Jekasirpiyan's Novel 'Mannin Kural' and the End of My Long Search!

Tamil writer, the late Jekasirpiyan, was one of my favorite writers during my childhood and teen years. I loved reading his historical and social novels, which appeared as serials in popular Tamil magazines. One of his novels was published in a Tamil Malaysian newspaper, Tamil Nesan, which I never got the chance to read.

Vinoba Bhave was an Indian philosopher and activist. His 'Bhoodan Movement' (Boodan means land gift) encouraged landowners to donate lands to his movement and distribute them to the poor. It was a popular movement in the fifties. Jekasirpiyan was attracted to this concept and wrote a social novel based on it, titled Mannin Kural (Mannin kural means the voice of the earth).

The Dark Night of the Soul: A Study of the Existential Crisis of the Sri Lankan Tamil Refugees as depicted in the novel An Immigrant by the Canadian Tamil Writer V.N. Giritharan By Dr. R. Dharani M.A.,M.Phil., M.Ed., PGDCA., Ph.D. Assistant Professor in English, LRG Government Arts College for Women –

Abstract

Any journey in life is blissfully ever sought by human travelers across the globe. However, there are certain migrations by specific ethnic groups who are left with not much choice except for a disagreeable movement, sometimes hazardous ones too. Life and journey go hand in hand in a pleasant manner for any human being with comfortable existence. Crisis occurs only when life becomes uncertain in the homeland and to enter an alien land. Srilankan Tamil people is one such ethnic group who have been going through the crisis of existence for having born in a land that coerces cruelty upon them. The writer V.N. Giritharan was born as a blessed being like others in a Tamil family in Sri Lanka. He grew up as a writer as well as an Architecture graduate with great sensitivity towards the land and people around him. However, his state of affairs did not remain the same, as there were the chaos and brutalities of the ethnic conflict between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamil. The only way to survive was to leave the homeland with a heavy heart and to move towards an asylum. This journey is the most pathetic one in any man’s life. His sufferings have been portrayed vividly in the novel An immigrant in which the protagonist named Ilango lives as the replica of the writer V.N. Giritharan himself.

The paper attempts to explore the existential predicament of the protagonist of the novel An Immigrant whose personal experiences demonstrate the physical, psychological multicultural, ethnic, political and socio-economic issues of such immigrants across the globe.

Void Within – The Migration of an Albatross into an Unsolicited Province – A Study on the Writings of the Canadian Tamil Writer V.N. Giritharan By Dr. R. Dharani M.A.,M.Phil., M.Ed., PGDCA., Ph.D. Assistant Professor in English, LRG Government Arts College for Women –

[March 1, 2013- Recently, a conference on canadian writing was held in the National college , Trichy. Called ‘Canada:A Multitude of Spaces’, the conference was spearheaded by the Indian Association of Canadian Studies. The following paper on V.N.Giritharan’s writings was submitted to the conference by Dr R Dharani.]

Literature, in a way, is a manifestation of an individual’s or a community’s elusive experiences. A grand procession of happy episodes alone in a life is highly impracticable and astonishing, as life itself is, and in most cases, akin to the tragi-comedies of Shakespeare. However, in the history of literature across the globe, catastrophe gained more attention than romance, chivalry and happy endings. The misfortunes of African- American writers have ever earned them the proper justice. The sorrow-stricken lives of a community who had been intimidated simply because of their ethnic background have been the cause of many social changes in western countries. Of all the complexities of life, the crisis of a survival stands first in the life of any human being. This is not the case with any other living creature in any part of the world. In any piece of literature, it is not uncommon to unearth such a theme intertwined with many other themes. Man struggles to locate a place of his own on this planet to ascertain a sense of identity of his life. Nationality, nativity, society, family, tradition, culture, language are such things endorsing the survival impulse of a man. Depending on the needs, man sets the priority for concepts like nationality, family and other matters.

Literature, being the replica of reality, has been communicating the indispensable impulse of human survival in various forms for ages. The predominant theme of many writings is of life and how to live it. There always appears to be an empty space in the psychic sphere of human beings, specifically in the modern ages. Waging war made the ancients lose their stability in the earlier times. There are no explicit wars today. Nevertheless, the same kind of callousness makes modern men desperate with the loss of their identity. In the name of Globalization, the entire world shrinks into the palm of a human. However, there is a giant void within the human heart. Such a void shall be discussed here.