Much of the modern Tamil poetry is written by middle class professions, mostly Tamil pundits or other lowly job holders. You don’t have a Tagore today. Or there are poets as revolutionaries either!  It is a laid-back, confused society! Our revolution talk seems to be mere bravado!  Either out of inferiority complex, or mere helplessness!

I have done a brief survey of the current poetry writers.  There are some energetic lines here and there.  On the whole, I feel a let down.  There is no serious poetry being written, lyrical or metaphysical.  This is a great disappointment for me, coming late into the field and fired with a great deal of enthusiasm and expectations.  In one or two literary meets I arranged in recent times, what I find is much superficiality.  The seriousness I seek is missing.  For me, writing is a serious pursuit and the climate in Tamil Nadu seems just nor right now!

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Tamil writers and scholars would be driven to silence if you ask them why no major literary prizes are coming to their literature!  I have been asking these questions lately in many forums.  I am surprised such thoughts haven’t come to the Tamil minds.  They are all so self-absorbed, operating in many narrow factions and nursing their own petty egos.   The very political environment helps the average writer or poet to settle down comfortably into this narrow groove.

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We live in a world where English had become a much powerful force and in the globalised world, translations of our literature into English assume critical importance.  How to expose the modern Tamil literature and poetry in particular to the international audience. We have to promote translation projects, run translation courses in our language departments, comparative literature and languages have to take the place of traditional English departments.

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Today, there are many complex issues that impact on modern man Prof.Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winner for economics, a friend from my Santiniketan days had explored the theme of human freedom in many of his books.  Sen, in my opinion, had taken our knowledge of human freedoms to new heights.  There are also the positive and negative freedoms as expounded by the late Isiah Berlin.  These are critical issues for our life today, for our democratic society.

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I often ask friends and scholars: what chance we have to make this century an opportunity for Tamil Nadu?  Tamil literature? Answers vary.   The genuine Dravidian culture and civilization can be promoted to world level only by transforming the Tamil society into a vibrant enlightened society. 

I feel there is no other way except to promote through good, governance, a new vision for creating a modern Tamil society and political culture.  There is much platform talk but no serious research on Bharati’s poetical evolution, for instance, we don’t have any body of critical writing on our poets as there are on English poets. 

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Somehow, I feel the Tamil intellectuals; I mean the Tamil scholars, had never studied the intellectual growth of Tamil society in the past 300 years.   In the way I see it. Why three hundred years?  I take this period roughly correspond with the rise of European Enlightenment, starting with the Newtonian revolution in physical sciences and the growth of reason in modern discourse in all branches of life, politics, society and philosophy.  The French Revolution and the thoughts and ideas that preceded the same, the thoughts of French philosophers, men like Rousseau and Voltaire and the growth of the ideas of freedoms and the rights of modern man. 

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What I have collected in the volume here as my latest offering is to give shape to my thoughts as experienced over a long period of living my life against so many odds.

After I finished writing my autobiography I imagined I had expressed all my thoughts or nuances of my feelings in Tamil prose.  Though many of my Tamil literary acquaintances and friends praised generously my prose style and  my expositions of my beliefs, philosophies and convictions, there was this feeling inside me:  I haven’t told all I wanted to say!  Not in a manner I wanted to express my inner self.  Tamil is a classical language and the current style of writing Tamil prose, in my opinion, is not well advanced by international standards as to express all thoughts in a subtle and sophisticated style.  I had listed the chapters of the Twentieth Century Poetry just to give an idea of the scope of the poetical universe the English reading public is acquainted with and what have we got in Tamil poetry today?

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I was reading off and on a number of Indian poets writing in English and a few of them had become my close friends over the years.  Besides Dom Moraes, I got to know rather well Kamala Das, the poetess who writes poetry in English and stories in Malayalam and R.Parthasarathy during his stint with the OUP in Chennai during the Seventies.  In fact, even now I read R.P. and get moved by some memorable lines.

A.K.Ramanujan, though I don’t know him personally, I had listened to him, read him much and had talked with his many friends.  He is perhaps, the highly gifted poet and translator and Tamils feel elated when they read his translations of the Tamil classical poems.  He had lifted Tamil classical poetry’s universal reach for the first time.  Even in India there is a realization that in the all India literary context, classical Tamil can lay claim to an original poetical tradition, not matched by the great body of Sanskrit literature.  So, Ramanujan would remain a milestone in the contemporary world literary scene.

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Just now I was reading through the A Verse Autobiography, by John Betjeman “Summoned by Bells”, published when I was in Oxford in 1960.  At that time I didn’t notice it though there was much debate about its literary quality.  Now in a new edition and reissued now and available in India, this verse autobiography brought me back much of my Oxford days!  Many of the scenes and sights bring back the Oxford atmosphere evocatively!

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Back in India, I chose for what seemed heroic and thus tried  my hand in several projects, some landed me in trouble and drove me into obscurity, some, daring and untried also lifted me above the ordinary and mundane and had given me the “spirits of the air”, to quote Shelley.  If I can quote a European poet, “I hated what was easy”.  Poetry reading was always an interest in all these years.   As I was writing this piece I lay my hands, quite unexpectedly, on a new collection of poems across the globe.  “The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, 1996, 654 pages, covers almost the whole geographical extent of the globe, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Japan, Latin America, Carribean, Russia and Africa.  Some 80 major poets! Some of whom are Nobel Prize winners as well as names known throughout the world wherever poetry is discussed seriously.

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