நுண்வெளி கிரகணங்கள்

by சு. வேணுகோபால்

Unknown Binding

About the author

சு. வேணுகோபால் (பிறப்பு: மே 20 1967) என்பவர் ஒரு தமிழக எழுத்தாளர். கோயம்புத்தூரில் உள்ள குமரகுரு பன்முக கலை, அறிவியல் கல்லூரியில் தமிழ்த்துறைத் தலைவராகப் பணிபுரிந்து வருகிறார். இவர் எழுதிய “வெண்ணிலை” எனும் நூல் தமிழ் வளர்ச்சித் துறையின் 2006 ஆம் ஆண்டுக்கான சிறந்த நூல்களில் சிறுகதை எனும் வகைப்பாட்டில் பரிசு பெற்றிருக்கிறது.

Reviews

[S Ashok · Rating 4 out of 5]

India had a long history of being a feudal society, for thousands of years all our cultural practices and myths, social structures evolved to support this feudal society. We were a predominantly agricultural society with a large number of people living in villages which had remained like this for many generations. Post-independence the forces of modernity started reshaping the rural world, land laborers who were slaved to agricultural land were emancipated through education, people were more free to work as daily laborers in cities. Forces of modernity also stuck a blow to the prevailing caste system. These tensions that arise due to conflict between traditional feudal society and modern forces of change were themes of many novels like Gora, the works of MT Vasudevan Nair. Su Venugopal's work Nunveli Kiranangal is such work but with an important difference. Most novelists tend to represent the modern in this discourse, they were western educated and looked to the traditional society standing outside wherein Su Venugopal is part of the traditional agricultural society. The novelist of previous generations were extremely erudite in explaining this conflict, one shortcoming their work had was they lacked the detailing that one like Su. Venugopal provides belonging to the traditional. He comes from an agricultural family and has first-hand experience in the agricultural practices, the cultural practices of the Kannada/Telugu people who had migrated to Tamilnadu during Sultanic invasions. This difference is something the reader will immediately notice in the subtle unique details provided by the author.

Nunveli Kiranangal begins in the dream of a young boy in which sees the story of how their forefathers were pushed out from their ancestral land by invading Sultanic forces. They migrate in stages over to Tamilnadu. The family he belongs to Vokkaliga caste, a Kannada speaking community which is a landowning feudal community. The family gets introduced to us in the modern-day, with multiple issues plaguing them. The family had to live through growing economic troubles but as part of their feudal heritage, they have to live a life of respect. In addition to this broad feudal life that Su Venugopal paints, he is also constantly grappling with darker forces that control human actions. Humans have to live up to social, moral and cultural compulsions and also need to live with a physical aspect that has its own desires. They are churned by these two forces acting on them in tandem in parallel with changing social structure it puts tremendous pressure on these humans.

We see Sreerangu one of the brothers of the family completely lost to drinking and a state in which he has lost all his land to drinking. He cannot live a life of labor and the initial stages of the novel he had to work in dark times to earn minimal money to keep his family afloat. The family and its ancestral home are run by Rengasamy who is hardworking but his life also is not ideal, as mounting economic issues and a compulsion to keep social pretensions make him deep in debt. We also understand at the end of the novel Rengasamy seems to have an illicit relationship with Sreerangu's wife in the earlier stages of his life, there is an allusion that this might have lead Sreerangu to drinking. In certain hidden references, this seems to have been known to some of the elder members of the family.
The women of the family even more affected by the circumstances they find themselves in, Sowdamma the daughter of the family one who effectively runs all the work in the family is separated from her husband after a brutal physical assault she had to suffer. She is alone, sexually tormented yet cannot satisfy herself, eventually ends up having a relationship with a Muslim local shopkeeper and elopes with him. The forces she had controlled all through her life take over in a moment and all is lost for her, including her independence.
The younger members of the family are romantically involved in relationships but are too afraid to aginst the wishes of the family. The caste system has multiple subcastes where even within the same caste there are multiple differences within clans, this makes matters worse as there is very little choice with respect to marriage.
There is a slow crumbling of the house, things are sold which are ancestral, the running of Sowdamma and the ensuing diktat of the village prevents people working for the family in fields. There is growing debt and loss that Rengasamy suffers from business adventures effectively kills the family. There is still hope as their house is taken over by the bank the family hopes to come back.

The strong points of the novel for me involve the amazingly detailed way Venugopal introduces us to rural life. The language is very rustic to start with and involves a lot of rereading to understand.
The way the novelist can draw attention to the darker forces of human nature, there is no romancing or sublimation of the sexual desire, nor there is a moral judgment passed.
This detached portrayal of human weakness especially the way it makes people do bizarre things comes out well in the novel. We also see how the family seems to be caught in an eclipse(alluding to the title) wherein part of it remains in the feudal traditional world view, slowly coming out into the modern world with all its challenges.