The Man is Greater than his work

Prof. J.V Raghavender Rao

Pattabhi Rama Reddy has completed 75 years on 19th February 1994. Pattabhi is lucky to have lived such a long span of life - three score and 15 years - as Time scythe cuts the knot of life - cruelly before it reches its consummation. His life is deep, rich and varied. It is colourful and poetic with ups and downs, light and shadow, mirth and tragedy.

He looks at life in a philosophical way and seeks meaning in terms of experience and feeling. As he put it: “Life is not a lesson but one experience after another. Each experience is unique. Life is a grand celebration with its innumerable arches of welcome”.

Pattabhi is deeply reflective and not scared of old age, loneliness, or for that matter even death. As he passionately put it: “The life we know consciously is only one..... Death is the greatest invention of life and its crowing glory. It is a method by which life regenerates itself”. The poet in Pattabhi looks at death as a beautiful and unparallel experience which is the denouement of life. Death is once again the beginning of life, as Pattabhi seems to believe in many births and Purva Janma Samskaras. He believes that what we do in this life and what we may perform in the next ones is governed by inexorable laws of birth and death based on Samskars.

Unlike many progressive, protestant and revolutionary writers and poets he is a God believer. Like Carl Jung he believes that the actions of people in their lives are programmed by a Meta-Programmer (God).

It is this philosophical outlook and conviction in the perennial that makes him different from other poets, artists and men. He has an intense love for life, passion for experience and feeling for truth. His is a life based on some grand values of equality, innovation and personal morality. That is why he has desisted from writing his autobiography or cataloguing his accomplishments in the field of Telugu literature or Kannada Cinema. Wilfully he has kept himself out of the blaze and noise of media publicity. He prefers to be withdrawn, reflective and live life all by himself. That is how this literary and cultural luminary has been less known and less sought-after by the Telugu people of Andhra Pradesh. I understand that he was not even willing to participate in the grand celebration of completion of 75 years of his life. He tends to be mystic and otherworldly. In the words of Harindranath Chattopadhya “He would like to be a stone quiet under dreadful thunder and cool like the pool———————”. This he would like to be when he is all alone as the most loved companion and the prized jewel of his life, his wife, Snehalatha Reddy passed away 17 years ago.

Pattabhi was born in Nellore in Feb., 1919 and carried on with his studies at V.A. High School till 1933. He went to Madras and completed his Intermediate in 1935. During the years 1935-1937 he went to Shantineketan for completing his graduation with Mathematics, English and Economics.

There is a story behind his venture to Shantineketan. In 1922 when Pattabhi was 3 years old, Gandhiji came and stayed with his parents Tikkavarapu Rami Reddy and Sudershanamma. The house Sudershan Mahal was situated in vast space surrounded by lush gardens. Impressed with the quietude of the surroundings Gandhiji renamed the home as “Shantineketan”. This unwittingly led to many from the family going for studies at Shantiniketan which included his uncle Bezawada Gopal Reddy, two of his sisters and he himself later.

After completing graduation he went to Colombia University New York for studying M.A. Literature. Instead he took a degree in motion picture production. This was forced on him as the U.S. Government was drafting all students into the army to fight the Germans and the 2nd World War. He refused to join the army as he hated to eat meat. He is a strict vegetarian and has continued to be so life-long. Since his childhood, Pattabhi has been extremely sensitive, deep and sublime. He could not bear the sight of “insects being killed or even flowers being plucked”. Vegetarianism came to him naturally as he had an innate love for life in all its forms.

Pattabhi is a colourful and many splendoured personality. His interests and inclinations are widespread and crisscross many directions. By instinct he has great thirst for wander and cease-less travel. He has gone round the globe more than once. He is an intense student of life and lives it passionately with observation, reflection and feeling.

But intellectually he has been a man of thought, reason and reflection. His two haunting passions have been (a) Mathematics and (b) Poetry. He has arrived at God through Mathematical reasoning. When we move from the infinite space to the unknown infinite, according to Pattabhi, we hit upon the idea of the creator of this infinite universe.

Writing poetry has been a spontaneous urge and a restless passion with him. While studying M.A. literature he lived in the dark and dingy streets of Calcutta which became the back drop of his first volume of poetry “Fidel Ragalu Dozen” published in 1938. This became a path-breaking and trendsetting work in Telugu poetry as it challenged the traditional forms of prosody, rhyme and metaphor. The book was received as a whirl-wind.

In 1951 Pattabhi along with his wife Snehalatha Reddy went to Spain for the latter to learn the Spanish dances. While Snehalatha was dancing Buleria and Fandango dances, Pattabhi was composing poems in Telugu occasionally sneaking a glance or two at Sneha’s dancing postures. Some of those poems had been published in “Kaitha Na Daitha”.

As a poet and literatteur Pattabhi is very fond of pun i.e., words with double meanings. He is a great pun artist in modern Telugu poetry and as Arudra observed, he is the richest pun writer that Telugu people know of. Sri Sri writing a short foreword to “Pattabhi Panchangam” published in 1980 stated that “the pun poems of Pattabhi were like Vitamin “B” tablets restorative of health, fun, joy and humour”.

When we assess the literary contributions of Pattabhi he stands out as an irreverent, hot and unconventional rebel against traditional forms of poetry and literature. His ambition was to break the back of tradition and innovate new types of free verse, which was new in content as well as in form.

As in literature so in the field of Kannada Cinema Pattabhi has been a pioneer of art and parallel cinema. By launching ‘Samskara in Kannada in 1967 he performed the same brave act as Satyajith Ray did in Bengali when he launched Pather Panchali. This film won many national and international awards and ‘put Pattabhi on the world map of directors. This was followed by the production of “Chanda Marutha” and “Shringara Rasa”. An accomplished director like Singeetum Srinivas Rao who worked for Pattabhi’s Samskara film thinks that his best film is ‘Shringara Rasa’ although it did not bag any award.

Despite his poetic and artistic bent of mind Pattabhi is deeply committed to values of equality, humanism, innovation, honesty and morality in private and public life. He himself has never been a front-ranking activist, but he stood like a rock by his wife Snehalatha Reddy and supported her venture to start the “Madras Players” amateur drama troupe and he is extremely happy that it has blossomed into a full-fledged organisation. Similarly Pattabhi and his children shared the agony of the Emergency brutalities inflicted on their family by the then government. The whole family was arrested and Snehalatha had to rot in the jail for nine months under MISA in its dirty and dingy rooms, spending breathless nights as she was asthmatic. Soon after her release in three months, she passed away, leaving a legacy of an indomitable spirit and bravery that fought against the cruel dictatorship. Anasuya the sister of Pattabhi says: “Pattabhi is in a cage without the parrot (Sneha)”. I don’t think so. On the contrary Pattabhi is stronger to day for he has a fearless daughter like Nandana who is busy organising the labour co-operatives. His son Konark continues to be an artist playing guitar with dexterity and subtlety.

Pattabhi, in my opinion, continues to be the symbol of protest, innovation, equality and humanism as he has bequeathed the heritage of Snehalatha to his children. He is not calculating nor money-minded. He was never after a career or social recognition. He is born of a distinguished literary aristocratic family, and has inherited the aristocracy of culture and not its lower order dimension of wealth.

Money and profit were never his concerns. He entered into many a business and ended in disaster. But that did not deter him from pursuing the sublime and the beautiful. It seems he used to tell his friends that bird watchers watch birds for long hours and they derive no profit in terms of money. But watching birds is a delightful and aesthetic experience which has to be pursued for its own sake. That is why in 1967 in the company of Dr.Lohiya he spontaneously decided to film Dr.Anantha Murthy’s novel Samskara. He seems to have said: “In my career, for the production of a commercial film, I sunk Rs.3 lakhs. Why not I sink Rs.1 lakh for the production of an artistic film?” This speaks of values of the man behind the poet and the director who has a large heart and a brave mind.

Pattabhi as a poet and an art film director has already accomplished a place for himself in the hall of great men. He is great as an artist and is greater as a human being whose values and work have not only inspired the contemporary artists like Arudra, Girish Karnaud and Singeetam Srinivas Rao etc., but may blaze a trail for the future generations to follow. It is no exaggeration to reiterate that the man is greater than the work.

(Courtesy: Hat's Off Pattabhi)