A BRIEF REPORT

Ayyappa Paniker Foundation celebrated the birth anniversary of the poet in a befitting manner on 20 September, 2009. Sitakant Mahapatra, the Jnanpith award- winning poet, translator,social anthropologist and a good friend of Dr. Paniker delivered the third Ayyappa Paniker Memorial Lecture at the V.J.T. Hall, Thiruvananthapuram before a packed  audience of writers, poetry lovers, Paniker’s disciples and friends. It may be recalled here that the two earlier lectures had been delivered respectively by Dilip Chitre and Ashok Vajpeyi.

Remembering the Poet

K.Satchidanandan, the President of the Foundation led the speaker to the dias and introduced him to the audience. He recalled that Ayyappa Paniker, though unfortunately misrepresented by some critics  as an individualist was in fact a poet of great social concern even while upholding the dignity of the individual. It is wrong to qualify him as an individualist as poetry to him had been a multidimensional engagement with reality and not an expression of a readymade ‘self’. He spoke in many voices , had various styles and employed diverse masks in his poetry-as lover, philosopher, traveller, clown, singer, social critic  and a lover of nature, thus producing a series of subjects rather than a single unified subject in his oeuvre as a poet.He employed traditional myths and archetypes chiefly to present a contemporary experience or to provide a dream or offer a warning to the present. He constantly hurt the false seriousness of the romantics through his black humour and the feeling of levity he conveyed in his lighter verses. He revived forgotten meters and introduced new forms like the cartoon poem and the sequence poem in Malayalam. He was critical of oppression in all its forms as proved by his poems written during the Emergency. He was dismissive of hypocrisy and vanity of every kind and expressed great truths through the juxtaposition of opposites.He was equally inventive as a critic and did radical re-readings of significant texts from C.V. Raman Pillai’s Ramaraja Bahadur  to Thakazhi’s Kayar and from Ezhuthachan’s Adhyatma Ramayana  and Kumaran Asan’s Duravasta to the plays of CJThomas and CNSreekantan Nair. In short his vision was quintessentially democratic.Satchidanandan then introduced Sitakant Mahapatra as a pioneer of modern poetry in Oriya besides being a translator of world poetry and tribal poetry and an outstanding social anthropologist and cultural administrator.

Discovering Brahma in the Market Place

Sitakant Mahapatra in the preamble to his speech fondly recalled his association with Ayyappa Paniker and the plans they had for collaborative projects. He remembered how Dr. Paniker while being a distinguished poet, was also a formidable  scholar and critic with wide-ranging interests that included theatre and cinema. He illustrated Paniker’s inherent strength, sense of irony, urbanity and metaphysical enquiry as a poet quoting verses from his “Days, Nights”. He qualified  Paniker as  the Zorba of Thiruvananthapuram on the shores of twilight.

The central  theme of the speech Sitakant Mahapatra delivered in memory of Ayyappa Paniker was  “ Poetry’s Shrinking Space: Search for a Suggestive Magic”. He said it is a trying time for poetry. The dark forces of our time are trying to order our dreams and put to sleep human imagination, creating mistrust for any scent of mystery. He echoed Holderlin’s desperate cry, “ In such spiritles times, why be a poet at all?”

Poetry, he said, has always expressed the perpetual tension between the self and the other. The self has various layers from the gross to the sublime. While the saints may transcend the gross, the poet  cannot get away from any of them as all merge into the crucible of his own self. This self however is no closed monad; the world outside constantly impinges on it. So the poet’s self is not hermetic; it also involves others. Rationalism was an indictment of intuition and an exclusive emphasis on the self; it despised man’s capacity to dream; but the poets , painters and philosophers of our time reacted to rationalism and found, like Rimbaud, that ‘the delicate flower of truth cannot stand the analysis of logic and cognitive semantics’. We also learnt of the complexity of the structure of the human mind from psychology and anthropology. They all helped shape the intellectual climate of our time.

While poetry cannot be experience in the raw and the poet cannot do sloganeering, a true poet is at the same time in the room and and on the street.There are no more walls. But the poet invests words with a magic seldom possessed by the language of utilitarian communiacation. This magic comes from linguistic nuances, associations and layers of meaning. The poet is a visionary even while being the man next door. His involvement  with other selves is inbuilt in his vision. This is what makes all poetry  authentically individual and yet poignantly universal. An Oriya saying claims that Brahma cannot be known in the market place; but the poet today is destined to seek and find his Brahma by meditating in the market place. The speaker quoted Baudelaire: “The modern conception of art is to create suggestive magic including at the same time object and subject, the world outside and the artist himself.”

The Festival: Visualising Poetry

The Memorial Lecture  was followed by an audio-visual presentation of Ayyappa paniker’s poetry titled “Utsavam” (Festival) co-ordinated by Dominic J. Kottoor. The programme was ably introduced by Priyadas Mangalath, Secretay of the Ayyappa paniker Foundation who spoke of the  high esteem in which people continue to hold Dr. Paniker. He asserted that Paniker was a people’s poet and that was at the core of the presentation to follow.

Rajeev ONV, Dr. Raja Warrier and Regatta Girija were the chief forces behind the presentations made by the students of University College and the Centre for Visual Performing Arts, Trivandrum.The poems were at times sung in a chorus (eg, Pookkatirikkan Enikkavathille-I Cannot Help Blossomig, a piece from Pakalukal, Ratrikal-Days, Nights), and at other times presentd as dances  (Gopikadandakam;  Priyatame, Prabhatame). The acting techniques of Koodiyattam were deployed by Margi Madhu in presenting an episode from Gotrayanam to great effect.  There were also theatrical presentations of poems like Maranakkurippu (The Epitaph), Ente Bhittimel ( On My Wall), Gandhiji Pathicha Moonnu Pathangal ( The Three Lessons Gandhi Learnt) and Kazhutha( The Donkey).The spectacular visual version of the poem on the temple festival, Utsavam, opened and closed the presentation.The whole event won great appreciation from the discriminating spectators.