Vaadivasal Novel Pdf
Demeter Exekutor
Originally published in 1949, Vaadivaasal is considered a modern literary classic in Tamil. It describes the events of an afternoon in Periyapatti, a village in southern Tamil Nadu, where a yearly jallikattu contest involving the traditional sport of bull-taming is about to begin.
At that fragile moment, I was forced to ponder these questions: Who is beast? Who is man? And who is avenging whom? By the time the story barreled to its inevitable finale, the answers to my questions were crystal clear.
Over twenty years ago, I was in a class devoted to studying American writer Ernest Hemingway\u2019s craft in The Sun Also Rises, the 1926 novel in which he portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Ferm\u00EDn in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. I recall that I enjoyed neither the book nor the class. Hemingway\u2019s terse writing, my immaturity as a reader, then, to appreciate his craft, and my inadequate grasp of all the elements that led to great storytelling contributed to my inability to appreciate both the writer and the teacher.
That book and that experience returned to me this past week even as I began reading C. S. Chellappa\u2019s Vaadivaasal (Arena) translated from the Tamil by N. Kalyan Raman. Considering how much I enjoyed Vaadivaasal I realized how, so often, reading is as much about the work itself as it is about the person reading the work at a particular moment in his or her life.
In the writing of his novella, the late C. S. Chellappa was actually inspired by another work by Ernest Hemingway\u2014The Undefeated\u2014which deals with an aging bullfighter\u2019s return to the sport after an injury. In his foreword, translator Kalyan Raman notes that Vaadivaasal is \u201Ca milestone in the annals of Tamil prose fiction\u201D because the writer captures the inner dynamics of the village crowd and conveys the \u201Csubaltern speech\u201D with great skill and fluidity in Tamil\\\". Just as Hemingway introduced his readers to the conflict between man and beast in bull-fighting, Chellappa captures the thrill, the gore and the inhuman elements of the ancient game of jallikattu in a searing portrait of brute force in Vaadivaasal.
There is a clear difference, from what I gather, between bullfighting and bull-taming. In Spanish-style bullfighting\u2014practiced in Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru, as well as in parts of southern France and Portugal\u2014it\u2019s a physical contest in which men publicly subdue, immobilize, or kill a bull. In a jallikattu spectacle, the idea is simply to tame and cow the bull into submission to the human. In this passage, Vaadivaasal explains how.
While the human beings daring to enter the arena do so of their own volition, the bulls, mighty and fearsome as they seem to be, are dragged into the arena to become part of a spectacle. The novella describes how once the bull is untethered, he\u2019s poked, prodded and teased for the enjoyment and jeering of all surrounding the arena.
Vaaadivaasal opens with the arrival of bulls in the village as it gears up for the excitement of the taming contest. An old man, Pattaiya, strikes up a conversation with two young lads from a village out east, from a place called Usilanoor. The mention of the name of this village earns the curiosity of Pattaiya who is a walking encyclopedia on the most famous bulls and their tamers, their methods of attack, their strengths and weaknesses. As in every sport, we glean that in bull-taming, too, it\u2019s often mind over matter. The two young men, both brothers-in-law, listen keenly to every warning and every suggestion from old Pattaiya.
Of the two young men, Picchi certainly has a reason to be in Periyapatti. He\u2019s there to avenge the death of his father at the hands of a formidable bull called Kaari.. The two of them are there to take home the prize.
Picchi soon trounces every animal that enters the arena; none of those victories prepare him or his brother-in-law for the village zameendar\u2019s prized possession, the bull called Kaari, who once gored Picchi\u2019s father to death.
As Picchi gets ready for his greatest test yet, it\u2019s clear that Kaari, the bull, may even be a sentient being with a mind of its own. The encounter between Picchi and Kaari is fraught with tension. In the book, their face-off extends over eighteen nail-biting pages of tight prose.
Even as the snort of the bull fends off and frightens those circling the arena, it seems no beast can stymie the venom of a spectator. The jeering by the villagers of both the men and beasts is relentless. It\u2019s clear, as time goes on, that in the moment, every man in the ring refuses to believe that the bull is revered in the form of Nandi, which means \u201Cgiving delight\u201D or \u201Cgiving joy.\u201D It is, after all, the sacred vehicle of the Hindu god Shiva. But in his moment of one-upmanship, which human being will remember his maker? Picchi and his brother-in-law forget to meditate on the deity, Amman, before they confront the Kaari. Instead, Picchi enters the arena with the confidence that only humans possess when confronting the fury of nature. The Kaari does indeed seem to have a mind of its own at every point during the taming.
A few years ago, the jallikattu sport became a sensitive topic in the state I call home in India, Tamil Nadu. When the Supreme Court banned jallikattu in May 2014 through a judgment on the grounds of cruelty to animals, it led to a state-wide protest on the sands of Chennai\u2019s Marina Beach. The echoes of this protest over a cultural sport were heard in several parts of India. What intrigued me immensely at the time of the protest was how even those who would never dare to pay to watch a bull-fight were up in arms over the judgement. Cultural practices as ancient as bull-fighting have been popular for over 2000 years and have been a critical part of Tamil identity and culture.
In Tamil, Jallikattu literally means \u201Cadorning the bull\u201D. It\u2019s clear from the way it\u2019s described in this novella that if an animal does survive the encounter, its future is not guaranteed after the clash. To all those animal rights advocates I must ask, most naively, perhaps, if ill-treatment of these animals prettied up for a fight in the bull-ring is any different from fattening cows for the slaughter houses here in the United States? The Humane Slaughter Act requires the humane treatment of animals during each of the stages before slaughter. (The grandest irony is in the juxtaposition of the words in the naming of the act itself.)
I found Vaadivaasal engaging, even at its goriest. It\u2019s a visceral work, yet it transcends into the sublime during some moments. Towards the end of the story Kaari, the vanquished bull, is seething with shame. Its destiny is now writ on its horns. This dramatic scene is captured in a visual on the riverbed. After the taming by Picchi, the zameendar who owns Kaari rushes to the riverbed with the villagers following behind him.
And so, my frayed companion, who had so steadfastly warmed my feet for countless winters and who as recompense got to be benevolently stared for so many years by the visages of the literary greats that adorned the Modern Edition spines in the shelves above, was finally ripped out, chopped into pieces and stowed away at the back of a truck in trash bags, as if they were some carpet-tramp trampled by countless feet on their way to indulge in their favourite pastime at some silly consumerist outpost.
Anyway, as part of the disinterment ritual, the overflow piles were now rearranged as neat little towers inside an open cardboard box. In this willy-nilly utilitarian rearrangement, the turmeric book with the menacing bull on its cover ended up cresting one of those book towers. Day in and day out, every time I turned right from my office desk, it would mock me as if I were some matador long past his prime, who dare not tempt fate and try his luck at tackling the likes of it.
Vaadivaasal has a unique place in Tamil novel history, in being its first (and perhaps only) sports novel. It is a novel about bullfighting, as practised in its Jallikattu variant in the Madurai, Ramanathapuram districts of South India. Its author, Chinnamanur Subramaniam Chellappa, aka Ci Su Chellappa, hailed from one of those districts (Vattalakundu) and is generally remembered for his legendary sacrifices editing the iconic Ezhutthu magazine, a breeding ground for future Tamil literary stalwarts.
Before venturing to write this piece, I googled to get a sense of how the English translation was received. The first few pages of the search results gave me a handful of entries. The legendary Asokamithran had written a piece in The Hindu, but this was more of a preview, providing a brief introduction to the author and the novel before abruptly ending with an excerpt from the forthcoming translation, pausing en route to pat Raman on his back for being a translator of international renown.
As far as I could gauge there has not been a serious review of the translation itself, only introduction to the original, bestowing at most a one-sentence encomium on the translation as an afterthought.
But this should come as no surprise. The reviewer of English translations of modern Tamil literature is at a serious disadvantage. Their choice is limited. To put it simply and starkly, there are not many of them to go around. And to be clear, I am not talking here of multiple translations of the same original, just the total number of English translations being done from Tamil.
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