Tinai 1 (by Nirmaldasan and Nirmal Selvamony, July 2001)
-- Reviewed in the Journalism Online newsletter (August, 2001)
 by Dwight Atkinson, Temple University, Japan (dwightatki@aol.com) --


Tinai, a new journal issued by two writers associated with the Madras 
Christian College in Chennai, India, calls itself a literary 
miscellany. If so, then Tinai is both "literary" and "miscellany" of 
a different order.

This is largely because tinai emphasizes definite themes and "master 
images," and across a range of topics extending substantially beyond 
what is conventionally understood as "literary." In terms of the 
former, the forces and power of nature, and the centrality of nature 
in the wholeness that could characterize the lives of human beings, 
is a major focus in tinai. In this sense it seems to take on the 19th-
century romantic project of repairing the rift between humans and 
their environment by resituating them more deeply and organically 
within it, and by using much the same tools -- the transformative 
power of poetry. At times, the authors of tinai also recall those 
20th-century romantics, the American Nature Poets and their cousins 
the Beats, who so influenced the youth of the 1960s. Thus, the 
authors of tinai would be fully in agreement with perhaps the best-
known lines in that period:

The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and 
things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man apart 
from that/or else you will share man's pitiful confusions, or drown 
in despair when his days darken. (Robinson Jeffers)

In terms of the range of topics treated beyond the traditionally 
literary in tinai, linguistics, ecology, and spirituality are all 
considered -- once again with emphasis on the organic connections 
among persons, environment, language and spirit, rather than the 
differences.

Tinai's opening essay, "Tamil Oikopoetics" by Nirmal Selvamony, is a 
manifesto of sorts, but a gentle one. It begins by explaining the 
ancient Greek concept of "oikos," which Selvamony sees as a close 
equivalent to the Tamil tinai -- hence the name of the journal. Oikos 
integrates human lives into the larger world of family, natural 
environment, economic exchange, spirituality, art, and communication. 
Selvamony traces human social development through three historical 
phases of "oikic" relationship -- a tribal/communal phase; a 
hierarchical/political phase; and an anarchic/economic phase. The 
most desirable of these, for Selvamony, is clearly the first, with 
its organic integration of humans into their natural, social, and 
spiritual environments. Subsequent periods seem to point basically 
downhill, though Selvamony focusses on the critical eco-consciousness 
of recent Tamil poetry as a possible opening here.

One of the things I liked best about Selvamony's essay is how, in the 
latter going, the author's voice came increasingly into dialogue with 
that of modern Tamil eco-poetry (here presented in Selvamony's own 
English translations). By the end of the essay, one had the distinct 
impression that a reversal had taken place -- whereas Selvamony began 
by writing in an authorial voice about the place of the oikos in 
Tamil poetry, by the end of the essay Tamil poetry itself was talking 
about the oikos (of course still under Selvamony's direction, but in 
a very different voice). The author thus became the animator of other 
voices, which proceeded to chant in progressively more authoritative 
terms as the essay went on, and the prose shaded into poetry, giving 
more substance to the theme of integration foregrounded throughout 
the journal.

This sequential dynamic fittingly prefaces the next set of writings 
to appear in tinai, one shorter and one longer poem by Nirmaldasan, 
the second contributor to the journal.

"The River Narmada" celebrates the natural power of India's most 
famous dammed river -- both in its more destructive (because humanly 
engineered) and more productive, spiritual aspects. That the poem 
ends on a positive note -- and in fact that both parts of the poem 
conclude with images of the river re-entering a larger body of water -
- is suggestive of the redemptive possibilities of the programme that 
Selvamony hints at in his opening essay.

Nirmaldasan's poetic technique deserves comment. Its intricate 
prosody and A-B-A-B rhyme scheme, combined with certain diction and 
word order choices that might have been conventional at the beginning 
of the last century, seem consciously anachronistic. Thus:

The wind sighs o'er the river tame,
Gathering clouds darken the skies;
But is a serpent ever tame?--
A snake hisses but never sighs.

This approach first struck me as quaint -- it was hard, at first 
glance, to take Nirmaldasan's poetry seriously. On further 
reflection, however, this strategy of separation from the language of 
everyday life fits closely with Selvamony's emphasis on the 
ritualistic nature of verse in ancient Tamil poetry, as well as the 
Romantic's own poetics. In fact, as both Selvamony and Nirmaldasan 
make clear, though in quite different ways, verse as a function of 
spirituality suggests the melding of art with other human yearnings 
and practices in the integrated oikos they promote.

Nirmaldasan's second poem, "Pastures Green," is subtitled "A 
companion to The Waste Land." In fact, it seems to be more of a 
rejoinder to Eliot's famous poem -- emphasizing wholeness, individual 
fortitude, and action where Eliot focussed on fragmentation, failure, 
and paralyzed inertia. Thus, whereas "The Waste Land" begins with 
stark images of a hopeless and forbidding landscape, the first 
section of "Pastures Green" is entitled "The Phoenix," the concluding 
line of which is "You change and you change the world."

The prosody of this poem is not as neo-traditional as the first -- it 
is heptasyllabic blank verse, in which each syllable is equally 
stressed, as the poet tells us in his extensive notes. The result is 
a more natural-sounding, smooth-flowing verse, which stands in stark 
contrast to Eliot's own broken prosody in "The Waste Land." This 
difference is taken up in the commentary which follows the poem, 
written by Selvamony. There, he condemns Eliot's free verse as "a 
pseudo-literary form," arguing that it violates the very conventions 
that make poetry possible. As previously, this account includes 
interesting material on Tamil poetics.

The next contribution to tinai is an essay by Selvamony 
entitled "Moli: The Personaic Nature of Language." This essay 
presents real challenges to the western-trained linguist, reaching 
back as it does to the rich indigenous traditions of Indian grammar. 
In fact, some of the major concepts of modern Euro-American 
linguistics are derived from this tradition, but their subsequent 
development in different directions makes them doubtful starting 
points for an understanding of Selvamony's essay.

Having hinted at my own constraints on understanding this essay, let 
me make a few critical points about it: 1) The "person" that stands 
at the center of Selvamony's theory of language is almost wholly a 
social person -- reduced to social roles like mother or guru, speaker 
or listener. It seems to me that a more fully integrative theory of 
the kind Selvamony is aiming for would also have to take the non-
social individual into account, or at least the subjective experience 
of being an individual; 2) I find Selvamony's attempt to combine his 
own more complex contextual view of language (e.g., "Meaning is never 
contained in the verbal body emanating from the speaker. Rather, it 
is a point where the nature of the person, world, and the sacred 
converge," pp. 28-9) and the traditional Indian grammarian's possibly 
more categorical and constrained view (e.g., "Basically, there are 
only two members in any language field, the speaker and the 
listener," p. 32) to be at odds. I wonder, therefore, if returning 
directly to the traditional texts at all (as opposed to using them as 
one of an array of enabling "thinking tools" -- Selvamony also uses 
Saussure and western structuralism to his advantage in this regard) 
is beneficial; 3) Some of Selvamony's statements about language 
strike me as questionable and perhaps straightforwardly falsifiable. 
For instance, regarding his statement, "Whatever one 'says' about 
oneself is always in terms of another" (p. 32), what about the 
utterance "Ouch!" in response to a twinge of a nerve or muscle 
(examples of this kind can be multipled endlessly). Or consider an 
example used to argue that language cannot be both symbol and 
metaphor system at the same time (p. 27): Saying of a man that "he is 
a lion." It seems to me that both symbol system and metaphor system 
are at work here -- we must have access to both the denotative 
reference (to the furry, fearless, four-legged beast) and the 
connotative reference (that the man referred to shares certain 
conventionally associated qualities with said beast). Otherwise, the 
word "lion" in the utterance in question -- being dissociable from 
its denotative meaning -- would signify something wholly different.

But this is perhaps to quibble -- I found reading Selvamony's essay a 
stimulating and educational experience.

I will give less space to the other contents of tinai, but only 
because my own space contraints as a reviewer are in danger of being 
violated. Nirmaldasan's study of his composing processes in the 
writing of a parody on Blake's "The Tyger" is an interesting auto-
analysis, although -- as he forthrightly acknowledges -- a quite 
speculative one. His rendering "into meter" of Eliot's "The Journey 
of the Magi" continues themes suggested earlier in his own 
poetic "companion" to "The Wasteland," and Selvamony's negative 
evaluation of Eliot's free verse. Finally, Nirmaldasan's "An Epistle" 
is a no-holds-barred celebration of romantic themes and images of the 
individual rejuvenated in nature, though beautifully adapted to the 
Indian context. It also most appropriately ends the first issue of 
this promising new journal on a hopeful note, and one sounding forth 
its master-theme of a world where humankind, poetry, language, and 
nature are once again integrated.




A REJOINDER
by Dr. Nirmal Selvamony
(selvamony@sathyam.net.in)

-- appeared in the Journalism Online newsletter (September 2001)--

Mr. Atkinson has three comments on my essay `Moli' and I shall
comment on each of them in the order of appearance in his review
(appeared in the August issue of the Journalism Online newsletter).

1. Concept of person: The human person is defined by the oikos of
which (s)he is a part. I do not conceive of an oikos which is a sum
of a few individuals brought together in some relationship. I do
conceive of an oikos which is primordial, the context where human
personhood manifests. To repeat, the oikos is a nexus of natural and
cultural phenomena, the humans and the spirit beings. If so, there is
no space outside of this where the human can find herself/himself.
Having said that this is the primordial, proper context for humans, I
would add that to the extent a human disorients herself/himself to
the oikos, the particular human jeopardises her/his identity as
human. Such disorientation -- forms of disorientation -- may be
possible in the cases of psychological disorder or other types of
dysfunction. Mr. Atkinson's `non-social individual' obviously does
not derive an oikic approach to human identity (shall I say,
philosophical anthropology), but from a western (specifically,
Cartesian) conception of human identity. In the Kuhnian sense, Mr.
Atkinson and I are referring to two different paradigms of
philosophical anthropology.

2. Incompatibility between Tolkappiyar's and my view of language: Mr.
Atkinson presumes that Tolkappiyar's view postulates only two basic
members in a language field. Perhaps it is necessary to absolve
Tolkappiyar of the need to assume responsibility of the theory of
language proposed in my essay. If there is anybody who should be held
responsible for it, it should be I. However, this does not mean that
my theory cannot be read as one of the interpretations of the views
on language found in Tolkappiyam. Further, Tolkappiyar does not say
that there are basically two members of a language field. I did.
Tolkappiyar speaks of three personae -- tanmai (first person),
munnilai (second person) and patarkkai (third person). These three, I
think, could be reduced to two basic entities -- speaker and
listener. Again, the question of benefit does not arise at all, for,
my own theory emerges from the triadic personae identified in early
Tamil grammatical tradition. No Tolkappiyam, no personaic theory of
language.

3. All language utterances involve reference to an other: Mr.
Atkinson wonders if interjections cannot be exceptions to this rule.
Isn't interjection also a form of speech? Earle defined it as a form
of speech which is articulate and symbolic but not grammatical (The
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 1). If so, it is uttered by
tanmai, a persona which cannot be thought of outside a language field
consisting of the other members as well. I repeat, munnilai is the
axiomatic listener in all language events including the event of
interjection produced by tanmai.

4. Symbol and metaphor: Another point Mr. Atkinson finds falsifiable
is my supposed statement "language cannot be both symbol and metaphor
system at the same time." He claims that I have made this statement
on page 27 (Tinai 1) but I could not find it there. If he refers to
my claim that language cannot be viewed merely as a symbolic system
or as a metaphorical system, I should admit to making such a claim. I
have not denied symbolic or metaphoric traits in language. All I am
saying is that these two figures do not adequately represent the
whole of human language. Most linguists see language as symbol
system. This view derives from a philosophical anthropology which
conceives of human as an individual who stands over against the world
(instead of standing in a primordial relation) producing symbols like
the way (s)he produces tools. Like her/his tools, the symbols exist
as objects independently, abstracted from the world and humans. Since
language is a mode of human being and doing, it cannot be thought of
in such an abstract, objective manner. If we need to affirm the
representational nature of language, the term `persona' is quite
adequate to do it and it scores over the term `symbol' retaining the
ontic dimension of humans in a way the term `symbol' does not.

A word about Mr. Atkinson's use of the terms symbol and metaphor.
Somehow he equates symbol with denotation and metaphor with
connotation. Of this peculiar equation I am certainly not guilty.

Lastly, I shall be the most ungrateful human if I do not thank Mr.
Atkinson for initiating a debate on the thesis I have laid down. I am
sure this debate is not wholly a quibble.