The Singer of Alleppey by Pramila Venkateswaran
Review by Varsha Saraiya-Shah
The Singer of Alleppey, is a unique collection of heartfelt persona poems. The Poet, Venkateswaran has rediscovered through her imagination and research the legacy of her grandmother, Sitala, Singer and Composer, about whose compositions she knew very little.
What a feat for the reader to journey through a microcosm of the last few decades of British India! Venkateswaran deftly draws a parallel between the slavery of India and the suppression of a wife, rarely recognized as an artist in a conservative culture, with no control over her destiny, her abusive husband, her body his property. The Poems unfold Sitala’s life portfolio in her many roles with this poet’s brilliant sensitivity and sensibilities.
“Waiting For The Photograph” (p.17) is the first window into Venkateswaran rediscovering the memory of her grandmother.
This poem’s last line:
“………I kick at seaweed snaking the shore line,
so stark the contrast of memory and imagination”
tells the reader, brace up, this one is the harbinger of what’s ahead.
Venkateswaran’s collection awakens the reader’s sensibilities poem after poem through weaving the ethos of Alleppey’s Singer. The poems contain navarasa, a collective of nine basic emotions coined by Sanskrit aesthetics as love (and beauty), laughter, sorrow, anger, courage, terror, disgust, wonder (surprise), and peace (tranquility). The Singer protagonist continues to strive through all those emotions, but finds it hard to attain peace through her ill-fated life until she becomes a widow. The journey of this series of poems is a rather heartbreaking unearthing of female plight in early twentieth century.
Venkateswaran’s imagined adversities of Sitala’s life is couched in raw emotion and cultural taboos, religious rites, and powerful patriarchy. Her courage to say the unsayable and ability to give the young grandmother a voice is praiseworthy. The sexual traumas that haunt almost to the end of her life makes the reader feel her inevitable pathos. The Singer’s hard-attained freedom, rather late in life, is barely a saving grace. Venkateswaran has done a commendable repertoire of Sitala’s life through the sections that parallel nature’s light-driven cycle. These poems weave a life’s tale between quotidian and the abstract.
The Darkness of female subjugation and helplessness to male dominance is starkly yet deftly brought out in poems like Obliteration (p.49) in which pregnant Sitala is worried about her fetus as her husband continues to hump away and stifle her with lust. Husband, Didn’t I Tell You It Will Be A Boy?, Karma Blues, and Unmasked echo some of those emotions.
Husband (p. 21), is the story of a ruthless man, and his helpless young wife whose pain or anger a patriarchy system refuses to see. A short poem packed with power of its words keeps us on edge. Anger is equated to a cloud of vermin. How she’ll pick apart antennae, filament, wings, snout. It gave me chilling shudder just visualizing it, what Emily Dickinson calls a true poem.
In Karma Blues (p.42), another poem of an abusive husband and the sorrow and humiliation of the wife, the poet evokes the unforgivable impact of lasting wounds in the Blues meter. Repeating phrases and lines reveal the evils of domestic violence, a form of slavery. The last two lines express wisdom that comes through crushing pain:
“This is the law of karma. Was as he blind
To his evil, an incubus, worming into me?
I need to use cunning in the face of karma,
A magician’s shawl for the song of my being.”
In Unmasked (p.50) Venkateswaran vocalizes the female mind through Mahabharata, one of the world’s greatest epic wars and its two foremost female characters, Draupadi and Kunti, how they suffered having to choose between loyalty to themselves, children, and their husbands. Male power and control, like in her grandmother’s life ruled and ruined their happiness. Through the vividness of a masked classical dance of Kathakali, she successfully draws poetic parallels, universally applicable between an epic family feud some 5,000 plus years ago to a woman’s plight in the early twentieth century.
In Ways To Relieve Routine and Oiled Hinges, Mistress, Sex, and Dung Song, Venkateswaran expresses Sitala’s anger and disgust in simple yet scathing words. Her fate feels more like a housemaid than homemaker, and a sense of dejection for her husband’s betrayal jar the reader in a way only a well-accomplished poet can.
Humor and wit in many of these poems, sometimes subtle, laced with irony and sarcasm, sometimes outrageous is endearing like in My Husband Is Ruled By Proverbs (p.46).
They often come to surface (wife’s way of coping with the suffering and injustice) in spite of the sad undertone as in The Chatterbox, Grandfather Clock, and Sitala Responds to the photographer.
Sitala Responds to the photographer (p.37) pokes at the hypocrisy of this event. Any family photographer’s attempt to capture everyone in great spirits is almost an impossible task. Venkateswaran has masterfully brought out emotions the subjects experience in two words, “mere ephemera” which the Singer of Alleppey knows well, like herself composing songs in her head she barely gets an opportunity to pen down. Her young children’s friskiness vs. her own struggle to smile when all she wishes is to frown and walk away from this pretense of a happy family.
In Cow Dung Cakes (p.75), ambivalence is woven with lighthearted approach to a rather repugnant object making it worthy of worship:
“they fuel the stove on which I
make sweet tea fit for the gods
what is merely dung to you is to me
beauty dear friend
the stench lies in my home
not in these rich brown cakes”
The portrayal of Sitala as a young woman, romantic at heart, an aspiring artist is brought out over and over in many poems. Especially the following I found deeply appealing:
Kummi Dance (p.20) is a playful rendition, portrayal of the light heart and abandon of a young maiden the grandmother once was, well narrated:
“We call our sweethearts, the ones promised to us,
to fill us with joy, more passion than we know;
soon it will be time to wear our mothers’ wisdom.”
The Art of The Invisible (p.68):
This Sestina reminds the reader, what optimism an artist requires to keep herself going even in the starkest of life situations:
“I know what it is to be invisible,
the rolled-up mat in the corner,
its design of a blue dancing peacock hidden
in the commonplace tan tassels and weave,
“Think of how the perfect pebble remains hidden,
until you stumble upon it by the river,
or you discover the secret rose in the weave
that the carpet maker tried to keep invisible.
“But the goddess who keeps herself invisible,
said in a dream, “Let me hear the ragas you weave.”
Art By The Way (p.30 ) is a brilliant piece of art, work in progress. The singer sees her compositions like a painter’s brush strokes, as wanting to finish her own work, setting aside mundane chores. Venkateswaran’s imagination turns it into a “Still Life.”
“it must have been the woman with magic
who put a god on watch to brush a few strokes
on leaves, the pen’s spout, her life, so imagine
the women who couldn’t manage it all,
let the dye coagulate, the pen stick to the bowl,
the parchment vanish into yellow dust.”
Poems on Sitala’s motherly love are as refreshing. A woman’s joy of motherhood, no matter how oppressive her marriage, always comes forth in various ways; Venkateswaran has astutely captured it in poems such as Ambi practices Tamil Vowels on his slate, Crayons, Joke, Boy-Man.
Like in Crayons (p.33) the poet narrates how a child uses crayon as his instrument to paint his world and the mother, an artist, understands it. In our modern world of excesses, a little boy’s exchanging a single red crayon for green with a classmate to continue his drawing of a mango tree and the windows is hard to imagine. Venkateswaran has made it possible with her keen attention to the beauty of a minimal possession.
In A Particular Shape (p.62), she says rather ruefully,
“Four children and two
miscarriages came quickly.
My mind checked out.
I was only my body
receiving giving.”
The same woman, as mother, finds consolation with the thought of her son grown and gone -
“..but he writes about his climb
and this warms me
makes everything bearable.”
Venkateswaran has given us a window into the political and sociological microcosm of India’s independence movement in this biographical collection through poems such as Diary Entry, 1940, Letter To Sarojini, Margaret Sanger in India, Why I could not Plan my Family, 1960.
Tryst with Death (p.40) is one of my favorites. A clear twist on a historical speech by Nehru, phrased “Tryst with Destiny.” And an incredible ekphrasis and metaphoric lament of Sitala trapped in her homemaker’s role. She finds her equal in the white woman, wife of an infamous Colonial administrator known for his cruelties he committed to Indians. The male dominance is the name of law and order. Sitala yearns for freedom.
“What a brave woman
to go off on a tourist boat without husband
or friend, and that, too, on the unpredictable Ganga!”
Freedom, when it finally arrives for the Singer, upon widowhood, finds her heart’s youthfulness and voice are not gone. A cause for real celebration.
Sighting peacocks in the surrounds of a temple, in Youthful Evening (p.87), Sitala says:
“A song rises within me in raga Vasantha,
spring meter of rejuvenation. My feathers flare.
I walk with a light step, my baldness, my widowhood,
my age, my brown sari,
my lack of jewelry or husband forgotten.”
in “After The Funeral” (p.90) Sitala’s sarcasm laced with expletives almost teen-like, show her coping mechanism to be buoyant in her otherwise dark state:
“I don’t remember the funeral.
I mourn the numb heart.
Dumb fart!
Thirteen days of rites
to help him land in paradise.
Fat prize!”
“Ten years from now I’ll still be
too young to die.
Come, magic spirits,
at least I won’t live a lie.”
Sitala’s freedom after becoming a widow, the official end of her marriage, gives her a tacit permission to live for herself, be an artist again. A reason to rejoice with her own private self she doesn’t hide in the stunning poem, Single, 1947, (p. 86). A striking poem about the horrific tradition of how a just widowed woman is stripped of her hair, bindi (the symbol of her good fortune, a husband!), and her gold ornaments. Venkateswaran gives a courageous voice to the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings in these lines:
“I laugh when no one’s looking.
I can sing again.
They don’t know I’m finally free.”
“As if I was ever tied to these jewels.”
or my dot.
“A widow.
I’m free.
India is also free.”
Diary Entry, 1948, (p. 91) the entire poem, is a sweet tribute to the resurrection of the artist, singer, her lost voice that can’t be suppressed any more.
“..Listen to this Tamil song by Bharatiyar like butter on my tongue. When I sing it, even my body feels supple. Yesterday I sang it to the daughters-in-law and my daughters lounging on their straw mats after lunch. Their smiles lit the room. The men in the other room fell silent.”
The Karmic Cycle (p.96), a letter to her daughters and daughters-in-law,
is an epilogue reconciling the essence of her lifelong suffering. Anger and a ruthless patriarchy’s lasting wounds. She looks for the answer in Hindu epics of Mahabharata and Ramayana, its heroes, villains, and the great sages. But, ultimately, it all boils down to:
“No amount of ritual can redeem
his rage hurricaning me through our eleven children,
some dead, some alive.”
“Witness anger’s filth generation after generation,
imagine the waste, the exhaustion.
As if each male had drunk a potion.”
“..Karma is a hungry dog, fierce,
ready to shred anything, fate that we
must bear and wait for it to pass…”
“When you read this, I will be far.
….Look questions in the eye.
..and remember only songs I have sung.
Learn them, keep them, the rest is dust.”
What a feat for the reader to journey through a microcosm of the last few decades of British India! Venkateswaran deftly draws a parallel between the slavery of India and the suppression of a wife, rarely recognized as an artist in a conservative culture, with no control over her destiny, her abusive husband, her body his property. The Poems unfold Sitala’s life portfolio in her many roles with this poet’s brilliant sensitivity and sensibilities.
“Waiting For The Photograph” (p.17) is the first window into Venkateswaran rediscovering the memory of her grandmother.
This poem’s last line:
“………I kick at seaweed snaking the shore line,
so stark the contrast of memory and imagination”
tells the reader, brace up, this one is the harbinger of what’s ahead.
Venkateswaran’s collection awakens the reader’s sensibilities poem after poem through weaving the ethos of Alleppey’s Singer. The poems contain navarasa, a collective of nine basic emotions coined by Sanskrit aesthetics as love (and beauty), laughter, sorrow, anger, courage, terror, disgust, wonder (surprise), and peace (tranquility). The Singer protagonist continues to strive through all those emotions, but finds it hard to attain peace through her ill-fated life until she becomes a widow. The journey of this series of poems is a rather heartbreaking unearthing of female plight in early twentieth century.
Venkateswaran’s imagined adversities of Sitala’s life is couched in raw emotion and cultural taboos, religious rites, and powerful patriarchy. Her courage to say the unsayable and ability to give the young grandmother a voice is praiseworthy. The sexual traumas that haunt almost to the end of her life makes the reader feel her inevitable pathos. The Singer’s hard-attained freedom, rather late in life, is barely a saving grace. Venkateswaran has done a commendable repertoire of Sitala’s life through the sections that parallel nature’s light-driven cycle. These poems weave a life’s tale between quotidian and the abstract.
The Darkness of female subjugation and helplessness to male dominance is starkly yet deftly brought out in poems like Obliteration (p.49) in which pregnant Sitala is worried about her fetus as her husband continues to hump away and stifle her with lust. Husband, Didn’t I Tell You It Will Be A Boy?, Karma Blues, and Unmasked echo some of those emotions.
Husband (p. 21), is the story of a ruthless man, and his helpless young wife whose pain or anger a patriarchy system refuses to see. A short poem packed with power of its words keeps us on edge. Anger is equated to a cloud of vermin. How she’ll pick apart antennae, filament, wings, snout. It gave me chilling shudder just visualizing it, what Emily Dickinson calls a true poem.
In Karma Blues (p.42), another poem of an abusive husband and the sorrow and humiliation of the wife, the poet evokes the unforgivable impact of lasting wounds in the Blues meter. Repeating phrases and lines reveal the evils of domestic violence, a form of slavery. The last two lines express wisdom that comes through crushing pain:
“This is the law of karma. Was as he blind
To his evil, an incubus, worming into me?
I need to use cunning in the face of karma,
A magician’s shawl for the song of my being.”
In Unmasked (p.50) Venkateswaran vocalizes the female mind through Mahabharata, one of the world’s greatest epic wars and its two foremost female characters, Draupadi and Kunti, how they suffered having to choose between loyalty to themselves, children, and their husbands. Male power and control, like in her grandmother’s life ruled and ruined their happiness. Through the vividness of a masked classical dance of Kathakali, she successfully draws poetic parallels, universally applicable between an epic family feud some 5,000 plus years ago to a woman’s plight in the early twentieth century.
In Ways To Relieve Routine and Oiled Hinges, Mistress, Sex, and Dung Song, Venkateswaran expresses Sitala’s anger and disgust in simple yet scathing words. Her fate feels more like a housemaid than homemaker, and a sense of dejection for her husband’s betrayal jar the reader in a way only a well-accomplished poet can.
Humor and wit in many of these poems, sometimes subtle, laced with irony and sarcasm, sometimes outrageous is endearing like in My Husband Is Ruled By Proverbs (p.46).
They often come to surface (wife’s way of coping with the suffering and injustice) in spite of the sad undertone as in The Chatterbox, Grandfather Clock, and Sitala Responds to the photographer.
Sitala Responds to the photographer (p.37) pokes at the hypocrisy of this event. Any family photographer’s attempt to capture everyone in great spirits is almost an impossible task. Venkateswaran has masterfully brought out emotions the subjects experience in two words, “mere ephemera” which the Singer of Alleppey knows well, like herself composing songs in her head she barely gets an opportunity to pen down. Her young children’s friskiness vs. her own struggle to smile when all she wishes is to frown and walk away from this pretense of a happy family.
In Cow Dung Cakes (p.75), ambivalence is woven with lighthearted approach to a rather repugnant object making it worthy of worship:
“they fuel the stove on which I
make sweet tea fit for the gods
what is merely dung to you is to me
beauty dear friend
the stench lies in my home
not in these rich brown cakes”
The portrayal of Sitala as a young woman, romantic at heart, an aspiring artist is brought out over and over in many poems. Especially the following I found deeply appealing:
Kummi Dance (p.20) is a playful rendition, portrayal of the light heart and abandon of a young maiden the grandmother once was, well narrated:
“We call our sweethearts, the ones promised to us,
to fill us with joy, more passion than we know;
soon it will be time to wear our mothers’ wisdom.”
The Art of The Invisible (p.68):
This Sestina reminds the reader, what optimism an artist requires to keep herself going even in the starkest of life situations:
“I know what it is to be invisible,
the rolled-up mat in the corner,
its design of a blue dancing peacock hidden
in the commonplace tan tassels and weave,
“Think of how the perfect pebble remains hidden,
until you stumble upon it by the river,
or you discover the secret rose in the weave
that the carpet maker tried to keep invisible.
“But the goddess who keeps herself invisible,
said in a dream, “Let me hear the ragas you weave.”
Art By The Way (p.30 ) is a brilliant piece of art, work in progress. The singer sees her compositions like a painter’s brush strokes, as wanting to finish her own work, setting aside mundane chores. Venkateswaran’s imagination turns it into a “Still Life.”
“it must have been the woman with magic
who put a god on watch to brush a few strokes
on leaves, the pen’s spout, her life, so imagine
the women who couldn’t manage it all,
let the dye coagulate, the pen stick to the bowl,
the parchment vanish into yellow dust.”
Poems on Sitala’s motherly love are as refreshing. A woman’s joy of motherhood, no matter how oppressive her marriage, always comes forth in various ways; Venkateswaran has astutely captured it in poems such as Ambi practices Tamil Vowels on his slate, Crayons, Joke, Boy-Man.
Like in Crayons (p.33) the poet narrates how a child uses crayon as his instrument to paint his world and the mother, an artist, understands it. In our modern world of excesses, a little boy’s exchanging a single red crayon for green with a classmate to continue his drawing of a mango tree and the windows is hard to imagine. Venkateswaran has made it possible with her keen attention to the beauty of a minimal possession.
In A Particular Shape (p.62), she says rather ruefully,
“Four children and two
miscarriages came quickly.
My mind checked out.
I was only my body
receiving giving.”
The same woman, as mother, finds consolation with the thought of her son grown and gone -
“..but he writes about his climb
and this warms me
makes everything bearable.”
Venkateswaran has given us a window into the political and sociological microcosm of India’s independence movement in this biographical collection through poems such as Diary Entry, 1940, Letter To Sarojini, Margaret Sanger in India, Why I could not Plan my Family, 1960.
Tryst with Death (p.40) is one of my favorites. A clear twist on a historical speech by Nehru, phrased “Tryst with Destiny.” And an incredible ekphrasis and metaphoric lament of Sitala trapped in her homemaker’s role. She finds her equal in the white woman, wife of an infamous Colonial administrator known for his cruelties he committed to Indians. The male dominance is the name of law and order. Sitala yearns for freedom.
“What a brave woman
to go off on a tourist boat without husband
or friend, and that, too, on the unpredictable Ganga!”
Freedom, when it finally arrives for the Singer, upon widowhood, finds her heart’s youthfulness and voice are not gone. A cause for real celebration.
Sighting peacocks in the surrounds of a temple, in Youthful Evening (p.87), Sitala says:
“A song rises within me in raga Vasantha,
spring meter of rejuvenation. My feathers flare.
I walk with a light step, my baldness, my widowhood,
my age, my brown sari,
my lack of jewelry or husband forgotten.”
in “After The Funeral” (p.90) Sitala’s sarcasm laced with expletives almost teen-like, show her coping mechanism to be buoyant in her otherwise dark state:
“I don’t remember the funeral.
I mourn the numb heart.
Dumb fart!
Thirteen days of rites
to help him land in paradise.
Fat prize!”
“Ten years from now I’ll still be
too young to die.
Come, magic spirits,
at least I won’t live a lie.”
Sitala’s freedom after becoming a widow, the official end of her marriage, gives her a tacit permission to live for herself, be an artist again. A reason to rejoice with her own private self she doesn’t hide in the stunning poem, Single, 1947, (p. 86). A striking poem about the horrific tradition of how a just widowed woman is stripped of her hair, bindi (the symbol of her good fortune, a husband!), and her gold ornaments. Venkateswaran gives a courageous voice to the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings in these lines:
“I laugh when no one’s looking.
I can sing again.
They don’t know I’m finally free.”
“As if I was ever tied to these jewels.”
or my dot.
“A widow.
I’m free.
India is also free.”
Diary Entry, 1948, (p. 91) the entire poem, is a sweet tribute to the resurrection of the artist, singer, her lost voice that can’t be suppressed any more.
“..Listen to this Tamil song by Bharatiyar like butter on my tongue. When I sing it, even my body feels supple. Yesterday I sang it to the daughters-in-law and my daughters lounging on their straw mats after lunch. Their smiles lit the room. The men in the other room fell silent.”
The Karmic Cycle (p.96), a letter to her daughters and daughters-in-law,
is an epilogue reconciling the essence of her lifelong suffering. Anger and a ruthless patriarchy’s lasting wounds. She looks for the answer in Hindu epics of Mahabharata and Ramayana, its heroes, villains, and the great sages. But, ultimately, it all boils down to:
“No amount of ritual can redeem
his rage hurricaning me through our eleven children,
some dead, some alive.”
“Witness anger’s filth generation after generation,
imagine the waste, the exhaustion.
As if each male had drunk a potion.”
“..Karma is a hungry dog, fierce,
ready to shred anything, fate that we
must bear and wait for it to pass…”
“When you read this, I will be far.
….Look questions in the eye.
..and remember only songs I have sung.
Learn them, keep them, the rest is dust.”
