Essays

Voices reflecting political disquiet over the years, mark modern Tamil poetry from Sri Lanka, observes Professor M A Nuhman.

Tamil poetry in Sri Lanka has a long history. However, in its true sense, modern Tamil poetry begins in the 1940s with the emergence of a younger generation of poets like Navatkuliyur Nadarajan, Mahakavi, and A. N. Kandasami whose poems represented romantic, realistic and leftist trends respectively. They continued to write till the sixties. A new generation of poets like Murugaiyan, Neelavanan, Sillaiyur Selvarajan and Puradchik Kamaal followed them in the fifties and became leading poets in the sixties. Mahakavi, Murugaiyan and Neelavanan are still considered major poets of that time. The poets of this period exclusively employed the traditional rhythmic verse forms as their medium of poetic expression with some modifications suited to their social content.

Marxism and Tamil nationalism heavily influenced the development of Tamil poetry in Sri Lanka from the fifties. Although the impact of Marxism on Sri Lankan Tamil poetry may be seen from the late forties, it was more dominant during the sixties and seventies.

Tamil nationalism was sparked off by the discriminatory Sinhala Only Official Language Policy in the fifties and Tamil poetry began to reflect the ethnic sentiments of the Tamils. Linguistic nationalism remained dominant in their poetic articulation till the end of the fifties. Owing to the failure of successive governments in addressing ethnic issues, Tamil nationalism reemerged in the seventies. It paved the way for the emergence of Tamil militancy and separatist war in the eighties, which lasted for three decades, causing loss of thousands of human lives, tremendous hardship, destruction and displacement that affected all ethnic communities in varying degrees.

A new genre of poetry of political protest emerged and developed from 1977 – the year that marks the beginning of a series of incidents of anti Tamil violence and ethnic turmoil in Sri Lanka. Tamil poetry began to reflect and react against the continuing war and indiscriminate violence, and increasingly became the primary medium of political expression. After 1980, the main thrust was the poetry of war, which was very new in the history of Tamil poetry (apart from the heroic genre of the classical period) and very similar to modern Palestinian poetry.

During this time, a large number of young talented poets – men and women – emerged. These included Jayapalan, Cheran, Vilvarathnam, Karunakaran, Solaikkili, Urvasi, Avvai, Sivaramani, Anaar and several others from the Tamil and Muslim communities. Meanwhile, the older generation of poets like Murugaiyan, Nuhman, Sivalingam, Yesurasa, Sivasekaram and others also engaged in writing. The poets wrote about the experiences of ethnic conflict and war; the voice against oppression and the tragedy and suffering of violence are recurrent themes.

Cheran (1960-) rose in prominence in the eighties and after. The following lines demonstrate his angry voice:



In this extract, he portrays the mood of wartime Jaffna:


(A Second Sunrise. Translated by Lakshmi Holmström and Sascha Ebeling. Navayana, 2013)

Jayapalan (1944-)'s poetry, too, came to be known widely the eighties onwards. He captures a scattered and displaced family in a few lines:



(The Memory of Autumn. In The Song of a Refugee)

Two new developments, the voice of women in Tamil poetry and poetry of the Tamil Diaspora, ought to be mentioned here. Numerous talented young women poets like Urvasi, Avvai, Sivaramani, Anar, Aaliyal, Zulfika and Faheema Jahan with a strong feminist stance, have emerged since the 1980s. For example, Sivaramani tells her male oppressor:



(Sivaramani Kavithaigal, 1993)

A number of expatriate Sri Lankan Tamil poets like Aravindan, Thitumavalavan, Aaliyal, Balasooriyan and several others who live in various European countries, Canada and Australia have written poems with themes of nostalgia, alienation and problems of cultural assimilation during the last three decades – a unique development in Tamil poetry.
Contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil poetry is diverse, socially committed, concrete, plain in language but rich in imagery. It is essentially the voice of victims and the oppressed.

Note: Readers may find many contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil poems in English translation in the anthologies Lute song and Lament: Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka(2001) and Wilting Laughter: Three Tamil Poets (2009).Both are edited by Chelva Kanaganayakam and published by TSAR Publication, Canada. The lines quoted above are taken from these anthologies.