Different Strokes

Listening to Tamil poet Kanimozhi at a recent South India heritage lecture on Tamil folk arts was an enjoyable, and for the uninitiated, an eye-opening experience. The first revelation was the vast number of folk arts in the state - villupattu, poikal kudirai, karagattam, oyilattam, silambattam, karadiattam, terukoottu, yes, even oppari, the finely rehearsed art of wailing at funerals, so on and so forth. The list was long and impressive.

According to Kanimozhi, we Tamils are embarrassed by our folk arts and decided to crush them under the weight of our classical arts, in order to compete with Victorian culture, promoting notions of chastity and ’pure’ arts, devoid of the sensual aspects of our earthy traditions.

Interestingly, the oral tradition of our folk arts presents the other dimension, the other truth of our history, different from the textbook paeans of praise for our kings. An example is the Big Temple of Tanjavur, the symbol of Chola might and cultural efflorescence. "Everytime I walked in the precincts of that magnificent temple, I felt this tremendous thrill of pride and wonder - until I learnt how many people had starved and suffered hardship to build the monument," said Kanimozhi. "Six out of seven brothers who rebelled against a diktat that they work for free, when they sought work to beat starvation, were killed and they belonged to a particular, exploited community. This side of history has been handed down to us via folk songs."

Chastity was a Victorian concept imported to prove we were a superior culture even to western culture. Kanimozhi recited verses that told tales of women consorting with their brothers-in-law. The word pathini that commonly denotes a one-man woman originally meant a woman of honour, someone who kept her word no matter what the circumstances. That was when a woman was a person in her own right, not merely an appendage of her husband, whose only virtue was her fidelity to him.

There were a couple of interesting stories about funeral processions. In the first one, Kanimozhi described the superb physical condition and expert performance of the young dancers at a village funeral procession she saw for the first time. ’Oppari’, she found out was a scrupulously cultivated art, not some uncontrolled expression of grief, as we might believe. The oppari artistes did not necessarily mourn the person whose death brought them to the funeral in the first place, they often sang out their own personal grief quite unconnected with the person whose death they had gathered to condole.

At one funeral she attended, Kanimozhi found one woman mourner actually using the opportunity to sing songs cursing her long-dead husband who had oppressed her in his lifetime! Kanimozhi’s husband once related an incident, she said, involving his grandmother. Grandma and grandson took a bus to a neighbouring village to attend a funeral. Grandma was perfectly normal until they neared the house where people had gathered to mourn an old relative. The moment she saw some of her kin in the vicinity, grandma went into ’oppari’ mode and put up an impressive performance for the next few hours. Only, on their way back home did she stop to ask her grandson this innocuous question, "Setthathu kezhavana, kezhavia?" ("Who died, was it the old man or was it his wife?")