Hi Jeyamohan sir,
This is Megana from Virginia. I wanted to thank you for the opportunity to speak with you and the esteemed guests on this panel about Classicism. It is really unfortunate to hear that Mr. Mahizhnan cannot make it anymore; his work is incredible. I was recently reading a lot of your works, watching your speeches on the classics, reading Mr. Searl’s books, and watching Mr. Mahizhnan’s speeches. This made my view on classicism so much clearer than it was before. I’ve written my thoughts below:
How do we define classicism? I was poring over this topic this past week, looking through the works of Dr. Searls, Mr. Mahizhnan, and Mr. Jeyamohan. I’d grown up reading so many – Arogyaniketan, Taming of the Shrew, The Abyss, The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, 1984. I knew what fit in the box, but I was having trouble finding a good label for it. In my view, selecting a book to be a “classic” is subjective. For some, classics are books that had social, historical, or cultural significance in the era in which they were published, or that enlighten or are universally appealing. For others, the hallmark of a classic is when it is selected for class reading in 11th grade – a text you and your classmates can grope over and highlight.
But researching for this panel gave me a much clearer view of what the classics really are: living history. In Dr. Searl’s book The Philosophy of Translation, we move past the idea of a classic being a static artifact. Classics possess the power to be reborn in each language they are translated into. Each translation serves as a realignment. In Dr. Searl’s own words, “A translation is and isn’t the same as the original – it’s the translator’s path through it.” A classic is not a mere relic of the past; it takes on a new form when seen from a new language or time period. That path through the original work is what we see as living history. As the translator makes their way through, the classic lives, breathes, and shifts across the boundaries of language, finding a balance between what was written then and what is felt now. Dr. Searl’s book What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going is one of the best real-life applications of classics as living history, with each short story taking inspiration from a classic work, transposing skeletal themes of the past onto the flesh and blood of the present. He weaves a path through the context of our world today using strands from the years before, creating living history.
However, we cannot discuss creating living history without talking about Mr. Mahizhnan. He was at the forefront of building a database to store 50 years of literature, plays, and poetry to create the Tamil Digital Heritage collection. Mr. Mahizhnan was one of the people who built this initiative brick by brick – from the funding, to reaching out to the National Library Board and the National Heritage board, to painstakingly unearthing now treasured works that serve as windows to the past and mirrors for Tamil Singaporean youth to see themselves in. This classical canon is being actively written – social, historical, and cultural significance are forged with each Tamil letter read. Mr. Mahizhnan, once worried about the conservation of the Tamil language and culture in Singapore, has now transformed the landscape from one of survival to one of permanence. This is living history – classics are reclaimed to shape cultural identity, to form its heart.
Mr. Jeyamohan argues for the value of classics in today’s world. A classic is not simply a good book, but one that has “permanent aesthetic value.” Rather than holding this idea that there is some moral duty to return to the classics, we should instead revisit them because they contain blueprints of human conflict and emotion. Bones to hold the body together. Archetypes that are not just reflected across stories we read, but in our real lives. They act as a collective memory, with situations we find ourselves in the present being echoed in waves across our past.
Perhaps the best definition of classics comes from Italo Calvino’s article, Why Read the Classics? “A classic is a work which persists as background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway,” Calvino says. A classic is omnipresent. When we reread classics, we glean a new meaning each time while simultaneously immersing ourselves in the traces of previous interpretations. In a way, classics form community. Through Mr. Jeyamohan’s eyes, we make the same mistakes, our struggles become universal, ripples of words forming reflections. Dr. Searls shows us that we weave new patterns all using the same thread. Mr. Mahizhnan carves an identity for the next generation, with the classics as his knife. Classics are living history – long after we are dead and buried, their pulse will beat on.
Megana Kumar
