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'The Day The Earth Bloomed' review: Returning to the Tamil roots of Malayalam
Summary
Manoj Kuroor’s novel is a feat of historical reimagination, linguistic virtuosity and a fantastical recreation of a vanished past
In her Translator’s Note at the end of Manoj Kuroor’s Malayalam novel, The Day The Earth Bloomed, J. Devika makes a poignant linguistic observation that captures the essence of the wondrous tale that the reader has just finished.
“Malayalis write closer to Sanskrit, but speak closer to Tamil. Our Tamil roots still sustain us, yet something keeps us from acknowledging them," she writes. “But when [these roots] burst upon us, we are overcome with joy… Kuroor’s book mesmerised its readers precisely because it suddenly brought to our minds many lost treasures."
Although Devika is speaking here for readers of Malayalam, the joy of Kuroor’s extraordinary work, and especially the thoughtful delicacy with which it has been rendered into English, is palpable to even those who don’t have the original language. The “treasure trove" that the translator draws our attention to are “words which are no longer in Malayalam or which were never there—but could have been, if only new layers had not smothered them so".
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To counter this erasure of language, Devika leaves dozens of words—referring to musical instruments, foods, rituals, clans and titles, among others—untranslated. This choice, though deeply political, is tactfully deliberate. The intention here is to strew over the story footprints of the past, which is both a feat of reimagination and fantasy.
This exercise is similar to an experiment Devika had tried, but not quite succeeded with, in her translation of R. Rajasree’s truly inspired novel, The Sthory of Two Wimmin Named Kalyani and Dakshayani (2022). In order to emulate the cadences of Malayalam dialect, she had repurposed the rules of formal English to create a colloquial pidgin there, but it never quite stopped being jarring. In the case of Kuroor’s novel, though, the profusion of non-English words organically becomes part of the architecture of feelings invoked by its poetic cadence. Fittingly, the great scholar of Tamil, David Shulman, has called this novel “a shimmering prose-poem".
The Day The Earth Bloomed is set 17 centuries ago, in the war-ridden terrain that lay south of “the Cape of Kumari", and follows the peregrinations of a group of wandering minstrels. The novel, which seeks to recreate the material and spiritual circumstances of the era of Tamil Sangam poetry, unfolds in three parts. In the first section, Kolumban, a lute player, is on a quest to find his runaway son Mayilan, as he travels through a wild and unpredictable region with his wife, three children, and rest of the clan of musicians and dancers.
The land teems with natural and human predators, the wanderers are occasionally visited by the supernatural, too. There is never enough sustenance nor shelter from the relentless storms of nomadic life, but Kolumban and his people are saved, time and again, by the kindness of strangers. However, their ultimate aim—to find a patron who would look after them—eludes them, even in a society where the economics of relationships are clearly codified. As Kolumban puts it, “The king needs praise, and poets to sing those praises. What else do we have to escape our poverty but song and dance?"
Soon Kolumban and his people get unwittingly entangled with unfamiliar rules of engagement in a culture that is rife with espionage and betrayal. As the reader discovers later, Mayilan, who is driven by his desire for wealth and success, is now part of this hostile milieu. Kuroor captures the dichotomies of belonging in the oscillations of voices, shifting between the choric ‘We’ and the distinctive ‘I’, with each of his protagonists. As Kolumban’s life ends in a strange tragedy, it sets off a chain of events, which sees his elder daughter Chithira going off with Makeeran, who is ostensibly a soldier but actually a real shadowy character, to a faraway village. In this place, women choose their spouses based on their performances in the bloody sport of bullfighting, which plays out like a precursor to the contemporary jallikattu.
In the second part of the novel, Chithira gradually discovers herself, the ‘I’ that has so long been subsumed by her clan identity, as she navigates secrets and revelations. Finally, she is given refuge by Avva, a celebrated woman poet of her time, a singular figure revered for her knowledge by even the mightiest of men. In a quiet but firm but understated accent, Kuroor’s novel explores a proto-feminist theme, right from his dedication to the “more than forty women poets writing in the Sangam era" to the description of the divine possession of Cheera, the youngest of Kolumban’s children, in the grand finale.
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In spite of the tumultuous social universe of Kuroor’s novel, riven by valour and violence, there is scope for the ambitious to grow and overreach their assigned professional roles. Mayilan, for instance, has no interest in, or talent for, the performing arts. He is drawn to wealth, refusing to stay tethered to the life his clan has accepted unquestioningly. With the ease of a chameleon, he goes through multiple iterations, becoming a part of a gang of bandits, mercenary soldier, disciple to a poet, palace guard and, finally, Machiavellian spy playing a game of deceit.
Mayilan takes advantage of the elastic milieu he inhabits—in which the “anthanar" (brahmins) were yet another group seeking to live their lives alongside other groups of people with their special labours, where “graded inequality" had not been fully entrenched yet, as Devika writes in the Translator’s Note.
But this same society, where the son of a humble bard could reinvent himself as a wily spy, was governed by forces that went beyond mastery over arichiyal—a word encompassing a range of meanings, from mastery over statecraft to political guile. Some of the most powerful writing in The Day The Earth Bloomed comes in the final section, where a nexus of earthly and unearthly creatures at the end of a bloody war erupts into a spectacular ceremony of bloodlust, attended by victorious soldiers, ghouls and demons. With this scene, as well as with Cheera’s possession, the realist novel is unmoored, let loose into a surrealist realm, where the moral cost of betrayal is hellish, a punishment that diminishes even Mayilan, the man with a vaulting ambition, into an outcast.
Somak Ghoshal is a writer based in Delhi.
