Tamil Esthetic Tradition in a Foreign Genre: A Study of Jeyamohan’s Kaadu (2003)

Abstract

In the second half of the twentieth century, the early modernist writers in Tamil, whose enthusiasm for the newly imported genre of the novel occupied most of their creative endeavors, felt the need to outgrow the confinements of their own literary tradition. However, after many decades of irreconcilable tensions with tradition, a new generation of novelists, in the last decade of the century, began to reengage with traditional esthetics through the genre of the novel itself. The advent of postmodernism into the Tamil literary scene prepared the ground for this new turn in the esthetics of Tamil writing. This paper argues that the result of this new engagement is a synthesis of traditional esthetic systems and the supposedly foreign literary genre, the novel. The argument is exemplified through a detailed analysis of a Tamil novel titled Kaadu (2003), written by Jeyamohan. Though the novel engages with modern Tamil life, it inherits multiple esthetic frameworks from the extensive Tamil literary tradition, including ancient Sangam poetics, bhakti literature, and different forms of folklore. It strings together these temporally distanced esthetic models on its narrative canvas through a multi-layered narrative structure. The analysis will show how the protagonist Giritharan’s perception of the world is mediated and shaped by different esthetic frameworks and how the novel, through a synthesis of those oppositional frameworks, creates a vision of life that belongs neither to the Tamil tradition nor to the Western esthetic models.