Ulloor Parameswara Iyer (1877-1949)

The poet who most clearly symbolizes the poetic revolution in the first quarter of the 20th century is Kumaran Asan. His early discipleship of Sri Narayana Guru and his Sanskrit studies at Bangalore, Madras and Calcutta were important influences on his poetic development. The three and a half years he spent outside Kerala provided him with a kind of board outlook and deep sensibility which would perhaps have been impossible if he had stayed at home.

A deep moral and spiritual commitment became part of Asan's personality and when after a spell of writing devotional poetry he turned to secular themes, he could produce something without any precedent in the language. Oru Veena Poovu ( A fallen flower, 1907) combines the lyrical and the elegiac with the romantic. Yet the relaxed discipline of a classical training was always there to add a deeper tone to his close investigation of the meaning of life as seen in the brief career of a flower. The infinite delicacy of touch in passages like the following was rare in Malayalam poetry at that time (Translation by G.Kumara Pillai).

The mother-plant with loving care Enfolded your infant charm in calyx soft; The gentle breeze came rocking you to sleep To the lullaby of the murmuring leaves. .......................................................... Your lovely body told a moving tale Of golden days of fulfilled youth; Your days were brief, and yet so rich and full; You had your woes; and yet your mind was steeped in joy.

The same close attention to detail may be found in all his poems, which authenticates and thereby enhances their spiritual glow. Asan did not try to write a neoclassicist mahakavya: instead he specialized in the narratives of middle length. Nalini (1911), Leela (1914), Chintavishtayaya Sita (1919), Duravastha (1922), Chandalabhikshuki (1923) and Karuna (1923) are eloquent testimony to Asan's powers of poetic concentration and dramatic contextualization. Occasionally the call of social pressures lured him to try a different strain, as in "Reflections of a Thiyya Boy".

Why shouldst thou wail, then, O Bharat? Thy slavery is thy destiny, O Mother! Thy sons, blinded by caste, clash among themselves And get killed; what for is freedom, then?

Asan is often described as the poet of love: many writers have written about love, but Asan's love is of a transcendental kind and in poem after poem. Nalini, Leela, Chandalabhikshki, he demonstrates it. For him it was identical with ultimate and absolute freedom, as he explains it in "The Song of Freedom". In Sita his reflections on love turn a bit bitter as the situation perhaps deserves it. In Duravastha it achieves a slight transformation, since he tries to seek love's meaning in terms of contemporary reality. It is set against the historical background of the Moplah Rebellion, but Asan the poet is basically concerned with the establishment of the idea that all men belong to the same caste and same religion, as he was taught by Sri Narayana Guru. Here is a representative passage from Duravastha which reveals the social reformer and prophet in Asan:

Wake up O you gardeners, Wake up and toil, spring is at hand. In this garden enriched by beautiful blossoms On high bough and low, Remember there is not a single flower Which does not delight the Lord. Come forward- And replace the laws, Or else they are sure to displace you. There is a raging wind Unceasingly reverberating with this utterance in today's Kerala Time from all the four directions declares the self-same thing And even the earth beneath your feet resounds with the din of unrest.

Asan as a poet was a great synthesizer. He wrote two major poems on Buddhist legends; Chandalabhikshuki and Karuna (Compassion). They were his last works, written before his untimely death in 1924. Love Freedom and Equality are his basic concerns. The last lines of Karuna sum up all
these in concrete, context-based terms:

Salutations to thee, O Upagupta: without getting lost in 'nirvana' come back again to serve the world. Mother Earth today needs more of such sons as you whose compassion reaches the lowliest and lost.

Asan's career illustrates in full changes that were taking place in the Malayalam poetry of his time. His earliest works were mainly hymns employing Sanskritized diction and Sanskrit metres. With Oru Veena Poovu (1907) his sensibility registers a change: the diction is simplified, and although Sanskrit metres are used, they have a closeness by now to the easy and flowing Dravidian metres. The pessimistic note is replaced by a more strident note in some of the later poems. The use of a focal character - most of such characters are women like Nalini in Nalini and Sita in the poem named after her - as protagonist helps to dramatize the whole experience of the poem. In the shorter poems and in Prarodanam, an elegy with a splendid and reasonant orchestration, the style fluctuates, but in his last three poems Dravidian metres are used, the diction is simple and natural. Karuna is the culminating point of this trend.