Written as an exercise in clarity ahead of a literary festival celebrating modern Tamil literature and translation in New York City, circa 2026.

1

‘Ma’am, are you aware we are in the middle of an International Situation?’ he asked.

He was wearing a pin-striped shirt: thin, dark-blue stripes on an earth-blue body. Oval, black-rimmed glasses, close cropped brown hair. His hands were resting on the ledge behind the glass, his body was leaning forward to be slightly to be closer to the black bud of the microphone. He was looking straight into my eyes.

‘Yes,’ I answered. Brief, guarded, the way you answer when the man on the other end is holding your passport. Yes, I was aware. But I could tell it was an earnest question. Perhaps even a little concerned.

‘A literature festival, did you say?’

‘Yes, on modern Tamil literature and translation,’ I placed a copy of the glossy-printed brochure and an invitation letter from the festival organisers in the little depression under the window of glass separating us. I saw him flick through the pages, examine the letter.

The long, partitioned office behind him held a few swatches of wood, but the panels on the ceiling, the lights and the walls around were all so overwhelmingly white that I had to take a deep breath to bring myself back together. The consulate reminded me of prisons, and hospitals, and detention centers — all the manner of liminal zones, border areas. I was aware. I was a liminal figure. And this was a border zone.

I knew what his question meant, of course. It was something I had parleyed around quite a bit with colleagues and friends. 

There was the question of the International Situation itself — the way the officer who had questioned me had earnestly framed it, capital letters intact — and the question of writers from India, Singapore, Malaysia and elsewhere traveling to the United States while in the middle of it. The considerations around what their dharma was, what values they ought to stand for.

And then, there was the more general question of the relevance of a literature festival, for modern Tamil, for translation, in New York City, and the even broader question around the relevance of literature festivals when people were supposedly not reading, when the world was the way it was.

‘With all the political problems of the day, why this litfest, and why now. Someone’s going to ask that question,’ one colleague said. ‘That’s the devil’s advocate.’

‘No,’ another corrected her. ‘That’s not the devil’s advocate. The devil would go one step further. He would say we need literature. But the literature needs to be political. Speaking to our times. Writing that is “immediate”, “urgent”, “timely”. He’s say all else is quixotic daydreaming, and that we are wasting everybody’s time talking about goodness, truth and beauty when the whole world is burning.’

I have always been a quixotic daydreamer. Perhaps that was why I had been invited to a literature festival celebrating modern Tamil literature in the United States in 2026,  and why I was applying for a visa to travel there despite the Situation.

I am not going to say anything about the Situation itself, since I am aware it could result in an extended, all-expenses-paid stay courtesy of the ICE, which, educational as it may turn out to be, I’d prefer to pass on for the moment. No, as a writer, I was simply going there to talk about Tamil literature. This is the first time I am travelling countries as a writer, so even when I showed up for my visa interview, I imagined that I was a wandering bard, like a Tamil poet from the classical age.

The old Tamil poets, men and women, travelled between kingdoms that were as likely as not at war with each other. Many of them were bards of war. The poetic convention of the day was to sing the valour and generosity of kings at war and obtain their patronage. Many of them were quite successful, if we go by the poems that have come down to us.

But the most creative poets among them made their points even as they fulfilled the conventions of the genre. For example, this was Avvai, the most celebrated woman-poet of the Tamil canon:

they were many young goats, those boys

who milled around him, their leader.

the pot of liquor he swayed over their heads

chose my son

and laid him flat

on his legless bier, covered

in a shroud of pure white.

This is also Avvai, about generations of military veterans loyal to a warmonger king:

you, lord of fine chariots and war-crazy elephants,

hand him his liquor first, then drink yours.

his father’s father stood unblinking on the field, taking

spears for your father’s father, and died

like a wheel hub in a carpenter’s workshop

studded with spokes.

this one, too, is a young man famed for his valour.

he, too, will protect you from spears

like a palm-frond umbrella from the rains.

And this is the poet Kovur Kilar, addressing king Killi Valavan:

look at these children,

the crowns of their heads are still soft.

as they watch the elephants,

they even forget to cry,

stare dumbstruck at the crowd

in some new terror

of things unknown

you’ve heard me,

now do what you will.

So that was what I was thinking about while the consular official in the blue pinstriped shirt was examining my visa application: poetry, and the travelling Tamil bards of old.

Of course, I expressed none of this. I kept my face white-person bland, called him ‘officer’ respectfully, and spoke in a practiced mid-western drawl that a Chicago-bred cousin had taught me to use around law enforcement personnel when I used to live in the States.

‘You’ve lived in the United States before?’ he asked.

‘Yes sir’.

‘Six years,’ he said, glancing at the screen.

‘That’s correct.’

‘And then you left.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘And why was that?’

I caught a glimpse of my own face in the glass and blinked.

‘I’d moved on,’ I said.

The last time I had applied for a US visa, I was a student. I had just been accepted to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon. The year was 2009. The officer at the consulate in Chennai — a former avatar of the pin-striped blue-shirt — asked me what I was going to study. The brain, I said. And what are you going to study in the brain? he asked. The part that makes us human, I answered.

It was true. It was with such a quixotic, albeit glorious, aim, that at the age of 21, I left home, family and friends to embark upon the shores of the United States, a nation that I believed upheld the  values of the individual — Man! — like no other. It was there I thought I would finally get closer to understanding what made us gloriously, incomparably human. 

I spent the next six years driving tungsten electrodes into animal brains, holding them very close to single neurons and overhearing them talk, or injecting vectors into the brain packed with molecules that, when stimulated with light, would drive specific cells to talk to their neighbors. I was studying cells that responded when the eyes of the animal were stimulated by complex visual imagery: anything from household objects to art objects to human faces. I believed my exercise was in the nature of an archeological excavation, except instead of digging into the earth I was digging into something equally ancient: the brain.

Neuroscientists map the brain into different regions and go in there with different tools to manipulate, listen, learn and conquer, a movement that, if they were really countries on a map, might have be called ‘forward deployment for intelligence gathering’. It was, as you can imagine, aggressive — different research labs mapping different regions of the brain; competitive — we were all struggling for funding to ‘take the oil’, so to speak; and ultimately not very useful for my quixotic objective.

While giving us a lot of mechanistic and computational insights into the dynamics of brain activity, the process is at least yet not at a sophistication that can actually tell us much about what makes us human. What we learn from the scientific or technological approach is mechanism. What we achieve is the thrill of solving puzzles, the satisfaction of having advanced human knowledge by a new piece of data (*subject to falsification) and above all, a sense of human conquest over the workings of nature. Certainly it is triumph of the human will.

But mechanism does not provide meaning, and the longer I engaged in the work, the more I realized that my quest for understanding humanity was really a quest for meaning. While I enjoyed the thrill of conquest over knowledge, I struggled with the question of why I enjoyed it so much, what was ultimately in it for me, who I was in relation to the knowledge I was producing. It was not a question that really went away, because other experiences in America brought me back to the same brink of dissatisfaction.

The United States, even then, was predominantly a Christian country. But this was just in the aftermath of all that happened in 2008, and it seemed like someone somewhere was mass producing needles with large enough eyes for caravans of some very prosperous, bulky camels to silently pass through. It all felt very surreal. In my first week at Pittsburgh, a homeless black man at Fifth and Bellefield asked me for money in the name of Christ. Before that, I had only seen homeless people in India. I did not know America had them too. Buying my first iPhone on my grad school stipend savings in 2012 felt simultaneously like I had at last arrived in America, and lost something precious and entirely unrecoverable. I realize now it was the knowledge that I had finally lost my virginity to capitalism.

Indeed, I related to the American dream like it was an idealised Clint Eastwood figure. I truly believed in American exceptionalism because, like everybody else who read Ayn Rand in college, I thought I was exceptional. There was awe at the figure of the lone crusader towering up against nature, respect for its solid values of self-reliance and hard work, and delight in its celebration of life, liberty and happiness. That was my life, I thought: self-reliance, freedom as an individual and happiness.

But during my time in America, while I felt enjoyment and lassitude by turns, I felt neither free nor happy. I realized everyone was on a leash, only its length and make were different. You bought branded gear to signal what a free thinker you were. But you couldn’t even let wildflowers grow in your garden without your neighbors insisting that you make it a lawn like everybody else’s. Conforming to the herd, it seemed, was the last word in liberty.

I felt this particularly keenly when I saw fellow immigrants from India with their homes in the suburbs, their families and their SUVs. They had won the American dream. They should have been happy. But they weren’t. When the community got together over long weekends or festivals, under the cheerful displays of belonging,  below the gossipy undercurrents of envy and anxiety around whose son had got into Harvard or whose jobs were on the line, even under the hushed conversations around alcoholism and marital discord was a sense of consummate sadness — insipidity and loneliness and isolation and fear. ‘But where am I?” each of them seemed to cry unto themselves.

I sensed the cry keenly. It seemed to come out of my own soul. It seemed to haunt all of America. ‘Who am I? What should I do? What is my place in all of this?’ A cry that rang all over a land that celebrated individualism and personal identity! But it was such a faint pulse, that it got drowned out on Monday morning when the cars were all back on the highway to work.  It was then I realized that if I did nothing about it, then I, too, would be propelled into the same wheel of fate.

I tried to find reprieve by volunteering at the local Indian community’s religious, spiritual and cultural organizations. I also went to the local churches: southern baptist, methodist, universalist unitarian. But I was not a believer. Moreover, the fact that they were ultimately institutions composed of people with their own agendas around ideology, regionalism, language, religion and caste made me realize that the problem lay deeper.

America was a symptom, perhaps a major one. But even if it shows up first in this organ or that, cancer is ultimately a systemic disease. Egomania, narcissism, conquest and domination are human instincts with roots that run very deep. I had found a provisional answer to the question of what makes us human — and it wasn’t an answer that I liked very much, or knew what to do about.

It began to dawn on me that I was only a pawn in the hands of forces much larger than myself, forces I had no way of understanding, let alone controlling, by driving electrodes or shining light into the brain, or by the diligent practice of religion. It was around this time — I was 25–26 then — that I began engaging seriously with literature. I began with the world classics. Dostoevesky, Herman Hesse, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Thomas Mann, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy… and then I began reading in the various Indian languages. Ten years later, I was living in Switzerland and translating my first book out of Tamil into English.

So when the officer asked me why I had chosen to leave the United States, my response, although deliberately laconic, was in essence the whole truth. I had moved on, personally, from the values and heroes the country chose to nurture. It was 2015 when I left. A year later, I knew I had made the right choice.

2

But here I was in 2026, at the US consulate in Chennai, waiting behind a plexiglass counter as the officer examined my application to enter the country again. This time, I had identified as an independent writer and translator in my DS-160. The officer asked me for my social media handle and confirmed it was set to public. What he saw there must have corroborated my statement, for he had no more questions.

‘When are you planning to travel?’ he asked. I told him the dates, drawing out as proof a plane ticket that the organizers had booked ahead of time. He waved his hand, and flipped through my passport before peering at the screen and clicking a couple of buttons as if to finalize things. ‘You’ll get your stamped passport back in a week,’ he said, adding my passport to the plastic tray heaped with indigo squares behind him. I sighed. Suddenly the Situation did not seem to bother him so much.

The Living Tamil LitFest was only three weeks out. There was not much of a chance that the Situation would be over by then. The world would still be burning. The dreamliner from India would cruise above smoke from fires all around the world to reach the safehaven of freedom, where la Liberté éclairant le monde stands with her lit torch in all her verdigris glory.

The vessel will carry in its belly thirty Tamil writers and translators. We will be traveling halfway across the world to gather in a conference center east of Central Park, and talk, with our American counterparts and readers young and old, about fiction, about poetry, about beauty, justice and eternal values. We will trade stories, and ideas, and hope. We may even hold hands, look into each others’ eyes, and smile. And America, for all her Situationships, is a country that will allow that.

Perhaps it is a quixotic daydream in action. Perhaps the entire cottage industry of creative literature — uttering phrases that nobody says, spinning tales that never happened, dreaming up ideas that nobody asked for, and trading them secretly with each other — is a quixotic daydream in a world that celebrates aggression, material conquest and power. But I found myself asking: is it really such an unreasonable course of action in so unreasonable a world? 

It was then that I was reminded of another writer, who had also flown out of a world in flames. He, too, had arrived in America. Even as Europe was burning — Germany had invaded Poland, and Jews and homosexuals were being marched into gas chambers to the accompaniment of Götterdammerung — this writer had been working on a long novel. He wanted to finish telling his tale, and so he left.

It was a tetrology, a four-part novel, written over the years from 1926 to 1942, while Hitler was rising to power and Germany went to war. But his story was not ‘timely’, ‘urgent’ or ‘immediate’. In fact it was set in the 14^th century BC, in the Amarna period of Egyptian history. It re-told chapters 27-50 of Genesis in the Bible: the myths of the patriarch Abraham, his descendents Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, and the story of Joseph coming into his own in the court of the pharoah Akhenaten in Egypt. The novel was called Joseph and his Brothers, and it was written by Thomas Mann.

Mann was in self-exile from Germany starting with Hitler’s accession to power in 1933. He spent six years in Switzerland, while publishing the first three novels of the series: The Stories of Jacob (1933), Young Joseph (1934), Joseph in Egypt (1936). In 1939, he flew to the United States, where he wrote the fourth part of the novel, Joseph the Provider. It was published in 1943.

Mann regarded the novel his personal ‘pyramid’. However, because of Nazi persecution limiting the distribution of the volumes and subsequent apathy from readers, the novel did not receive the keen readership Mann had hoped for. Many readers didn’t find the novel ‘timely’ in the aftermath of the war. Christians thought it was heretical and Communists did not like its engagement with theism, while his Jewish readers had for the most part perished in the holocaust. The novel’s English translation by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter did not help popularize the work; it was dry, heavy and obscure, with no ear for Mann’s sense of humor. Thus Joseph and His Brothers todaylies largely covered by the sands of history.

And yet, the novel holds lessons for us today, not in the least because it was also, in a sense, a ‘quixotic daydream’ embarked upon at a time when the world was burning. Just like Avvai folded her respose to warmonger kings in her conventional poetry, Mann wrote a response to Nazi ideology in his unconventional novel, and I believe we can learn something from how he framed it it.

In Joseph and his Brothers, Mann had moved from the ‘individual’ to the ‘typical’ or ‘mythical’ stage of his career as a writer. It was his belief that writers, when they are young, are interested in the bourgeois and the individual, and therefore write novels like his own Buddenbrooks. But the mature writer, he wrote, is interested in types and patterns. Patterns of human thought, patterns of human psychology and patterns of human action that repeat across time. In other words, myth.

The psychology of the singular individual cuts him off from time. His life consists merely of the unique and the present; he is thrown into existence and left adrift to make his choices by himself. He is burdened by the same questions that I once had also been: ‘Who am I? What should I do? What is my place in all of this?’ He does not know how to act in an ever-changing, uncertain world where he is effectively powerless.

But when man comes to understand that he is more than just an individual in the present, that he has a great body of past to draw upon, and that, like the tip of an iceberg, his individual self only barely lifts its head above the impersonal elements in his unconscious; when he opens himself up at the back to the deep time of the past to become more than his individual self, then he finds himself and his repetoire of intellectual, psychological and dynamic patterns widened; he has entered the mythical stage of life. He no longer sees his life as individualistic and isolated. The naive belief that he is unique in space and time is now happily displaced by a wider knowledge of the nature of existence and his own role in it. 

Such knowledge man comes to arrive at, when he studies the history of the human past and comes to recognize its patterns of action. The realization that our lives and actions, whether we like it or not, follow set schemes, formulas and repetitions is the beginning of a mythical understanding of our psychology. A mythical understanding of the self, wrote Mann, when it enters into the psychological life-history of the individual, also penetrates into the primitive childhood of mankind. At this point of knowledge, the life of individual man and the life of mankind are in convergence.

It is not a knowledge about humanity that can extracted, as I had thought earlier, by mining the depths of a material brain with electrodes and light, divorced from the subjective individual. Rather, it is an understanding that is worked out in the imagination of the subjective individual, perhaps not entirely in a conscious manner. By observing one’s own patterns of thought and dream and action, by gaining a wide understanding of the patterns in human cultural history, and by playing them out in the theatre of the imagination, one comes to understand one’s role and possibilities of action in one’s own life. In Indian philosophical thought, there is a name for such a subjective knowledge of the self and its ideal mode of action: svadharma.

Mann does not use the word svadharma. But the idea he alludes to is very close. He expands upon this idea in his 1936 essay Freud and the Future. A human being acquires a certain dignity and security when he recognizes that he is connected to the very foundations of life in his depths and roots, that his purpose and action can emerge from therein. If he allows it, something timeless can once more emerge into the light and become present in him. His otherwise poor and valueless single character can become enriched by the addition of a mythical value, an archetypical sense of purpose.

When this knowledge becomes action enacted in a gentle, ironic, self-aware manner, Mann says, the person’s life becomes ‘lived myth’, a tragicomic celebration, a carnival, a feast. We can then enter the stage of life like an actor in a play, for we now know that we are re-enacting a character that has been performed upon the same psychological stage of history numerous times. This is the knowledge that Joseph arrives at in Joseph and his Brothers.

Joseph is thrown into a well by his jealous brothers, sold into slavery, and in Egypt, though blameless, he is cast into prison. But Joseph understands himself mythically in the mould of the mythic gods Tammuz and Osiris, and emerges in this knowledge as he gamely re-enacts their myth of being dismembered, buried, and resurrected. He is also simultaneously stepping into the shoes of his forefathers, Jacob, Isaac and Abraham, as the holder of a covenant to one God. However his relationship to God is shown to be psychological, not theological, discovered and nurtured in his own imagination and action. Joseph is sympathetic to the pharoah Akhenaten and his new monotheistic god, Aton, because of his own inner understanding of the phenomenon (it is a sign of Mann’s creative genius that he places Joseph in Egypt when Akhenaten is pharoah). Both men are shown to be dimly aware that they are prefiguring the arrival, death and resurruction of Jesus Christ. It is in this manner that their psychological understanding of myth makes their lives richer, vaster, greater. 

But how was Mann responding to Nazism with this novel? For Mann, myth is a human cultural inheritence. It lives in memory, but requires self-awareness, personal courage and pride to be enacted and bought to life. It is active, even if ironic, human engagement with myth and its repeated enactment over time that deepens its power in the cultural memory. By telling his story the way he did, Mann was actually tearing down the Nazi premise that myth was an instinct, embedded in one’s blut und boden — blood and soil — and thus only the province of those who bore that blood and were born of that soil.

No, in Mann’s Joseph novels, myth is not shown as the inheritence of any one race or people. Even the covenant with God is not the preserve of one family, but is an idea that is rediscovered and reinterpreted across generations by intersections with other parallel, regional myths. These myths (like the tale of Osiris, the story of Akhenaten and the saga of Joseph’s forefathers) are intuited and woven together in the psychology of individuals astute enough to make those connections; it is in this manner, Mann argues, that the mythical imagination deepens in culture. It is but a short leap to intuit the idea of a magnificent rug, woven with all the multicoloured strands of the human imagination across the globe — how deep, how rich would those colours be?

It is in our collective mythology, then, that we find the psychological ground of a larger human resonance, a more magnficent human sympathy. Such a ground cannot be the possession of one tribe, race, caste, region, language or nation. All myth, without doubt, belongs to the human civilization. Myth is a repository of human archetypes, which is to say a repository of human behavior, human action over time. Myth is a collection of stories that depict various ways of acting in the world in response to the pressures of life. Myth, is the ground of the human moral imagination. And what is literature, but a modern myth risen from that ground for our times?

3

It is said that literature widens the human moral imagination because it teaches us empathy. It allows us to live the lives of others, inhabit their psyches, and thus become broader in our sympathetic understanding. This is, indeed, one of the primary humanistic functions of literature.

But there is an equally important dimension of the moral imagination that is not recognized quite as often. Moral imagination makes us not only understand others, but also ourselves. We need moral imagination to be empathetic to ourselves, and to have courage to act in ways that are in tune with our inner nature.  ‘Who am I? What should I do? What is my place in all of this?’, we ask ourselves. A comprehensive moral imagination provides us with a vast set of models to understand who we are, and borrow upon personae we feel enabled to enact in the theatre of life. It provides us with an expanded repetoire of actions and responses, and allows us to creatively modulate them in a given situation.

Because we are drawing upon pre-existing, successful models, we feel secure in our knowledge, and free in our action. Like the individual poetic talent working within the literary tradition and yet innovating within it, the individual human being becomes secure in his understanding of life  (and what is life, but the human tradition) and begins to act in manifold creative ways to realize his individual potential. Grounded in his past, his human tradition, man can act deliberately, ironically, becoming larger than himself.

It was in this spirit that I invoked the poet Avvai at the beginning of the essay. Even as I write this essay, I realize that it is her persona that I am stepping into as I speak. I am fulfilling her dharma in myself. It is not that I am pretending to be her. I am simply channelizing my response to the Situation of having to speak as a writer in a burning world in the same manner as she might have, even borrowing upon her formal attitude of understated critique and mild didacticism — and like Joseph in the novel, I am aware of this. It is in that sense that the voice that is speaking here is really hers. That she is speaking on this page becomes possible through the cultivation of a moral imagination that is capable of realizing her.

Between the king and the careful poet, the poet

Has greater glory.

                              Apart from his kingdom

A king has nothing. Every place a poet goes—

Praise.

The Avvai who wrote this poem was not the same Avvai who wrote the earlier poems. Literary historians date this Avvai to a much later period (12^th CE vs. 1^st-2^nd AD). Yet both are called Avvai — which just means ‘lady’ or ‘mother’ — and the Tamil literary imagination considers them both to be the same poet. Their individual identities do not matter, the tradition seems to say, for their mythical or archetypical identity as Avvai — built around a particular mode of action, attitude or response to the world as poets — is what is important about them. That is the eternal part of them.

I think one can argue that really, it is in this sense that praise awaits great poets in every place — or time — they show up in. Poets are immortal, eternal, because they live in language, and as language, as memory, they endure as living myths in the human cultural imagination. The name ‘Avvai’ is a signifier for the Avvai-ness that endures in the poetry. The fact that Avvai is also enshrined as a goddess in some parts of Tamil Nadu points to a fundamental unity between myth, culture, religion and language, all of which comprise the grand human tradition. The idol of Avvai at the heart of the shrine is really her language and myth, her mode of action in response to the world, turned into stone-image. It is in the same manner that the major religions of the world are all expressed in language and story, as signifiers of certain moral imaginations. The range of the human moral imagination, out of which we individuals emerge, lives in language.

What are stories but the narrative repetoire of the multifarious ways human beings understand reality, think and act in the world? The Mahabharatha, the Odyssey, the Silappathikaram, the Quran or the Bible have all endured because they are all maps of the moral imagination. Our modern literature is in reality a continuation of these ancient ways of seeing, thinking and acting. The range of our moral imagination shapes our language, and language, in turn, re-shapes our moral imagination. This is where translation emerges as a central, human practice, that helps us re-shape and expand our collective moral imagination.

The role of translation in shaping the moral imagination becomes apparent when we consider how modern languages are influenced by the prose, narrative style and rhetoric of the ancient languages whose influence they bear. The influence of Hebrew on English prose is really the influence of the Jewish Old Testament, and the values and beliefs of those Near-East desert-dwellers of old. What the King James Bible brings into English with its enormous rhetoric and stylistic power, is the force of Hebrew thought, the shape of its moral imagination. Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. The concrete imagery, the incantatory repetition, the magnificent, rolling, paratacic narrative rhythm and the lofty, paternal didactic tone is the precisely where the ancient Hebrew structure of thought resides — it belies a certain grand, all-encompassing way of looking at the world, a certain unshakable faith and emotion in the mode of response to it. It is no wonder that parts of the Declaration of Independence or MLK Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ sound like they are spoken with the voice and authority of a messiah. Even Gandhi, at times, sounds like a Hebrew patriarch from the desert. It is because they emerge from the same moral imagination.

One can similarly analyze the influence of Arabic and Islamic culture on Spanish, or Latin on German, or Prakrit and Jaina culture on Kannada to understand how moral imagination is embedded in, and inherited with language.  So far in human history, such inheritences have been largely restricted to the same ‘thought-family’ — for example, Italian draws from Greek and Latin, but not from Tamil or Chinese. While colonialism complicates this picture, the influence is one-sided; today, globally, it is the Western moral imagination that holds sway. But this is restrictive for humanity, for it does not allow us to access the entirety of the human imagination.

For example, the English language begets its earthy directness from its Germanic past, its precision and rhetoric from Latin and Greek, and moral seriousness from Hebrew. That is quite a broad influence. But a language like modern Tamil is arguably richer, because it is watered by multiple rivers. There is the direct influence of Old Tamil and Sanskrit poetics, rhetoric and philosophy. But through colonial influence, modern Tamil prose marries these influences with those of modern English (and to some extent, French) prose, which in turn carry threads of the Germanic, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. If my English prose sounds unusual, it is because it bears the influence of this tradition.

What this influence translates to is a broader moral imagination. A good reader of modern Tamil is as much at home with the images of the Bible or Norse mythology, or Greek philosophy, or even post-Enlightenment romantic and modernist traditions, as they are with the Upanishads, the Tamil epics like Silappathikaram and Manimekalai, medieval bhakti poetry and folk narratives, resulting in much wider possible choices of action and a greater human sympathy. In fact, I would venture to hazard that language-cultures with multiple linguistic inheritences have a more diverse cultural fields to draw out of, and therefore possess a wider moral imagination, than language-cultures with fewer inheritances.

The living classical languages and cultures of the world — including Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Tamil — have deeply embedded mythical and archetypical patterns, because they have been around for such a long time. But there has been little exchange of moral imaginations between their descendents leading up to the modern age. The moral imaginations of ancient cultures from Africa or Central America contribute very little to the mainstream modern imagination. I would venture to argue that the next phase of humanism — our creative literature, our translation — should focus on creating greater mutual influence between them.

I should note that I don’t mean ‘influence’ here in the sense of domination, or conquest, but rather in the sense of a braiding, a weaving of the imaginations of the world. I am envisioning the possibility of cross-talk between the various literatures, philosophies, myths and religions of human language and culture, at this level of depth.  I go back to the image of the magnificent multicoloured rug, woven with all the strands of the human imagination across the globe. Such a rug can only be woven in language, and such a weaving can only be made possible by dedicated translation and their reading —- like what the KJV Bible did for the English language. We should want to absorb those manners of thinking, those forms of life, into ourselves and make it our own, with the unyielding persistence of a magnificently human lover. It is by incorporating new modes of language into our consciousness through translation that we learn new modes of action and expand our moral imagination.

While the production and reading of literary translation between world languages proceeds valiantly in the face of many material odds, a lot of the motivation and effort behind the exercise today seems to rest on ‘knowing’ the other in an abstract manner. If we read and ‘know’ how a Muslim woman struggles in hinterland Karnataka or refugees suffer in Myanmar, we think we have developed empathy for the other, that we have demonstrated a certain liberal virtue unto ourselves. Many readers of translation I meet often say this is the reason they read translations from all over the world: to ‘know’ how the other half lives, to ‘learn’ about them. We prefer to sit in our comfort and look into the homes of the ‘other’, like a traveller from the first-world taking a half-day tour of Dharavi.

I wouldn’t fault anyone for what I call the ‘information mode’ of reading books, after all people are free to read how they want. But it is a pity, because in the creation, and the reading of a translation there is the possibility for a greater human expansion.

No, what if we moved out of our comfort zones and truly made space in our psyches, for the thought, the modes of action of the other? Instead of seeking to ‘learn’ and ‘know’ how other people see, think and act in the world, if one were to ask: how do I understand reality, think and act in the world, what is my svadharma, how can I expand my personal repetoire of thought and action by absorbing other ways of seeing, thinking and acting, then that might make the reading of literature a truly humanistic endeavour. For then, we shall truly be letting our imaginative faculties become as wide as the world. We shall not try to ‘understand’ the other in the abstract, we will absorb them into ourselves, and let those imaginations influence our action in the world. Our imagination can become the ground on which all of human culture, the entirety of the human tradition, plays out its drama. And we, individually, shall be richer, vaster for those experiences.

It is in this sense that I now believe we are human. It’s not unlikely that the basis of our humanity lies somewhere deep in our brains. But we’re not going to uncover it by poking around there. We learn it by braiding together in our imagination — our languages, our cultures, our gods, ourselves — and acting in the world. Human growth is realized in our choices and actions, and our freedom of choice and action (and consequently, our fundamental ability to be free) expands with the growth of our moral imagination.

4

This intuition is why, just like translation across space, the retelling of myth appears anew in every time period of literature. In every age, we feel the human need to produce a fresh translation of our most cherished symbols and archetypes for our present needs, our personal growth. Thomas Mann’s Joseph novels, or Kazantzakis’s The Last Testament of Christ, or Jeyamohan’s Venmurasu or The Daughter of Kumari are exemplary modern works in this tradition. I will conclude this section by giving two examples of how the reworking of narratives have consistently serves to expand our contemporary moral imagination.

The first of those examples centers on a short story by Maupassant called ‘Boule de Suif’.  In the story, a motley bourgeois group is fleeing from Prussia into France by coach at the height of the Franco-Prussian war, when they are stopped at the border by a Prussian officer at guard. He demands that one member of the group — a genial prostitute nick-named Boule de Suif, or Butterball — sleep with him as condition for the group to safely pass through. Initially she refuses, for although a sex worker, her moral principle refuses to let her participate in such a charade. But the group prevails on her, pressuring her into compliance, appealing to her patriorism and framing her act as a sacrifice for the greater good. In the end she agrees, and in that manner, secures their freedom. However when the group is finally safe and back on the road, the people she saved reveal how much they despise her, and hate being in her debt. The story ends with Boule de Suif sitting all alone in a corner of the coach, realizing how isolated and scorned she is in the hypocritical eyes of the society around her.

Maupassant’s story is a  dissection into the hypocrisy of modern bourgeois society. In Boule de Suif’s reluctant sacrifice, he locates a moral act — her generosity in engaging in something personally repulsive for the greater good. But in her painful endurance of social stigma he also situates a mirror in which the hypocrisy of people around her is reflected. She is like the woman accused of adultery in the Bible who earns the scorn of the Pharisees, indeed, the story reads like another version of that myth. Maupassant’s version, however, is a realistic picture befitting of the modern age; there is no messiah in it who shows up to proclaim, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone at her.’

The messiah shows up, albeit in a different avatar, in ‘The Heroine’, a short story by the Danish writer Isak Dinesen. The story preserves the theme of Boule de Suif but re-narrates it, and in the process, translates it in the register of an entirely novel moral imagination. In the story, when a similar group comprising, among others, an old married couple, a pair of nuns and a young theology student, is stopped at the border, the Prussian officer demands to see a young, proud French woman in their company —- her name is Helöise — in the nude if the group must safely pass. Helöise’s face turns pale at the insult, but after a moment of contemplation, she immediately turns to her travelling companions and says she would agree if they would agree to have their freedom at the price of her honour.

The focus shifts to her companions as each of them considers it and shudders in horror of what is asked of them, and realize that their lives, even if saved, would have no meaning at that cost. When everybody agrees to go to their deaths rather than see the young woman dishonoured, the officer reluctantly realizes that there is no choice but to let them go. The group crosses the border in an overwhelmed, awe-struck mood, as if they had just celebrated a sacred feast. They realize that they had been willing to sacrifice their lives to preserve Helöise, and she becomes their personal heroine, their daughter, their own symbol of the divine that they had preserved with their lives in that moral crusade. The incident, we are told, became the spiritual height of the lives of those simple people.

Many years later, the young student of theology, now matured into a middle-aged, worldly man, happens to meet Helöise, and discovers that she was all along really a dancer who performed in the nude. They speak about the night at the border, when Helöise reveals that it wouldn’t have taken her much to comply with the officer, but the people with her ‘were simple folk, and she worried for their souls.’ By letting them decide the worth of her life, she had generously gifted them the sum worth of theirs.

Dinesen’s story is a shockingly imaginative take on ‘Boule de Suif’, but also on the story of Jesus Christ in the Bible. When Christ gave up his life for mankind, it wasn’t in the nature of a debt (like Boule de Suif’s sacrifice), the story seems to say. Rather it was as a moral example, as one half of a reciprocal mutual-love relationship. The sacrifice of Christ holds up a mirror to our hearts, and identifies the capacity for sacrifice within us, and it is in this manner of mutual love that we are bound to Him, and He to us.

The story echoes this principle. Helöise acted as if she was Jesus Christ. She was willing to sacrifice her life if the people really wanted her to, and in recognition of that, the people made the significant gesture of putting their lives on the line for her, becoming Christ-figures themselves. This is the moral imagination of the story, where it expands from both the traditional biblical parable and from the bourgeois cynicism of Maupassant to an almost metamodern re-instantiation of Christ; locating the Christ-nature in Helöise the Venusian dancer is its perhaps most radical originality.

The second of my two examples of expanded moral imagination is from Tamil. The ancient epic poem, Silappathikaram by Ilango Adigal, has its heroine Kannagi, a chaste wife, rise in moral outrage against the king of the land they had sought refuge in, when he unjustly murders her husband Kovalan. Her rage leads to the eruption of public anger and the whole town is engulfed in flames and destroyed —- so goes the epic.

Jeyamohan brings the archetypical figure of the chaste wife into his contemporary short story, Aram, the first story in the collection Stories of the True; in English, it is called ‘The Song of Righteousness’. The chaste wife is featured in a contemporary bourgeois setting now; she learns that her husband, a prosperous merchant, has financially abused a poor writer, and is refusing to pay his wages in a time of need. The chaste wife responds like Kannagi, storming out in rage and seating herself outside his shop in the blinding heat, ‘eyes closed and motionless like a stone sculpture’, refusing to budge until he agrees in tears to restore the writer his rightful money. She sits on the road that was so hot that even the tar was melting away, while the man scrambles for the money and arranges to personally deliver it. He rushes back and falls at her feet, for her gesture of aram could potentially destroy everything of value in his world. It is only then that she consents to be raised. It needed four people to lift her up, and along with her saree and petticoat, ‘her skin and flesh had singed and were stuck to the melting tar’.

This was the intensity of Kannagi’s anger too. But here is where Aram builds upon and expands the moral imagination of the Silappathikaram. Where Kannagi rose against the king of a foreign land, the chaste wife in Aram rises up against her own husband when he turns out to be morally compromised. The Tamil tradition makes much of the chastity of Tamil wives and their unquestioned devotion to their husbands. Fertile rain will fall at the mere word of a chaste wife, who acknowledges no God but her husband — so goes a much-repeated poem of tradition.

But Aram expands that imagination. It locates the power of the chaste wife from that tradition, not in the person of the husband, but in the person of the wife’s own self, such that her power allows her to express aram against even her own husband, if he should turn out to be unrighteous. It is a  transgressive, counter-traditional moral imagination. But perhaps it is what the contemporary world needs.

We see it all around us today. It is one thing to outrage against the foreigner, the other. To protect the home and hearth against the invader. It is entirely another to have the moral courage and integrity of self to raise with aram against the monsters in one’s own home, some of whom commit unspeakable crimes and continue to enjoy boundless power and privilege.

Dear friends, as I write this, I have a vision of Kannagi, rubied anklet in hand, with long, open tresses and face glowing with rage, marching up the Pennsylvania Avenues and Rajpaths of the world.

5

I feel like beginning this section of the essay with those immortal words that any historically conscious Indian speaking to the United States feels compelled to use at some point… ‘Dear brothers and sisters of America’. I am now entering the moral imagination of Swami Vivekananda, whose historic address to the Parliament of World Religions at Chicago in 1893 built upon this note of fraternal, human intimacy. I am not a Swami, nor am I here to talk about religion —- in fact, the only human endeavour I approach with the kind of awe and reverence due to a God, is literature. But when I view the world through the lens of literature as the seat of the moral imagination as I sketched out earlier, the readers of this essay feel no less than blood-and-milk brothers and sisters.

My intimacy with the brothers and sisters of America is particularly pronounced, because I have lived in your country, and I know your joys and anxieties as if they are mine. Whether it is the personal anxiety of having to find one’s place — material or spiritual — in the age of late capitalism, the political anxiety of having to deal with the various national and international Situations of the day, or the anxiety about the future in a technocratic world where A.I. is threatening to take over all our jobs and our children’s jobs, I can relate. Whether it is the the writers and translators among you, or the members of the Indian diaspora: citizens, students, working professionals, retired grandparents, wives on the life-sucking H4; or whether you are the young people who were born in this country, most of you old enough to be my nephews or nieces, I know you, and I have lived some part of most of your lives over the course of mine. Your questions:  ‘Who am I? What should I do? What is my place in all of this?’ are mine, and perhaps your answers, too, are not unlike mine.

We are coming together in New York because we value literature, and because we are readers. It is in this sense that we are brothers and sisters, flowing together in the ocean of the human tradition. Even as fires burn in the lands overhead, we swim underground in silence and secrecy. We are fish, and as fish, we are upheld and supported by the ocean; we are in harmony with our element. We have the protection of the cool waters of the human tradition that surrounds us on all sides. We move in all dimensions, we change shape of our waters even as we move in it. We read the patterns of the universe easily, because we observe it in silent contemplation from below.

Some years after I had left America, I worked in a lab where among other duties, I had to routinely dissect the eyes of many different animals: pigs, lizards, birds, mice, monkeys, sometimes even humans. It was something I had never done at such a scale before, and to observe, sometimes in the matter of a week, the phylogenetic range of adaptations the organ of visual perception has evolved over biological time was astonishing.

Biological adaptation in response to evolutionary stress strikes me as a sort of moral imagination, a svadharma. The svadharma of a fish is not the svadharma of a fowl, and the adaptations each has evolved to survive in its particular environment are extraordinary, and decide how it fulfils its role.

It was at that time that I grew to appreciate how wonderful the eyes of fish were. Many fish live deep in water. The deeper they live, the less light there is to see by. Some fish live so deep that sometimes the only light available emerges from the bodies of other bioluminiscent fishes. To adapt to this reality fish have evolved eyes with very specific adaptations to improve their power of detection. Many fish have movable lenses that can slide back and forth like focus pullers in a film camera. They possess extraordinary sensitivity, with some fish-eyes being able to detect light as faint as only a few photons.

Friends, brothers and sisters: we are all fish swimming in the waters of our tradition, and our eyes are the only tools we have.

It is dark all around us. The water is sometimes murky. Above us, the hazy clouds of reality. Our past and our present weigh upon us. Our only help is our eyes. These eyes, our extraordinarily sensitive fish-eyes.

My hometown, Madurai, is home to an ancient goddess called Meenakshi. Her name means ‘the fish-eyed one’. It is a strange name, usually thought to be descriptive of the shape and quickness of of her eyes. It was only when I learned about fish eyes and their peculiar biological power, that I intuited a further significance to her name. She is a goddess of the deep waters, whose eyes can detect the barest glimmer of light.

It is her eyes that we have inherited as readers. Like that old goddess, our gazes can penetrate very deep into our collective past. They allow us to sense even the faintest glimmer of our fellows, past and present.  There, all towns are ours, all people our own. The ground of our moral imagination, that teaches us how to act and what to be if we look long enough.

What is this eye within us, after all, but our consciousness? In the age of AI, the only matter of distinction that sets us apart as humans is the fact that we are conscious of phenomenology. As readers, it is by our consciousness that all our collective knowledge comes together as wisdom, it is by our imagination that we learn how to act in an increasingly uncertain world. There is no greater political act today than reading, for it is in the womb of reader’s consciousness that humanity stays alive.

What is sweet, you ask.

Solitude is sweet,

and sweeter than that

is communion with nature.

Even sweeter,

is knowing the wise,

and far more so,

to see them all the time,

in waking, in dreaming.

In the Avvai poem that I have translated here, I sense a personal insight about this great ocean that we live together in.

Dear brothers and sisters, I share this insight with all of you, as one human being to another. For what better treasures do we have, in this tremblingly transitory world of ours?

6

All is dark when we go into the brain. The tungsten probe is hair-thin, and we drive it in slowly, carefully, by the light of a torch, with micrometer precision. Most of the time we proceed in silence, micrometer by micrometer, in complete darkness. When the probe gets close to single neurons, their ‘firing’, a rapid fluctuation in the voltage around the cell, is picked up by the metal, amplified and converted to sound, and the speaker sparks to life with a series of rhythmic, pulsed pops and crackles. It tells us that we have found a neuron, that it is healthy and kicking. Encountering a living neuron in a running brain is always an experience of enormous awe, like coming face to face with a lion in the Serengiti. 

All my dreams begin in that dark. I’m pushing in, slowly. There is darkness all around, and silence, and stillness. It envelops me like an embrace. Deeper, deeper, I go, till the deep turns into the darkness of waters, and I’m be rolling with it. Rolling, turning, and sinking, deeper, deeper, until the pitch black and the silence is offset only by the roll of the deep. I wait.

And then it shows up. The first glimmer of light in the dark. And the next. And another. One more.

I watch in silence as they all come to life, flickering like fireflies, and on and on they keep coming, with no end in sight.

~*~

Post-script

In the writing of this essay, I was guided by the enduring image of Avvai; I felt her hand on my shoulder as I wrote it. I dedicate this essay to her elderly presence, her piercing insight and wisdom with much humility and gratitude. My understanding of Avvai was shaped by, among others, the translator A.K. Ramanujan (Poems of Love and War), the poet Isai, whose essays on Avvai, Kalinellikkani, I read avidly when they appeared in the Tamil little magazine Neeli, and the translator Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma, whose book on Avvai’s poetry, Give, Eat, Live, was an inspiration in more ways than one.

Suchitra

March 20, 2026

Bengaluru