Alai Osai (Tamil) by Kalki

Reviewed by K.S.Loganathan

Kodimullai, Puducherry, 2022, 800 pages.                             

Ramaswamy Krishnamurthy(1899-1954), who wrote under the pen name Kalki, was a Tamil writer, editor, and follower of Mahatma  Gandhi, who took part in the Indian Independence movement and underwent jail a few times. His oeuvre includes 120 short stories, 10 novellas, five social novels, three historical novels, a translation of Gandhi’s autobiography into Tamil, besides many editorials, opinion pieces, film and music reviews, etc., Alai Osai is a social novel serialized in 1948 in ‘Kalki’, the Tamil weekly magazine he edited and co-founded with T.Sadasivam seven years earlier. It is the first Tamil novel to earn the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956.

In Alai Osai, Kalki gives the reader a sense of how ordinary people’s lives were affected by the momentous events- both natural disasters and political turmoil- leading to Indian independence,  between 1934 and 1947, the impact of which still reverberates to this day. After the Partition riots, he visited the refugee camps in Delhi, Panipat, Karnal, and Kurukshetra as a reporter and filed the ” people’s stories”. Alai Osai is a chronicle of pre-independence India and the story of its common people. Its main characters are drawn from five well-to-do Brahmin families engaged at the time in agriculture management, law, and civil service (both in the British Provinces and in a Princely State).

In his foreword to the novel penned in 1953, Kalki writes that of all his books, Alai Osai is the one likely to endure for a fifty or a hundred years after him. The main characters themselves wrote the book, he says. Towards the end of the book, Kalki bemoans the author’s predicament in not finishing a story to the satisfaction of the readers, as opposed to a truthful conclusion, which may not be acceptable to them.

The story goes: Kittavaier of Rajampettai, a prosperous landlord in a village in the Madras Presidency, looks for a suitable groom for his daughter Lalitha. This is 1934 and there are expectations of independence coming soon. Soundararaghavan, M.A.,(Raghavan), employed in Delhi, comes to see the girl, but instead falls for Seetha, her cousin visiting them from  Bombay. Seetha marries Raghavan, and Lalitha marries Pattabhiraman, the son of an advocate from Devipattinam. Lalitha’s brother Surya, Pattabhiraman, and Amaranathan, a neighbor, are close friends. Surya becomes a political activist and attends the Haripur Congress Meet. He goes sight-seeing to the Taj Mahal along with Seetha, Raghavan, and Dharini, an old friend and lover of Raghavan, who becomes friendly with Surya and participates in political activities.

Dharini is a beautiful princess with a mysterious past. Dharini later saves Seetha from drowning in a lake in the Rajanipur princely state. Raghavan is resentful of Surya ‘s blossoming relations with Dharini, and gradually his married life with Seetha sours.

Surya gets involved in the Quit India Movement in 1942, and is wanted by the police, but escapes with the help of Amaranathan. Their friend Pattabhiraman is also arrested for sedition. Surya saves a desperate Seetha from dying by suicide but misfortune dogs her as she is kidnapped by goons and taken to Rajanipur in a case of mistaken identity. A case of theft is also foisted on Seetha, but she is saved in time by a Muslim Maulvi. She lands up in Calcutta and stays with Amaranathan and his wife Chitra, pursuing relief work during the Bengal famine. She is again arrested as an activist allegedly operating under numerous aliases, including Dharini, whom she resembles. She gladly accepts a jail term as a welcome relief from her domestic woes. On release, she visits Lalitha in Devipattinam a decade after their marriages. She helps Pattabhiraman win a local council election, and in the process gains numerous enemies as well as provokes Lalitha’s resentment.

Seetha is eventually reconciled with Raghavan and they move to Hoshangabad in Punjab where the family lives happily for a year. When the Partition riots break out, their lives are upended. The story ends with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948, which plunges the nation in gloom, and at the end the survivors are set to rebuild their lives.

The plot twists and turns as in many serials, and depends frequently on chance interventions. For example, Seetha gets into a number of difficult situations and is rescued each time by another. There are some loose threads as well. For instance, why doesn’t Surya ask Seetha’s father to explain his telegram to stop her marriage? Seetha’s father’s activities could have been separately covered, and not left to the speculation of other main characters over the period in which he is absconding.

Seetha’s emergence from the home to engage in outside politics reminds one of Rabindranath Tagore’s Bimala in ‘The Home and the World.’ Kalki’s treatment of the Calcutta and Partition riots is more varnished than that of writers like Khushwant Singh, Bhisham Sahni, and Sadat Hassan Manto , but it is nevertheless telling. The local elections in  which Seetha campaigns for Pattabhiraman who is aspiring for a post without a salary is reminiscent of today’s elections anywhere- complete with cash -for -votes, personal attacks, corruption charges, and legal imbroglios after the results come out.

As a rule, reading an integrated text can be a different experience from reading installments of a serial published over a period, especially after 75 years. In a magazine with a decent distribution network, the publisher can spread the cost of production over several issues, and the subscribers can benefit from the lower prices of the individual issues. Each episode is arranged to grab the reader’s attention, with illustrations added and situations contrived to sustain reader interest in the next issue. In practice, this substantially increases the market for books when the extent of the reading public is limited.

At the time of independence, Indian literacy levels were abysmally low- about 10% for males and 6% for females. Even at the peak of Ponniyin Selvan’s popularity, the number of Kalki subscribers was only 71,000. Therefore, Kalki’s pioneering role in inculcating the reading habit among the Tamil people is significant. Naturally, the main characters in the book reflected the readership profile at the time.

Seventy-five years after its initial publication, Alai Osai is still around, though it is less popular than Kalki’s historical novels. It is a reminder of a time in ordinary people’s lives about which the elders in our homes are no longer around to tell us- ” When the Japanese took Singapore, your grandmother and I … etc.,etc.”  Perhaps the addition of notes to the historical events as an appendix in the next edition will be helpful to a new generation of readers to engage with the text in an immersive manner.