lovers in Thillana Mohanambal.

While the moving love story would have the readers racing on the trail of the Mohana-Shanmugam romance, Kalaimani's writing takes his readers to a lost era of a country having an irresistible grandeur of princes, feudal and vainglorious aristocracy and its sycophants and also of a well-nourished fine arts. Kalaimani also writes about the craving of those fawning on the British rulers of the time for the conferring of the titles of ``Rao Sahib''s and ``Sir''s. The ethos of the time is portrayed by Kalaimani when he writes about a prince marrying an English girl, Alice Jane and her being ``Hinduised'' later by being christened as Ashalata Devi. Part of the princely tradition of the times was the shooting of deer. It is doubtful whether the younger generation of today has heard about ``auto dilbahar'', the perfume very much fancied by the rich.

The magnificence of the traditional and cultural origins of the Nadaswaram is portrayed in Kalaimani's introduction of the reader to the ``Paari Nayanam''. His erudition surfaces repeatedly in scenes like the one of a group of village elders engaged in an animated discussion on the ethics and the violation of it by a Nadhaswaram performance when there is a controversy raging over it.

The author's sad awareness of how great musical compositions of the past were lost because of a self-defeating obstinacy to have them learnt and sung by the privileged aristocrats finds articulation in the comments of a participant in a discussion.

The present edition of Kalaimani's magnum opus is the second, distanced from the first one by 31 years. The love story is eminently worth reading as it is inlaid with riches all the way.

CVG

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