Hindutva seeks to appropriate Mahakavi Kumaran Asan: Family calls it vicious propaganda

In a small thatched house in the village of Thonnakkal in Kerala where he spent the last few years of his life, the great poet Kumaran Asan wrote Duravastha, a long anti-caste poem that would a hundred years later be given a new, vile spin. Set against the Mappila Rebellion of 1921, Duravastha told the story of a Brahmin woman called Savithri escaping the riots and finding an abode with a Dalit man. But in the past few years, Hindutva activists have been spreading a narrative that the poem was proof of Asan's ‘Hindutva vision’, when all his life the poet, who was from the lowered Ezhava caste himself, had staunchly fought the caste system and came to be known as a social reformer. The Sangh has also been claiming that Asan was murdered by “Muslim terrorists”, when in fact the great poet had drowned after his boat capsized in River Pallana near Haripad in the winter of 1924. TNM spoke to P Vijaya Kumar, Asan's grandson and retired English professor, who calls this propaganda a “toxic and vicious” myth. .A few years ago, Vijaya Kumar read these claims as an eight-column newspaper story — on the Bharatiya Janata Party’s mouthpiece Janmabhumi. ‘Asan was murdered, Circumstantial Evidence,’ said the headline. He came across the story again last year, when upon persuasion he bought a book called Hinduthwam Urappicha Kumaranasan (Kumaran Asan who fortified Hindutva). . Asan was one among the three Malayalam poets, along with Vallathol Narayana Menon and Ulloor S Parameswara Iyer, who later came to be known as the ‘modern triumvirate’ of Malayalam poetry. He was also among the handful of poets to earn the label of ‘maha kavi’ in the last century, when he had not penned a ‘maha kavyam’ but written kanda kaavyams (long poems) that are fondly quoted to this day. This year marked the hundredth anniversary of his tragic passing at the age of 52. The day he died, on January 16, 1924, he was travelling on business from Kollam to Ernakulam. But after 2020, a myth began to spread that Asan was murdered, says Vijaya Kumar. “This is the attempt by a set of partisans to hijack Asan’s life and work to push through an agenda shaped by the compulsions of contemporary politics. As India has abandoned a secular approach for a theocratic one and everything is looked at through the distorting prism of religion, the image of a different Asan, an aggressive defender of one religion, is taking shape,” he says. In the book Hinduthwam Urappicha Kumaranasan, the author Ramachandran claims that Asan was some kind of Hindu missionary and his only aim was to establish Hinduism, because of which Muslims killed him. This view, Vijaya Kumar says, has little academic backing. “But self-styled historians and cultural critics make false and distorting assertions that can, and do, mislead people, particularly the young.”. Some of these conspiracy theories also bring up Duravastha, set against the backdrop of the Mappila Rebellion, a Muslim uprising against the British and feudal landlords during the Khilafat movement. At the time, members of the Muslim community had objected to certain parts in the poem, and approached Asan with their concerns. Asan is believed to have addressed their concerns and offered an explanation. Three years ago, on the 100th anniversary of the rebellion, Sangh Parivar workers reprinted a copy of the long poem, claiming that it depicted what the Hindus went through during the riots. They further insinuated that the poem reflected the thoughts of Sree Narayana Guru, spiritual leader and social reformer of the time. Asan had long been a disciple of Narayana Guru, joining him as a teenager and earning the name ‘Chinnaswamy’ (Little Swamy). . It is ironic that the Hindutva forces should make such a claim about Narayana Guru, who had famously worded the line: “one caste, one religion, one god for all human beings.” He, with Asan and Dr Palpu — another social reformer of the time — did much for the upliftment of the lowered castes at the time. Dr Palpu, who was also born into the oppressed Ezhava caste like Asan and Narayana Guru, had to go to Madras to study medicine and afterward to Mysore to practise it. Historian Robin Jeffrey writes in his book The Decline of Nair Dominance that Ezhavas, “the largest single category among the polluting castes,” amounted to about 15% of the total population of Travancore, and were forbidden among many things, entrance to public offices. Asan too could not get the education he desired in his hometown, Kayikkara, in Thiruvananthapuram district. He picked up the basics and showed an interest in Sanskrit, tutoring under a neighbourhood scholar Kochuraman Vaidyar. He attended a government school, till he was 14, but was not allowed to attend one where English was taught, Vijaya Kumar says. Asan also joined this school as a teacher but had to discontinue, being too young for the post. . His dreams to study more were fulfilled when he, with the help of Dr Palpu, went to Bangalore to study Sanskrit and chose legal science as his elective, while also picking up English. An infection of plague in the city led Asan to leave Bangalore after three years, before he could write his final exam. He had a short stint in Madras, studying Sanskrit under a guru, before moving to Calcutta to study further. “This was a most crucial period in his life. He spent close to three years in Calcutta, between 1898 and 1900. It had a big impact on his thinking,” Vijaya Kumar says..Fascist ideologies seek to rewrite and distort our actual histories, resorting to conspiracy theories to normalise their politics. Support independent journalism for the truth's sake. Subscribe to TNM.. Both Asan and Dr Palpu, Vijaya Kumar believes, were influenced by the work of Booker T Washington. The African American leader, who after being born into slavery before the Emancipation of 1863, had worked for the upliftment of Black slaves in the US through technical education and the idea of self-help. In Kerala, Sree Narayana Guru, Asan, and Dr Palpu together worked on similar lines for the upliftment of the lowered castes, making them aware of the freedoms they should have, among other things. “If today the Malayali has a place as a global citizen, it is largely owing to this generation of reformers and pioneers,” Vijaya Kumar says, adding, “A century after the death of Kumaran Asan, when I look back on his life, I am filled with pride and joy. Pride at what he had helped achieve and joy that this is now a widely acknowledged fact.”. Asan’s opposition to the caste system came through strongly in several of his works, including Duravastha and Chandalabhikshuki. In Chandalabhikshuki, a long poem about a young woman of lowered caste in awe of a disciple of Lord Buddha, he shuns the caste system in no delicate terms. In the tale, “some Brahmins” are shown to resent the woman, Matangi, for staying in the convent with the women followers of the Buddha like an equal. Speaking of tradition and caste, much in the same line as today’s conservatives, they get the king to approach the Buddha. To the king and his coterie, the Buddha says: Caste is but humbug, O Prince!The angry beast would fightEven against the echo of its own cry.Whence is the twice-born one, the Brahmin born?Is it from the shoot of a plant or from the cloud?Or is it from the yogi’s sacrificial fire?Is his caste inborn in his blood, his bone, his marrow?Is the Chandali’s untouchable body infertile for the Brahmin’s seed?Is it born with him,The Brahmin’s sacred thread, his caste mark, and his tuft of hair?Do the Brahmins get learning without instruction?Is it not the noble hand of karma, the hand of fate that makesEvery man, who like every worm, is born to die.. And so on it goes, in a translation of the poem by G Kumara Pillai, poet and English professor. It is a gross misinterpretation of all that he represented to call such an anti-caste poet as Asan a proponent of Hindutva, by any account. “It is difficult to fight this slow flood of lies and half-truths as religiously affiliated groups jostle for political power and the fruits of being in power. The din these people create drowns the voices of reason and moderation,” Vijaya Kumar says. . In 1971, for Asan’s hundredth birth anniversary, his son Prabhakaran (Vijaya Kumar’s father) helped bring out a book Ormakalile Asan, speaking to people who knew the poet when he was alive. Vijaya Kumar remembers the visit and recollections of a man called Raman, who used to do odd jobs around Asan’s house when he was a young boy. “He used to call Asan ‘thampuran’ (lord) as was the custom of the time. Kumaran Asan told him not to call him thampuran but Asan. He was called Asan because he worked as a teacher, otherwise he was just Kumaran.” The book was published by the Kumaran Asan Memorial, established by the Kerala government after acquiring Asan’s house in Thonnakkal in 1958. The poet’s fights against casteism were not done through protests but petitions. Kumaran Asan used a variety of methods to move the government – petitioning, writing articles and publishing editorials, speaking at meetings, moving resolutions at the legislative assembly (he was elected to the Sree Moolam Praja Sabha, an elected legislature, in 1913), meeting important officials and persuading them, and lobbying influential people among them. There is an incident recounted in his biographies about Asan’s experience at a guest house in Kollam, where when he visited with his family, he was denied a room. “Asan immediately wrote a petition to the man supervising the guest house, saying this was illegal. It was ordered that Asan be given a room and the manager had to grudgingly allot him one. He told his wife that if ever his son (at the time only the elder child Sudhakaran was born) wanted to fight the system, don't stop them but ask them to do it through moderate means,” Vijaya Kumar says.. Marriage happened late in Asan’s life, and that can seem surprising given the number of romantic poems he had written — Nalini, Leela, Duravastha. His work Karuna, which tells the story of a sex worker named Vasavadatta and her attraction towards Upagupta, a disciple of the Buddha, is believed to be the inspiration for Chandalabhikshuki. In Chinthavishtayaya Seetha, he had a woman protagonist musing about life. But Vijaya Kumar says that his grandfather should not be reduced to a romantic poet, for he was a smart and practical businessman as well. Asan ran a tile factory in Aluva and travelled frequently for its operations. He also bought a plot of land in Aluva with some of his friends for business, but later donated it to Sree Narayana Guru (which is now called the Adwaithasramam). In 1905, Asan, as secretary of the Sree Narayana Paripalana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP), held what is possibly the first industrial exhibition in Kerala. He was also the founder-editor of its literary journal Vivekodayam.. And he read, in plenty. His English professor grandson tells you how Asan was inspired a lot by western poetry, the romantics, and especially by Shelley. He holds proof in the precious collection of Asan’s books he has kept safely — among them a copy of A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry: Selected and Arranged by Charles Mackay, LL.D. But more precious for Vijaya Kumar is Asan’s copy of Gundert’s Dictionary, a first edition from 1872. All that romanticism, all that love poetry (even his Veenapoovu about a fallen flower is rich in romance), and Kumaran Asan did not marry till he was 45. Bhanumathi was his student, daughter of another Kumaran, a document-writer, whom Asan knew from working together in the SNDP. She was only 18 at the time of their marriage. They lived together for seven years, the last of these in a house that Asan built in the middle of a 20 acre compound in Thonnakkal. Vijaya Kumar’s father, the second son, was born in this house. The compound, handed over to the government in 1958 to be retained as a memorial, has however changed in many ways much to the family’s chagrin, Vijaya Kumar says. He advises others with such irreplaceable memorabilia, never to hand it over to the cultural department. . In saluting Asan, he says, we salute a couple of generations of idealistic and pragmatic Malayalis. “Let us salute them with enthusiasm. They were led, most of the time, by love and knowledge. That people can be motivated by love and can use knowledge to achieve progress is an idea that is nearly incomprehensible in today’s world. Perhaps someone will try to change that.” .Disinformation is on the rise, and we can counter it with independent journalism that fact-checks, provides informed commentary, and shares diverse views. Subscribe to TNM and empower us in our pursuit of the truth.