‘A poet has the responsibility to guard language and to employ it to show what’s happening around’

Meena Kandasamy explores the political responsibility of writers in engaging with classics and reinterpreting traditional stories.

From Circe in Odyssey to Sita in Ramayana, characters in classics have been revisited, and their stories retold from time to time. Meena Kandasamy — poet, novelist and translator — believes that engaging with classics is not just a literary action, but also a political responsibility of writers.

In Kandasamy’s poem “Ms Militancy”, Kannagi, the central character of the Tamil classic Cilappatikāram, sheds the garb of a wife avenging her husband’s death with the power of her chastity to reveal a raging woman whose unflinching belief in justice brings down an empire.

In her translation of the third section of Tirukkural – titled Inupattupal or The Book of Desire – Kandasamy trains a ‘Tamil Decolonial Feminist’ lens to it.

“It’s essential to tell our own stories, stories from the margins which have never been told, stories on women’s experiences which for some reason have never been considered part of high literature or high culture. It’s a massive responsibility,” she says.

The acclaimed writer was recently in Bengaluru to deliver a public lecture at the St. Joseph’s College of Commerce.

“If you don’t change a story or its terrain, then the story becomes so fixed and permanent that it will have only one ending. It tells you that if a woman has desire, it is going to end in tragedy. Such predetermination can only be subverted by going back to these classics,” says Kandasamy who believes revisiting classics is also an act of laying claim to space in history.

Invoking the works of Carol Ann Duffy, Margaret Atwood, Periyar, and Ambedkar, all of whom have engaged with classic texts to train a non-conformist lens towards them, Kandasamy argues that classics and mythologies are living texts that belong to no particular set of people, but to universal imagination.