In a world getting trapped in its overwhelming consciousness of art for art’s sake, poetry is going out of fashion. With the increasing rejection of political consciousness and the rationalization of destruction, we are fast becoming a people unaware of our intrinsic values, confused by a globalized world, where even the mention of culture and ethnicity is construed to be a call to arms. This is where a poet like Kasi Anandan stands alone, and idolized. He is a poet who wears the political tag with pride. You don’t have to seek, but with a little fine-tuning, you can see the Eelam liberation struggle everywhere in his work. The warriors literally prowl Kasi Anandan’s poems.

This Tamil Eelam poet was born in Batticaloa, a land famous for its singing fish, in 1938. In 1948, ten-year-old Kasi Anandan witnessed the birth of the new nation of Sri Lanka, and with it came the woes: Tamil people were quick to realize that independence meant a transfer of power from the hands of the British to the hands of the Sinhalese. The Tamils had lost out in the process. While reliving the memories of those tender years, he says, “The first President Senanayaka divested the estate Tamils of their citizenship rights. He also disenfranchised them.” Growing up in such turbulent times had its effect on Kasi Anandan.

His inspiration to write poetry came from the Tamil heartland, and he counts nationalist poet Subramania Bharati and Dravidian ideologue Bharathidasan as his greatest influences. And it comes as a surprise when he informs me that his first poem, written when he was a ten-year-old, was a spontaneous reaction to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.

But how exactly did Kasi Anandan enter the forefront of the Tamil struggle? The story is set in the time of his student life. “After the end of Senanayaka’s regime, Bandarnaike took over as the Sri Lankan President and, on 5 June 1956, he brought about the Sinhala-only language policy. I was just 12-years-old then, but I was shocked to read the news that we were going to be educated only in Sinhala. I called upon my classmates, we went to the railway station and we waved black flags at visiting officials. We were chased away by the police force. The next day we were caned in our college. Soon, the Sinhala teacher came to our school. We would boycott his classes and register our protest by lying down at the school’s entrance. Because of the popular discontent, the Government was forced to withdraw this law.”

One act of rebellion led to another, and soon, Kasi Anandan found poetry and politics an integral part of his life. Even as early as 1957, he used the words ‘Tamil Eelam’ in his poem Muzhakkam (Slogan) to denote the independent Tamil Nation. He also has the rare honor of using the word pulippadai (Tiger Army) for the first time in the early sixties to denote the Tamil Army in his poem Tamilar Padai (Army of Tamils) in these lines: Verikol Tamilar pulippadai/ Avar velvar enbadhu velipadai (Rage! The Tiger Army of the Tamils! / Your victory is obvious.) Kasi Anandan’s act of using the words Pulippadai was considered seditious and capable of inciting racial hatred.  The importance of his politics and poetry comes to light when we look closely at the Eelam liberation struggle which had two phases: the early non-violent phase that lasted under Thanthai Chelva and the armed liberation struggle being waged under Tamil Eelam National leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.

In 1972, when the TULF was formed, Kasi Anandan served as its Organized Secretary and he later went on to become a member of its Central Politburo. When he turned to the Tigers in 1982, he served as a Central Committee Member in the Political Wing of the LTTE. His popularity is legendary: he admits that the stories of the Sinhalese army using Kasi Anandan’s photographs for target practice are true. While the Sri Lankan state incarcerated him for creating a literature that incited armed rebellion within the Tamil community, it is accepted without doubt that he is “the greatest recruiter of guerillas for the cause of Tamil Eelam”-youngsters drop all their work and take up arms on hearing his lyrical poems.  But the poetry didn’t go unpunished.

“I spent five long years in various prisons at Welikade, Battlicaloa, Matara and Kandy undergoing torture and police brutality,” Kasi Anandan says. “And the more I was wounded, tortured, beaten up, harassed, the more I understood about refinement, civility and humanity. The torture did not break me as it was intended to.”

Excerpts from an interview:

Meena Kandasamy: Why did you chose such a new medium: of short, point-blank poems which you call Narukkugal. Why not a long testimony that shall wait out for our willing tears? Hasn’t the history of war always been written in the epic form?

Kasi Anandan: Ancient literatures, irrespective of the country of origin, were in lengthy poetic formats, there is no doubt about that. These were writings that flowered in ancient times. Perhaps if the Tamils today can live in a peaceful atmosphere, they can write peaceful literature and they can sit back and enjoy it. When the situation is not so, when we are being sidelined and stamped upon, we are able to record our opinion as screams and shrieks. In such times, one cannot engage in literary achievements, one cannot get preoccupied with lengthy debates over aesthetics and such like. These short poems were born out of such a compulsion.

Generally, a war, or a war-like situation, implements in people the tendency to say things in brief. Warriors and the leaders are used to commands, terse orders. A battlefield is no place for lengthy discourse, for over-wrought sermons. Whenever I read the Bhagavad Gita, I begin to wonder. It is so amusing, you know. They say that Krishna gave a sermon to Arjuna, all in the battlefield. It was no small sermon, it was dialogue, it was packed with meaning, highly oblique and it runs into many pages. Using the plainness of logic, I feel that it is an improbable event. How could the enemy keep waiting? How will he watch you sermonize?

MK: How do you think colonialism affected the island to which you belong?

KA: It is common knowledge that colonialists used the policy of divide and rule. When the colonialists came, they pampered the Tamils. They wanted to use the educated Tamils to run the affairs of the state. This was a selfish motive of the British. Just as the Sinhalese were slaves of the British, the Tamils were also slaves. There was no reason why the Sinhalese had to carry a grudge against the Tamils. But the feeling of oppression and enslavement always remains in memory. It is an aftermath of the colonial project. The oppressed and enslaved people always carry it in their hearts, they hate the oppressor. These feelings naturally take on further dimensions and begin to threaten peaceful existence.

Today, the Americans might speak as though they are the ones who have brought democracy and independence into the world. They might pretend to be people who love liberation. But, those who have become victims of American fury will not forget the fact that the same Americans killed millions of native peoples and only thereby they conquered the land. The freedom and liberty about which the Americans brag about gets drowned in all this blood. It is just reduced to some lip-service. And I feel that their conduct proves the contrary-take the case of Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Does it look like all the butchery has stopped? All that we can say is that the victim has changed. It is no longer a native Red Indian; it is an Iraqi or an Iranian.

MK: On a related note, as a staunch opponent of English-dominance, and Sanskrit-dominance in Tamil texts, how do you view the translation of your text into other languages?

KA: I don’t think there is any poet, in any language in the world, who would oppose his/her poem getting translated. Because, at the bottom of a libertarian’s heart, there is a genuine humanism. That is the ideology of all literature.

But, the efforts to protect a language are not anti-humanist. If somebody fears that the adulteration of his language with extensive borrowings from other languages brings about the destruction of one’s language (and the consequent destruction of one’s nationality), we cannot say it goes against humanism. I think that it is my great responsibility to ensure that my ethnicity is not destroyed, my language is not destroyed.

What differentiates man from animals is the fact that man has a language. It is my opinion that language is the source from which culture and civilization have stemmed. I don’t consider language merely as a tool. I also consider it as a foremost form of individual expression. I work to save my language and the nationalism based on my language.

A few things like caste and patriarchy can die, but a few things must live. Language is that which ought to be alive. All these years I have been writing about the war and I have written a lot of verse. Never have I said anything against the Sinhalese language or the Sinhalese people, never have I called for their destruction. But when his language uproots mine, I present my literature and I create it solely in order to save my language and my people.

MK: Why this tirade against beauty in your poems?

KA: I am frustrated when I come across people saying, “He/She has written beautifully.” I think that beauty – which we are so used to seeing and enjoying – is not needed, given the present condition of the world. To say that we are admiring beauty and to feel that we are being charmed by beauty, means that we have forgotten about the death that has taken place right next door. It is like somebody enjoying a television program when his neighbor is lamenting the death of his mother. I find that this whole concept of literature that searches for beauty is going to be useless. A great struggle is needed in every field on earth. The media makes much of skin-show, of international beauties. But it turns quite a blind eye to women who are wasting away as skeletons, women who are starving to death because of poverty and hunger and war. We need a literature that forgets such perfectly-sculpted beauties. We need a literature that burns and boils. We need a literature of concern.

MK: In the opening poem in this collection, you speak about standing in the battlefield. Do you view yourself as a warrior?

KA: It is true that there was once a time when kings and poets were separate entities. But now, it is compulsion of time that poets become warriors. In the days of monarchy, the kings did not send the bards and intellectuals to the battlefield. But in the later days, the situation reversed-which is why we have many war poets in all the languages of the world. We can observe that poets have been killed for the literature that they created.

In Tamil Eelam, young women poets like Kasturi were warriors first, poets second. She wrote intensely powerful and courageous verse. One of her lines goes like this: Karuththerikkum engal kal araigal (our tombs will conceive). She died in the battlefield. She did not write more than a few poems, and she is more well-known as a warrior.

I feel that those who write must also live and practice what they write. I think literature has that power to a certain extent. On that basis, I too say that I was pushed into this liberation struggle. I don’t say that I went on my own. The situation shoved me into this-it was how Eelam was at that time. Not only me, all the Eelam Tamils were not people who loved war, nor were they people who were filled with fury. They were pushed into this war: for the sake of their language, for the sake of their nation, and because they had to register their protest to oppression. I am one of them. That is why I create my literature. That is why I write.

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To read Kasi Anandan’s poems, click here