We were getting ready to leave - we did not know if we would return. If the seaweed broods over its loosened roots, it can never glide on a current.
So begins the bittersweet account of Kolumban, the man of the family, the player of the lute in his community of itinerant bards. The paanar live near forests, but do not know how to hunt. There are fields of millet behind their huts but they are unused to sowing or reaping. Tired of depending on song and dance to make a living, and the attendant poverty, the eldest son, Mayilan, runs away from home. Many years later his family sets out to find him. As they roam the land, they perform in village commons and palaces, to farmers and cowherds, and famous kings and even more famous poets.
Set seventeen centuries ago, The Day the Earth Bloomed tells the intertwined stories of Kolumban, his daughter Chithira and son Mayilan, drawing on the celebrated poems of classical Tamil. The result is an electrifying and haunting connection to the past.
Manoj Kuroor's Nilam Poothu Malarnna Naal is a rare work in Indian literature. It takes a language as its theme, philosophy and metaphor. Before it was consecrated and confined in the stone idols of Sanskrit by the anthanar - the brahmins - and the varathar - the ones who came from elsewhere - the Malayalam language was rooted in the fertile soils of the Dravida tongue. There it thrived and flourished and bloomed lushly. Nilam Poothu Malaranna Naal brings back to life that experience and marks it in our memory. The book is a reverent song resplendent with the fiery sparks that flew off the history of the ancient people of Kerala and the politics that shaped it. This narrative of the tribal life of yore is such that it makes possible a pan-Indian moulting of the caste system and the history of languages.
I believe this book is a milestone in the history of Malayalam literature. Only someone like Manoj Kuroor who combines academic knowledge and creative imagination in language and literature, and scholarship with performance of music, is capable of such a feat - of imagining and realising such a book.
It is also a milestone in the history of translation. For this is a book in which the translator inevitably encounters every single hurdle in the way of translation with the same intensity. It calls for deep knowledge of history, extraordinary mastery of language and the willingness to let the spirit be consumed by the soul of the work. This is a da
We were getting ready to leave - we did not know if we would return. If the seaweed broods over its loosened roots, it can never glide on a current.
So begins the bittersweet account of Kolumban, the man of the family, the player of the lute in his community of itinerant bards. The paanar live near forests, but do not know how to hunt. There are fields of millet behind their huts but they are unused to sowing or reaping. Tired of depending on song and dance to make a living, and the attendant poverty, the eldest son, Mayilan, runs away from home. Many years later his family sets out to find him. As they roam the land, they perform in village commons and palaces, to farmers and cowherds, and famous kings and even more famous poets.
Set seventeen centuries ago, The Day the Earth Bloomed tells the intertwined stories of Kolumban, his daughter Chithira and son Mayilan, drawing on the celebrated poems of classical Tamil. The result is an electrifying and haunting connection to the past.
Manoj Kuroor's Nilam Poothu Malarnna Naal is a rare work in Indian literature. It takes a language as its theme, philosophy and metaphor. Before it was consecrated and confined in the stone idols of Sanskrit by the anthanar - the brahmins - and the varathar - the ones who came from elsewhere - the Malayalam language was rooted in the fertile soils of the Dravida tongue. There it thrived and flourished and bloomed lushly. Nilam Poothu Malaranna Naal brings back to life that experience and marks it in our memory. The book is a reverent song resplendent with the fiery sparks that flew off the history of the ancient people of Kerala and the politics that shaped it. This narrative of the tribal life of yore is such that it makes possible a pan-Indian moulting of the caste system and the history of languages.
I believe this book is a milestone in the history of Malayalam literature. Only someone like Manoj Kuroor who combines academic knowledge and creative imagination in language and literature, and scholarship with performance of music, is capable of such a feat - of imagining and realising such a book.
It is also a milestone in the history of translation. For this is a book in which the translator inevitably encounters every single hurdle in the way of translation with the same intensity. It calls for deep knowledge of history, extraordinary mastery of language and the willingness to let the spirit be consumed by the soul of the work. This is a da
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