Vaasanthi seems to believe that SVV credited the British rulers of his time with a far greater sense of fairness and integrity than the Indians by inviting attention to a serial in which an English officer had to come to the rescue of a young girl by knocking sense into her husband who was ill-treating her. SVV saw Gandhiji as the man who came to liberate a debilitated India from its sickness and bondage to foreign rule. An essay in which SVV writes about Mahatma Gandhi – and which was not perhaps among the collections which had come to Vaasanthi for her comments – heralding a new dawn in India should correct her notion about his not having been drawn towards Gandhiji. Yet another scene in the same serial presents a village crowd highly excited by the feud in a Dalit (though the word had not come into currency in SVV’s time) family over a young man’s right, sanctified by tradition to marry a close cousin and his being outraged by those trying to rob him of the same. His devoted wife takes good care of him on the sly – to the risk of her becoming pregnant in her village which ostracises her until the truth reveals her as a very great woman. It has a freedom fighter who is on the run as a revolutionary and has gone underground. Vaasanthi’s observation about SVV having been indifferent in his writings to the freedom movement of his time is also not fair if one could recall the scenes in yet another long serial. The recollection of the story would leave one’s eyes misty. A novel which comes readily to the mind is about a childless couple bringing up an orphaned Brahmin boy who tops in a competitive examination. There were quite a few of his novels in which he very movingly acknowledges the graciousness of the non-Brahmin benefactors. Though she does not seem to think so, SVV should, however, have been quite sensitive to the response his writing might have received from the larger sections of the society in his time. This should explain the unwelcome attention which the leading Tamil periodicals of the SVV era, principally the Ananda Vikatan, provoked about their being the journals of the “Agraharam” from the emerging Dravidian movement of which Vaasanthi is fully aware. It would seem that the focus of SVV’s fiction was entirely on the Brahmin middle and upper middle classes. Vaasanthi, Editor of the Tamil edition of India Today, takes a close look at the writings of SVV in a readable book of less than a hundred pages. However, even in his own time, along with the euphoric reception given to his short stories and novels, the response at least from perhaps a much smaller section of his readers was sufficiently discriminating. Vijayaraghavachari – known to the large circle of his readers only as SVV – did offer a very rich fare to project him as a very keen, lively and warm-hearted observer of the people he knew very closely. IT WILL be difficult to think of a contemporary writer of Tamil fiction who had kept his very wide circle of readers lapping up his serials week after week and waiting breathlessly for the subsequent issues of the Ananda Vikatan as SVV had done half a century ago. SVV ENUM RASAVADHI (Tamil): Vaasanthi Vaanathi Padhippagam, 13 Deenadayalu Street, T.Nagar, Chennai-600017.
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