About the Book

‘Like a lion in the first flush of its golden-maned youth, the forest of giant golden-stemmed bamboos stalked towards them. Why not burn it down? Green shoots and all?’ Thrumming with cicadas and honeybees, bristling with bamboo and tamarind, and redolent of heady illuppai blossoms, here comes a saga of the life-and-death struggle of a lush South Indian jungle. The agent of change is a man who has nothing to lose. Uprooted from the human jungle of caste, clan, and kinship, Singapore-returned Chidambaram hacks, and finally burns his way into the untamed wilderness to make way for sugarcane plantations and a sugar factory. Tamil literature has from the earliest times been infused with an awareness of the natural world. Saaya Vanam, along with this English avataar, vividly reminds us that Tamil itself–like any human speech–is an outgrowth of nature. Says the translator, Vasantha Surya: ‘It has been my endeavour to show how languages are inseparably intertwined, and derive their nourishment from a shared ground of human experience and imagination.’

About the Author

Sa Kandasamy (23 July 1940 – 31 July 2020) -Tamil novelist, short story writer, literary critic and documentary filmmaker, Sa Kandasamy wrote his first novel Saaya Vanam at the age of 25, naming it after a village that he had lived in as a child. Now in its twelfth edition, Saaya Vanam is one of the earliest examples of modern Indian literature focussing on environmental issues. Sa Kandasamy’s Visaaranai Commission, which dealt with custodial violence and the police, won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Tamil in 1998, one of several awards and fellowships received by him. Sahitya Akademi published a series of Tamil biographies introduced by him. He wrote extensively for the literary magazine Ka Sa Da Tha Pa Ra, which featured the work of artists, writers, scholars, and translators of all hues. His film Kaval Deivangal documenting the history and techniques relating to traditional terracotta art in South India won the first prize at the Angino Film Festival, in Cyprus, in 1989. ‘Sa Kandasamy believed in expressing profound ideas in simple words and was not trapped by labels,’ says A S Panneerselvan.

About the Translator

Vasantha Surya (born 10th April, 1942) is a poet, journalist, and translator whose prose translations from Tamil include six novels, an anthology of contemporary short fiction (A Place to Live), and a collection of Imayam’s short stories (An Order from the Sky). The Stalk of Time and A Word Between Us are her two poetry collections in English, while among her translations of poetry are To Plunge Within, a selection of verses from the Tamil classic Nammaazhwar’s Thiruvaimozhi, and several poems in Tamil Dalit Writing. The Ballad of Budhni is her translation of a narrative folk poem in Bundeli Hindi, Budhni ki Aalha. Her works for children include Mridu in Madras, translated into Tamil by Prema Srinivasan and herself, and a children’s Ramayana. Her articles and reviews have appeared in major publications. A Matter of Method is an investigative report on the creation and dismantling of the Method of Science Exhibition for UNESCO’s International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU).