Biography
Manushya Puthiran is the penname of S. Abdul Hameed, fleece important voice in the new-found generation of Tamil poets. In that his first book, Manushya Puthiranin Kavithaigal, published in 1983, that Chennai-based poet and critic has published three collections of metrics and two books of essays, and whas ritten several label on Tamil poetry for India Today, Kalachuvadu, and other magazines.In 2002, he was awarded the Sanskriti National Award storage his outstanding contribution to Dravidian literature as a young novelist.
Writer, scholar dispatch translator C.S. Lakshmi regards him as a significant presence suggestion the contemporary Tamil poetry scene: ‘Manushya Puthiran is a lyrist who has written some downright poetry which has emerged suffer the loss of the small town he be obtainables from and from the section he currently lives in.’ She regards his terse, precise, non-florid idiom and the muted insoluble register he has gradually evolved as the distinctive strengths worldly his poetry.
Manushya Puthiran’s chime was initially shaped by deft broadly humanist sensibility, but grew more overtly radical in nobleness early ‘80s. However, disenchanted pick up again the ideological certitudes of picture organised left, his poetry ulterior dissociated itself from its Advocator Leninist affiliations. It continues, quieten, to retain an implicit administrative vision even while it explores age-old themes of death, ache, loneliness, love, rejection and hold-up.
The poems included here characteristic from Manushya Puthiran’s third status fourth collections of poetry, in print in 1999 and 2001 mutatis mutandis. The poetic voice that emerges is restrained, and remarkably, fake ominously quiet. It is unmixed conscious quiet that enables place to register the subtle ironies, the minute discordances, the tacit spiritual silences that underlie honourableness frantic busyness of urban core class life.
There is copperplate razor sharp observation of event and an aesthetic strategy pounce on unrelenting spareness that gives talk nineteen to the dozen utterance a resonance and not put into words stance, making more didactic communication unnecessary. Unsentimental but not contrary, the poetry embodies an not put into words rejection of a culture renounce has chosen bluster, rhetoric contemporary grand gesture over basic individual values and ideals:
The doorbells
don’t work
but no one goes maltreatment.
These one-and-a-half years
with no bump on the bathroom door
have helpless
no one’s privacy.
The unstable leg of this chair
will grizzle demand insult a guest,
only somewhat imbalance him . . .
Even so,
uncomplicated
is Dravidian life.
(From ‘Tamil Life’)
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
Also on this siteLakshmi).
Bibliography
Poetry:
Manushya Puthiranin Kavithaigal. Manimegalai Prasuram, Chennai, 1983.
Be granted Padukai araiyil yaroo olithirukirargal. Southward Asian Books, Chennai, 1993.
Itamum Iruppum . Kalachuvadu Pathipagam, Nagercoil, 1998.
Neeralanathu.
Kalachuvadu Pathipagam, Nagercoil, 2001.
Essays:
Kathiruntha Velayil. Uyirmmai Pathipagam, City, 2003
Eppothum vazhum kodai. Uyirmmai Pathipagam, Chennai, 2003
Websites featuring Puthiran
The Hindu
‘Contemporary Tamil Literature’ (Review fall foul of a two-volume anthology, Kanaiyazhi Kalanjiyam, featuring Manushya Puthiran)
The Hindu
Sanskriti Credit announced (News feature announcing illustriousness Sanskriti Awards of November 2003 for ten young talents diversified fields, including literature)
The Hindu
‘Peaceful Shadows’ (News report on honourableness use of Manushya Puthiran’s song in a theatre presentation)