O.V.

Vijayan

O.V. Vijayan (1930–2005) was an acclaimed Malayalam novelist, short

story writer, cartoonist, translator, columnist, political analyst, and public
intellectual. In a literary career spanning almost half a century, he published
six novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eight volumes of non-fictional
prose, three volumes of reminiscences, three volumes of cartoons, and four
self-translations. This book offers a comprehensive understanding of O.V.
Vijayan’s work by analysing his fictional and non-fictional works, cartoons,
and columns, and situates him in the context of Malayalam literary culture
and Indian literature at large.
The volume discusses themes such as the politics of everyday life; culture,
religion, and the changing nature of Indian society; struggles of a writer
and thinker; the idea of socially responsive radical modernism; ecology
and subculture; and the politics of self-translation. These readings explore
Vijayan’s legacy as an iconic figure of modernism in Malayalam fiction
who reinvented its language; as an unrelenting critic of the modern nation-
state and its excesses; as a post-colonial thinker; and as a visionary who
transcended the binaries of the mundane and the magical, the political and
the spiritual, and the premodern and the postmodern.
Part of the Writer in Context series, this book will be useful for scholars
and researchers of Indian literature, Malayalam literature, English literature,
comparative literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, global south
studies, and translation studies.

E.V. Ramakrishnan is bilingual critic, poet, and translator who writes in

English and his first language, Malayalam. He is a former Professor Emeritus
and Professor and Dean of Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. He has
been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for his critical study of Malayalam
novel, Malayala Novelinte Deshakaalangal (2023) by the National Academy
of Letters, New Delhi. He is a recipient of Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award,
Odakkuzhal Award and fellowships from the Indian Institute of Advanced
Study, K.K. Birla Foundation and the Shastri Indo-Canadian Foundation of
the Government of Canada. He has delivered lectures in many International
conferences held in the Universities in Georgia (U.S.A), Paris at Sorbonne,
Vienna, Beijing, Macau, Amman, Kuala Lampur etc. His prominent critical
works in English are: Making It New: Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi
and Hindi Poetry (1995), Locating Indian Literature: Texts. Traditions,
Translations (2011), Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity
(2017) and Mikhail Bakhtin: A Critical Introduction (2023). Among the schol-
arly volumes he has edited/co-edited are Interdisciplinary Alter-Natives in
Comparative Literature (2013), Bakhtinian Explorations of Indian Culture:
Pluralism, Dogma and Dialogue through History (2018), Literary Criticism
in India: Texts, Trends and Trajectories (2021) and A Cultural Poetics
of Bhasha Literatures: In Theory and Practice (2024). He has published
eleven books of critical studies in Malayalam which include Aksharavum
Aadhunikatayum (1992, 2001, 2021), Anubhavangale Aarkkanu Peti?
(2007, 2022) and Achati Muthal Aagolatha Vare (2022). He is the author of
four volumes of poetry in English, the most recent being, Tips for Living in
an Expanding Universe (2018).

K.C. Muraleedharan is Associate Professor of English retired from Payyanur

College, Kannur University, Kerala. He is an academic and translator whose
articles and translations have appeared in various journals like Malayalam
Literary Survey of Kerala Sahitya Akademi, Granthalokam, Countercurrents.​
org​., and Modern Literature. He has translated from Malayalam into English
the manuscript of Pattom A. Thanu Pillai’s biography published in 2012. He
has edited/co-edited seven anthologies for undergraduates of various Indian
universities, prescribed in and outside Kerala, a few of them published by
Cambridge. He has served as the Chairperson of the Board of Studies and a
member of the Academic Council of Kannur University. He has been associ-
ated with the SCERT, Kerala as an expert resource for textbook production
since 2009.
Writer in Context
Series Editor: Sukrita Paul Kumar, critic, poet, and academic;
Chandana Dutta, academic, translator, and editor

The ‘Writer in Context’ series has been conceptualized to facilitate a

comprehensive understanding of Indian writers from different languages.
This is in light of the fact that Indian literature in English translation is
being read and even taught extensively across the world with more and more
scholars engaging in research. Each volume of the series presents an author
from the post-Independence, multilingual, Indian literature from within her/
his socio-literary tradition. Every volume has been designed to showcase the
writer’s oeuvre along with her/his cultural context, literary tradition, critical
reception, and contemporary resonance. The series, it is hoped, will serve as a
significant creative and critical resource to address a glaring gap in knowledge
regarding the context and tradition of Indian writing in different languages.
Sukrita Paul Kumar and Chandana Dutta are steering the project as Series
Editors with Vandana R. Singh as the Managing Editor.
So far, 12 volumes have been planned covering writers from different
parts and traditions of India. The intent is to facilitate a better understanding
of Indian writers and their writings for the serious academic, the curious
researcher as well as the keen lay reader.
Krishna Sobti
A Counter Archive
Edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Rekha Sethi
Joginder Paul
The Writerly Writer
Edited by Chandana Dutta
Indira Goswami
Margins and Beyond
Edited by Namrata Pathak and Dibyajyoti Sarma
Amrita Pritam
The Writer Provocateur
Edited by Hina Nandrajog and Prem Kumari Srivastava
Mahasweta Devi
Writer, Activist, Visionary
Edited by Radha Chakravarty
Vyankatesh Madgulkar
A Villageful of Stories and a Forestful of Tales
Edited by Sachin C. Ketkar and Keerti Ramachandra
Bama
The Writer of a Counter Culture
Edited by Raj Kumar and S. Armstrong

For more information about this series, please visit: www​.routledge​.com​/Writer​-In​-Context​/

book​-series​/WIC
O.V. Vijayan
The Critical Insider

Edited by E.V. Ramakrishnan

and K.C. Muraleedharan
First published 2025
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2025 selection and editorial matter, E.V. Ramakrishnan and K.C.
Muraleedharan; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of E.V. Ramakrishnan and K.C. Muraleedharan to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-367-71574-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-74741-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-15932-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322
Typeset in Sabon
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Figure 1 O.V. Vijayan under the Banyan tree.
Source: K.R. Vinayan


Figure 2 O.V. Vijayan’s handwriting.
Source: Ravi Dee Cee

Contents

List of photographs xiv

Preface to the series xv
Preface xvii
Acknowledgements xix

O.V. Vijayan: The Making of the Critical Insider 1

E.V. RAMAKRISHNAN

SECTION 1
The World According to O.V. Vijayan: A Selection of His
Writings 17
(a) Excerpts from Vijayan’s Novels 19

1 The Schools: (From The Legends of Khasak) 21

2 The Conversion: (From The Legends of Khasak) 26
3 The General: (From The Saga of Dharmapuri) 31
4 The Infinity of Grace: (Chapter 24 of the Novel,
Gurusagaram) 39
TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY RAMESH MENON AND THE AUTHOR

(b) Two Short Stories by Vijayan 43

5 After the Hanging: (Short Story) 45

6 The Blessing of the Wild-Fowl: (Short Story) 51

(c) A Selection of Vijayan’s Non-Fictional Prose 57

7 Two Wars, Two Finger Prints 59

TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY E.V. RAMAKRISHNAN

x Contents

8 The Forgotten Book 62

TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY E.V. RAMAKRISHNAN

9 Understanding Divisiveness 64
ESSAY BY O.V. VIJAYAN

(d) A Selection of Vijayan’s Autobiographical Essays 67

10 Bangarwadi 69
TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY K. RAMACHANDRAN

11 Meditation on Words 73
TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY K. RAMACHANDRAN

12 Memory of a Vermillion Mark 76

TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY K.C. MURALEEDHARAN

SECTION 2
The Emergence of a Modern Malayalam Classic: Essays on
The Legends of Khasak 83

13 Laughter of Detachment 85
K.P. APPAN
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY K.T. DINESH)

14 The Music of Khasak 93

ASHA MENON
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY K. RAMACHANDRAN)

15 The Paternal Clock 99

P.K. RAJASEKHARAN
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY ARUNLAL MOKERI)

16 Orality, Literacy, and Modernity: A Reading of The

Legends of Khasak 108
E.V. RAMAKRISHNAN
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY DHANESH MANKULAM WITH THE AUTHOR)

SECTION 3
Vijayan’s Oeuvre as a Fictionist: Dissent, Terror, Grace, and
Beyond 117

17 O.V. Vijayan: A Sage and an Iconoclast 119

K. SATCHIDANANDAN
 Contents   xi

18 At the Sign of the Goat 124

DAVID SELBOURNE

19 Vijayan the Sceptic Visionary: A Reading of The Saga of

Dharmapuri 126
P. P. RAVEENDRAN

20 The Quest and After: A Reading of The Infinity of Grace

(Gurusagaram) 132
V. RAJAKRISHNAN

21 The Rite of Expiation for the Accumulated Guilt: A

Reading of O.V. Vijayan’s Thalamurakal (Generations) 136
THOMAS MATHEW
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY K.C. MURALEEDHARAN)

22 From Transgression to Transcendence: A Reading of

O.V. Vijayan’s Short Fiction 142
E. V. RAMAKRISHNAN

SECTION 4
Vijayan in the Twenty-First Century 149

23 Vijayan’s Journeys 151

P. PAVITHRAN
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY K.C. MURALEEDHARAN)

24 Vijayan’s Women: Beyond the Deterministic Dogmas 162

G. USHAKUMARI
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY E.V. RAMAKRISHNAN)

25 O.V. Vijayan’s Politics 171

V.C. SREEJAN
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY K.C. MURALEEDHARAN)

26 The Saga of Dharmapuri in the Twenty-First Century 176

AJAY P. MANGAT
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY K. RAMACHANDRAN)

27 Thalamurakal (Generations): The Caste System as Seen

through the Cracked Mirror of the Present 181
E.V. RAMAKRISHNAN
xii Contents

SECTION 5
Vijayan in Translation 189

28 Self-Translation as Self-Righting: O.V. Vijayan’s The

Legends of Khasak 191
CHITRA PANIKKAR

29 The Writer as Translator: Self-Translation in

O.V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak 203
SANJU THOMAS

30 From Text to Performance: Deepan Sivaraman’s Stage

Adaptation of Khasak 212
A CONVERSATION WITH DEEPAN SIVARAMAN BY MANILA C. MOHAN
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY E.V. RAMAKRISHNAN)

SECTION 6
Vijayan the Cartoonist 221

31 A Cartoonist’s Workshop 223

O.V. VIJAYAN
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY P.N. VENUGOPAL)

32 Foreword to the Volume, The Tragic Idiom:

O.V. Vijayan’s Cartoons and Notes on India 228
BRUCE PETTY

33 He also Cartooned: On the Fading Half of O.V. Vijayan 230

E.P. UNNY

SECTION 7
Vijayan as Seen by His Contemporaries 233

34 The Literary Get-Togethers of Delhi 235

P. GOVINDA PILLAI
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY E.V. RAMAKRISHNAN)

35 Vijayan 1975–2005: Progressive Erosion of Black

Humour and Laughter 239
ANAND
(TRANSLATED BY E.V. RAMAKRISHNAN)

36 O.V. Vijayan: Death and Afterlife of a Writer 242

M. MUKUNDAN
 Contents   xiii

37 Remembering My Brother 247

O.V. USHA

38 The Lean Young Man 251

MADHAVIKKUTTY (KAMALA DAS)
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY SHYMA P.)

SECTION 8
Vijayan in Conversation 253

39 ‘We can never accept that the black man can say
something original!’: A Conversation with O.V. Vijayan 255
AKBAR KAKKATTIL
(TRANSLATED BY K.C. MURALEEDHARAN)

40 The Lion in Winter: An Interview with O.V. Vijayan 262

RAJEEV SRINIVASAN

41 ‘Writing in English is like wanting a new set of parents’:

A Conversation on Language between O.V. Vijayan and
O.V. Usha 268
GOPI NARAYANAN
(TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY E.V. RAMAKRISHNAN)

42 Sorrow of the Traveller 272

S. PRASANNARAJAN IN CONVERSATION WITH O.V. VIJAYAN

SECTION 9
Vijayan in Letters 277

43 Letters by O.V. Vijayan to Anandi Ramachandran 279

TRANSLATED FROM MALAYALAM BY E.V. RAMAKRISHNAN

Bio-Chronology: O.V. Vijayan: His Life and Times 287

Bibliography 299
A Selection of Vijayan’s Cartoons 303
Notes on Contributors 309
Index 315
Photographs

1 O.V. Vijayan under the Banyan tree vii

2 O.V. Vijayan’s handwriting viii
3 Vijayan by Madhu, O.V. Vijayan in his youth xxii
4 Cover of the Hundredth edition of The Legends of Khasak 84
5 Vijayan statue – at Thasarak 118
6 O.V. Vijayan on the Beach 150
7 Picture of Vijayan 222
8 Entrance of O.V. Vijayan Memorial 234
9 Vijayan, wife Theresa, and sister Usha 278
10 Vijayan and wife Theresa 286

Cartoons
Cartoon 1: A comment on the state of the nation. (Page 37,
The Tragic Idiom, from the section “The State of the
Nation”) 303
Cartoon 2: Erosion of idealism in public life. (Page 49, The
Tragic Idiom, from the section “The State of the Nation”) 304
Cartoon 3: Gandhian ideals do not guide the ruling class.
(Page 63, The Tragic Idiom, from the section “The
Foreign Encounters”) 304
Cartoon 4: Transparency has disappeared from public life.
(Page 89, The Tragic Idiom, from the section “The
Foreign Encounters”) 305
Cartoon 5: The judiciary fails to be a watchdog of civil
rights. (Page 120, The Tragic Idiom, from the section
“The Democracy Wall”) 306
Cartoon 6: Stalinism finds supporters among Indian
communists. (Page 198, The Tragic Idiom, from the
section “The State of the States”) 307
Cartoon 7: There is ‘heavy water’ but no drinking water.
(Page 233, The Tragic Idiom, from the section “Nuclear”) 308


Preface to the Series

The conceptualization and making of the Writer in Context series must in

itself be seen in the context of a historical evolution of literary studies in
English in India. It was as late as the mid-1980s of the twentieth century,
decades after the independence of India, that the angst to redefine English
literary studies in the universities manifested itself in thoughtful discussions
amongst scholars. In 1986, the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o published
his well-known book Decolonizing the Mind that had a widespread appeal
amongst the academia and people in general who were struggling to shed
their deep-set colonial hangover. Soon after, English departments of Indian
universities and the Centers of South Asian Studies abroad began to incorpo-
rate Indian literature in translation into their syllabi. This encouraged more
translations of Indian literature into English, even though translation studies
never picked up as a popular academic discipline. Other than the transla-
tions of a few critical texts from Indian languages, the creation of appro-
priate critical material for an understanding of the comprehensive context
of the writers remained minimal. There still remains an impending need to
place Indian writers within the context of their own literary as well as socio-
cultural linguistic traditions. Each language in India has a well-developed
tradition of creative writing and the writings of each writer require to be
understood from within that tradition even if she/he may be writing against
the tide. Readers, translators, editors, and publishers ought to be able to
acknowledge and identify these writings from within their own intimate con-
texts. Familiarity with the oeuvre of the writers, with their times as well as
the knowledge of their critical reception by the discerning readers of their
own language, facilitate an understanding of certain otherwise inaccessible
nuances of their creative writings. Apart from getting an insight into the dis-
tinctive nature of the specific writer, this would also add to the sense of the
fascinating diversity in Indian literature.
Each volume in this series is designed to provide a few extracts from the
creative and other prose writings by the author in focus, followed by the
English translations of selected critical essays on the author’s works. For bet-
ter insights into the writer’s art and craft, self-reflexive essays and articles by
the author about the creative process and her/his comments on the writerly
environment are also included. Much of this material may be available as


xvi Preface to the Series

scattered correspondence, conversations, notes, and essays that lie untrans-

lated and locked – as it were – in different bhashas. A discreet selection of
such material has also been included in each of the volumes in this series.
In the making of this series, there has been an ongoing exchange of ideas
amongst the editors of different volumes. It is indeed intriguing that while
the writers selected belong to more or less the same times, the contexts vary;
and, even when literary conventions maybe similar in some languages, the
author stands out as unique. At times the context itself creates the writer
but many a time the writer creates her/his own context. The enquiry into the
dialectic between the writer and the context lends a significant dimension to
the volume. While the distinctive nature of each volume is dictated by the
uniqueness of the author, all the volumes in the series conform to the shared
concept of presenting an author from within the literary context of her/his
language and culture.
It is hoped that the Writer in Context series will make it easier for the
scholar to, first, examine the creative interventions of the writer in her/his
own language and then help study the author in relation to others, thus map-
ping the literary currents and cross-currents in the subcontinent. The series
presents fiction writers from different Indian languages of the post-Independ-
ence era in their specific contexts, through critical material in translation
and in the English original. This generation of ‘modern’ writers, whether
in Malayalam or Urdu, Assamese or Hindi, or for that matter in any other
Indian language, evolved with a heightened consciousness of change and
resurgence fanned by modernism, postmodernism, progressivism, and other
literary trends and fashions, while rooted in tradition. Highly protective of
their autonomy as writers, they were freely experimental in form, content,
and even the use of language. The volumes as a whole offer a vision of the
strands of divergence as well as confluence in Indian literature.
The Writer in Context series would be a substantial intervention, we
believe, in making the Indian writers more critically accessible and the schol-
arship on Indian literature more meaningful. While the series would be a
creative attempt at contextualizing Indian writers, these volumes will facili-
tate the study of the diverse and multilingual Indian literature. The intent is
to present Indian writers and their writings from within their socio-literary
context to the serious academic, the curious researcher as well as the keen
lay reader.
Sukrita Paul Kumar and Chandana Dutta
Series Editors
Preface

When Sukrita Paul Kumar, my long-time friend, asked me if I would like to

edit a volume in the series, Writer in Context, on a Malayalam novelist, I did
not think twice before naming O.V. Vijayan as my choice for such a volume.
The title ‘The Critical Insider’ also came naturally to me before I embarked
on the volume, along with K.C. Muraleedharan as my co-editor. There are
many Vijayans and this complicates our effort to situate him. In Malayalam,
he is primarily the novelist who wrote the Malayalam classic, Khasakkinte
Ithihasam (The Legends of Khasak) which reached its hundredth edition in
September 2022. It is a truism in Malayalam to say that The Legends of
Khasak divided Malayalam novel into pre-Khasak and post-Khasak periods.
The celebrity status Vijayan enjoyed in Kerala was at variance with his image
in Delhi which was that of a cartoonist and a political commentator.
Adil Jussawalla’s New Writing in India (1974) included a chapter from
The Legends of Khasak, titled ‘The Conversion’ which caught the attention
of David Davidar of the newly launched Penguin India, based in Delhi. That
set the ball rolling for Vijayan’s self-translations into English. After self-trans-
lating three novels and a good number of short stories (some long enough to
be termed ‘novellas’), many of them classics in Malayalam, Vijayan could see
his afterlife in English as a literary writer, gaining substance and visibility.
However, there was very little by way of the writer’s social background or his
location in Malayalam letters available in English, except stray reviews and a
monograph by P.P. Raveendran, published by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi.
His books have been prescribed in many universities in India, but informed
critical readings of Vijayan are absent. This is what prompted us to edit a
volume of this kind which we hope will facilitate a better understanding of
Vijayan’s complex oeuvre.
All the six novels he wrote were accomplished works. He is a master
craftsman whose fictional world is nuanced and many-layered. The history
of his reception in Malayalam has many twists and turns. The essays we have
chosen from the writings of the major literary critics in Malayalam, some of
them specially written for this volume, will reveal the multiple ways in which
his works have been read. The various sections are designed to bring out
the multiple worlds of creative imagination he inhabited and the nature of


xviii Preface

his interventions as a public intellectual, social thinker, and defender of civil

liberties and human rights.
A volume of this kind is made possible by a community of authors, pub-
lishers, translators, copyright-holders, and various kinds of experts. K.C.
Muraleedharan and myself were lost in the jungle of texts, editing and com-
piling, before a semblance of order emerged. The series editors were always
there to provide guidance and moral support. We cannot claim to have
achieved any degree of comprehensiveness in representing the critical inter-
pretations of Vijayan. The book is a traveller’s guide to traverse Vijayan’s
land of creative imagination, real and surreal, lyrical and luminous, reflective
and visionary, and scathing and unsparing, which holds a mirror to our inner
and outer selves.
For a holistic understanding of Vijayan’s creative genius, we need to know
his various contexts from the local to the national. This is what this volume
attempts to provide through a range of materials most of which have been
translated from Malayalam by competent translators. I am sure the volume
will be welcomed by general readers as well as those from academia.

References
Jussawalla, Adil, 1974. New Writing in India. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books.

E.V. Ramakrishnan
Acknowledgements

We were overwhelmed by the support and cooperation we received from

authors, publishers, and translators who went out of the way to help us. It is
impossible to name and list all the persons we are indebted to in the prepara-
tion of this volume.
We are deeply grateful to:

• The series editors, Sukrita Paul Kumar and Chandana Dutta for their
unfailing support throughout the project;
• Shoma Choudhary and Routledge for taking the project forward with
timely advice;
• Madhu Vijayan for generously granting permission to use excerpts from
Vijayan’s translations of his own work contained in Selected Fiction
(Penguin Books, 1998);
• Ravi Dee Cee, the C.E.O of the D.C. Books, Kottayam, Kerala, which
has published all the books by O.V. Vijayan in Malayalam, for his gener-
osity in providing us with advice and guidance whenever we approached
him and for granting permission to use some of the published material
from The Tragic Idiom: O.V. Vijayan’s Cartoons and Notes on India
(2006), and O.V. Vijayan: Orma Pustakam (2006), both published by
D.C. Books.
• Penguin Books (An Imprint of Penguin Random House) for granting per-
mission to print materials from O.V. Vijayan’s Selected Fiction (Penguin
Books, 1998).

We have used the writings of some eminent critics and creative writers who
are no more with us. We are extremely thankful to Mrs A. Omana for grant-
ing us permission to use the article of her husband, the late Shri K.P. Appan;
to Mrs R. Parvathi Devi, the daughter of the late Shri P. Govinda Pillai
for granting us permission to use her father’s article; and to Mrs Jameela
Kakkattil for granting us permission to use the interview her husband, the
late Shri Akbar Kakkattil had conducted with O.V. Vijayan. We have used
a short essay by Kamala Das (1934-2009) on Vijayan which brings out her
deep regards for him. Bruce Petty (1929-2023), the Australian cartoonist


xx Acknowledgements

and satirist, has contributed an insightful piece on Vijayan’s distinction as a

cartoonist.
Many eminent writers of Malayalam have helped us with suggestions and
advice. We are greatly indebted to Satchidanandan, Anand, M. Mukundan,
Thomas Mathew, O.V. Usha, V. Rajakrishnan, and P.P. Raveendran, all
eminent writers of Malayalam, for their advice as well as for granting us
permission to use their essays. David Selbourne, the British philosopher who
has written on India under the Emergency, packs a lot of punch in his short
review of Dharmapuranam, which adds to the worth of this volume.
We are extremely grateful to Asha Menon, P.K. Rajasekharan, P.
Pavithran, G. Ushakumari, V.C. Sreejan, Ajay P. Mangat, Chitra Panikkar,
Sanju Thomas, Deepan Sivaraman, Manila C. Mohan, E.P. Unny, Anandi
Ramachandran, S. Prasannarajan, and Rajiv Sreenivasan, all distinguished
authors, for contributing to this volume their learned pieces of writings.
We thank Shri Tejbir Singh, the editor of the monthly magazine, Seminar
for granting us permission to reproduce Vijayan’s essay “On Divisiveness”
published in the January, 1988 issue (Issue no. 341) of Seminar, devoted to
the subject, ‘India 1987’.
It was the translators who really made this volume possible. We have
worked in close contact with each of them. We express our deep sense of
gratitude to K. Ramachandran for translating O.V. Vijayan’s essays, ‘On
Bangarwadi’ and ‘Padadhyanam’, both from Ithihasathinte Ithihasam; Asha
Menon’s essay, ‘Khasakkinte Sangeetham’ from Khasak Patanangal edited
by K.G. Karthikeyan and M. Krishnan Namboothiri, and Ajay P. Mangat’s
essay, ‘Dharmapuranam Irupathiyonnam Noottantil’; to K.T. Dinesh for
translating K.P. Appan’s article, ‘Niranandathinte Chiri’ taken from Vijayan:
Ormapustakam; to Arunlal Mokeri for translating the second chapter from
P.K. Rajasekharan’s book, Pithrughatikaram; P.N. Venugopal for translat-
ing O.V. Vijayan’s essay, ‘A Cartoonist’s Workshop’ and Shyma P. for trans-
lating the essay by Kamala Das, ‘Aa Melinja Cheruppakkaran’ from Vijayan:
Ormapustakam.
Both the editors, E.V. Ramakrishnan and K.C. Muraleedharan have trans-
lated essays for this volume. We acknowledge them here: K.C. Muraleedharan
has translated O.V. Vijayan’s autobiographical essay, ‘Oru Sindoorappottinte
Orma’ from Vijayante Lekhanangal (2005, 439–445), Thomas Mathew’s
essay, ‘Papapaithrukathinu Prayaschitha Bali’ (Mathrubhumi Weekly,
December 7–13, 1997, 41–44), P. Pavithran’s essay, ‘Vijayante Yatrakal’
from Bhoopatam Thalathirikkumbol (2022, 213–274) and Akbar Kakkattil’s
Interview with O.V. Vijayan from Sarga Sameeksha (1993, 202–209). E.V.
Ramakrishnan has translated two essays from Vijayante Lekhanangal,
namely ‘Randu Yudhangal: Randu Kayyoppukal’ (368–370) and ‘Oru
Marakkappetta Pustakam’ (804–805), his own essay, along with Dhanesh
Mankulam, namely ‘Aksharavum Aadhunikatayum’ from the book,
Aksharavum Aadhunikatayum (Kerala Sahitya Akademi, 2020, 13–30),
G. Ushakumari’s essay, ‘Vijayante Pennungal: Nirnayavadathinappuram’
  Acknowledgements xxi

(Anyonyam, 10, June 2023, 37–55), Manila Mohan’s Conversation with

Deepan Sivaraman, ‘O.V. Vijayante Novel Raviyude Prashnangalalla’
(Mathrubhumi Weekly, January 31–February 6, 2018, 8–27), P. Govinda
Pillai’s essay, ‘Indraprasthathile Souhruda Sadassukal’ (O.V. Vijayan: Orma
Pustakam, 39–44), Anand’s article, ‘Vijayan 1975–2005 Karuthathum
Kurayunnathumaya Chiri’ (O.V. Vijayante Orma Pustakam, 24–26),
O.V. Usha’s conversation with O.V. Vijayan titled ‘Bhasha Samvadam’
(Mathrubhumi Weekly, December 7–13, 1997, 21–23) and the second and
fourth chapters from Anandi Ramachandran’s Vijayan’s Letters (2011)
namely, ‘Samvedanathile Sutharyatha’ (23–26) and ‘Ezhuthukarante
Dourbalyankal’ (31–37).
The eminent photographer, K.R. Vinayan, shared with us his entire col-
lection of O.V. Vijayan’s photographs from which we have made a selection.
He went out of the way to support our project. P. Premachandran, writer
and the curator of international film festivals in Payyanur, gave valuable help
in formatting the cartoons we have used here, apart from providing valuable
advice on computer-related issues. Vinodkumar Pola, Associate Professor of
Mathematics (retired), Payyanur College deserves mention for the help in the
matter of managing the technical aspects of the photographs. We would also
like to put on record the support we received from Sreehari, Department of
English of Payyanur College.
We have used a few photographs/images from Creative Commons, the
international non-profit organization that promotes sharing of knowledge
and culture that serves public interest. We express our gratitude to them.

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xxii Acknowledgements

Figure 3 Vijayan by Madhu, O.V. Vijayan in his youth. Credit: Madhu Vijayan
O.V. Vijayan
The Making of the Critical Insider

E.V. Ramakrishnan

Prologue: A Writer’s Writer

O.V. Vijayan (1930–2005) is best known as a pioneer of modernist fiction in
Malayalam. He straddled multiple worlds in a creative life of over 50 years
from the early 1950s to the late 1990s. His oeuvre consists of six novels, thir-
teen short story collections, eight volumes of essays, two autobiographical
narratives, all in Malayalam, besides his self-translations of three of his nov-
els and many of his short stories, now collected in Selected Fiction (Penguin,
1999), and three volumes of cartoons originally published in the prominent
national and international newspapers. He spent the best years of his life in
New Delhi where he made a name for himself as a cartoonist, columnist, and
political commentator, while his reputation in Kerala was primarily that of
a novelist and a short story writer. His first novel, Khasakkinte Ithihasam
(1969) (The Legends of Khasak), which cast a spell on the readers through its
innovative idiom, has a cult following in Malayalam and has gone through
100 editions. His fictional works evidence an underlying continuity in his
philosophical vision, political attitudes, and social concerns which contribute
to his enduring appeal as a fictionist. His career as a cartoonist, columnist,
and political commentator testifies to his standing as a public intellectual
who knew the pulse of Indian society. It is this rare ability to engage with
the philosophical and the political with equal ease and inwardness, in both
Malayalam and English, sparkling with wit and insight that marks him out
as a writer’s writer.
This introduction attempts to situate Vijayan’s works in the context of
Malayalam literature of the twentieth century. After a brief outline of his early
life, the transition from the social realist to the modernist phase in Malayalam
literature is mapped as a prelude to Vijayan’s creative life. The breakthrough
achieved by his first novel, The Legends of Khasak (1969) is dealt with in detail.
Dharmapuranam (translated as The Saga of Dharmapuri) broke new ground
as a devastating critique of the emergent dictatorial tendencies of the post-
colonial societies. Both Gurusagaram (The Infinity of Grace) which embodies
Vijayan’s shift towards a spiritual frame of mind and Pravachakante Vazhi
(The Prophet’s Way) which deepens this quest are examined in relation to his
spiritual turn as a creative artist. Madhuram Gayathi (Sweet Is the Music)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-1
2 O.V. Vijayan

distils Vijayan’s ecological vision into a futuristic fable, detailing the disas-
trous turns that await a mindless machine-dominated pursuit of industrial
capitalism, and it is the most cerebral of Vijayan’s works. In Thalamurakal
(Generations), Vijayan returns to his village in Kerala for a second time in his
long writing career to revisit the history of Kerala’s modernity in one of the
most autobiographical of Vijayan’s works. Vijayan’s non-fictional essays and
cartoons primarily address a national audience, making him an Indian writer.
He was a reputed commentator on national affairs, and this makes him a
public intellectual of rare insights. It is not easy to categorize Vijayan as he
defies the prevailing notions of the literary by constantly reinventing himself.
Vijayan belonged to a middle-class Ezhava family. The Ezhava caste had
been at the forefront of the reformist movement in Kerala under the visionary
leadership of Shri Narayana Guru. His mother, Kamalakshiyamma belonged
to a feudal family in decline, while his father’s family, Ottupulakkal,
belonged to the middle class, most of the family members being school teach-
ers or farmers. As his father was a commandant at the Malabar Special Police
(M.S.P), Vijayan’s childhood was spent in the police camps in rural Malabar.
The facts of his upbringing impacted the nature of his imaginative world. The
lasting fascination the rural heartland of Kerala had for him comes through
in his major novels as well as short stories. His mastery of the local dialects
of Palghat opened up the subliminal world of beliefs, rituals, and myster-
ies animating the outer social world. Equally significant was the impact of
his maternal grandfather, Thachamuchikkal Chami, a Gandhian activist. He
was at the forefront of the struggle against untouchability and had led a
march of the members of the untouchable castes including the Dalits, to the
Kalpathi temple in Palghat in 1924. The central character of his last novel,
Thalamurakal (Generations), was named Chamiyarappan after his maternal
grandfather.
Vijayan was 17 when India attained independence. His involvement with
the Communist movement begins from his college days in the early 1950s. In
one of the essays included in the present volume, ‘In Memory of the Vermilion
Mark’, Vijayan recalls the excitement with which he heard the news of the
Communist Party’s electoral victory in Kerala in 1957. The news of Stalinist
purges inside Russia and the subsequent Russian invasion of Hungary forced
him to rethink his commitment to Communist ideology. He had to work his
way out of his crisis of faith through decades of creative reflection and self-
criticism. His first novel, Khasakkinte Ithihasam, bore the marks of this dis-
enchantment in its very structure. What was intended to be a revolutionary
novel about the peasants’ revolt against the landlords of Palghat turned out
to be a complex meditation on the nature of human existence and freedom
and a deep exploration of the relation between language and imagination.
Vijayan remembers this period in these words:

While setting out for Delhi, I carried with me a lot of doubts. The
strike at Posnan, the invasion of Hungary, the murder of Imre Nagy
  O.V. Vijayan 3

(1896–1958): all these unsettled me, and destabilised the monolithic

nature of my ideological commitment. But, it was not yet time for gain-
ing something out of this dissolution of faith. I was able to cultivate the
openness to make light of my loss of faith, after all those years of ideo-
logical stupor. That was all. I had to wait further for a loosening of the
inner realm, to come into that compassionate frame, which combines
laughter, grief and meditation. Through these long years of wait I kept
working on Khasak. God was merciful.
(Ithihasathinte Ithihasam1989, 29)

Vijayan reinvented himself in the 1960s, which also coincided with far-reach-
ing avant-garde movements in the field of art, films, theatre, and literature.
The new critical consciousness that was being shaped by the counter-culture
of the period finds its articulation in Vijayan’s novel, Khasakkinte Ithihasam
(The Legends of Khasak), the novel which became the high water mark of
modernism in Malayalam.
What came to be known as ‘aadhunikata’ (the Malayalam word for ‘mod-
ernism’) defies clear definition or description. In retrospect, one can see it as
more of an ethos, or a climate of ideas, than a well-defined literary movement.
It created a new reader who found Utopian ideas of political revolutions
as well as triumphal celebration of abstract human values equally hollow.
The modernists viewed language as an autonomous world and refused to be
bound by the prescriptive culture of the prevailing notions of art and culture.
Here it is important to note that the shift towards a new sensibility in fic-
tion begins much earlier. In the 1940s, Kesari Balakrishna Pillai (1889–1960),
a critic who interpreted Western modernity from an indigenous perspective
strongly argued that the French and Russian novels, and not the English
ones, provide the best examples of novelistic expression (1984: 53). Among
the writers who were translated into Malayalam during this period were
Balzac, Mauppasant, Stendhal, Anton Chekhov, Anatole France, Marcel
Proust, Franz Kafka, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg. This widening
of literary horizon occasioned a resurgence in fiction, poetry, and theatre.
The encounter with the cosmopolitan traditions of the modern European
novel brought about a new awareness of the human as a domain of infi-
nite possibilities. The word, ‘manushyan’ (meaning ‘human being’) echoes
in the Malayalam literature of the 1940s and 50s with a rare resonance. The
best novelists of this generation such as Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Keshav
Dev, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, and S.K. Pottekkat were inspired by the
humanist vision of the social realist tradition of the European novelists. The
interior world of the modern man as portrayed by them was set against the
oppressive environment of social deprivation and exploitation.
This period of social realist fiction had dissenting voices like that of
Vaikkom Muhammed Basheer whose narrative mode was more nuanced.
A carnivalistic sense of the world which is ever in flux animates Basheer’s
fictional world. Vijayan felt that despite the popularity Basheer enjoyed, his
4 O.V. Vijayan

radical and visionary world view was not properly understood by Malayali
readers or critics. Vijayan described Basheer’s short novel, Sabdangal
(Voices, 1947) as a forgotten classic. The central character in this novel is
an ex-soldier who is unhinged, having witnessed the harrowing events of the
war. Living among the destitute migrants in the city, the soldier notices how
violence has become endemic in society. Significantly, this short novel came
out in 1947, when the dawn of independence was dimmed by the mindless
violence of the Partition and the memories of the world war. Basheer had
an ironic sense of society where the demonic cannot be separated from the
divine. The soldier in Shabdangal suggests that the nation operates like an
impersonal war machine centralizing all power, in the name of the people,
betraying their trust. While Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Scavenger’s Son,
which also came out in 1947, came to be hailed as a classic, Shabdangal
never received the attention it deserved. This demonstrates the limited sense
in which ‘the social realist mode’ was understood in Malayalam. Its pri-
mary function was mimetic, and ‘social commitment’ was understood in
a narrow sense to mean the author’s allegiance to the ideology of a parti-
san kind. Vijayan found the book’s dystopian vision a refreshing departure
from the stereotypical depiction of the class struggle. A novel like Vijayan’s
Dharmapuranam was made possible in Malayalam by Basheer’s dystopian
vision of the totalitarian state and his use of an idiom which was ironical
and incisive.
Vijayan’s discussion of Basheer points to the disjunction between experi-
ence and expression which deepened in the 1950s, necessitating a shift in
sensibility. Basheer was no modernist, but he was no social realist either.
His fiction helps us understand the contradictions within the Progressive
movement. In Vijayan’s early story, ‘Oru yudhathinte avasanam’ (‘The End
of a Battle’), one can sense Vijayan’s unease in conforming to a mechanical
model of class conflict (2000,92-104). In his evocation of the rural interiors
of Palghat, the people steeped in old habits and traditional beliefs come
alive with their organic bonds within the community. Modernity came to
be synonymous with ‘progress’ which distrusted the cultural dynamics of
the popular. The rustic community was identified as ‘the yet-to-be devel-
oped’, and their belief systems rooted in orality and tradition were seen as
inherently obstructive to their progress. A close reading of Vijayan’s early
fiction would reveal the schism within his imagination which develops later
into a critique of the positivist content of modernity. There was a void at
the core of modernity, beyond the triumphalism of the materialistic and
the utilitarian. Modernism, as it manifested in Malayalam fiction in the
1960s, was an attempt to address this fraught sense of the modern which
excluded the realms of the spiritual and the existential from its domain of
experience. The conventions of realism were inadequate to articulate the
complex nature of the emergent reality of the 1960s which was turbulent
and volatile.
  O.V. Vijayan 5

The Moment of the Modernist Breakthrough: Khasakkinte Ithihasam

(The Legends of Khasak) and Dharmapuranam (The Saga of
Dharmapuri)
The gestation period of about a decade for a first novel is not unusual. But,
in Vijayan’s case, it was an eventful decade, when he lost his faith in commu-
nism, found his vocation as a cartoonist and a political commentator, devel-
oped an ironic mode of engaging with the everyday world of contingency
and upheaval, and discovered a new way of balancing the cosmopolitan and
the local. Vijayan’s Khasakkinte Ithihasam (1969, The Legends of Khasak,
1994) affirmed the fundamental role of the novel as a counter-narrative that
questioned the normative. The sixties in India was a watershed that produced
some of the enduring works of twentieth-century Indian fiction: Kosla by
Bhalchandra Nemade (1963 in Marathi and 1997 in English), Samskara by
U.R. Ananthamurthy (1965 in Kannada and 1976 in English), Aadha Gaon
by Rahi Masoom Reza (1966 in Hindi and 1994 in English) and Khasakkinte
Ithihasam by O.V. Vijayan (1969). All of them shared a dissenting critical
voice reclaiming the fundamental role of the novel as a counter-narrative
that questioned official versions of reality. Their authors had suffered a loss
of faith; bereft of the safety net of ideologies, they plumbed the depths of
their inner resources by exploring the limits of language. In shoring up the
fragments of their spiritual and mental lives, they reinvented the form of the
novel for a new generation, investing it with the burden of intractable ques-
tions of ethics that exceeded the formalist concerns of aesthetics.
Vijayan went beyond the issues of ideology to address an epistemologi-
cal problem that still haunts us: he had serious misgivings about the way
modernity produced and legitimated knowledge that met with uncritical
acceptance. Modernity was as much content as form, and one could not
step outside it, without surrendering one’s speaking voice. What happens to
forms of knowledge that lie outside its institutional spaces? The Legends was
about the imaginative apprehension of an order of reality that lay beyond
the language of modernity. Vijayan’s narrative, replete with resonant images
informed by the echoes of other worlds that reach out to us, transcends the
templates of linear time that novels embody, to invoke a vast ecosystem of
interconnectedness across the living and the non-living. This is how the novel
resists the impulse to classify and subjugate which manifests the Cartesian
logic of modernity. Vijayan’s was a dissenting note on the Euro-centric epis-
temology of the modern with its will to power.
In his ‘An Afterword’ to the English self-translation, The Legends, Vijayan
described how he lost his faith in communism: ‘It was then that tragedy
from afar shattered the carnival of liberation. In Hungary, they tricked and
shot Imre Nagy. It blew my mind. I turned away, I began my unchartered
journey’ (Vijayan 1994:205). Vijayan’s insights came as much from his disil-
lusionment with dialectics as from his intense imaginative engagements with
the dialects around him. His great discovery was that language as dialect
6 O.V. Vijayan

in its rudimentary and radical mould was a life form that gave access to
a society’s conceptual cosmology. The epiphanies of Vijayan’s novel were
made possible by the subliminal layers of an oral subculture that animated
Khasak with its mythopoesis. In bringing this orality into a dialogic relation
with the standard idiom of the written and conventions of formal knowl-
edge, he demonstrated how the subaltern can speak and that the novel as a
grand narrative is complicit with the ideology of the dominant. Allah-Pitcha
Mollakka, Nizam Ali, KuppuAcchan, Maimoona, Thithi Bi, Kunhamina,
Chukkru Rawuthar, Aliyar, Kuttadan, Kuttappu, Appu-Kili, Kali, Neeli:
these characters and many more, sculpted in sensuous local idioms with
their rhythms and rhymes, become a presence which has a poetics of its own,
that cannot be grasped by the standard syntax of modern Malayalam. That
Vijayan calibrated a tone that could convey the nuances of their voices prob-
lematized the ideology of the novelistic form. He deviated from the narrative
orientations of mimesis to defy the hegemonic conventions of social real-
ism. Khasak was myth and memory, rituals and customs, sacred groves and
dragonflies, and laughter and melancholy performed through the tales that
do not make a distinction between the sacred and the profane. The fabulist
nomads of Khasak who travel in and out of it, and the stunted Appu-Kili,
who move between religions and wore a gown with the emblems of many
faiths, belong to a world without closure, where multiple possibilities of
identities coexist with no rigid boundaries. The author says: ‘What obtained
in Thasarack (the original village which became a model for the fictional
Khasak) was a playful interface between being and beyond being’ (207).
The sense of play holds the key to the carnivalized sense of space and time
rooted in polysemy. Vijayan’s fictional text was more like a musical score
that conjured up a kinetic field of life force liberating us from our habitual
ways of seeing.
The first two novels of Vijayan, Khasakkinte Ithihasam (1969, The Legends
of Khasak, 1997) and Dharmapuranam (1985, The Saga of Dharmapuri,
1999) have attained the status of modern Malayalam classics. Apparently,
they have very little in common, but, on closer look, they enact two criti-
cal approaches to a postcolonial society. Khasak explores the interiors of
a rural society, where the dynamics of a pre-modern oral culture define the
contours of an everyday world rooted in collective memories and the mytho-
poesis of the supernatural and folklore. Dharmapuranam turns the novelistic
gaze outward on the entire nation to frame its decline into despotism and
mindless violence. Both are compelling in their persuasive power to alter our
habitual ways of relating to the conditions of modernity as given. Vijayan
was not merely telling stories, but questioning the very assumptions that con-
struct our sense of the real. He made a discourse of self-criticism available to
Malayalam readers to think through their perplexing sense of incomplete and
chaotic modernity. With reference to these novels, it can be safely said that
he did not leave the language of Malayalam fiction as he found it, and that is
no small achievement.
  O.V. Vijayan 7

Dharmapuranam has often been mentioned in relation to the several Latin

American novels on the theme of dictatorship from Miguel Asturias’s The
President to Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat. The readers of
Malayalam had never before been treated to such an explosive expression
of rage and anguish at the degeneration of moral values in public life. As
Vijayan dealt with the farcical ways of the state in his daily cartoons over the
decades, he had first-hand knowledge of the deception that went under the
garb of democracy. He could see that India, as an emergent nation, had lost
its faith in the high ideals of social justice and equality that inspired the mass
movement against colonialism. He critiqued the moral failures of the nation-
state and lampooned the pettiness of those in power. Dharmapuranam por-
trays the nation-state and its labyrinthine structures of power as an unending
source of evil and violence. He spoke truth to power, in the face of dog-
mas which were taken for self-evident truths. He could see the continuities
between the colonial/feudal structures of the past and the new dispensations
of power of the nation-state.
In the novel, the totalitarian state parades as a democratic regime, per-
petuating the fraud by the use of double-speak and fraudulent political prac-
tices. The novel anticipated the period of the Emergency in India, though
it was written between 1971 and 1975. He wrote this novel, in great dis-
tress, and hoped that he would never again be required to revisit this topic.
The use of scatology and grotesque realism in the novel conveyed his rage
at the violations of human dignity in our times. Dharmapuri could be any
third-world country where democracy has degenerated into autocracy. The
country remains in a permanent state of emergency, with all civil and human
rights suspended. The regime manipulates language to create an alternative
reality: the war is known as ‘the Sorrow’ and the Minister of War is ‘the
Minister of Sorrowing’, the Parliament is known as ‘the House of Celestial
Birds’ and the soldiers are ‘Persuaders’. The absolute power of the state takes
on the dimensions of an inviolable destiny, with no one able to defy its logic.
Vijayan’s novel remains a permanent reminder that democracy carries within
it the germs of tyranny and authoritarian excesses if the domain of the popu-
lar loses its capacity for criticism and corrective action.
Amidst this looming darkness, the figure of Siddhaartha appears as a
hope of redemption. He slowly emerges as a centre of resistance, for the for-
saken victims of political repression and those fleeing from Prajapathi, like
Parashara, a former General. Vijayan’s dystopian narrative documents the
relentless march of cruelty and dehumanization in Dharmapuri, in such detail
that one is struck dumb before the criminality of the state. Siddhaartha’s
redemptive vision does not bring about any change in the regime, but he is
able to suggest that an alternative order is possible. Critics have noted that
Vijayan’s depiction of Siddhaartha marks the beginning of his fascination
with guru-like figures which recur in the novels of his second phase, particu-
larly in Gurusagaram (The Infinity of Grace) and Pravachakante Vazhi (The
Prophet’s Way).
8 O.V. Vijayan

Vijayan’s Metaphysical Turn: Beyond the Binaries of the Secular and

the Spiritual
It is customary to argue that there are two Vijayans, the one who wrote
The Legends and Dharmapuranam, and the other who wrote the subsequent
novels from Gurusagaram (1987, The Infinity of Grace) to Thalamurakal
(Generations, 1997). While the former is seen as a sceptic and a rebel, the
latter is seen as a spiritually inclined conservative thinker distancing himself
from the secular-modern world view. In the charged political atmosphere
of Kerala, Vijayan was accused of endorsing the ‘Hindutva’ line of think-
ing. Such a reductive view of Vijayan’s development as a writer does not do
justice to his complex creative life. He has always shown the highest regard
for dissent and democracy. But this question cannot be explained away by
citing his unflinching belief in secular values. What appears as a shift towards
the mystical and the metaphysical is the outward marker of a larger churn-
ing inside, which cannot be grasped in the binaries of the secular and the
spiritual.
His evolution from being a revolutionary in the 1950s, to a spiritual seeker
in the 1980s, is born of his disillusionment with ideologies that get progres-
sively corrupted as they become instruments of power. In an article written
in the New Indian Express on June 18, 1996, under the title, ‘Discovering
Bharat: Dialectics of Hindutva’, Vijayan wrote: ‘This writer would like to
submit – the saffron wave and the Hindu slogan have nothing to do with
Hindutva. The saffron wave is the cumulative residue of gory clan wars, of
the macabre memory of Partition. Neither Partition nor its irredentist oppo-
site was predicated on questions of faith and enlightenment. It is lumpen
politics. And it will remain so’ (Vijayan 1996: 6). In retrospect, one may
say that his use of the term, ‘Hindutva’ sends out mixed signals. For him,
‘Hindutva’ is not the dogma of a codified faith, but ‘an ideology of unlimited
questioning’ and ‘a polity of fabulous dimensions’ where ‘folk wisdom and
its grotesque pantheon’, turn superstitious beliefs into ‘a rich and civilizing
choreography’ (Ibid). This nuanced treatment of ‘Hindutva’ by Vijayan was
lost in the din of arguments and counter-arguments on Vijayan’s commit-
ment to secularism. In his reply to Paul Zacharia who had accused him of
being an advocate of ‘Hindutva’ ideology, Vijayan wrote: ‘I have been an
out-spoken critic of Hindu sectarianism in my columns, when I was active
as a columnist. I wrote an article in The Times of India, the very day Babri
masjid was demolished. I welcomed the arrest of Lal Krishna Advani. … The
burden of my argument in all my writings has been that the Hindu should be
rescued from the extremist Hindu’ (2005, 752).
In writing Dharmapuranam, Vijayan exorcized the demonic elements
originating from the politics of plunder and greed that had taken possession
of him. He felt the need for healing and empathy, a return to the basics of
organic bonding and belonging. He was done with the theatre of the absurd
that was Indian politics. At the core of his novels written in the second phase
  O.V. Vijayan 9

is the act of forgiving as an act of remaking oneself. They lack the exuber-
ance and defiance that one associates with his earlier novels. The Legends
and Dharmapuranam investigated the possibilities of existence in a world
without closure. No single point of view was privileged as central or domi-
nant, as the human and the non-human, the earthly and the other-worldly,
the feminine and the masculine were seen from a perspective beyond the
binaries, subverting their self-sufficient autonomy. The double-voiced tongue
and the grotesque realism of the physical had the potential to transform the
limits of the real.
With Gurusagaram (The Infinity of Grace) and Pravachakante Vazhi
(The Prophet’s Way), Vijayan sets out on an inward journey of introspec-
tion and self-reflection. The quest is for harmony and self-discovery. In
Pravachakante Vazhi, Narayanan’s father tells Joseph, a revolutionary
turned ascetic, that both the Bhagavat Gita and the revolutionary writ-
ings he had followed earlier, justify violence for the sake of dharma (the
righteous conduct), in their different ways. They lack a vision of empa-
thy and compassion (1995, 203). They finally lead to dehumanization and
suffering, not freedom and social justice. Vijayan argued that wherever
Marx was revered as a prophet, his followers did not succeed in establish-
ing an egalitarian social order. Russia, China, and Vietnam failed in their
separate ways in establishing a socialist society based on Marxian princi-
ples. He comments: ‘Communism did not produce a new human being.
Both Communism and Capitalism finally reduced communities of people
to labourers manufacturing washing machines and colour television sets’
(2005, 541).
Vijayan’s deepening interest in Indian traditions of metaphysics and
philosophy is neither exceptional nor a betrayal of his secular credentials
if seen against the larger intellectual currents of the 1980s and 90s. Such
explorations of indigenous sources of modernity can be seen in authors who
were far removed from each other as Nirmal Verma (1929–2005) and U.R.
Ananthamurthy (1932–2014). The parallels between Nirmal Verma and
O.V. Vijayan are striking: both were card-holding Communists and left the
Communist Party in 1956, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Both were
aware of the perils of surrendering to ideological dogmas. After spending
about ten years in Prague, Verma returned to India in 1968. As he became
increasingly suspicious of the claims of Western modernity, he turned to
Indian traditions of thought. He published a series of essays such as ‘Indian
Culture and the Nation’, ‘The Dream and Responsibility of the Indian Writer’,
and ‘What Being an Indian Means to Me’, in this phase of enquiry. He feels
that all the great Western novels are heavily invested in ‘a world centred on
the self’ whereas ‘Indian sensibility’ goes beyond this existential humanism:
‘Here, all beings and creatures are one with each other; not only living things
but also those things that seem animate. In this interpolated (‘antargumfit’)
world, ‘things are linked to people, people to trees, trees to animals, animals
to the flora, and the flora to sky, to rain, to wind’ (quoted from Vineet Gill
10 O.V. Vijayan

2022, 95). In words that may echo Vijayan’s thoughts, he says: ‘In India, our
religious and worldly lives have never been separate’ (105).
U.R. Ananthamurthy was another writer who found it necessary to
engage with the other India of rituals and traditions. In his essay, ‘Why Not
Worship in the Nude’, Ananthamurthy dealt with an incident at a place
called Chandragutti, near Shimoga in Karnataka where men and women of
all ages, mostly from the lower castes, offered naked worship to a goddess
in fulfilment of a vow, every year. The progressive youth and rationalists
opposed this practice, with the support of the government. There were those
who felt that practices of this kind cannot be understood in terms of rea-
son and modernity. Ananthamurthy writes that what we feel and what we
think are often in conflict, and adds: ‘With regard to cultural questions, I am
increasingly and agonisingly growing ambivalent’ (1990, 99).
Vijayan, Nirmal Verma, and Ananthamurthy found the state of ambiva-
lence between scepticism and belief their peculiar fate as fiction writers who
had got themselves estranged from the Western sense of Enlightenment
modernity. All three were steeped in Western literature. But there was a
schism within they had to confront, in the process of being ‘Indian’ writers.
Amit Chaudhuri traces the lineage of the vexed relation between religion
and culture to the nineteenth century when they ‘came to occupy related but
oppositional spaces’ in Indian society (Chaudhuri, 111). He observes: ‘The
iconography of secular culture in India is predominantly, even hegemonically,
Hindu; but we should pause before we rush to conflate it with Hindutva, as
many commentators do these days’ (2008, 112). An organic intellectual has
to walk the mined roads of the past and present, to evolve a lexicon of self-
criticism and self-reflection.

The Siege Within: Vijayan’s Perspectives on the Postcolonial Other

There is no denying the fact that the novels Vijayan wrote in the second
phase lack the complex visionary interplay with diverse cultures from the
oral to the literate, with their separate cosmologies and points of view. The
carnivalesque sense of irony, which could accommodate the sublime and
the grotesque on an equal plane, progressively gets diminished in his later
works. There is an essentialist sense of ‘the eternal truth’ which overrides
the flux of everyday life. Kunjunni and Narayanan, the central characters of
Gurusagaram and Pravachakante Vazhi, respectively, are defined by a set of
dogmas which exhaust their subjectivity. However, these novels have to be
read against the complex post-colonial realities which they represent.
As political novels, both Gurusagaram (The Infinity of Grace) and
Pravachakante Vazhi (The Prophet’s Way) deal with the fate of minority
communities in South Asia. The war of Bangladesh liberation and the mili-
tancy of the Khalistan movement questioned the legitimacy of the modern
monolithic nation-states. Linguistic, cultural, and ethnic identities can desta-
bilize the world of ‘national consensus’ if the sense of alienation minorities
  O.V. Vijayan 11

feel is not addressed through their political participation in power. The cata-
strophic events narrated in these novels, throw into relief, the fault-lines that
run beneath the post-colonial nations. The Bangla identity, which is cultural
and linguistic, could not be contained by the Islamic identity that defined
Pakistan as a nation. The more a nation-state centralizes its power within
its own sovereign authority, the less tolerant the nation becomes towards
dissent, diversity, and difference. Vijayan repeatedly highlights the claims of
the sub-national identities whether it is that of the Tamilians in Sri Lanka,
minorities in India, or Blacks in the U.S. in his columns.
Kunjunni finds all his book-centred knowledge of no use in facing the
existential crisis occasioned by Kalyani’s death and the knowledge that she
is not his daughter. He turns inward to tap his spiritual resources. The novel
recounts many occasions of epiphany when Kunjunni feels the world of nature
coming alive and entering into a communion with him. ‘Guru’ as invoked by
Vijayan is the locus of many alternative discourses that run through his fic-
tion and non-fiction, from an ecological vision of the interconnectedness of
the living and the non-living to a political vision that views democracy as
social accountability and participatory thinking. But the problem with this
concept of ‘Guru’ is that it carries some kind of finality, a limit which cannot
be crossed, thus suggesting a semantic closure. It has echoes of exclusivistic
self-righteousness we associate with the patriarchal order.
Pravachakante Vazhi (The Prophet’s Way, 1992) has much in common
with Gurusagaram (The Infinity of Grace). Both are set in Delhi during the
1970s and 1980s and have a cast of characters from many parts of India. The
rise of Sikh militancy, the occupation of the Golden Temple by Bhidranvale,
Operation Blue Star in which the Indian army wiped out the insurgents, the
assassination of Indira Gandhi by a Sikh guard, and the massive violence
against the Sikhs in Delhi: the events of this period unfold like scenes in a
horror movie. Narayanan’s association with Sujan Singh, a taxi driver, brings
into focus the entire history of the Sikh community from the Partition to the
Operation Bluestar. Rema tells Narayanan how her grandfather had refused
to leave his village when the exodus happened in the wake of Partition. He
had rebuilt the mosque in his village and had close contacts with the local
Muslims. However, he was brutally hacked to death, in the communal frenzy
which overtook all communities during the Partition. Sujan Singh migrated to
England to seek his fortune but finally returned to his roots in Delhi in search
of his Sikh identity. When the Indian army entered the Golden Temple, some-
thing within him broke and he once again became a stateless refugee over-
night. His allegiance to the Indian nation now becomes suspect. The syncretic
vision embodied in the Sikh faith sustained robust communitarian ways of
living in Punjab for centuries, till it came under strain under the pressure of
colonial strategies. The linguistic division enforced by the census undermined
the consensus built over centuries of inclusive Bhakti traditions.
Vijayan was haunted by the Holocaust which has no parallels in recorded
human history. Its echoes are heard in all his novels in various forms.
12 O.V. Vijayan

Midway in Dharmapuranam, the novelist speaks in his own voice to tell the
reader that time and again in history, the theatre of cruelty one witnesses in
Dharmapuri is staged with the same plot, but different characters. He recalls
how in the Warsaw Ghetto, an old man pleading for life is shot dead by a
young soldier, with ‘casual brutality’ (266). What finally determines your fate
in the street, are the marks on your body or the way you wear your clothes.
You are reduced to your biological body with no attributes of humanity such
as education, knowledge, or values.
In the novel, Gurusagaram, Kunjunni meets Olga, a woman of Czech ori-
gin, at the house of his editor, before leaving for the war front. Later they are
alone in Olga’s house, when she tells him that her roots are in Romania, in
the Gypsy community. They have been uprooted for ages and now wander
through the world with no sense of belonging. She says: ‘Revolution and
counter-revolution have exploited us equally. We stopped singing, we hid
our sacred idols, and were forced to become scientists, soldiers and spies
in an alien world. My race has lost its selfhood in the genetic deluge of the
white man, we are sunk in inescapable despair’ (352). The extreme sense of
alienation from one’s roots, language, and culture dehumanizes the victims
of power. In Pravachakante Vazhi, the mob sets Simran and Sujan Singh on
fire, in the vicinity of the airport, the iconic site of the state’s absolute sover-
eign power and its modernity. As he vanishes into flames and smoke, Sujan
Singh desperately cries out to the prophet, ‘O lord, is this your way?’ (226).
The Bhakti traditions of the Gangetic plains had made it possible for people
of different religions to forge organic bonds of reciprocity in the pre-mod-
ern period. Their identities were fuzzy and could accommodate the other.
However, with the rise of the colonial nation-state, the identities began to
harden. The prophet’s way is lost within the moral economy of the mod-
ern nation-state which reproduced the colonial ways of thinking through its
institutions. The reference to the Holocaust recurs in Vijayan’s last novel,
Thalamurakal, as well.
The relation between knowledge and power has been a recurring trope
in Vijayan’s fiction. This becomes central to Thalamurakal which traces the
landed aristocratic Ponmudi house’s tryst with the stigma of caste. Ponmudi
tharavad was a patriarchal, feudal family that had fallen on evil days after
attaining the peak of prosperity and power. Chamiyarappan, who presides
over the family now, has sold much of his property to carry on his cam-
paign against caste and colonial oppression. He sends his nephew, Gopalan,
to England for study, but he could never get over the sense of inadequacy
instilled in him by the caste system. He converts to Islam, marries a Jew, and
both of them end up in the concentration camps of Germany. Chandran, the
youngest family member, living in Hong Kong, is married to a German Jew,
Rosemary Wagner. As a dealer in weapons, he continues his family’s pursuit
of wealth and power.
Knowledge does not bring redemption and salvation to the grand patri-
archs of Ponmudi family who end up as tragic failures in their separate ways.
  O.V. Vijayan 13

Vijayan draws our attention to the way racial and caste violence casts dark
shadows across the history of the twentieth century. The alienation and
aggression bred by the caste system and racial divide are not exorcized by the
modern institutions of democracy. They are reproduced by the authoritarian
tendencies of contemporary political culture. Rosemary Wagner’s father was
shot dead by Hitler’s soldiers for refusing to kill Jewish convicts. Similarly,
Velappan had broken the law by letting off the young revolutionaries of
the Communist revolt in Andhra, inviting the wrath of the superiors. It is
through such dissenting acts of compassion that Vijayan projects an ethical
vision of the future. Towards the end of the novel, Chandran remarks that
his race has miserably failed in their greed to amass unlimited wealth. ‘This
shows there is hope’, says Chandran (1997, 334).

The Gaze of the Critical Insider

What makes O.V. Vijayan a critical insider is the concern and the compas-
sion that he brings to his creative and critical writings in fiction and non-
fictional prose, through their biting sarcasm, bitter irony, and dystopian
vision. It was U.R. Ananthamurthy who gave wide currency to the term
‘critical insider’ by suggesting that in the absence of constant critiquing
of traditions, they become stunted and lose their ability to sustain life. A
critical insider is an organic intellectual who is not a prisoner of any one
ideology. He comments: ‘Very strangely, in India, the creative people are
those who have roots in their own tradition, while at the same time are
also exposed to the West’ (2014, 137). Creativity and the capacity for self-
reflection are intimately related. Vijayan was a local cosmopolitan who
found the dialects of his village a treasure house of knowledge and empa-
thy. Exposure to the West had sharpened his sensibility and enabled him
to think and write like a citizen of the world. Ananthamurthy comments:
‘Tradition is a kind of continuity of memory which makes you human,
which makes it possible for you to interact within a certain context, thereby
adding something significant to that context’ (2014, 138–139). Cultural
memory of the kind Vijayan tried to retrieve was not an attempt to revive
atavistic memories of grandeur, but a desperate need against the collective
amnesia inflicted by modernity and its subterfuges. He understood the sig-
nificance of decolonizing the mind much before Ngugi wa Thiong’o pub-
lished his book on it in 1986. Vijayan remained committed to the cause of
minorities, minor languages, and the cultural memory of the community. In
an interview with his sister (which is reproduced in the volume), he remarks
that writing in English is like getting a new set of parents. In his essay,
‘The Cartoonist’s Workshop’, he mentions how the task of the cartoonist
in India is made complex by the intractable nature of Indian reality. The
Western cartoonist operates within the safety of his socio-political institu-
tions. However, the Indian cartoonist can take nothing for granted. He
lives in a state of permanent siege; he can convey his vision of Indian reality
14 O.V. Vijayan

only through black humour. He observes: ‘Destroying illusions is the most

important among the duties of a cartoonist. … In essence, it means that the
cartoonist will always have to function as an opponent of the establish-
ment’ (2006, 15).
That Vijayan was found wanting by both the left and the right wings in
his native state proves that he held his own ground in the face of hegemonic
thought systems that demanded complete allegiance. He shaped a nuanced
idiom which could breach the clashing polarities of the material and the
metaphysical, sustenance and survival, justice and mercy, and love and free-
dom through a critical gaze that defined the ethical as the foundation of the
aesthetic.
The organization of the present volume may be outlined briefly, in con-
clusion. It is divided into nine sections. In the first part, the extracts from
his self-translations of some of the novels along with two of his short stories
are included. We also present a selection of his non-fictional and autobio-
graphical writings. The four essays in the second section will help the readers
understand how his first novel, The Legends of Khasak, became a mod-
ern Malayalam classic, by delineating the critical reception of the book in
Malayalam. Of the six essays in the third section, five are originally written
in English. The essay by Thomas Mathew, translated here from Malayalam,
deals with his last novel, Generations. The four essays in the fourth section
are informed by contemporary critical approaches to Vijayan. The fifth sec-
tion titled, ‘Vijayan in Translation’ comprises three essays, two of which
deal with Vijayan’s self-translations by Chitra Panikkar and Sanju Thomas.
Deepan Sivaraman’s dramatic adaptation of Khasakkinte Ithihasam can be
seen as a translation of the text into another medium. The conversation
between Deepan Sivaraman and Manila C. Mohan discusses the various
aspects of his dramatic production, with special emphasis on his sceno-
graphic innovations. The three essays in the sixth section contain Vijayan’s
insightful analysis of the task of the Indian cartoonist, E.P. Unny’s criti-
cal comments on Vijayan’s art as a cartoonist and Bruce Petty’s views on
Vijayan’s international stature as a cartoonist. The seventh section has five
essays by Vijayan’s contemporaries capturing the various facets of his per-
sonality and creativity. The eighth section features four conversations with
Vijayan which help us grasp his politics, aesthetics, and social vision. In
the ninth section, a couple of extracts from Anandi Ramachandran’s book,
Vijayan’s Letters (2011) are included here, as they provide insights into his
personal life, his struggle with failing health, anxieties about everyday prob-
lems and his concern for others.
The 43 chapters are carefully designed to bring out the oeuvre of O.V.
Vijayan as a creative writer, cartoonist, and political commentator. The Bio-
Chronology at the end documents his life’s journey in relation to the socio-
political events that shaped his creative life as a fictionist and cartoonist.
Note: Unless otherwise mentioned, the translations cited in the above
chapter are by the author.
  O.V. Vijayan 15

References
Ananthamurthy, U.R. 1978. Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man. Trans. A.K.Ramanujan.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Ananthamurthy, U.R. 2014. Rujuvathu. Edited with an Introduction by Manu
Chakravarthy. Bangalore: Prism.
Basheer, Vaikkom Muhammed. 1947 (1987). Sabdangal (Voices). Kottayam: D.C.
Books.
Chaudhuri, Amit. 2008. Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and
Culture. Ranikhet: Black Kite, An Imprint of Permanent Black.
Gill, Vineet. 2022. Here and Hereafter: Nirmal Verma’s Life in Literature. Gurugram,
Haryana, India: Vintage (Penguin Random House).
Nemade, Bhalachandra. 1997. Cocoon. Trans. Sudhakar Marathe. Mumbai: Popular
Prakashan.
Pillai, Kesari Balakrishna Pillai. 1984. Kesariyude Sahitya Vimarshanangal (The
Critical Essays of Kesari Balakrishna Pillai). Kottayam: SPCS.
Pillai, Sivasankara T. 1947 in Malayalam/ 1993 in English translation. Scavenger’s
Son. Trans. R.E. Asher. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Raveendran, P.P. 2009. O.V. Vijayan (Makers of Indian Literature Series). New
Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
Reza, Rahi Masoom. 1994 (2003). A Village Divided (Adha Gaon). Trans. Gillian
Wright. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1989. Ithihasathinte Ithihasam (The Story of Ithihasam, Reminiscences).
Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1994. “An Afterword”, The Legends of Khasak. Translation by O.V.
Vijayan. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 204–208.
Vijayan, O.V. 1996. “Discovering Bharat: Dialectics of Hindutva”, The New Indian
Express. Dated 18th June, 1996.
Vijayan, O.V. 1998. Selected Fiction: The Legends of Khasak; The Saga of
Dharmapuri; The Infinity of Grace; Stories. Trans. by the author. New Delhi:
Penguin Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2000. O.V. Vijayante Kathakal (The Complete Stories of O.V.
Vijayan). Edited with an introduction by Asha Menon. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2005. O.V. Vijayante Lekhanangal (The Articles of O.V. Vijayan).
Kottayam: D.C.Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2006. Tragic Idiom: O.V. Vijayan’s Cartoons and Notes on India.
Edited by Sundar Ramanathaiyar and Nancy Hudson-Rodd. With a Foreword by
Bruce Petty. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
---0--
Section 1

The World According to

O.V. Vijayan
A Selection of His Writings



(a) Excerpts from Vijayan’s
Novels


1 The Schools
(From The Legends of Khasak)

The Khazi went among the people, spreading the glad tidings of the Sheikh.
The mullah had barred the children from the school, now the Khazi com-
mended its new learning. What was the Khazi’s power? What but the miracu-
lous signs? Midnight baths in the cursed tank, the taming of the spirits in
marsh and mosque, fetishes scattered amid gravestones.

‘What is the Khazi’s truth?’ The troubled elders asked one another.

They recalled the spell the mullah had tried to cast on Nizam Ali. They had
seen the spell fail.

‘The Khazi’s truth’, they told themselves, ‘is the Sheikh’s truth’. ‘If that be so’,
troubled minds were in search of certitude, ‘is Mollakka the untruth?’
‘He is the truth too’.
‘How is it so?’
‘Many truths make the big truth’.

In the seedling house, Ravi was trying to calm the landlord who had burst
in, greatly agitated.

‘The Bouddhas are against us’, Sivaraman Nair whispered.

‘Let them be’.
‘They are holding the children back’.
‘Don’t worry’.

Sivaraman Nair quietened, but he was still panting. Then, on second thoughts
he said, ‘It is just as well, Maash. Better to have them on the other side’.
It was then they saw the lithe figure slouching in the shade of the tamarind
tree.

‘Assalam Aleikum!’ The visitor greeted them from a distance.

‘Waleikum Salaam!’ Ravi returned the greeting.
‘May I approach?’
‘Please do …’

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-4
22 O.V. Vijayan 

He walked up with a springy stride, a dappled apparition emerging from

under the tamarind’s porous canopy.

‘I am Sayed Mian Sheikh’s Khazi’.

‘I’m the District Board’s schoolmaster’, said Ravi, not quite knowing what
to say.

Hair parted and combed down to his shoulders, his locks feminine and dark,
the Khazi stood there tall and strangely elegant.

‘I bring you Sayed Mian Sheikh’s blessings’, the Khazi said. ‘Your school will
prosper’. And then he was gone as abruptly as he had come.
‘Tell me, Sivaraman Nair’, Ravi said, ‘who’s this Sayed Mian Sheikh?’

Sivaraman Nair was embarrassed; the Sheikh’s Khazi pledged Bouddha sup-
port to the school at the very moment he was raising the Bouddha issue.
Fortunately, Ravi was not bothered about these undercurrents of animosity.
He was merely curious.

‘Don’t be afraid, Maash’, Sivaraman Nair said.

‘I’m not afraid. But who is he?’
‘He is … he is a ghost’.
‘A ghost!’ Ravi laughed and stretched in his chair. He lit a cigarette. Sivaraman
Nair did not like this profane disrespect.
‘The ghost is real, Maash’, said the landlord, ‘and he is a Muslim ghost, an
unclean one. But as I’ve said often, it can’t touch us if we Hindus stick
together. The Devi of the temple in Kozhanasseri can make this Muslim
spirit defecate in terror’.

At that triumphant prospect, Sivaraman Nair broke into verse:

‘It is not the damned shaven head

that will wear the crown of Bharat’.

He went over it again in silence and laughed, and said, ‘Kalyanikutti, my

daughter, taught me these lines, Maash. Isn’t the poet right?’

‘Absolutely’.

But alone on his way home, Sivaraman Nair turned compulsively to gaze at
the mountain; a cloud had darkened the wild beehives … When he reached
home, his wife Narayani was on the veranda with nothing on but a wet
and threadbare towel round her waist. She was spreading sandalwood paste
on her body. As she rubbed the fragrant paste on her breasts and thighs,
  The Schools 23

Sivaraman Nair gazed for one fleeting moment, devastated; Narayani hadn’t
changed in these thirty years she had been his wife.
She broke off in the middle of the song she was singing and turned to her
husband with a caustic welcome, ‘Has my Nair’s frenzy passed? And how
goes the war over the seedling house?’
Sivaraman Nair pretended not to hear, chanted a name of God, and
walked past her into the house. He called out to his daughter, ‘Kalyanikutti,
my child, is there something to eat?’
Anklets tinkled down a corridor, bangles clinked softly, then hands went
to work over hearth and vessel.
Narayani was still on the veranda … It had begun thirty years ago,
within days of their marriage. Narayani would bare herself to the sunny
forenoon winds and smear sandal paste all over her body. Sivaraman Nair
had objected. She had done it again. She wore a turquoise pendant over her
breasts and walked across the paddies for a bath in the brook, and took a
long time to return.

‘Where were you all this while?’ Sivaraman Nair asked her once.
‘The seedling house’.
‘What have you to do there?’
‘My mother told me paddy mildew is good for the complexion’.
‘I know of no such discovery’.
‘Mother knows’.
‘Let your mother keep her knowledge to herself. You aren’t going to that
wretched shed anymore’.

But she went again, and again, until Sivaraman Nair confronted her.

‘Who was it in the tamarind yard of the seedling house?’ He asked.

Narayani looked silently and menacingly into his eyes. Sivaraman Nair
repeated. ‘Who was it?’
‘Kuppu’, she said, ‘Kuppu, the palm-climber’.
‘What did he come there for?’
‘He wanted fire to light his beedi’.
‘But where can one find fire in the seedling house?’

The years went by … Sivaraman Nair recalled it all, the mildew on the breasts
and the palm climber’s quest for fire. He would look on Kalyanikutti’s face,
on her eyes and nose and lips, sometimes in frozen horror, sometimes in sad
and forgiving love.
There was an upper-primary school in the adjoining village, one that
taught bad English and arithmetic, but this did not worry the mullah, as he
was certain that not many Muslim children would walk two miles across
shelterless fields to the school when it opened in June. June was the month
of rain and lightning. This school was owned by Kelan, an untouchable, but
24 O.V. Vijayan 

one who had not forgotten his lowly birth; he had come to Sivaraman Nair
and sought his blessing.
‘Prosper, O untouchable!’ The feudal chief had said – that was a long time
ago and he had meant do not prosper beyond limits. But Kelan had pros-
pered. Kelan’s wife came dressed in shining sarees and made offerings to the
little gods of Khasak. Kalyanikutti, a sad spinster trapped inside her feudal
home, looked out through ancient peepholes at the assailing silk and colour.
Kelan’s school and his burgeoning property began to aggravate Sivaraman
Nair; he denounced all teaching by the low-born, he talked ramblingly to
the villagers and even more to himself. He was ill. The doctors in Palghat
town strapped a pneumatic tube round his arm, took readings, and put him
under sedation. … When the new school came to Khasak, Sivaraman Nair
felt revived. It was to be on his property and would make a better school. He
offered his seedling house to the District Board. The seedling house would
henceforth be the school, and nobody’s rendezvous.

‘Where will you store the seedlings?’ Narayani asked in scarcely disguised
anger.
‘Damn the seedlings!’ Sivaraman Nair said in reply. It was the night after the
disastrous panchayat meeting; the mullah sat in his tiny strip of veranda
trying to mend his broken sandal. Thithi Bi watched her husband’s
labour, the frayed leather and the kitchen knife. She said, ‘The Sheikh
will not forsake us’. The mullah punched and stitched futilely. She gave
him money to mend the sandal; instead, he bought her a copper ring
embossed with a piece of honed glass.
‘Why didn’t you get the sandal mended?’

She stretched her hand into the tiny halo of the kerosene wick and stuck out
the finger with the ring on. Allah-Pitcha turned towards her and smiled, and
resumed the mending. ‘Great King of the Universe’, she said, ‘protect us!’
Promises weren’t kept; many children joined the school, even the grand-
children of the red-bearded conservatives. A day more for the school to open.
The last namaz was over; the congregation had consisted of just two old men.
The mullah sat alone in the mosque a long while. The priest and his flock,
and even this house of worship were passing through trying times; the mullah
stroked his beard, a mere frazzle of silver and brown, as he did whenever he
contemplated his own dissolution. From the mosque, the mullah could see
the school far away. Ravi’s bedside lamp burned bright, the schoolmaster
was perhaps reading, as the learned do, to fall asleep. The mullah hadn’t seen
him face to face. The women of the village said he was young and handsome.
For a moment Allah-Pitcha contemplated visiting him, talking to him, but
lost his nerve; what was he but an unlettered priest? From the school, the
mullah’s gaze turned towards Chetali. Beyond the mountain lay untrodden
tracks. Great unseen rains fell on those timeless springheads and the waters
  The Schools 25

avalanched down muddy and turbulent, leaving the silt of age on the enfee-
bled pilgrim.
The mullah stepped out of the mosque, leaning on his stick. His way home
lay past the school. He crossed the yard and paused awhile at the gate of the
mosque. He thought of the stranger in the seedling house with sympathy and
love. Innocent wayfarer, what bond of karma brings you here?
Then the lamp in the seedling house went out.

Source
Extract from the novel:
Vijayan, O.V. 1998. Selected Fiction. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 33–37.
2 The Conversion
(From The Legends of Khasak)

And summer was over; dew glistened again on the morning grass of Khasak.
The school reopened.
Ravi glanced through the register lying in front of him; he had under-
lined some names in green – the names of those who wouldn’t be coming to
school anymore: Vavar, Noorjehan, Uniparathy, Kinnari, Karuvu. He had
only underlined the names, he couldn’t bring himself to cross them out. Like
the fakir who kept his dead grandchild on the mountain and would not give
her up to the grave-digger, Ravi kept the names. The lines of green became
the little windows of his temple through which he gazed, listless. Outside, sun
and dew, grass and palmyra, in repetition and rebirth, in endless becoming,
sorrowless and without desire…
Ravi looked up from the register at the places where the dead children
used to sit. He did not call the roll that day.
During the epidemic, Appu-Kili had gone off to the mountains where his
hair had grown long and matted. He came back to school with lice multiply-
ing in its knots. The lice grazed about and at times herds of them crawled out
in search of other heads.
Ravi was teaching history and he thought the example would come in
handy.

‘The Aryans came in exactly this manner’, he told the children. ‘They came
driving their herds of cattle looking for fresh pastures’.

The matter of the lice did not stop with history. That evening Cholayumma,
Kunhamina’s mother, had given her a bath and was dressing her hair with
scented oils when a louse jumped out.

‘Where did that louse come from?’ Cholayumma asked.

‘That was Appu-Kili’s louse, Mother’, Kunhamina said. ‘It must have come
like the Aryans’.
‘What are you blabbering about, child?’

Kunhamina told Cholayumma the story of the Aryans. It did not impress her.
The next day Cholayumma complained to Ravi Appu’s knotted locks must

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-5
  The Conversion 27

be shaved off, that was the only way to get rid of the lice. Ravi had no desire
to offend the Parrot. So he asked Madhavan Nair to put the proposition to
him as gently as possible. Surprisingly, the Parrot agreed without resistance
… When Appu-Kili got to the barber’s shop, one of the mendicants was hav-
ing his head shaved leaving a tuft at the back.

‘Shall I give you such a tuft, O Parrot?’ the Hindu barber asked in passing.
‘See mine’, encouraged the mendicant. ‘Do you know what – if you keep one
they will give you their daughters to wed’.
The Parrot turned on his timeless grin, ‘Get a girl?’ He told the barber, ‘I
wan a tuft’.
And when the Parrot was leaving tonsured, save the tuft dangling behind
him, the barber gave him this advice, ‘If ever you fall off a tree, pull
yourself up by the tuft’.
Appu-Kili stood before Madhavan Nair, the grin still on his face. ‘Look at
me, Madhavan-Etto!’

Madhavan Nair was angry at first, he disliked anyone having a joke at the
Parrot’s expense, but he couldn’t hold out for long against its charming
absurdity. Matters of destiny, he said to himself.

‘Ayyo! My Parrot!’ he said. ‘One needs the thousand eyes of Inderjeet to see
you!’

The next day there was chaos in the school. It became difficult to restrain
children wanting to decorate the tuft with flowers and berries and silver
paper. Only Kunhamina kept away – she was sad that her mother and the
louse had brought all this on Kili.
Ravi was writing out a sum on the blackboard; when he turned round, he
found Kunhamina in a state of distraction.

‘What is it now, my little one?’

She did not respond.

‘Tell me’, Ravi said again.

She began tentatively, ‘Oh, Saar …’
Ravi waited. Kunhamina found the words at last, ‘Do lice have souls, Saar?’
He paused, then said, ‘If we have souls …’
‘We have, Saar’.
‘Then, I suppose, so do lice’.
Ramankutty interceded, ‘Lice do have souls, Saar’. That decided the matter
because he was the sorcerer’s son.
Kunhamina wanted to know more, ‘What will Appu’s lice be in their next
lives?’
28 O.V. Vijayan

Will they be reborn as lice? Or will they return as people or wild elephants
and whales or little microbes? Ravi’s mind suddenly went back to the jasmine-
scented night when he had taken leave of his father in silence and stealth. Will
you, my father, come back to me in another birth, if you have sins to wipe
out? And who does not sin? Will you come back to me as the creature I detest
most? There on the wall it clung, its eight legs stretched, looking at him with
eyes of crystal in love and uncomprehending grief. He crushed a piece of
paper into a ball and threw it at the spider. The spider ran around in wild
circles, and again came to its mindless trance on the wall. Ravi swatted it with
his sandal. It stayed on the wall, a patch of broken limbs and slime and fur.
Ravi stood a long while in contemplation. Gratitude welled up inside him, the
gratitude of procreated generations. He shivered and the sandal fell from his
hand. What an offering to dead ancestors, what a shraddha!

And now he turned to Kunhamina’s question, ‘Frankly, my little one. I don’t

have the answer’.

But the children had the answer. They knew that those who went away had to
come back, and Vavar, Noorjehan, Uniparathy, Kinnari, and Karuvu would
be fair babies again. They told Ravi the legends of Khasak, of those who had
come back from the far empty spaces, of the goddess on the tamarind tree,
of Khasak’s ancestors who, their birth cycles ended, rose again to receive the
offerings of their progeny; then like the figurines on the throne of Vikrama
who narrated the idylls of the King, each child told Ravi a story:
Kunjuvella was the daughter of Nagan the toddy-tapper and Thayamma.
When she was five, they had gone to visit their relatives in Koomankavu.
While there Kunjuvella died. The same year in Koomankavu, Kannamma,
the wife of Ayyavu, gave birth to a daughter. They called her Devaki. Even
as a little child, Devaki would spend hours gazing vacantly recalling some-
thing real and inscrutable. Kannamma would put the child on her lap and
ask, ‘What is the matter, my child, that you sit and brood?’ The child would
say, ‘I am thinking, mother’. On her fifth birthday, she had told Kannamma,
‘Mother, I have another mother’. Kannamma had not taken much notice of
this. Five-year-olds knew no limit to fantasy. But Devaki kept insisting and
weeping. She wanted to see her other mother. She led the way and the fam-
ily came to the house of Nagan and Thayamma. ‘That’s my house’, Devaki
cried out from the gate. She recognized every nook and corner. She found an
old peashooter hidden away in the attic and rejoiced at the sight of her old
plaything. ‘Mother’, she asked Thayamma, ‘where is Father?’
Thayamma wept. She stretched her hands across the awesome void to
hold this child of hers. ‘Father has gone’, she said, ‘he fell from the palm tree’.
The watching women wiped their tears; Devaki did not understand, wasn’t
hers a simple home-coming?

She asked Kannamma, ‘Mother, don’t you remember that day at the pool?’
Kannamma asked, ‘Which day?’
  The Conversion 29

’That day, that day, many days ago when you were bathing, didn’t I come to
you on pattering feet?’

Memories came back to Kannamma. She remembered bathing in the pool

at sunset, and a funeral procession passing by. That was five years and ten
months ago … As Devaki grew up, these memories weakened, soon they
were lost altogether in profane and worldly torrents …
Two days after Appu-Kili began to wear his tuft there was a Muslim festi-
val. Muslim children, their heads shaven and scented, appeared in joyous and
colourful crowds before the mosque. Appu-Kili would never miss a festival.

‘Hey, Parrot!’ The Muslims greeted him, ‘but what is this handle at the back
of your head?’
‘Get a girl’, the Parrot grinned.
‘Yaa Allah! What have the Hindus done to your head?’ the Muslim boys
said. ‘Surely the mendicants are the culprits. With a tuft like that you will
become a mendicant and that is not the surest way to get a girl’.
The Parrot stood bewildered, yet smiling.
‘Shave it off’, the Muslims said, ‘shave your head clean’.
‘Get a girl?’
‘What have we been telling you all this while? You just shave that knot off
and go ask Maimoona Akka to marry you’.

The Parrot grinned until his cheeks disappeared. The Muslim children took
him by the hand and led him to the Muslim barber. When the tuft was shaved
off, one of them said, ‘Now that it has gone this far and he is going to marry
Maimoona Akka, why not convert him? How about it?’

‘Of course’, the Muslim barber agreed.

Freed at last from pagan connections, the Parrot walked out grinning.
Somebody brought a frayed fez cap and put it on Appu-Kili’s head.
In the evening, Ravi had just lighted the lamp and got into bed to read
when Maimoona stormed into the room.

‘Both master and pupils are becoming riotous’, she said.

‘What happened?’
‘Keep that lunatic under control’.
‘Which lunatic?’
‘That Parrot of yours!’

Ravi shut his book and sat up. While he was raising the wick, she said, hiding
her charm beneath her anger, ‘I won’t speak to you again’.
Madhavan Nair came in as she was leaving.

‘What did the houri come for, Maash?’

‘Something about the Parrot. We’ll find out tomorrow’.
30 O.V. Vijayan

Madhavan Nair sat at the foot of the bed.

‘Haven’t you heard it, Maash? The Parrot has been converted’. ‘My God!
Into what?’
‘Need you ask? The Fourth Way, Islam’.

Through the window the Parrot jumped in, the fez cap on his head …
The next day Sivaraman Nair walked through Khasak in great agitation.
‘Have the infidels gone this far?’ He coughed and stumbled, he stood before
the school and called out, ‘Maash, this is not good. There is still something
called Hindu civilization. That cannot be shaved off’.

‘But Sivaraman Nair’, Ravi tried to calm him, ‘was it any of my doing?’
‘But this is definitely not good. You mustn’t be led astray by that Madhavan.
He is the one who has disgraced the family. He is a Communist’.

At the foot of the big banyan tree in the square of Khasak, the people were
merrily discussing the Parrot’s choice of religions. Massaging his feet with
oil, the mullah argued that once a convert, neither man nor parrot had the
right to go back. The Khazi declared, ‘We will go by the majority’.
The majority was yet to make its decision known. Appu-Kili sat in the
front row of the class wearing the frayed fez cap. As a Muslim they had given
him a new name – Appu-Rawuthar. Ravi did not call Appu’s name while
calling the roll. He decided to wait until he knew the majority’s verdict.
Sivaraman Nair wrote out a long petition to the School Inspector. Ravi
was creating religious strife in Khasak, leading minors astray. He concluded
the letter with words picked out of an old petition: For which act of kindness
it is my bounden duty ever to pray.
Within a few days, the panchayat’s verdict was known. The Parrot was
to be allowed the freedom of both religions. For certain days of the week, he
could be a Muslim. For the rest, he could be a Hindu. If necessary, Hindu,
Muslim, and Parrot all at the same time.
When months passed and Appu’s fez wore thin, when his hair grew long and
matted, the lice were born there again. They came pattering on little feet. Vavar,
Noorjehan, Uniparathy, Kinnari, Karuvu, and all. Their fathers and mothers did
not know them. Among the karmic wefts of hair, they sat grieving and waiting.
Ravi lay down to sleep. Through the window, the sky shone and shivered.
Oh God, to be spared this knowing, to sleep. To lay one’s head down, to rest
from birth to birth, as forest, as shade, as earth, as sky … The knowing eyes
grew heavy, the lids began to close. Leaving their skies the stars descended
on the screw pines to become the fireflies of Khasak. Out of these infinities, a
drizzle of mercy fell on his sleep and baptized him.

Source
Extract from the novel:
Vijayan, O.V. 1998. Selected Fiction. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 133–139.
3 The General
(From The Saga of Dharmapuri)

During the Great Decolonization, the departing Imperialisms had bequeathed

costume kits and obsolete weapons to their freed colonies: there were inter-
minable parades in all the new republics, which could devise no better use
for their new-found sovereignties. In Dharmapuri, there was a parade every
month. Weapons were taken out of silos and towed along, the people saw
the heraldic emblems and the shine of metal and rejoiced. The weapons were
antiques, but so were Dharmapuri’s wars, antique wars waged on antique
neighbours. Much of the weaponry bore White Confederate patents and
were obsolete by a century: ironclads, and flying machines so primitive that
one fancied they nested, and explosive devices that raised palls of stench and
dust. But Dharmapuri had no military budget, only a budget for Sorrowing
and Persuading, and so became the most pacific nation on earth.
Scholars streamed in from the White Confederacy to study the ancient
military artefacts. Cryptologists and antiquaries found Dharmapuri an inex-
haustible treasure house, but the government severely screened their inflow.
The scrutinies and obstacles were so numerous that most of the scholars went
back; and for those who eventually made it to the armouries, the shock of wit-
nessing their own baroque past was often the cause of neurotic indisposition.
There were also occasions, not infrequent, when a spy of the Confederacy
was caught pilfering Dharmapuri’s military secrets, his embarrassment all the
greater because this was intelligence concerning his own obsolete weapons.
Spy scares would then convulse Dharmapuri, and since it was not possible
to hold white spies in captivity or punish them, native proxies were caught
and executed.
Despite the silos and the guards, metal inexorably aged and tired; then the
damp and vapours of the deep earth would set to work on it, and often the
armourers would find a whole generation of weapons in a state of terminal
rust. These weapons the President would sell to lesser Presidents, the ones
ruling over tiny islands of history, marooned oligarchs content to maul their
subjects and one another with rust.
Dharmapuri’s armouries were replenished regularly by the White
Confederacy, and at the monthly ceremonials, the President would reas-
sure the people of his powers of persuasion. The Confederate Navy itself
was to have a taste of this when one of its aircraft carriers cruised into

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-6
32 O.V. Vijayan

Dharmapuri’s territorial waters. Dharmapuri had its own warship; a vessel

salvaged and welded together in the Empire’s workhouses and set afloat to
mark the country’s Independence. This vessel went out to meet the intruder.
The Confederate carrier was driven by nuclear power, and in ring upon ring
round the awesome crustacean were submarines, missile launchers, destroy-
ers, frigates, and cruisers. None of these stopped Dharmapuri’s vessel as she
skimmed past and headed for the mother vessel. The carrier’s crew crowded
onto the deck for a closer view of this strange man o’ war: they could iden-
tify it with nothing they had learned about at the Naval Academy. It drew
astern; the Confederate sailors had a clear view of the craft now, yet fed as
they were on legends of Eastern seas, the fear of the absurd and the ancient
persisted. The antique pressed home her advantage: her spindly Admiral,
tottering under the weight of his decorations, appeared at the prow, and
accosted the Confederates in the name of the Celestial Birds. It is said that
the fear of Eastern sea-sorcery came over the Confederates, and they pulled
back to the high seas.
As credible is another version which has it that Dharmapuri’s seamen,
when they got close to the carrier, took out their empty mess cans, and hold-
ing them out to the Confederates, set up a chorus, We are not alone, the
Tartar Republic is with us! Whereupon a Tartar submarine surfaced and
began signalling requests for a popular brand of Confederate cola. Overcome
by traditional Imperialist guilt, the carrier and its ensemble retreated.
Imperialism had its presence in Shantigrama in the form of the Confederate
trading houses; these fortress-like structures caused the citizens, as they
passed them, to rage and smoulder. However, the Imperialists had their uses;
as many as 14 members of the President’s family, sons and sons-in-law, held
ceremonial vice-presidencies in these establishments. The common citizens
saw this as their country’s hegemony over Imperialism. These 14 spoilt chil-
dren of people’s power had not found time in their youth to master letters,
and were even worse at reckoning, but were much praised by Prava as lead-
ers of the new decolonized cultures. The Confederates, on their part, kept
the 14 in comfort, giving them gleaming limousines to travel in, big blonde
women attendants, and stocks of aphrodisiacs and striped candy. Their wives
were prolific mothers, a condition encouraged in no small measure by the
aphrodisiacs; and the President was well pleased with the rising numbers
of the dynasty. On his numerous state visits abroad, he took his enormous
brood with him, and they descended on their hapless hosts with the harrow-
ing thoroughness of an invasion.
Dharmapuri’s scholars of current history have recorded and elaborately
commented upon one such event, the Confederate banquet for the visiting
President. The dynasty by then numbered a hundred and fifty. And its mem-
bers, in defiance of the hypocrisies of protocol, waylaid the stewards even
before the banquet had formally begun, and seized the food with whoops of
delight. The Great White Father sat back, looking on in wonder at their mili-
tant appetites. As the chase for food got under way, one of the Presidential
  The General 33

offspring shat in the excitement of pursuit and circled the banquet table with
a trail of slime. Then another one shat, and yet another; soon the whole
brood followed suit. Their indulgent grandsire, meanwhile, fed avidly on a
steak, until unable to hold it inside him, he opened his sluices as well; pres-
ently he was sitting on a sumptuous cushion of excrement, and seated thus,
he addressed his host, ‘White Excellency! We have our differences, but have
much in common as well’, a private truth to which, in the compelling pres-
ence of Excrement, the Great White Father hastily assented. The dynasty was
now wallowing in dung with much clatter and unsettling of crockery; the
patriarch chided them for interrupting the palaver of Presidents.
Food and wine are great equalizers, and the euphoria of banquets has often
encouraged the poorest of the earth’s rulers to stand up to imperial powers;
it is thus that the diplomatic services of decolonized countries have come to
be dominated by bartenders and chefs. Now, sunk deep in food, wine, and
excrement, Dharmapuri’s President went on to assert that of their two coun-
tries his was the richer in tradition and wisdom. The Great White Father was
used to such brag from the tiny Presidents and midget emperors who ate at
his table and would never dispute their claims even while choosing one of
their countries for carpet bombing. He would tell his prospective victim, with
much bowing and clinking of glasses, It is true, Your Tiny Excellency, the
New World has a good deal to learn from your ancient civilization.

‘Brown Excellency’, the Great White Father said, ‘we have indeed heard
much about your Celestial Birds’.

Satisfied, Dharmapuri’s President and his entourage now gorged on the des-
serts, and in an attempt to undo the past wrongs of plundering Imperialisms,
hunted among the gold and silverware for souvenirs.

The President often worried about his progeny; like a mollusc hiding its jelly
inside a giant conch, he would sit in the lonely gloom of the palace, while
outside the shell roared a dark sea of clangorous absurdity – his past with its
shame of pimping and vagrancy, demagogy and terrorism, and the frenetic
pursuit of food. He would see the sea lash his children and consume them;
fear would grow and become a colic within, causing him to excrete at unex-
pected times and in improbable places, in the armoury and into the arms of
his scented concubines. These aberrations would last for days and paralyse
the affairs of state. During one such interlude, the President lay prostrate,
naked save for the nation’s colours tied across his genitals. Around his couch,
in a reverential circle, stood his cabinet; the Ministers sensed in their Lord
one of his periodic seizures of fear. The President asked, ‘What will happen
if we are forced to go to the polls and the Convention of the Holy Spirit is
beaten?’ The Ministers made elaborate pretence of consulting learned tomes,
34 O.V. Vijayan

and answered variously, The ideology of the Celestial Birds will be endan-
gered; Dharmapuri will no longer be able to lead the struggle for peace;
mankind will become spiritually leaderless; there will be no one to prevent a
nuclear holocaust.
The President rose in a rage, and flinging away the nation’s colours, said
‘Speak straight, devious vermin!’ The Ministers wet their barks and stam-
mered, ‘Mercy, Sire. We shall, if Your Grace will pardon us’. They grovelled
before him and the oldest among them spoke, ‘The Confederate ware-
houses will take back the limousines and the blonde women from the Young
Excellencies and withhold the supplies of candy’.
A great terror seized the President then, and he howled, ‘O, they will sack
my children, they will sack them all!’ And the Council of Ministers joined
in the lament. He paced back and forth, and from his behind syringed the
steaming hieroglyphs of his anger. When he had done with this preface, he
stood tense, and the Ministers, trembling, told one another, ‘A Proclamation,
it is a Proclamation!’ The President bent forward and crowed, and out came
a turd as big as a sewer rat, and with that was promulgated what came to be
known as the State of Crisis.
The news was broadcast and printed that the country was besieged by the
Enemy, and that neither the seas nor the mountains were defence enough.
Shantigrama’s citizens listened to the sound of gunfire in the night and to
the wailing of sirens; they saw the glow of distant fires and spoke in terrified
whispers of the enemy within. ‘My beloved people’, the President said in a
midnight broadcast, ‘give me your freedoms, henceforth let them be hid-
den inside me, because it is to rob you of these that the insidious enemy has
penetrated us’. The people were grateful to be stripped thus, yet the sceptics’
whisper caught the unwary citizen now and again, settling with wasp’s feet
on his ear for a brief while, before winging away to the next defenceless
host. But the people easily overcame these feeble disturbances. No, they told
themselves, not the President, the Supreme Commander of the Congregation
of Persuaders; never would he imprison and torture his own subjects! The
Palace brought out colourful stamps of the President squatting among heaps
of carrot and lettuce, munching the vegetables, and defecating – a picture of
deep and enduring peace which reinforced the people’s faith in their pacific
Presidency. There was praise all round for the President’s resilience and
courage, but the most articulate endorsement came from Prava which said,
‘Dharmapuri has done away with the last obstacle which Imperialism had left
in the way of liberation, the Law of Habeas Corpus. Now Dharmapuri joins
those who march in the grand parade of human progress’. The Communards
of Dharmapuri welcomed these abridgements of rights with a fervour that
dismayed even the Partisans of the Holy Spirit; often welcoming their own
imprisonment, the Communards recalled the Great Tartar Purges and
rejoiced in the comparison.

*
  The General 35

The Crisis had come to stay, gently fearsome and familiar like the tiger in
the neighbourhood zoo. But soon the President became despondent again,
and he lamented to the Ministers who stood round his couch, ‘We prom-
ised the people a Sorrow, we promised them an enemy, and time is running
out. . .’
And so the news was broken to the people that a Confederate armada
had set sail for Dharmapuri and would soon disgorge machines of war on
its shores. The Tartar Radio promptly announced a ballet festival to defend
Dharmapuri. The White Confederacy was embarrassed and weakly denied
it was invading anyone, blaming the impression on the noisiness and brash-
ness of its tourists. That convinced nobody in Dharmapuri and the streets
resounded again with slogans against Imperialism. Within seven days of the
newsbreak, the trading houses raised the wages of the Presidential offspring
five-fold. This was construed as a debacle for Imperialism and greeted with
riotous rejoicing in Shantigrama. Soon two giant Confederate freighters
came ashore and unloaded their cargo under cover of night. It was wheat, red
wheat fed to cattle in the Confederate ranches and to humans in Dharmapuri.
There were also crates of sweetened feed and candy for the Palace and for the
Ministers. The ships slunk away as they had come, in the night. As the days
went by, the armada became tiny ships of the mind, their little sirens softly
pierced the dreams of men; and the Great Crisis, the old zoo tiger, the gentle
evil, stayed on.
This was the state of Dharmapuri when Siddhaartha arrived.

A parade was on in Shantigrama, and Siddhaartha threaded his way to the

rim of the crowd to watch. As he did so, a snatch of doggerel from his child-
hood came to him:

Ka twam baale? Kaanchanamaala.

Kasyaa putree? Kanakalataaya.
Kim te haste? Taalee patram.
Kaavaa rekha? Ka Kha Ga Gha!

The crowd seethed and swirled, then slept within itself, like silt on the river
bank, and between the banks, the march rolled away bearing the delusions
of the freed slave. Chariot followed chariot, formation followed formation.
Each ironclad was worth a million pieces of gold, all that gold merely to carry
one soldier in duel against another! Surely they could have wrestled instead,
thought Siddhaartha, or gambled, tossed, or slanged; ways of contention as
senseless, but which hurt little and wasted even less. It passes my understand-
ing, the king said to himself in despair, I am the dull-witted one. Those who
had their wits about them made the wars, they spent the substance of men
age after age, and strewed fields of battle with the dismembered dead.
36 O.V. Vijayan

Once long ago a distraught god had stood between embattled armies and
sought in vain to unravel the riddle of the killing and the dying. Siddhaartha
did not desire to recall the Gita, the song of the god, but only the doggerel of
his childhood. A darkness seemed to gather beyond the reaches of the march,
and there the dead of the wars lay scattered; in this darkness the little girl of
the doggerel stood gazing upon Siddhaartha.

Who are you, little one? asked Siddhaartha.

I am Kaanchanamaala, she said, Kanakalata’s daughter.
What do you hold in your hand?
Palm leaves, sir.
And what have you written on them?
Oh, it is the Ka and the Kha, the Ga and the Gha!

Between the armies of darkness Siddhaartha heard only this doggerel, and
the little girl of the doggerel, and he communed with each other, telling of the
Ka and the Kha, the Ga and the Gha, the mysterious seals of childhood. Now
she was moving away; Siddhaartha called after her, but she had disappeared
in the distance where the darkness loomed heavy.
Siddhaartha turned once again to the march. As a soldier passed by, his
chest covered with medals, he said, ‘Soldier, that is a heavy burden of war
you carry’.
Someone tapped Siddhaartha on the back; it was a Partisan of the Holy
Spirit.

‘Soldier, did you say?’ the Partisan demanded.

‘Your pardon, sir’, Siddhaartha said. ‘Did I say anything wrong?’
‘Plenty. That was not a soldier, but a Persuader. This is a Congregation of
Persuaders. Of these you seem to have no knowledge. I presume you are
an alien?’
‘I come from far away’.
‘Which is your country?’

Alas, thought Siddhaartha, they asked that of every wayfarer, in the facile
camaraderie of the road; but in him the question only awakened a penitence
for the guilt of kings. He had left Kapilavastu to atone for these inventions
of men.

Siddhaartha answered, ‘Country, sir? I have none’.

‘What deprivation!’ The Partisan said.
‘I was in a strange trade, sir’, Siddhaartha said, ‘Where they asked such ques-
tions over so often it clouded my mind, and I began this journey of mine’.
‘What trade was it?’
‘Sir’, said Siddhaartha with some trepidation, ‘I worked at being King’
‘You are sick’, the Partisan said. ‘Come with me, and let me make you whole’.
  The General 37

Siddhaartha willed that the Partisan should not see him; unseen, he moved
along the great pathway, and soon the Partisan was gone. Suddenly there
was cheering and clapping. Siddhaartha saw a picturesque chariot approach
in a blaze of brass and clatter of shafts and cranks. On its high perch sat
Paraashara, Dharmapuri’s General, holding a jewelled turd in his hand.
Siddhaartha laughed. Not at the jewelled turd, but at the medals spangling
the commander’s chest, the imbecile residue of war. Siddhaartha was amused
that grown men should lend themselves to such comedy.
‘General, Excellency!’ Siddhaartha called out, softly and joyfully, and
laughed some more. Like a mantis sporting enormous spiked headgear, the
General turned his head, seeking out the source of the laughter. Siddhaartha
laughed out loud now, without ridicule, and with abundant pity. Soon the
laughter enveloped the march and choked the chariot; the laughter grew and
stretched, it became a swamp through which the ironclad plodded.
Now there was nothing but the swamp; the General sat on his perch and
wailed, ‘Where are you, laughing stranger?’ There was no answer, only the
great baptism of that laughter, until he could bear it no more. He leapt down
from the chariot, and as he stood there enveloped by the laughter, the chariot
too was lost to view. In the dense wet colours of earth and leaf that sought
rebirth in decaying, the swamp stretched without end. Paraashara sank and
floundered, and blindly sought his way. … Siddhaartha, laughing no more,
watched the march again, and again Kaanchanamaala beckoned.

Look at my eyes, my King, said Kaanchanamaala.

Merciful Lord! said Siddhaartha. I see dead orbs, white and sightless like
sparrows’ eggs!
While I slept in my mother’s womb, said Kaanchanamaala, no one fed my
little eyes. They fed their wars instead, and I came sightless into this
world.
My little one, O my little one, said Siddhaartha.
Look at my palm leaves, my King, said Kaanchanamaala. I never wrote on
them.

Siddhaartha leaned forward, and for a moment held her palm in his, but she
dissolved like the mist of the night, moving once again towards her dead.

The General ran on, unseeing, ploughing through people. His sodden clothes
flapped about him like wings. In this state, he reached his mother’s door, and
called out to her.
‘My son!’ Answered a grating voice from inside and the door opened.
A wizened old woman looked out. Paraashara brushed past her and ran
38 O.V. Vijayan

towards the inner chambers, trailing a line of slime. His mother wept when
she saw her son’s disarray.

‘Ah, my little son’, she sobbed, as the maids came in with mops, ‘someone
has tormented my little son!’
‘Whoever has vexed His Excellency’, the maids said, ‘will be punished, O
Mother of the Congregation of Persuaders!’

In the room where he had spent his boyhood, playing with hoppers and
ladybirds, a great boyhood joy returned to Paraashara. In the joy of play, he
plucked off his medals one by one, medals from which the scent of blood had
gone and which were now like the playthings of a child; he cast them away
without hate like a child does his toys. Next, he peeled away his general’s
costume and stood naked before the mirror. Silently the maids tiptoed into
the chamber, while the old woman kept anxious vigil outside.
There was a knock at the outer door, and Paraashara’s mother, opening it,
found a delegation of colonels drawn up in the patio. On seeing the colonels
prostrated themselves before her, grovelling on the cobbles. Then rising, the
oldest among them addressed her, ‘Venerable Mother of the Congregation
of Persuaders! His Excellency fled the parade, but his scent led us here. This
flight might well unsettle the Presidential Defecation, dampen the struggle
of the subject peoples and cause Imperialism to rejoice. I had foreseen this
in the dissertation I wrote for the Patrose Lecomba Tartar University. I have
brought the dissertation along, and it should convince His Excellency that he
must rejoin this evening’s finale’.
Paraashara’s mother called out, ‘O my son, your colonel awaits your
pleasure. He has brought his dissertation along’.

‘Your Excellency …’ began the colonel.

In deep peace, Paraashara replied from inside, ‘Go away, brethren!’

The stench of excrement was gone from his body. Gone too was the evil of
war, and he laughed like the stranger. And like that precious find of his child-
hood, the caterpillar, he slid over the maids in larval gratitude, while from
outside, once again, the distraught colonel tried to remind him of the threat
from Imperialism.

Source
Extract from the novel, The Saga of Dharmapuri:
Source: Vijayan, O.V. 1998. Selected Fiction. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 189–199.
4 The Infinity of Grace
(Chapter 24 of the Novel, Gurusagaram)

Translated from Malayalam by Ramesh

Menon and the author

The dream of the shuttlecock gave way to a dream of the ocean. The infinite
serpent which lay upon the waters gazed in fascination at its own endless
length, coil upon coil. Who was He that slept on that bed of coils? In his
sleep, Kunjunni spread his arms upon the sheets. Now, his arms turned into
wings, they bore him into the air, flying across ocean and sky. Dear God, he
grieved, why do You hunt Yourself as the journey and the journeyer? The
voice of the eternal Guru spoke tenderly to him.

‘Turn back and look’.

When he stilled his wings and turned his head, he saw the lustrous Deity who
rode on his back, and his eyes were dazzled. The voice of the Guru spoke
again.

‘Open your eyes’.

When his inner eyes fluttered open, the Serpent and He who slept upon it
were gone. Then, wave and ocean were gone, gone was the rider on his back,
gone were his wings, his beak and talons, gone were his eyes. He was a puls-
ing luminescence, at once an infinitesimal seed and the infinite Universe, as he
flew through the spaces of the Brahman.*

The voice of the Guru said, ‘You once sought to know what liberation meant.
Have you understood now?’

Kunjunni awoke in profound peace. Sivani stood at the bedside, watching

him.

‘Have you rested?’

‘I have’.
‘Shall I give you some coffee?’
He did not answer, she poured him a cup.
‘Sivani, who is with Kalyani?’

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-7
40 O.V. Vijayan

‘Pinaki is with her. You must not worry. He was with her all night. We can
go there soon’.

Kunjunni still felt the presence of his dream … In the hospital, Kalyani rested,
her face serene, her eyes shut.

‘Can I touch her? Will it hurt?’ Kunjunni asked.

Kalyani’s hands and feet were dark and swollen with blood which had flowed
free from ruptured capillaries.
Kunjunni stretched out a forefinger and softly touched Kalyani’s lips, then
he kissed that fingertip.
Sivani introduced the chief doctor who was treating Kalyani. A hundred
questions thronged Kunjunni’s mind. Was Kalyani in pain, would she open
her eyes, would she know him? Kunjunni and Sivani took turns, in and out
of the room, to keep vigil. Pinaki, who had gone back to the hotel to rest,
returned in the evening. He examined the child. Then he walked Kunjunni
down the corridor. They sat on a white bench at the end of the passage.

Pinaki said, ‘Another night and day at the most’.

Kunjunni received this quietly. One night and one day. Pinaki left Kunjunni
on the bench, and walked back to Kalyani’s room. When Kunjunni went into
the room again, Sivani was wiping her tears.
The evening grew into night.

‘Go and rest for a while’, Pinaki said. ‘You must come back later tonight’.

Sivani came out with Kunjunni.

‘Are you in pain?’ she asked.

‘Nothing unbearable’.
‘Have you rested enough?’
‘I have’.
‘I have never seen you looking so tired’.

Kunjunni smiled in futile gratefulness. They came out into the hospital
porch.

‘You must rest’, Sivani said. ‘Or you won’t be able to bear anything. Come
to the seaside with me. The air will refresh you’.

Kunjunni went with her. They sat for a while there in silence. The breeze was
like a healing balm.
 The Infinity of Grace 41

‘Let us go now’, Sivani said at last.

They arrived at the hotel, in Sivani’s room. Silence between them at the sea-
side, silence on the way here. Now, in the room, that silence was unbearable.
Sivani came and stood before Kunjunni. As he sat on the edge of the bed
wondering at this, suddenly she knelt before him. He tried to raise her up.
But she would not let him.

‘I must tell you …’ she began. Kunjunni waited.

‘Kalyani is going’, she said. ‘We must not burden her in any way’.
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘You must listen to me with kindness’.
‘Tell me’.

Sivani did not speak. She knelt before Kunjunni for a long time. Then, softly,
her heart churning, she began to cry. Not allowing him to lift her up, she sat
at his feet and wept.

‘You will never be able to forgive me for this’, she now said.
‘Sivani …’
‘You must not hate Kalyani. She must not go with that burden’.

Now, her sobbing subsided. And then Kunjunni heard a voice which sought
him from another dimension, a voice he had never heard before, and would
never hear again. In that voice, Sivani said, ‘Kalyani is not your child. She is
Pinaki’s daughter’.

Footnote:
*Kunjunni has an advaitik experience. For a short while, he feels that he
is Garuda, the eagle which is the vehicle of Lord Vishnu. At the end of his
experience, all identities are merged in one, and Kunjunni is now part of a
great luminescence in the space of Brahman.

Source
Extract from the novel:
Vijayan, O.V. 1998. Selected Fiction. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 442–444.
(b) Two Short Stories by
Vijayan


5 After the Hanging
(Short Story)

As Vellayi-appan set out on his journey the sound of ritual mourning rose
from his hut, and from Ammini’s hut, and beyond those huts, the village lis-
tened in grief. Vellayi-appan was going to Cannanore. Had they the money,
each one of them would have accompanied him on the journey, it was as
though he was journeying for the village. Vellayi-appan now passed the last of
the huts and took the long ridge across the paddies. The crying receded behind
him. From the ridge, he stepped on pasture land across which the footpath
meandered.

Gods, my lords, Vellayi-appan cried within himself.

The black palms rose on either side and the wind clattered in their fronds.
The wind, ever so familiar, was strange this day – the gods of his clan and
departed elders were talking to him through the wind-blown fronds. Slung
over his shoulder was a bundle of cooked rice, its wet seeped through the
threadbare cloth onto his arm. His wife had bent long over the rice, knead-
ing it for the journey, and as she had cried the while, her tears must have
soaked into sour curd. Vellayi-appan walked on. The railway station was
four miles away. Further down the path he saw Kuttihassan walking towards
him. Kuttihassan stepped aside from the path, in tender reverence.

‘Vellayi’, said Kuttihassan.

‘Kuttihassan’, replied Vellayi-appan.
That was all, just two words, two names, yet it was like a long colloquy, in
which there was lament and consolation. O Kuttihassan, said the unspo-
ken words, I have a debt to pay you, fifteen silvers.
Let that not burden you, O Vellayi, on this journey.
Kuttihassan, I may never be able to pay you, never after this.
We consign our unredeemed debts to God’s keeping. Let His will be done.
I burn within myself, my life is being prised away.
May the Prophet guard you on this journey, may the gods bless your gods
and mine.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-9
46 O.V. Vijayan

The dithyramb of the gods was now a torrent in the palms. Vellayi-appan
passed Kuttihassan and walked on. Four miles to go to the train station.
Again, an encounter on the way. Neeli, the laundress, with her bundles of
washing. She too stepped aside reverentially.

‘Vellayi-appan’, she said.

‘Neeli’, said Vellayi-appan.

Just these two words, and yet between them the abundant colloquy. Vellayi-
appan walked on.
The footpath joined the mud road, and Vellayi-appan looked for the mile-
stone and continued on his way. Presently he came to where the rough-hewn
track descended into the river. Across the river, beyond a rise and a stretch of
sere grass, was the railway. Vellayi-appan stepped onto the sands, then into
the knee-deep water. Schools of little fish, gleaming silver, rubbed against his
calves and swam on. As he reached the middle of the river Vellayi-appan was
overwhelmed by the expanse of water, it reminded him of sad and loving
rituals, of the bathing of his father’s dead body and how he taught his own
son to swim in the river; all this he remembered and, pausing on the river
bank, wept in memory.
He reached the railway station and made his way to the ticket counter and
with great care undid the knot in the corner of his unsewn cloth to take out
the money for the fare.
‘Cannanore’, Vellayi-appan said. The clerk behind the counter pulled
out a ticket, franked it, and tossed it towards him. One stage in my jour-
ney is over, thought Vellayi-appan. He secured the ticket in the corner of
his unsewn cloth and, crossing over to the platform, sat on a bench, wait-
ing patiently for his train. He watched the sun sink and the palms darken
far away, and the birds flit homewards. Vellayi-appan remembered walk-
ing with his son to the fields at sundown, he remembered how his son had
looked up at the birds in wonder. Then he remembered himself as a child,
holding onto his father’s little finger, and walking down the same fields. Two
images, but between them as between two reticent words, an abundance of
many things. Soon another aged traveller came over and sat beside him on
the bench.

‘Going to Coimbatore, are you?’ the stranger asked. ‘Cannanore’, Vellayi-

appan said.
‘The Cannanore train is at ten in the night.’
‘Is that so?’
‘What work do you do in Cannanore?’ ‘Nothing much’.
‘Just travelling, are you?’

The stranger’s converse, inane and rasping, tensed round Vellayi-appan like
a hangman’s noose. Once you left the village and walked over the long ridge,
 After the Hanging 47

it was a world full of strangers, and their disinterested words were like a
multitude of nooses. The train to Coimbatore came, and the old stranger rose
and left. Vellayi-appan was again alone on the bench. He had no desire to
untie the bundle of rice, instead, he kept a hand on the threadbare wrap, he
felt its moisture. He sat thus and slept. And dreamt. In his dream, he called
out, ‘Kandunni, my son!’
Vellayi-appan was woken up from his sleep by the din and clatter of the
train to Cannanore. He felt for the ticket tied into the corner of his cloth and
was reassured. He looked for an open door, he tried to board the compart-
ment nearest to him.

‘This is first class, O elder’.

‘Is that so?’
He peered into the next compartment.
‘This is reserved’.
‘Is that so?’
‘Try further down, O elder’.
The voice of strangers.

Vellayi-appan got into a compartment where there was no sitting space left.
He could barely stand. I shall stand, I don’t need to sleep, this night my son
sits awake. The rhythm of the train changed with the changing layers of
the earth, the fleeting trackside lamps, sand banks, trees. Long ago he had
travelled in a train, but that was in the day. This was a night train. It sped
through the tunnel of darkness, whose arching walls were painted with dim
murals.
The day had not broken when he reached Cannanore. The bundle of
kneaded rice still hung from his shoulder, oozing its wet. He passed through
the gate into the station yard, the dark now livened with the first touch of
dawn. The horse-cart men clumsily parked together did not accost him.

Vellayi-appan asked them, ‘Which is the way to the jail?’

Someone laughed. Here is an old man asking the way to the jail at daybreak.
Someone laughed again, O elder, all you have to do is to steal, they will take
you there. The converse of strangers tightened round his neck. Vellayi-appan
suffocated.
Then someone told him the way and Vellayi-appan began to walk. The
sky lightened to the orchestration of crows cawing.
At the gate of the jail a guard stopped him, ‘What brings you here this
early?’
Vellayi-appan shrank back like a child, nervous. Then slowly he undid the
corner of his cloth and took out a crumpled and yellowing piece of paper.

‘What is that?’ the guard enquired.

48 O.V. Vijayan

Vellayi-appan handed him the paper; the guard glanced through it without
reading.

Vellayi-appan said, ‘My child is here’.

‘Who told you to come so early?’ the guard asked, his voice irritable and
harsh. ‘Wait till the office is open’.

Then his eyes fell on the paper again, and became riveted to its contents. His
face softened in sudden compassion.

‘Tomorrow, is it?’ the guard asked, almost consoling.

‘I don’t know. It is all written down there’.
The guard read and re-read the order. ‘Yes’, he said, ‘It’s tomorrow morning
at five’.

Vellayi-appan nodded in acknowledgement, and slumped on a bench at the

entrance of the jail. There he waited for the dark sanctum to open.

‘O elder, may I offer you a cup of tea?’ the guard asked solicitously.
‘No’.

My son has not slept this night, and not having slept, would not have woken.
Neither asleep nor awake, how can he break his fast this morning? Vellayi-
appan’s hand rested on the bundle of rice. My son, this rice was kneaded
by your mother for me. I saved it during all the hours of my journey, and
brought it here. Now this is all I have to bequeath to you. The rice inside the
threadbare wrap, food of the traveller, turned stale. Outside, the day bright-
ened. The day grew hot.
The offices opened, and staid men took their places behind the tables.
In the prison yard there was the grind of a parade. The prison came alive.
The officers got to work, bending over yellowing papers in tedious scrutiny.
From behind the tables, and where the column of the guards waited in forma-
tion, came rasping orders, words of command. Nooses without contempt or
vengeance, gently strangulating the traveller. The day grew hotter.
Someone told him, sit down and wait. Vellayi-appan sat down; he waited.
After a wait, the length of which he could not reckon, a guard led him into
the corridors of the prison. The corridors were cool with the damp of the
prison. We’re here, O elder.
Behind the bars of a locked cell stood Kandunni. He looked at his father
like a stranger, through the awesome filter of a mind that could no longer
receive nor give consolation. The guard opened the door and let Vellayi-
appan into the cell. Father and son stood facing each other, petrified. Then
Vellayi-appan leaned forward to take his son in an embrace. From Kandunni
came a cry that pierced beyond hearing and when it died down, Vellayi-
appan said, ‘My son!’
 After the Hanging 49

‘Father!’ said Kandunni.

Just these words, but in them father and son communed in the fullness of
sorrow.

Son, what did you do?

I have no memory, father.
Son, did you kill?
I have no memory.
It does not matter, my son, there is nothing to remember anymore.
Will the guards remember?
No, my son.
Father, will you remember my pain?

Then again the cry that pierced beyond hearing issued from Kandunni,
Father, don’t let them hang me!

‘Come out, O elder’, the guard said, ‘the time is over’. Vellayi-appan came
away and the door clanged shut.

One last look back, and Vellayi-appan saw his son like a stranger met dur-
ing a journey. Kandunni was peering through the bars as a traveller might
through the window of a hurtling train.
Vellayi-appan wandered idly around the jail. The sun rose to its zenith,
then began the climb down. Will my son sleep this night? The night came,
and moved to dawn again. Within the walls Kandunni still lived.
Vellayi-appan heard the sound of bugles at dawn, little knowing that this
was death’s ceremonial. But the guard had told him that it was at five in the
morning and though he wore no watch, Vellayi-appan knew the time with
the peasant’s unerring instinct.

Vellayi-appan received the body of his son from the guards like a midwife a
baby.

O elder, what plans do you have for the funeral?

I have no plans.
Don’t you want the body?
Masters, I have no money.

Vellayi-appan walked along with the scavengers who pushed the trolley car-
rying the body. Outside the town, over the deserted marshes, the vultures
wheeled patiently. Before the scavengers filled the pit Vellayi-appan saw
50 O.V. Vijayan

his son’s face just once more. He pressed his palm on the cold forehead in
blessing.
After the last shovelful of earth had levelled the pit, Vellayi-appan wan-
dered in the gathering heat and eventually came to the sea-shore. He had
never seen the ocean before. Then he became aware of something cold and
wet in his hands, the rice his wife had kneaded for his journey. Vellayi-appan
undid the bundle. He scattered the rice on the sand, in sacrifice and requies-
cat. From the crystal reaches of the sunlight, crows descended on the rice, like
incarnate souls of the dead come to receive the offering.

Source
Vijayan, O.V. 1998. Selected Fiction. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 633–638.
6 The Blessing of the Wild-Fowl
(Short Story)

In the basement of our country house, there is a disused room where bygone
elders of the family had worshipped diverse deities: serpent-gods, the primor-
dial monkey and Garuda, the vehicle of Vishnu. Our house rested on pillars
of ageing teak and brooded over this warmth of worship. In it lived the two
of us. The other occupant was an old hen I named ‘Spotted Dove’.
In my loneliness, I often talked to her. ‘Spotted Dove’, I would say, ‘I see
a great sadness on your face’. She would make gentle noises in response,
and walk after me, her gait heavy and matronly. I would scatter grains of
rice for her which she sometimes pecked and swallowed and at other times
abandoned in delicate caprice. I would ask her, ‘Spotted Dove, aren’t you
hungry?’
There was one memory which returned to me insistently, of my days in
the city. I had gone to the poultry shop to buy fresh chicken. The shopkeeper
strangled the birds with perfect economy, and like an expert surgeon knifed
apart leg and wing and breast. In a cage of wire-mesh behind him a brood of
chickens sat, drooping.

‘I hope these birds are not ill?’ I remarked.

‘Of course not’, said the shopkeeper. ‘They are healthy. I buy them from the
state farm, where they are inoculated against the epidemic’.
‘Why then do they droop, their feathers ruffled?’
‘They sleep’.
‘Sleep?’
‘They escape the fear of death. They don’t want to watch me slaughtering’.

Today, I am struck by a similarity in my own experience. My days in the

country home were spent in reading and contemplation. The Gita and Katha
Upanishad were the two texts I went over time and again. The immortality
promised by the Gita failed to console me, the God of the Gita seemed to
be evading responsibility for the pains He created. Inconclusive too was the
Katha’s long discourse on Death. At the end of each reading, I went to sleep.
To return to my conversation with the shopkeeper: ‘You spoke of the state
poultry farm, didn’t you?’ I asked him.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-10
52 O.V. Vijayan

‘Yes, I did’.
‘Where is that?’
‘It is in the suburbs, beyond Govandi’.
‘A big farm, I suppose?’
‘Quite big. It occupies five hectares’.
‘That is a lot of space for the chickens to graze in’.

The shopkeeper smiled darkly in his knowledge of the mystery of chickens.

He said, ‘Foraging days are over for those chickens. They are all in cages, the
farm’s space is for human employees. The birds themselves are not allowed
to move. You know movement toughens the muscles and makes for bad
meat’.

‘Prisoners for life, aren’t they?’

‘Yes, if you look at it that way. The fate of the laying hens is even worse.
They are bred to lay eggs, which they do all their lives. They do so with-
out mating with roosters, without knowing love’. ‘And what happens
when they stop laying?’
‘They become meat too’.
Half the chickens sleep, unmoving, in cages, I said to myself, the other half
lay eggs all their lives, and yet become meat. I asked, ‘How many birds
are there on the farm?’
‘A hundred thousand, on a rough reckoning’.
‘If the epidemic infects one bird …’
‘You forget what I told you just now. The farm birds are inoculated. It is only
the chickens in the country houses that fall ill’.

In the farm beyond Govandi, the chickens multiplied in slavery and in health,
and were brought into the city shops, where they readied themselves for
death through unnatural sleep, unconsoled by the Katha’s discourse, their
lives spent without movement of limb or the knowledge of love.
‘Spotted Dove’, I told my hen one day, ‘such is the tragic destiny of your
clan’.
She pecked at a grain dispiritedly, then walked out into the yard, raking
the loose soil with her feet.

I rarely had visitors, preferring to be left alone, yet there were friends whose
occasional intrusions cheered me. Unnikrishnan was one such. He visited me
one day, armed with his shotgun.

‘Nice to see you, Unni’, I said, ‘but why the gun?’

‘To take you out of your stagnation at gunpoint’, he laughed. ‘Now, Bhaskar-
ettan, let us go’.
 The Blessing of the Wild-Fowl 53

‘Where?’
‘To the Nelliyampathi mountains’.
‘To hunt? Leave me out’.
Unnikrishnan raised me by my shoulder and sat me on the bed; he said,
‘Reading books in bed, day and night. What kind of existence is this?’
‘Not much of an existence, I admit’.
‘Then get up, Bhaskar-ettan, and get ready. If you don’t want to shoot, you
don’t have to. But breathe in the fresh air of Nelliyampathi’.

Unnikrishnan was a great persuader. We walked out over the fields and across
the river, we climbed the hills towards Nelliyampathi. Soon we were on the
blue and humid mountain. The cane creepers lay around us in immense tan-
gles, from the high canopy of forest trees rose the dithyramb of cicadas. An
occasional black monkey leapt across the arching branches with high pitched
shrieks.

‘Do you shoot the monkey, Unni?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no! He is the descendant of Hanuman, sacred to Lord Rama!’

So the monkey was free, only a few of his tribe being bred in captivity. Certain
creatures seemed to be protected in nature’s scheme of things. It did not make
sense in terms of sin and grace.
We walked into a clearing. A little stream sparkled across. We stopped
to drink, when suddenly, frightened by our movement, a flight of peacocks
rose into the air, dazzling us with spreads of turquoise. I was afraid that
Unnikrishnan might shoot them down.

‘No, Bhaskar-ettan’, Unnikrishnan said. ‘The peacock is sacred to

Subrahmanya, it is the god’s vehicle’.
The peacock was protected, too, like the monkey.
‘What about the tiger?’ I asked. ‘Have you shot tigers?’
‘I am scared of tigers. Moreover there is a ban on hunting them’. So, here
was another favoured species. We left the clearing and entered the forest
again.
‘We haven’t seen snakes’, I said.
‘Why, do you like them?’
‘Mm’.
‘This forest is full of snakes, hamadryads’.

The vision of the royal serpent rising out of grass and reed overwhelmed me,
its hood spread and branded with the Lord’s insignia, an ancient palm raised
against the arrogance of creatures. I thought of the conflict between the two
wives of the legendary sage. One was to mother the tribe of serpents, and
the other, Aruna and Garuda. The mother of Aruna hatched his egg before
time, and he came out with no limbs below his waist. He became the Sun’s
54 O.V. Vijayan

charioteer, seated forever, legless. He became the god of dawn. His brother
Garuda was born in the fullness of time, a great eagle with magical powers.
Garuda and the serpents feuded, in the karmic maze of sin and retribution,
through long and bloody ages. Such conflict seemed to be the lot of sentient
beings, while above its tumult blew the breezes with the deeper awareness
inert matter was heir to. Once in a long while a solitary bird or beast would
understand this serenity.

‘No game seems to come our way’, Unnikrishnan said.

‘Then let us rest for a while’.

It was past noon. We sat down on the grass and opened the packages of
food we had brought with us. As we sat, a flock of birds of bright red and
black and yellow plumage flew in and settled on the tree tops above us.
Unnikrishnan leapt up. ‘Bhaskar-ettan, wild-fowl!’
The ancient forebears of domestic chickens, whom nature had spared
incarceration in Govandi, whose wings still had the power of flight, and
whose vibrant muscles had not been degraded by the needs of the epicure.
Unnikrishnan took aim.

‘Stop, Unni, stop!’

‘What is it, Bhaskar-ettan?’
‘Leave the wild-fowl alone’.
‘What has come over you?’
‘Let us not harm the wild-fowl!’ I said. I had decided that my love would
be the protection of the wild-fowl ancestors of my Spotted Dove, a clan
with no divine protection.
‘I shall not shoot’, Unnikrishnan said, ‘if you feel so strongly about it’. He
laid the gun on the grass and sat down beside it. The sun dipped west-
ward and the mountain breeze cooled.
‘Unni’, I said, ‘let us go home’.
‘Let us. But we shall have chicken for supper’.

I thought of my Spotted Dove following me, trusting and secure, pecking and
discarding grains of rice. ‘Tonight I shall give you a different supper’, I said.

‘What kind of supper?’

‘Gruel, coconut juice and steamed peas’.
Unnikrishnan laughed, ‘Ascetic as usual!’

By sundown we were back home. Spotted Dove was in the yard, waiting for
me. She bent her head in greeting, crooned, fluttered round me, and led me
into the house.

‘She is telling you something’, Unnikrishnan said.

 The Blessing of the Wild-Fowl 55

‘Yes’.
Spotted Dove led me to the basement. There in a corner was an egg.
‘Spotted Dove’, I said, ‘you kept your love a secret!’

Spotted Dove laid another egg the next day, and then stopped. I felt her, she
was warm for the brooding. I looked after her during the days of incubation.
I told her of my encounter with her wild ancestors in Nelliyampathi. She
listened with deep understanding.
On the fifteenth day, a strange impatience seized me. I went down to the
basement and pulled out an egg from beneath her and pressed it to my ear.
Inside the shell, there was noise and movement. I cracked the shell open.
Spotted Dove looked on in alarm. From the splintered shell there emerged,
luminous and mystic, a winged human form, with no limbs below the waist.
The legless Aruna, the Sun’s charioteer! I put him down in front of his mother
and said, ‘Spotted Dove, forgive me. Mine was the impatience of love, and
I, the blundering human, have intruded into the genesis of birds. But before
long he will rise into the skies to take the reins of the chariot. Now brood on
the other egg’.
I went back to bed. That night I saw a blinding trajectory of light rise up
to the heavens. I saw it, and so did the wild-fowl of Nelliyampathi.
My days passed in lucid wakefulness and gentle dreaming. I went down
to the basement on the twenty-first day; Spotted Dove, brimming over with
the caring warmth of motherhood, was getting ready to peck the egg open. I
stood by in humility, waiting for the incarnation.

‘Spotted Dove’, I said, ‘do you realize who this is?’

Soft light emanated from the egg and filled the basement. A new Garuda
stepped out, cleansed of the long ages of conflict. He will no longer hunt
down his serpent brethren, but go instead in search of Amrit, the elixir of
eternal life. I whispered the vedic prayer, Mrityoma Amritham Gamaya: lead
us from death to immortality.
That night another trajectory of light signified the second ascent. When
day broke, Spotted Dove followed me round the house, pecking at grains of
rice.
And the mountain winds blew down on our house, with the love of the
wild-fowl of Nelliyampathi.

Source
Vijayan, O.V. 1998. Selected Fiction. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 627–632.
(c) A Selection of Vijayan’s Non-Fictional
Prose


7 Two Wars, Two Finger Prints
Translated from Malayalam by
E.V. Ramakrishnan

Autumn is the time of festivals and fairs in Delhi; it is the time for those who
relish sweets and are fond of colourful clothes. Conferences and exhibitions
are held in these months. At the time of writing this, an art and cultural
exhibition of the Soviet Union is in progress here. The official measures in
the interest of security disrupt the flow of traffic, but the cheer of autumn
pervades the city. The government and the people feel secure in their petty
diversions, unmindful of the tragic disruptions that plague the very founda-
tions of the country. The newspapers of New Delhi (these are institutions
that have enormous resources and talent and are capable of seeking out the
truth) have trivialized the civil war in Sri Lanka to the level of the Reliance
Cup Tournament. The Punjab situation has also ceased to be news. This is
not merely the failure of the media. It is a sign of India’s soul getting entan-
gled in contradictions and the soul of India getting fragmented. The average
citizens of Delhi (Vijayan uses the word, Indraprasta, an old Sanskrit word
for Delhi) want the Indian army to succeed in Sri Lanka. Natural enough,
everyone would like their own soldiers to succeed.
However, exploiting such emotions amounts to a misguided political line
of action. A tragedy begins to take shape when the citizen’s honest national-
ist emotions get mixed with the complex policies of the state that lack hon-
esty. Whose war is being fought in Sri Lanka? The Sri Lankan problem had
complex beginnings. Before the British government integrated the Tamil and
Simhala territories, both these ethnic communities had their separate rulers.
In order to survive under the British rule, the Sri Lankan Tamils became
hard-working and highly competent, something the minorities always excel
at, in many places. The Simhala people, given to idle ways and comfortable
living, conceded crucial roles to the Tamils, in educational and professional
fields, lacking the vision to see its consequences.
The Sri Lankan Tamils did not subscribe to the Simhala nationalism which
did not assume a strident form. This was the situation when Sri Lanka became
free. When racism and democracy meet, they assume dangerous forms in
realpolitik. The achievements of Tamilians now came to be interpreted as
evidence of their lack of commitment to the nation. The Tamil community
was seen as the adversaries of the Simhala religious identity. All these hap-
pened gradually. The leftists in Sri Lanka could not only stop the Simhala

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60 O.V. Vijayan

polarization, but they took advantage of this divide for their own gains. In
the process, they became the spokesmen of the centralization of power which
was opposed to the people. This has also happened in India.
India, which has had its deep bonds with the Sri Lankan Tamils, was
forced to intervene in the Sri Lankan situation when the Simhala polariza-
tion and the militant backlash it created snowballed into a crisis. It is here
that the dishonest and dubious attitude of our political leadership landed us
in problems of various kinds. We lacked the honesty to state where we stood
and put into practice what we spoke. The contradictions in Sri Lanka can be
traced to the ethnic divisions and their historical contradictions. It is natural
that RAW, the secret service operators of the Indian government lacked the
expertise to handle the situation. Instead of handling the issues democrati-
cally in relation to the context of the people, we left them to the conspiracies
of the secret service agents. Our objectives had a hidden side to them: we
wanted to appease the Tamilian community and promote the vested interests
of the Congress party. As in Punjab, the conspiracies succeeded initially, but
in the long run, there were unexpected setbacks.
We did not set the stage for reconciliations. We have been trained to view
the politics of ethnic divisions in black and white: either as a means of manu-
facturing public consent or as treason and attempt to secede. The Sri Lankan
situation has its similarities with the regional, communal and ethnic divisions
we witness in India. We have not been able to promote a cultural ethos where
such problems are approached in relation to a value system. The central gov-
ernment had its eyes on the political benefits to be gained in Tamilnadu.
Now we are caught in a situation of deep ethnic divisions, and unspeakable
violence.
This is how the Sri Lankan civil war got transformed into something
worse. We began arming the militants to placate the Tamilians. When the
possibility of an independent Tamil nation loomed large in the horizon, the
North Indian ruling class felt that it might lead to a larger Tamil nation,
threatening the stability of Indian nation. Such a possibility seems to have
unsettled them and put them off their balance.
This is how the war gets transformed. The North Indian army divisions
which had set out to protect the Tamil minority is now engaged in demolish-
ing the Tamil resistance, to uphold the central authority of the Simhala rule.
A complete division of Indian army with tanks, helicopters, and gunships is
up against 2,500 Elam tigers. Some people suspect it is not one division but
three. This is an unholy war.
In recent history, Indian armies got entangled in two wars, fighting others’
battles: Sri Lankan War and the Bangladesh War. In Bangladesh, our engage-
ment could be justified based on some values. It is true that Indira Gandhi
exploited the Bangladesh War to her advantage. The Bangladesh War was
fought on the moral principle that the people have their right to self-determi-
nation and self-expression. They have the right to seek support for their fight
against invasion or repression. Sri Lankan War has no such justification. Our
 Two Wars, Two Finger Prints 61

army is fighting on behalf of a repressive regime against a community which

has been denied its right to ethnic identity. The Sri Lankan War is a distor-
tion of what happened in Bangladesh.
With great distress I would like to point out that these conflicts presage the
nature of events that may disrupt the harmonious relations between tribes
or minority communities in India. A nation’s inner strength is its people’s
consent. It signifies the voluntary and independent commingling of its diverse
ethnic, tribal, and communal identities. If such a harmonious coexistence is
not possible, defence forces can never dictate a solution. We seem to distrust
the very prospect of such a consensus among the diverse sections of people.
That is why we resort to the brute power of the army.
While evaluating these two wars, I am reminded of two finger prints.
When Kashmir became part of the Indian union, we went by Maharaja Hari
Singh’s willingness to sign an Instrument of Accession to join the Dominion
of India. In the case of Hyderabad, we assigned no importance to the Nizam’s
signature but valued the popular consent to join the Indian union. Let us not
forget that we gained independence through a nationalist movement which
owed allegiance to a set of universal principles. Our independence, state-
hood, and limits of action need to be rooted in those principles.
However, what we witness around us are the signs of those very principles
being uprooted.

Source
The original Malayalam essay is from Section 4 of The Collected Articles of O.V.
Vijayan (2005), pp. 368–370.
Vijayan, O.V. 2005. O.V.Vijayante Lekhanangal (Collected Essays of O.V. Vijayan).
Kottayam: D.C. Books, 368–370.
8 The Forgotten Book
Translated from Malayalam by
E.V. Ramakrishnan

An active participant in the freedom struggle, a wanderer with a passion for

travel, a magician of the street, a man with an inquisitive mind – someone
who was all these, entered the domain of Malayalam literature. We were
taken aback when he wrote works that brought out the inherent form of his
diverse experiences.
It was the turbulent year of 1949. The year of the tragic adventurism
of Ranadive, the Communist leader, who had put forth a new thesis about
armed struggle to capture power. K. Damodaran, a Communist intellectual,
had commented on Basheer’s Voices: ‘This book reflects the cultural bank-
ruptcy of Basheer’ (The words are quoted from memory).
It was this criticism of Damodaran that led me to the book. A small book.
Its pages were full of the discarded, distraught men and women condemned
to live like insects with no hope, goodness, or redemption. A story becomes
sublime or base, depending on the perspective of the reader. The theme of
the book was the collective crime of mankind, a thousand or many thousand
years old. An air of inevitability surrounds it.
Shabdangal led me to this.
Under the sky, a colony of beggars, their hearths, smoking and smoulder-
ing, like ulcers. A woman rises from the embers in darkness. She hands over
her child to an unknown destitute lying nearby. Mother tells the child, ‘Lie
here, my child. Someone is coming to me’. She pokes fun at the consumer
from the city.
After the deed, she goes near her child. The destitute is sleeping. Ants have
covered the child’s body.
Oh, God! Whose moral bankruptcy is this traumatic scene! To me, it felt
like the lamentation of the universe. I have been writing for years. Still, the
cover and pages of that book haunt me. When I look back, look back again
and again, I grasp its essence – it is a prayer of the universe, sin is its lan-
guage. It nudges God from his sleep.
Readers slipped and fell, in the pages of Voices. As if impacted by its
shock, the author tried to distance himself from the book. In his evaluations
of his own work, Basheer prioritised Balyakalasakhi (Childhood Friend) and
Premalekhanam (A Letter of Love). He reincarnated before the readers with
entertaining stories like the ones about Aanavari and Ponkurishu. We asked

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 The Forgotten Book 63

ourselves: who is Vaikom Muhammad Basheer? What is Vaikom Muhammad

Basheer? We don’t know. He appeared as a man of humour. We were afraid
to look beyond this persona and look within his real self. Therefore, we
confined him to a familiar label – a humorist. When we mention the word,
‘humour’ we should take into account the growth and changing energy lev-
els of its emotional dynamics and the multiple manifestations of its artistic
forms. We have a tradition of pure humour, from Kunchan Nambiar to our
own times. There are two larger-than-life figures in the world of humour:
Sanjayan and V.K.N. Sanjayan’s humour blossomed and bore fruit, drawing
sustenance from his erudition. V.K.N. takes us to the heights of humour,
holding the whole of language on his palm, transforming us. We become raw
material for his laughter.
I feel Sanjayan and V.K.N have forgotten to add an important ingredient
in their humour: love. Basheer’s laughter is not loud, but half of it is com-
posed of love. And the other half is made up of an agreeable sense of the
absurd.
We failed to understand this combination and we never recognized its
value, not because of any discrimination against him. We never classified him
as a ‘Muslim’ writer. Basheer belonged to the whole of Malayalam. His Islam
also belonged to Malayalam.

Source
Vijayan, O.V. 20 05. O.V. Vijayante Lekhanangal (Collected Essays of O.V. Vijayan).
Kottayam: D.C. Books, 804–805.
9 Understanding Divisiveness
Essay by O.V. Vijayan

The talk about unity and divisiveness has become a sick charade: but what is
fearsome is that this charade is moving towards violent and painful resolu-
tions. Resolved, not through conscious and intelligent historicity but in the
bloody opportunism of centralizing processes. The time has come for us to
acknowledge in all humility that India’s is not the mythical oneness of the
Mahabharata but that its inputs are Muslim and later, British. It is some-
thing like the EEC put together by Atilla the Hun. Which is just as well. For,
sheltered behind the Himalaya and the ocean, we are a bowl of inherited
historical commonality and given a reasonably tolerant dispensation, could
have made a go at nationhood. Twenty or 40 Indian nations need not be bet-
ter than 1 confederacy except that perhaps, with 40 votes, we might acquire
dubious clout at the United Nations. Twenty-five years ago this might have
sounded like a joke but is not so any more. Instead of moronic pledges of
unity taken at flag hoisting ceremonies, the one serious thing we ought to be
discussing is India’s togetherness, the grim alternatives of balkanization or
confederacy.
Nor will a consideration of these be at variance with the predictions of
the national movement. At no point during the fight for freedom was India
conceived of as unitary state, far less as one manipulated into accepting the
hegemony of a family.
Right till the transfer of power the Congress had a federal scenario in mind
and so did the Communists, only the Indian big bourgeoisie provided carping
dissent and advocated a centralized state congruent with its centralized mar-
ket. We enter, now, a hectic interregnum of renegacy and grab, with Gandhi
suddenly pushed into the shadows, and the splendrous vistas of rulership
unfolding before the erstwhile partisans of freedom. The Congress almost
by stealth, jettisoned federalism, the cardinal principle on which half a cen-
tury of its struggle was based. And most curiously the Communists followed
suit. The bourgeoisie was satisfied and so was the bureaucracy. From 1947
onwards, the building of the Indian state moved away from the discovery
of India to an active inheritance of the Mughal Empire and the East India
Company. For three decades effectively and during the fourth partially the
Empire and the Company worked, for the country was still in the hypnotic
afterglow of the freedom struggle.

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 Understanding Divisiveness 65

Today the glow has failed and against our imbecilic silhouettes of lead-
ership, the cruel night of reality is darkening. What is nihilistic is that the
circus goes merrily on, with trumpets and flourishes and the moronic litany
of pledges. And as the reality surfaces in stark relief, the mindless hegemon-
ists strike back much in the same manner as Wellesley enforced his Doctrine
of Lapse. That is where we are today in our inept pursuit of the Doctrine of
Lapse.
Phoney patriotism and terror have stilled all debate. It is taboo to re-exam-
ine the oddity of depending on the prince’s assent in Kashmir and popular
will in Hyderabad as the basis of accession, it is taboo to question the moral-
ity of our ingestion of Sikkim into the Union, it is taboo to be aware of
the umbilical cord that binds the Indian Muslim to the Islamic Republic of
Pakistan or the Sri Lankan Tamil to the Dravidian homeland. In less intense
forms are other ties of memory and blood, the dormant but now resurfac-
ing heritages from the centuries past. A resurgent nation would have taken
all this into its melting pot like the new American nation did. It did so in its
abundance of material opportunity and in a context of less persistent civiliza-
tional memory. It is obvious that the melting pot is not for us.
Instead, mindlessly we resort to the terror mechanisms of centralization
and hide it futilely behind inane ceremonial pretences. We whip up, or try
to, a synthetic chauvinism by means of external adventure. We marched into
Kashmir on the strength of that state’s provisional accession to repel raiders
and stayed put. We marched into East Pakistan on the strength of a legal fig-
ment, in defence of the East Bengalee’s right to self-determination and aban-
doned the new state to intrigue and militarism. We marched into Sri Lanka
on the strength of no figment whatsoever to put down the very same urge for
self-determination and are yet to experience the long-term backlash. These
are fatal aids to our crumbling core of nationhood and can do no better than
provide hallucinatory comfort. For, behind this front of heroism and self-
righteousness, our internal tragedy grows and acquires chronicity.
Our nation is resting on far too many snug lies. What we experience today
is the sprouting of truth beneath their overlay. For we have suppressed legiti-
mate and disparate identities, driven them underground into sullen anger.
These identities, had their legitimacies been treasured, would have been the
components of a vibrant collage. We have degraded them. And made them
charges of potential dissension instead. We inherited an Empire, and sought
to rebuild it, instead of building a nation. And in a most peculiar tragic drive,
we have carried the centralization to its ultimate symbolic absurdity – family
rule.
The Indian solution can only begin with the recognition of ancient Indian
differences; not in an insistence that India is one but that she ought to be one.
The instrument of the solution is not the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie,
the intelligence network, and the armed forces, but the freedom conceded to
the federal components. Keeping them together by threat and deceit would
be the replication of conquest and empire-building and might work in the
66 O.V. Vijayan

short run. But all empires eventually disintegrate, and an internal decoloniza-
tion can be painful and bitter.
Along with the recognition that India is not one, there should be an
attempt to legitimize the overlapping nationalities of the sub-continent, to
celebrate their identities, and simultaneously to harmonize them in a new and
larger confederacy.

Source
Published in Seminar 341, January 1988 devoted to theme of ‘India 1987’
(d) A Selection of Vijayan’s
Autobiographical Essays


10 Bangarwadi
Translated from Malayalam by
K. Ramachandran

It was in 1956 that I happened to go and stay in the village on which Khasak
was based. The work on Khasak started the same year, but it did not take
form keeping to the plan that was in mind at that time. Now let me dwell a
little on that background.
My sister Shanta was seeking admission to a teachers training college.
Those who had served in some schools had priority in admission. Thus, we
approached P.T. Bhaskara Panikkar, the President of the Malabar District
Board and he kindly granted a teacher’s job for my sister. It was a one-
teacher school in the original village which became Khasak (in my novel). By
the time she completed four or five months, it would be time for admission
to the teachers training college. That village is near Palakkad, an area where
a few rich farmers who were our relatives had influence. Hiring an outhouse,
my father and mother shifted to that village to stay along with Shanta.
At the end of that academic year, terminated from Malabar Christian
College, I too happened to go and stay with Shanta. I spent the summer
vacation in that village till I got a job in a college in Thanjavur the next
year. Mother was worried about my lost job. It was at that time that we
were acquainted with Khaliyar. Mother thought of a shortcut solution to the
problem of my joblessness – to get a charmed amulet from Khaliyar. To test
whether the university would yield to the mantra! Khaliyar with his mother
came and started their elaborate magic ritual to invoke Syed Sheikh Hussain
Mastan, a powerful djin (In Arabian and Muslim mythology, a spirit which
can assume human and animal forms and also possess humans) whose sleep-
ing room was in Arabia. The mother was the medium. The chanting here
should go up there all the way, wake him and bring him here in a spell.

‘It’s difficult for him to land here’ Khaliyar explained. ‘He has to blind the
eyes of several people all along’.

However, Syed Sheikh Hussain Mastan, who flew all the way and landed in
Khasak, won for me the job of a teacher in a college at Thanjavur. Maybe
that the power of the magic spell was not enough or that the djin was not
much interested in the permanence of my job, the college in Thanjavur
also terminated me. After that, probably it was in the 1970s that I met the

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70 O.V. Vijayan

Khaliyar. I was taking rest at Shanta’s house during an illness in the course
of my preparing an article after visiting Naxal-affected areas in Tamilnadu.
Knowing that I was there, Khaliyar came up to meet me. Though there was
no relationship between this Khaliyar and the one in the novel, I was afraid
that the story may have offended him. With a little embarrassment, I started
saying: ‘Khaliyar, I wrote a book …’ I was about to array lame arguments
to the effect that characterization was imaginary and that he should not take
offence in it.

‘Ayyayyo! Don’t bother!’ he said, ‘what’s there in it? Isn’t it all the grace of
God?’

He ended his visit after tying one more holy thread endowed with magical
properties. This time we did not talk about Syed Sheikh Hussain Mastan.
Just as we say, once communism takes over, ‘each one can get according to
his need’. In a story, each one gets his own ghost. I had discovered Sayed
Mian Sheikh. Today in Kerala, Sayed Mian Sheikh is a ghost with a celebrity
status, though he is nowhere near the ghost of Marx in popularity.
Whether it is Marx or Mian Sheikh, our history in its tragic and farci-
cal forms is full of ghosts. Let me pass on to an anecdote. The time was
those last months I spent in Christian College before spending my vacation
in the village. Bhaskara Panikkar and me were returning to town after speak-
ing in a teacher’s meeting at Peruvayal, a village outside Kozhikode. During
those days, my long story ‘Beginning of a Battle’ had appeared in print in
Mathrubhoomi weekly. Bhaskara Panikkar mentioned that story and told
me ‘Vijayan, your story was good; but please write something with more
‘inquilab’ (Communist ideas) next time’. ‘Yes; I will’, I replied.
‘Beginning of a Battle’ was a story of farmers’ conflict. Communist that I
was, I wrote that story to show my loyalty to the movement, and the story
had an undercurrent of social conflict, in the process of writing, the story
took off in another direction, the strange characters, nature, and romanti-
cism all went wild. Panikkar was asking me not to go wild and to write a
story that conformed to the formalism of progressive literature. With a sense
of guilt for the excessive aesthetic charm of ‘Beginning of a Battle’, I too
wished to write a revolutionary story, sort of the stuff suggested by Panikkar.
There was no dearth of characters and places as I was able to observe
closely the agricultural scene of Palakkad. I had noted in my mind one or
two places. It was then that the summer vacation at Khasak came at hand.
Khasak, like a map of inferno, was waiting for me. I added in the list of my
red army the shadows that lurked behind the people of Khasak. Revolution
was imminent in Khasak! Ravi, the banished child of the town arrived to
ignite the pyrotechnic. Each character, who prayed at the mosque, who
stealthily walked on the marsh, who went in trance in the sacred grove would
have to take his role in the revolution. I did not exempt even Appu-Kili from
this burdensome duty entrusted by history.
  Bangarwadi 71

Then, I started writing. When it progressed, detours more dangerous than

those in the ‘Beginning of a Battle’ engrossed me. Appu-Kili, who was not
obliged to learn the alphabet, overtook young students who were drinking
the lessons of revolution. The legend advanced through several shortcuts that
digressed from the story of revolution. Yet, with a fond hope to guard the
objective of the story, I went on with corrections and cancellations. By 1958,
the story was almost completed. I was starting to Delhi that October. It was
in August, I think, that I had given a chapter of the novel to N.V. Krishna
Warrier as a ‘sample’ to try. When I went to the Mathrubhoomi office to take
back the manuscript just before leaving to Delhi, N.V. had already left for a
British tour. When I enquired with Thrivikraman, his colleague, he told me
that it had been sent for publication in the weekly.

‘It was only a chapter of my novel’, I said complainingly.

‘You should have made it clear’, Thrivikraman replied.

It was the story of Appu-Kili, which was a single chapter in the first draft and
later split into two under the titles ‘The Tiger’ and ‘Dusk’. N.V. had left it on
the table after reading and Thrivikraman sent it to press thinking that it was
for publication.

’Once it is printed and published, how is it to appear again when it is serial-

ized?’ I asked.
’It will be difficult’, he said.

It was with a feeling of dejection that The Legends of Khasak could never
be serialized in the Mathrubhoomi weekly that I took the train to Delhi with
the manuscript. N.V. returned from Britain via Delhi. As soon as I met him,
I told him how the sky had collapsed. ‘Never mind!’ He responded coolly.

‘Well, can this chapter be printed again?’

‘We will see when the story is finished. Have you finished writing?’
‘Only a few gaps to fill.’
‘Write it, then’.

Long leisure, which had been a part of college service, was lost to me forever
as a journalist. There was no time even to fill these minor gaps in the story.
Thus, filling these gaps was postponed time and again.
Looking back, I see this also as one of the mercies of fate. Khasak which
began as a story of revolution had turned into an idiosyncratic garland of
tales by the time I left for Delhi. Its sense of humour was overarching its inner
dimensions. Now I feel that this humour was really an unconscious challenge
to revolutionary formalism. If I had released Khasak in that form, my char-
acters would have been doomed to rot in their prime as half-sprouted seeds.
The postponement of gap-filling saved The Legends.
72 O.V. Vijayan

I left for Delhi in 1958, carrying a baggage of doubts. The strike in Posnan,
the attack of Hungary, the murder of Imre Nagy, etc. had disturbed me and
destroyed the monolithic nature of my political creed. Still, it was not yet
time to obtain anything meaningful out of the fragments of this collapse.
After the ideological stupor of the past years, I finally found the openness to
face my crisis of faith, with a sense of humour. That was all. I had to wait
further to develop a holistic sense of sympathy in which laughter, lament and
contemplation commingle. It was through these years of waiting that I went
on postponing the process of gap-filling Khasak. It was by the Grace of God.
However, in this interval of humour, I learned a great lesson: it required
only a moment for theories that had appeared to be inviolable, such as Moses’
edicts, to crumble down. When they disintegrate, commitment becomes
loud laughter and forgiving. Happy similarities between the invocations of
the ghosts of Karl Marx and Sayed Mian Sheikh. Aesthetic quest stops, if
one does not go beyond this laughter. The chapter on Appu-Kili that got
printed in the Mathrubhoomi weekly in October 1958 was humour; a story,
stumbled by humour. ‘The Tiger’ and ‘Dusk’ printed as part of the novel,
The Legends of Khasak, in 1969 had elements of compassion transcending
humour. The Appu-Kili chapters of 58 and 69 are not different in their struc-
ture, characters, and language. But like a micro-medicine that transforms the
chemical immensity of the body, small corrections transformed Appu-Kili
from a comic character in a story of revolution into a transcendental child of
a combination of pap and punya.
Let me tell you another small matter too as a footnote to this chapter. An
allegation that the Legends of Khasak had plagiarized the novel Bangarwadi
was propagated widely a few years ago. It was after this propaganda that I
took out the English translation of Bangarwadi (I don’t know Marathi) from
the Sahithya Akademi library of Delhi and read it. Here I do not enter into
the relevance of comparing The Legends of Khasak with Bangarwadi, which
has only mechanical dimensions of narrating a story. I leave that duty to the
critic and the discerning reader. But, the publication date of Bangarwadi was
prominent: October 1958. In the usual course of book business, it should
have taken at least two months to reach the bookshop; that means, it could
be in January 1959. The Khasak chapter published in Mathrubhumi weekly
in October 1958 should have taken six months before it – for N.V. to read it,
four weeks to print it in the September that elapsed. There is an error of his-
tory of six months in it. I should have stolen Bangarwadi six months before
it ever appeared in bookshops.
This would be possible only if I could divine the past, the present, and the
future simultaneously.

Source
This essay appears as the sixth chapter of Ithihasathinte Ithihasam (The History of
the Legends, 1989. Kottayam. D.C. Books), an autobiographical narrative by
O.V. Vijayan describing the genesis and the writing of the novel, Khasakkinte
Ithihasam.
11 Meditation on Words
Translated from Malayalam by
K. Ramachandran

My years passed by in bewilderment and exhaustion. In this condition, I

could not read much. The number of books I wanted to read was numerous.
But my days pass, making my reading and non-reading irrelevant. Who is
nurturing the rare plants in my uncultivated wasteland? He, the one with that
first primeval touch.
My education was mainly in English. Educating children in English
medium was a craze for parents those days; these days too. My father’s wish
was that I should get the maximum possible English education that he was
not able to get in his impoverished childhood. Thus, except for some learning
in Manipravalam and Krishnagatha, my attention turned towards English.
In my early childhood, I started writing poems in English imitating poems
in my textbooks. Misshapen things, senseless writings. Writing something in
Malayalam did not occupy my serious thoughts. We, who are members of an
Ezhava family, did not have any purity of language or culture in the sense in
which upper castes use these words. As we were educated, we did not speak
the common dialect of Ezhavas among us. We used the lifeless, disciplined
language of textbooks. Except the ‘orderlies’ who were Nairs appointed
to serve my father, our servants were mostly from among the Ezhavas of
Palakkad. Mother talked to them in their small dialect.

‘Whotsit golden girlie, are you ill?’

‘Head’s reeling, my dear achee’

Father and mother were keen to keep us aloof from these dialogues, consid-
ered to be garbage of a language. But the music of that small dialect filled in
my ears as elixir. To this day, it sounds sweet.
But for the sweetness of that dialect, I have no presence in (Malayalam) lit-
erature. That is the element which the Indo-Anglians can never attain. I would
have become an Indo-Anglian if God had not willed otherwise. Preparations
to be that had started from early years in college. I wrote small articles in
the Indian Express; wrote stories in little-known English weeklies. For some
time, I used to carry with me a bundle of papers which had a half-completed
revolutionary novel in English.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-17
74 O.V. Vijayan

During graduation, I opted for Malayalam as my second language. The

textbooks prescribed for us were uninspiring in the extreme. Needless to say,
these multiplied my unwillingness to adjust to Malayalam and my inborn
aversion to books. In the B.A. examination, I managed somehow to scrape
through with a third class in Malayalam.
Among my classmates, there was an Iyer (Tamil Brahmin) boy Raju who
was the only one as bad as me. Raju was generally scornful of languages.
His small dialect was a mixture of Tamil, Malayalam, and English; he used
it sparingly, though. Instead of talking, he would smile, laugh aloud, slap on
your back, and pedal cycle in open spaces. So what is the need for language
which is full of errors of incompleteness and doubtful meaning?
I remember how once Raju used his small language in an unforgettable
way. He took this precious pearl out while answering a question from the
Ramayana. ‘Ramar told Lachmana thus …’
The teacher asked the full class ‘Who is Raju?’ Raju stood up, smiling.
The teacher returned his answer paper and asked him to read it aloud. Raju
read it aloud without any hesitation whatsoever: ‘Ramar …’. The class
erupted in laughter. Even me, who is his most loyal friend laughed. Raju
didn’t understand what the laughter was all about. It was in Khasak that
Raju’s language, the sweet language of innocence, came up to console me
again.
I continued writing in English off and on. In 1953, while studying for
M.A. Literature, I was preparing to write an English short story titled ‘Father
Gonsalves’. After writing a few paragraphs, I was stuck. There was a kind of
vague restlessness. Yet, I completed the story with that restlessness. I felt very
disturbed. I looked into the written pages with some confusion. What am I
doing? Other’s language, other’s experience, other’s history. Like a clown, I
am walking blindfolded among them. That night I took a decision to write in
Malayalam, though I was not conversant with it. I took the pains to translate
‘Father Gonsalves’ into Malayalam. There were the bruises of translation in
that story. Even then, I could publish it in Jayakeralam weekly. After that, I
never looked back.
I had severe limitations of vocabulary in Malayalam. Even then, earnest
attempts to survive these limitations gave me unending novelties of creation.
A word born out of one’s own body. A gene belonging to no one else. This
experience is not unattainable to anyone. Lying by the wayside, Malayalam
words cry out for attention, like orphans, when we narrate a story, write a
study, compose a poem, and so on. Just extend a finger in attention to them;
they will hold it and walk along with us.
Malayalam is not a backward language. No language is backward, for that
matter. Only idle minds are responsible for the backwardness. Scholarship
is no remedy for that. What, then? Devotion, concentration, and meditation
on words!
The creation of The Legends was a period of utmost devotion to words. I
remember them as if they are my own children. Oh, my dear words!
 Meditation on Words 75

Source
This essay appears as the sixth chapter of Ithihasathinte Ithihasam (The History of the
Legends of Khasak, 1989. Kottayam. D.C. Books. pp. 79–81), an autobiographical
narrative by O.V. Vijayan describing the genesis and the writing of the novel,
Khasakkinte Ithihasam.
12 Memory of a Vermillion Mark
Translated from Malayalam by
K.C. Muraleedharan

I could look upon the recent purges in the Marxist party only with an over-
whelming sense of bewilderment. The reason is that it is justifiable in abso-
lute theoretical terms only, and hardly does it address the fundamental issues
faced by the left organizations in Kerala. My readers may bear with me if I
return to the emotional planes of revolution. I remember even now, the day,
fifth of April, the first Communist ministry was sworn in. I was then teach-
ing in a college in Thanjavur. I decided that l have to be in my hometown
to celebrate this moment. Don’t remember whether it was for admission or
vacation work, the principal insisted on my presence in the college but I was
stubborn too. ‘Family matter’, I told him, ‘I have to go’.

‘What is so urgent at home?’ He asked.

The reply that should be given but couldn’t be, overwhelmed me.

‘Our family came to power’. This was the reply. ‘Mine, Sankaran
Namboodiripad’s, A.K. Gopalan’s, Kunhiraman Master’s, and the num-
berless farm workers’ joint family’.
I didn’t say that but repeated, ‘It’s a family matter’.
‘All right, then’.

On fourth of April (recalling from memory presuming the dates are exact),
I boarded train from Thanjavur to reach Palakkad on the fifth. That day is
historical to Palakkad, a day of fulfilment. Myself and a Sikh NCC officer
occupied two of the four second-class berths. After supper, l ventured to start
a dialogue with him – I had a lot to say – family matters – of this extraor-
dinary family, the listener was quite indifferent though, but I must recount:

‘We are going to have a new ministry’.

‘Is that so?’
‘A Communist ministry’.
‘Is that so?’
‘Haven’t you heard of E.M. Sankaran Namboodirippad?’
‘No’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-18
 Memory of a Vermillion Mark 77

‘Must’ve heard of A.K. Gopalan?’

‘No’.

My listener untied his turban, removed his uniform and slipped into night
dress.
Sleep, you silly, I exclaimed in a whisper. Me, the politically aware one,
went to sleep in the moonshine of my wisdom. As the train rushed past the
yellowish mud hills and rocks of Tamilnadu to the greenery of dawn, I woke
up. The fellow passenger was fixing his hair.

‘Reached Kerala?’ he queried.

Nearing Kollankode, left behind Meenakshipuram.

‘Yes’. I replied.

He looked at the green landscape excitedly. Somewhere, women were bath-

ing in a small pond, bare-breasted.

‘Beautiful sight’. Then, added awkwardly, ‘lush green all over’.

I was familiar with the impressive verdure spread all over. Amidst the green
flourish, I looked for another colour – vermillion. The train shot through
the inner parts of Kerala. Suddenly, there, I shouted in my mind, in the com-
pound of a hut, tied to a tamarind tree, a red flag. I did not share this instance
of the vermillion with the Sikh.
Reached home, took rest for some time. Somehow, whiled away time till
evening. Together with comrades, waited at the shop of a friend, eagerly
expecting the victory procession. Namboodirippad’s public address on the
radio aired from Thiruvananthapuram. In tired voice. The exhaustion seemed
to worsen his stammer, but rendered it more hearty and charming, arousing a
fellow-feeling. Can’t recall the details of his speech. One sentence that struck
me in particular meant, ‘We are to work under a constitution we don’t like’.
l remember the sense of the statement but not the exact words used.
These memories of mine begin with this sentence. What was the dislike
about the constitution? What was the undivided Communist Party to do
to address these discontents? Was coming to power by ballot wrong? Was
making use of such power so disagreeable? Whatever it is, the nephews
of the joint family who were listening to the broadcast in the shop of the
Communist fellow traveller had no chance at all to know what it was. The
street was getting dark. The procession of darkening streets moved to the
Kota Maidan (Fort premises).
78 O.V. Vijayan

Forbidden Knowledge
Even after three decades, the confusion pertaining to those doubts still
remains. The accomplishments and grievances of the Communist Party and
the purges within are the private discourses of the elderly, with no access to
the nephews. How can this knowledge denied to nephews be accessible to
the villages, countryside, and the region at large? I who wished to share the
excitement with the Sikh passenger dreamed not merely of this family but, of
this family spreading fast into something universal.
Accomplishment of that universality was the task of the 1957 ministry.
But the Communist Party of the faraway Kerala carried the experiential bur-
den of another nation and another people. The clandestine practices of Lenin
who reached Russia through the war front in a locked bogey, the lack of trust
and faith which was part of the counter-terrorism, the military discipline, all
these were imposed on the simple and spontaneous mandate. No one can be
blamed for this. Bungling in the fields of experience is quite common, but wis-
dom that comes from a liberating awareness of mistakes can be put to advan-
tage in future. Even when a mistake is identified and accepted, the tendency
to justify the mind that conceived the mistake will pave the way for disasters.
The fact that history has rendered null the bookish understanding of revo-
lution should not make a Communist intolerant at all but inspire the person
to seek innovative forms of revolution with more ardour and passion.
Indian communism was given the first mandate in Kerala, in social condi-
tions almost totally unfamiliar to Marx and Lenin. The failure to creatively
respond to the challenges posed by the Indian situation (and reinterpret the
Marxist–Leninist theory) has led to lethargy and gradual decline of the move-
ment. The Indian mind has a natural affinity towards righteous conduct and
ethical attitudes. I say this knowing well its limitations and the history of its
blunders and dishonesty. Lenin made a statement after the 1917 revolution:
I am handing over a lighted torch to other people. This torch befitted Europe
but not us. The Indian sense of righteousness would have appreciated the
lamp of the Communist ethics better.

E.M.S.
But this did not happen. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a Gramsci, Togliatti,
Berlinguer, or Kirilov. As a human being, Namboodirippad is exceptional, his
commitment unquestionable, his mind youthful, and his knowledge invari-
ably profound. But, the preparedness to look beyond the bounds of knowl-
edge and be enthusiastic about uncertainties and scepticism was missing in
his personal make-up. No living sceptic can be spotted in Indian Communist
parties in the contemporary times. I happened to discuss with K. Damodaran
some matters in a chance meeting at the P.C. Joshi Archives of Jawaharlal
Nehru University. It was the time of emergency. Sacked from the job, passing
through tough times and terror, l was disgusted with the Soviet Union and
 Memory of a Vermillion Mark 79

CPI for endorsing the Emergency. Emotional pressures and bitter personal
experiences triggered me to blame Communism. But the virtuous scepticism
of that revolutionary persuaded me to quit my stance and come back to a
certain extent. Damodaran has left us forever. Quoting the words of a friend
who is no more with us is quite unfair.
The Joshi Archives of Jawaharlal Nehru University comes back to my
mind. Pre-emergency days. Damodaran’s room on one side, his collection of
books. In the adjacent room, a towering figure of the gone times, now an old
man, Puran Chand Joshi. Comrade Joshi was weak and exhausted with the
onslaught of brain disorder. Not many days to go. He was losing sense of
time and place, mostly speaking without making sense.

‘What do you do?’ Joshi asked me. ‘Drawing cartoons, right? Contribute to
The New Age but you’ll have to tow the party line’.

Joshi was totally disconnected. I felt sad.

‘Mohan was a sprightly fellow’, Joshi resumed, ‘I was talking to Mohan …’

What he said to Mohan Kumaramangalam long-time ago was coming back

without its space-time frame. Joshi might have drawn him to the party. Years
passed. Kumaramangalam was offered a berth in the Union ministry. Don’t
remember whether he was alive then or succumbed to injuries in the air crash
by that time. Oh! God! Revolution and revolutionary grow old and cry out
for empathy and love.
This revolution of empathy is a process of growing mutuality, sharing,
and openness. That should have happened in 1957. It seems that instead of
articulating the ideologue’s displeasure, on revisiting history, one feels like
asking whether any revolution had ever happened anywhere according to
Marxist theoretical prescriptions. The depictions by Marx have two levels,
external and internal. The latter is the level of abstract class processes. The
former is of the concrete symbols, like the working class and the dictatorship
of the proletariat. The proletariat is a flux of huge masses of people caught
in conflict with elite value systems, subject to conditioning by experiences. It
never thinks uniformly or with a single or unified mind but in its abstraction,
it has shared ethos. Marx required visual images to translate that abstraction
through language, propaganda, and persuasion. That was the proletariat and
the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Now, let us address the abstract and concrete contradictions of the October
Revolution. The transfer of power did not occur the way Marx imagined.
Soldiers fed up with battles and the landless peasants, who desired private
ownership of lands, together, through a spontaneous response, subverted the
ruling authority. There is a story that when the revolution happened in a way
so unexpected and spontaneous and the leadership found itself quite incapa-
ble of handling it, the socialist leader and ideologue Plekhanov who realized
this broke into tears. The new rulers and those who upheld that tradition had
80 O.V. Vijayan

in due course accounted for the capture of power which was actually made
possible by certain other unforeseen fundamental and prime conflicts, using
Marxian vocabularies of social change.
Marx presumed that the British State driven by capitalism would wither
away, as a leaf that runs its natural course is shed, for Socialism to emerge.
But that did not happen. Marx was right in his perception that the surplus
value of imperialism would serve to prolong the life of Capitalism. I just
want to point out that no revolution occurred in Britain because there was
the special situation that Marx pointed out. The fate of the prediction of
contemporary revolutions is also decided like this, by numerous unexpected
special, mainly contextual circumstances.

Symbolized Revolutions
Thus, no classical revolution took place in Russia. Did that happen in China?
No. Stalin who by the mindless execution of dissent depicted the change
of rule that happened beyond the notions of the science of revolution as
classical revolution was hardly enthusiastic about the struggles occurring in
China. Stalin’s representative Borodin commanded Mao Zedong to co-oper-
ate with Chiang Kai-shek till the proletariat is organized and strong enough
for revolution since the farmers in China were thought to be incapable of
revolution. Mao Zedong ignored the dictates. But that was not a revolution
of the farmer class. The widespread anti-Japanese feeling, anti-imperial atti-
tude, and change of sides by both warlords with their armies and the tribal
groups – a Chinese revolution by such summative forces, one that refuses to
be defined, like an early morning flood spread all over China.
The story of Vietnam also weakens the notions of calculated revolutions.
It was not a revolt of the working class, not at all a fight for Communism.
That primitive and pristine rising was directed first against the Asian rulers
and the violent White man. The most intense stage of the struggle was the
war the Vietnamese people fought against America. Beyond ideology and
prediction, it was a clean fight between the yellow man and the White man,
a clean conflict, conflict’s righteousness it turned out to be. The conflict was
led by politically conscious Communists. After the victory, they installed the
concrete symbols of historical narration on the abstractions of the process of
confrontation. This was what happened in Cuba also. In the case of Eastern
Europe, it was the Soviet army that liberated it.
Where has revolution occurred? At the outer level of symbols, at the outer
levels of Marxism, nowhere did it happen. But at the level of abstract human
emotions, at the level of righteousness, inside Marxism, the spirit of revo-
lution is getting intense. Why does the revolutionary turn away from such
infinite reserves of energy?
I attempt to situate the 1957 moment of the small state of Kerala in
the abstractness of revolution already mentioned. Instead of initiating a
chain of exploration and innovation, it perished after some insignificant
 Memory of a Vermillion Mark 81

confrontations. But it was reconditioned with the help of pseudo-leaders of

communalist complicity. Now, these very shortcuts are condemned as tainted
ideological practices to woo martyrdom. Philosophical martyrdom (not the
martyrdom of the body) is a pleasant experience. It helps to keep away logic
and reason and transform the reality of failure into a fantasy of success. So
both the sin and salvation are equally unreal. And what results from the ideo-
logical purity that is unreal is nothing but deceptive, strategic satisfaction.
The problem that remains is the question that was denied an answer
in 1957. The historical task of 1957 was to infuse the abstract energy of
Marxism as an open choice into the age-old traditions of India, into the
goodness of Hinduism, in the freedom of openness. As long as the return to
the 1957 task is ignored, so long, discipline and purge would work only to
provide a feeling of deceptive self-gratification.

Source
Vijayan, O.V. 2005. O.V. Vijayante Lekhanangal (Collected Essays of O.V. Vijayan).
Kottayam: D.C. Books, 439–445.
Section 2

The Emergence of a Modern

Malayalam Classic
Essays on The Legends of Khasak


84 O.V. Vijayan

Figure 4 Cover of the Hundredth edition of The Legends of Khasak. Credit: Ravee
Dee Cee
13 Laughter of Detachment
K.P. Appan (Translated from Malayalam
by K.T. Dinesh)

Our experiences are usually expressed only in the existing literary styles, con-
ventions, and genres. Or else, we prefer to choose only those themes which
befit the available literary styles and genres. Thomas Mann has referred
regretfully to writers who were within the confines of such practices. It was
not merely a lament over the decline in the adventurous explorations in lit-
erary genres, but in it lay latent the issue of the conflict between language
and the sense of vision of the writer. In fact, Thomas Mann was echoing
Nietzsche, who lent the eloquence of prophecy and revelation to his language,
in his commentaries discussing the incompatibility between one’s words and
thoughts. Nietzsche had stated many years ago that writers were able to
present only those thoughts that could be expressed in stale words, or they
happened to think only about those ideas that could be conveyed through
words that were banal. In a sense, Nietzsche’s statement of revelation along
with the regret articulated by Thomas Mann imitating Nietzsche indicates
the context of an intense desire associated with the quest for an innovative
language style and the experimentations to be carried out in the medium. It
is so because it is the writer who experiences the greatest resistance from the
medium than any other artist does. The writer is often forced to succumb to
the demands of words equipped with the predominance of predetermined
meaning. That is, the writer hardly uses the language but the language in
fact takes advantage of the writer. Language uses the writer for its survival.
It needs a writer for its survival. For it cannot live by itself in its purest form.
So, the writer turns out to be a tool in the hands of the language. During these
critical moments, language offers itself in the degenerate form of stale culture
or cliched aesthetic styles and dominates the writer. This was why Salinger
stated his uncertainties and apprehensions about words. Ionesco too for the
same reason complained that words have become hollow shells making only
mere noise. However, as writers, they were not freed from language. They
used language, knowing well that it would distort everything. Some writers
tend to like silence, fearing that they will lose the purity of their experiences
if they get caught up in the eclipsing effect of language, but they are forced
at the same time to use the language as they have no other choice. Writers in
such a complex state of mind, one can say, as stated in the first verse of the
Kenopanishad, are engaged in writing without knowing for sure who wills

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-20
86 O.V. Vijayan

them to fall into writing and who chooses the words they utter. Such writers
who realize the intensity of the inherent conflict between the distinctness of
their sense of perception and the cliched nature of the media seek to revamp
their medium of expression constantly with the help of bold imagery and
powerful narrative art that can impart a profound feel of disposition, rather
than mere ideas. In The Legends of Khasak, O.V. Vijayan tries to revamp his
medium in this way. He renounced the established ways of language when
he had to articulate a reality that moves beyond the ultimate veil of logic.
When he had to ignite a kind of emotion that arouses a sense of transcend-
ence in the reader, Vijayan sought to create a new language by a process, to
use Bhartṛhari’s symbols, that involved breaking of the phonemes that form
the words and by trying to sense the ultimate truth in words. Vijayan uses
myriad metaphors and enigmatically beautiful usages like the following: ‘the
wind, like cataplexy’, ‘death’s breast milk’, ‘the light sun of rebirths’, ‘dark-
ness felt like solace’, ‘an alley that ends like a juncture’, ‘the intense twilight
on the coffee plants’, ‘the face loosened and merged’, ‘he grew brimming in
that desolation’, ‘from that infinite space the dreams of some dense moments
oozed into his slumber’, ‘the helpless old man was tossing and turning in that
eternal space’, etc. Vijayan evokes perceptions about the murky sense of life
that transcends the meanings of the words given in the dictionary. He makes
it clear that he neither presents experiences in the existing literary convention
nor brings in a literary sensibility that can be expressed through the existing
literary approaches. It is this quality that makes The Legends of Khasak a
symbol of transformation in the Malayalam novel.
In the preface to the novel, O.V. Vijayan has made it clear that The
Legends of Khasak does not express his vision of life. Not only The Legends
of Khasak but any work of art of higher quality won’t be a statement of
the writer’s view of life. It was Thomas Hardy who once said that he had
no philosophy of life and what he did in his works was describing some-
thing akin to the panic of a child who had witnessed some sort of witchcraft.
Taking this for granted one should not conclude that Hardy did not have
any sense of life vision. As pointed out by Morgan, Hardy was standing on
a lofty cliff and observing the vast experiences he had. That it was his own
vantage point was the most important thing. In fact, this is the writer’s sense
of vision. What is meant here is that Vijayan intends to establish that there
is no life vision in his novel that can be presented through philosophic terms
or syllogistic descriptions. He wouldn’t have written a novel like this had his
sense of vision been presentable in sheer philosophic terms. Therefore, one
can very well say that there is no intellectual arrogance behind the making of
this novel that warrants it to be an embodiment of life vision. What is avail-
able here is a world of sensitivity in which the author’s mind accepts a kind
of creative indiscretion or a kind of jocular epiphanic vision taking place at a
moment sans bliss. Then he begins to write, as if flowing in the holy streams
of stoicism, about these things that disenchanted him. The mindset behind
the creation of The Legends of Khasak was such a one.
 Laughter of Detachment 87

However, as in any worthy work of art, there is an abundant presence

of the writer’s sense of epiphanic awareness of reality in The Legends of
Khasak. But it remains as an intriguing riddle in the divine houses of the
absurd, without assuming a logical form. The word ‘surd’ in ‘absurd’ shows
this nature of life that does not yield to logic. William Barrett points out that
there is such a ‘surd’ in life that argumentative description based on logic
cannot represent at all. Ancient mathematicians described this ‘surd’ as a
quantity that a rational number is incapable of representing. Such a set of
overriding issues of existence is the main factor that governs the conscious-
ness of the novel, The Legends of Khasak. The terrain called Khasak and the
beauty of the superstitions the villagers had about understanding the natural
phenomena through a kind of collective delusions, and the characters like
Appu-kili, Mollaka, Naizamali, Madhavan Nair, Abida, and Kunhamina
do not create an atmosphere of any historical or sociological point of view,
rather they appear as victims who are alienated and bound by illusion and
create an atmosphere of maddened knowledge that persuades us to search
for answers in vain. The words like ‘mirage’ and ‘illusion’ repeatedly used
in the novel and the mood they evoke beautifully articulate the absurdity of
everything and make them even more mysterious.
Through the creation of the character of Ravi, the novelist laughs at this
inscrutable anguish of life. But this is not a laugh of bliss; this is the laughter
of detachment, an anhedonic (‘the inability to experience pleasure in nor-
mally pleasurable acts’) laughter at the tragic predicament of human life.
Here the writer becomes a visionary jester. That is why the language in this
novel abounds in playful words that are poignant with that predicament.
The all-pervasive anhedonic laughter in The Legends of Khasak comes out
in its brutal beauty in the final scene of the novel. I have in mind the scene
where Ravi dies of snakebite. Here it appears that Ravi willingly submits to
death. Ravi offers himself to the snake with a curiosity that is filled with deep
detachment. The narrative brilliance the writer shows here becomes reminis-
cent of a deadly puppet show. Here we see the laughter of a yogi informing
the secret interiors of a strange consciousness born of perception which gets
further transformed into a grotesque vision of the ludicrous. The novelist
who writes that Ravi lay down and smiled as he faced the enormous expe-
rience of death by snakebite becomes a yogi with a demonic smile, break-
ing the familiar mould of Malayalam literature. The puppetry of this deadly
horror, which Vijayan invests with a two-dimensional quality, subdues the
reader’s consciousness with its powerful touch of irresistible appeal.
Vijayan’s boundless creative spirit does not limit itself to constituting a
congruity of diverse emotions by juxtaposing sorrow and grief. It travels in
other directions seeking the shores of alien or unsettling human emotions.
In a study of Lawrence Durrell, G.S. Fraser describes him as a ‘lyrical come-
dian’ as his novel evidences a curious mix of both intense sensuality as well
as yogic sensibility. A similar quality in The Legends of Khasak prompts us
to apply Fraser’s observations on Alexandria Quartet as a narrative tour de
88 O.V. Vijayan

force to Vijayan’s novel. Vijayan demonstrates the same sensibility in his

narrative art. Deep within his perceptive consciousness, Vijayan is a mystic
like Durrell. Like Durrell, Vijayan tries to create beauty from the toxic rush
of sensuality. In Ravi’s disposition, we see the fusion of these twin sensi-
bilities that are dichotomous in nature. At the same time, Ravi’s actions are
also proof of this: in the world of attachments, he lives without desires; he
shows the same passion towards a prostitute in Khasak and the attractive
inmate of the ashram. As the novelist says, along with the passage of time,
the love and sins of Khasak get progressively erased over the years. All this
brings out the peculiar vision of the writer where sensuality merges with
yogic temperament.
This nature of his vision is not confined to the character in action but is
seen to permeate the language and the symbols in the novel. Psychologists
have pointed out that sharp objects are universal symbols of the male geni-
tal organ. He mentions the sword lying on the lap of Kuttadan the priest.
He views the drops of menstrual blood that fall on the ground as crimson
vermilion marks (regardless of the question of good or evil), describes how
the Goddess associated with the curse of smallpox was an object of lust for
the natives of Khasak, compares the pus of the boils to the chrysanthemum
blossoms, and imagines the epidemic of smallpox to be a blissful state of
coitus. Along with all these, Vijayan uses Indian images which suggest mys-
tical concerns as in ‘the ties of worldly desires’, ‘the banyan leaf’, and ‘the
ultimate truth invoked by life’s karma’. These indicate a complex sensibil-
ity where yogic delight and intense sensuality are fused. Ravi’s sexual rela-
tion with Swamini Nivedita in the ashram, the mix-up of their clothes, with
Ravi travelling forth in saffron robes, all this shows a visionary sensibility
where spirituality and sensuality are fused. The naming of the ‘Swamini’ of
Bodhananda Swami’s Ashram as Nivedita, the beloved disciple of Swami
Vivekananda may appear disturbing, but behind all this is the black humour
of a prophet born of anguish. We have noted how the anhedonic laughter
mentioned earlier becomes a puppetry of deadly terror. Here it grows to the
heights of violence and evolves into the laughter of Kali, the incarnation of
sin. Thus Vijayan’s desire to amalgamate humour and grief and thereby find
parallels between sensuous pleasures and mystical states of being points to
his emotional ambivalence. It is this emotional ambivalence that gives the
capability to the writer to realize the profound enigma called life.
In fact this vision, where the comic and the tragic dissolve into each
other, befits our times of contradictions and antithetical emotions. When
man becomes a source of disorder in the setting of our times, Ravi assumes
relevance as a symbol of this vision. His life bears testimony to this truth.
Live as if this is not life at all. Find pleasure in breaking social norms, even
as you accept them. Renounce everything as if it was no great renunciation.
Experience everything as an outsider and analyse them from outside. Isn’t
this what Ravi actually does? To arrive at such a state of mind certainly
means to cultivate the laughter of detachment. This laughter of Vijayan,
 Laughter of Detachment 89

which is full of irony and compassion, is different from the hollow laughter
born out of mere bliss. It is this kind of anhedonic laughter, which contains a
yogic solemnity, that Beckett describes in his novel Watt as ‘the laughter that
pokes fun at the ordinary laughter’.
In the novel that communicates labyrinths of mystery with the readers,
Ravi’s sense of guilt becomes a critical issue. Though Vijayan epigrammati-
cally scripts only a few lively lines about sin, the sense of guilt portrayed in
this novel has become a profound malaise. The sense of sexual sin arising
from his incestuous relationship is one of the main reasons for Ravi’s unex-
plained predicament. This reality is illustrated not only by the image of his
step-mother with sweaty cheeks smeared with mascara and his incestuous
relationship with her but by the symbolic metaphors of travel the novelist
has repeatedly used throughout the novel. Words like ‘wayfarer’, ‘traveller’,
‘sarai’, and the phrase that brings in the metaphor of ‘one who bears the load
of futility and anchors the ship on an unknown planet’ open up before us a
wide world of the complex and multiple sensibilities related to travel. In the
novel, Ravi is seen bidding farewell several times. Ravi’s life itself is a jour-
ney. Ravi, lying dead of a snakebite, is waiting for the bus, thus suggesting
that even in death Ravi is setting out on a trip. The symbolic nature of the
journey, which is thus repeated like a religious ritual, reveals two hidden lay-
ers of meaning upon closer examination. In a sense, this journey is a symbolic
expression of Ravi’s inner consciousness searching for his lost mother, whose
overwhelming presence he feels in his childhood memories. Similarly, as has
been pointed out by some Western critics, the escapades one embarks on
signify one’s fear of falling into an incestuous relationship. These two secret
expressions about the symbolic nature of the journey help us to read Ravi’s
mental state in all its depths. However, it must be said that the second version
is more in line with the obvious reality of Ravi’s sense of sexual sin. Thus the
agonies out of the sense of sexual guilt are not always hidden in symbols as
an inner secret of the character. In the contexts of emotional crisis, the very
word ‘guilt’ is mentioned openly, and it overwhelms Ravi’s consciousness.
In the psalms of sin one comes across in sentences like, ‘that was the stain of
the sinner’, ‘he was engrossed in sin for a fraction of a second’, and in Ravi’s
intense yearning to hold on to the memory of the step-mother’s silky hair
on her upper lip and her nude body, in a state of delirium, the word ‘guilt’
resounds as the surreptitious voice of his unconscious. The observation of the
Malayalam critic V. Rajakrishnan that Vijayan has used the word, ‘know’ in
‘That’s where I knew my step-mother’ in the biblical sense, echoing the fall of
Adam, frames Ravi’s fall and its agony, graphically before our eyes.
But I am of the view that it is not justifiable to confine this sense of guilt
within the bounds of sexual experience alone, as done by V. Rajakrishnan
and Asha Menon. Such conclusions only serve to link the transcendental and
philosophical anguish in The Legends of Khasak with mere materialistic grief
and to prompt the reader to the perilous conclusion that Ravi is afflicted only
by the stigma of sexual guilt. The sense of guilt seen in The Legends of the
90 O.V. Vijayan

Khasak is not something that happens because of an action. This originates

from the existence in the world, in the course of life bound by birth and
death. The cardinal reason for Ravi’s predicament is his metaphysical sin in
being born. It will be good to remember in this context what Schopenhauer
often expressed with much exuberance, that man’s greatest sin is to be born.
Ravi’s sense of sexual sin is only a cause that serves to intensify this meta-
physical sense of guilt. In fact, the sense of sexual guilt does not develop into
fear. Let me emphasize that in the depths of that sense of guilt what lies latent
is the toxic tranquillity and the forbidden pleasure of fall in making love to
his step-mother. There is even an unmanifest desire in Ravi’s attitude in find-
ing a kind of dubious satisfaction in being persecuted by the benevolence
of sin. Taking cues from Nietzsche, one can very well say Ravi’s attitude
has reached a state of aloofness through decadence, self-denial, and trans-
gression. In Ravi’s question to Padma, ‘Has your aunt touched you while
swimming in the river?’, this laughter of detachment unfolds its black petals
gracefully.
So Ravi’s predicament is not primarily a product of Ravi’s sense of sexual
guilt. It is a part of the awareness that committing sin is an ordinary affair of
life. This observation has been highlighted again in the novel by the reference
to the epidemic of smallpox and by the recurring references to the memoirs
about the karmic wheel of life, in prophetic terms. Smallpox does not figure
in the novel as an epidemic threatening public health. It has a meaning that
cuts across births. According to the Indian concept, smallpox is not just a
disease, but a disease of sin. The fact that smallpox, a disease associated with
sin, affects not only Ravi but the entire populace of Khasak clearly presents
sin as an integral practice of human life. In the same way, the meaning of the
uneasy voices heard in this novel about karmic ties is also related to the deep
deliberations on sin as an attribute of ordinary life. In Indian parlance, the
human body is prone to sin. Indian thought describes the human body, which
is destined to be reborn to experience the results of karma in other births,
as the body of sin. This awareness of the novelist flows through the pages of
the novel. Expressions suggestive of karmic ties like, ‘Ravi also remembered
his karmic ties’, ‘Which string of karmic ties has brought you to this path?’,
and ‘The ephemeral acquaintance out of karmic ties’ bring in the vision of
life in the novel. The word pictures thus created by Vijayan garner the shad-
ows of previous births. This brings home the fact that committing sin is the
perennial nature of human life and to be born in this world is the greatest
sin humans commit. Vijayan tries to laugh a mirthless laugh at this general
unhappiness brought in by this attitude.
An analysis of the images and symbols used in this novel exemplifies this
ultimate truth. Ravi’s subconscious desire to escape from the guilt of human
life finds expression in the images of return to his mother’s womb. Erich
Fromm, while explaining the human predicament of not being ever free from
conflicting attitudes, points to this desire of the human mind. Erich Fromm
says that as humans have an inherent desire to escape from mother’s womb,
 Laughter of Detachment 91

there also exists a strong desire to return to the safety of mother’s womb
from the fearful insecurity of life. Ravi’s desperate desire to return to his
mother’s womb as a safe home is poignantly presented in expressions like,
‘Sheikh’s bones rested in the womb of the rock’, ‘resting in the mercy of the
womb’, and ‘He longed to curl up with her in the womb’. Such telling images
are totally unconventional in Malayalam literature. The relevance of the
womb images in this novel does not remain confined to such images alone.
Water has been described as a universal symbol of the womb, and dream-
ing of water represents a subconscious instinct to return to the womb. The
water images that appear in this writer’s dream-like works of art express the
instinct of the subconscious mind as well. The longing to lie deep in water,
the symbol of womb, expressed by Ravi depicts this attitude with all its kin-
ship. Metaphorical expressions like, ‘Ravi lay immersed in water up to his
neck’, ‘He lay submerged in water for a long time’, and ‘He didn’t feel like
getting out of the lukewarm water in the ditch’ bring out Ravi’s hidden desire
to go back to the womb and be safe there. This conclusion brings us back
to the issues of sin and guilt. It is the painful conviction that man’s greatest
sin is being born that prompts Ravi to escape from this sin by returning to
the womb. This irremediable sinful nature of human life does not turn into a
sense of terror in Ravi, nor does it evolve into dark blooms of melancholy. It
transforms itself into a sense of the comic, without the bliss of laughter. Ravi
tries to look at this sinful nature of life as if ‘nothing is funnier than unhap-
piness’, as one of Beckett’s characters puts it in Endgame.
Time is another important issue in The Legends of Khasak. Time exists
here as a perpetual presence in its vision and in its mode of expression. The
narrative style followed in the novel reminds us of the orbiting of the Earth
as the narration revolves by making past memories intermittently vivid
and at times by drifting itself away to the future. I am reminded here of
Schopenhauer’s analogy between time and a rotating globe. According to
him, the shape of life and the human will are in the present. This present
is like a tangent on the surface of the globe of time. The hidden half of this
rotating globe is the past and the half that unfolds is the future. Just as the
tangent to the surface of the sphere does not rotate, the present does not
move. But everything is revolving through the tangent of the present. There
is an ostensible presence of the present time in The Legends of Khasak. The
past gets unfolded in the present. Everything revolves through the present
and disappears. We see the stories of Molakka, Naizamali, Abida, and the
memories about father and step-mother intermittently swirling and unravel-
ling themselves as tales of the past. And along with these, we become aware
of the evolution of time through multifarious scenes of life. The concept of ‘a
slowly revolving mind’ seen in the very first chapter is a brilliant indicator to
the fact that time is treated as a revolving globe in this work of art.
The relevance of time in this work of art does not end with these reflec-
tions. The fear of time in Vijayan’s sense of vision is a subject that needs to be
examined. As one of Hermann Hesse’s characters says, time is an instrument
92 O.V. Vijayan

to make the world complex and to brutally torment humans. Vijayan’s sense
has also been filled with this fear of time and it is evidenced by fear-inducing
expressions such as ‘the journey of the immovable through time’, ‘infinitely
avaricious time’, and ‘blind time screamed outside like dark bluish winds’.
The morphological construct of these expressions and the dense tone of some
of these words make it convey the feeling that time is something heavy that
falls on the human mind as a burden of fear. But despite this fear, the novel-
ist does not forget to laugh like a jester. He writes, ‘Ravi broke the journey
of the immovable through time by sweeping away the dust on them with a
broom’. Though the novelist is distressed about falling into the abyss of the
fear of time, he accepts it as a painful reality and tries to jump out of it with
a laughter of detachment.
The ambience, the characters, the symbols, the images, and the treatment
of time in The Legends of Khasak all lie dissolved in this laughter of detach-
ment. The Legends of Khasak will remain beyond the reach of a reader who
cannot accept this laughter, the elixir of Vijayan’s philosophy of life.

Source
Appan, K.P. 2006. “Niranandathinte Chiri”, O.V. Vijayan: Ormappustakam, Ed.
P.K. Rajasekharan, Kottayam: D.C. Books, 103–112.
14 The Music of Khasak
Asha Menon (Translated from Malayalam
by K. Ramachandran)

A Sublime Sense of Futility

Let us return to the story of Ravi who leaves his studies and goes away
from the hostel on the day before the examination. He is not prepared to go
to Princeton and wanders like an aimless refugee. Having understood that
no laboratory can reveal the secrets of life, he shouldn’t have felt any sense
of loss. (Another modernist Malayalam writer Kakkanadan has a charac-
ter called Ramachandran, who returns from Germany after abandoning his
plans to do research in comparative philosophy.) If Ravi had gone to the
U.S., the same thing would have happened. It is in a train compartment that
this escape begins. The word `escape’ is liable to misinterpretations. Really,
it is not escapism, born of cowardice. It is a quest undertaken by a fearless
man who disregards life’s achievements as valuable. His quest is implicit in
this escape. What does the time of dusk when Ravi sets out on his journey
signify? The dusk is the time of the sub-conscious; it belongs neither to the
conscious nor to the unconscious. The quest for physical knowledge in Ravi’s
conscious mind and the confused memories in his unconscious mind disap-
pear. He is led by the primeval human desire to know what is lying deep
within his sub-conscious mind. In the excitement of desire, Ravi has been
hurrying along through various spatial expanses for years. The colours of
dust have changed … smells have changed … the directions of sun-rise and
sunsets have changed … For how long? Where is he destined to? For what?
Not to know why …
Here I am reminded of a scene from Somerset Maugham’s novel, The
Razor’s Edge mentioned earlier. Before he reached the Himalayan valleys,
Larry used to sit in the library for hours together with a sense of resignation.
Larry’s friends who knew this used to ask him with concern: ‘Don’t you have
ambitions (desires) in life?’ He would reply, ‘Oh, let me just loaf around’.
Larry’s answer does not suggest that he was a traveller pursuing truth.
Remember Ravi’s faltering words here: ‘Not to know why …’. Discarding
everything in a sublime sense of futility, setting out on the path of an ardent
seeker, what Ravi understood through his wanderings all these years: beyond
those meanings, beyond those symbols, a pain spreads and envelopes eve-
rything. Everything settles in its mist. It is the impurity of the sinner; the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-21
94 O.V. Vijayan

isolation of the sojourner; the suffering heart of an orphan; the sense of

futility that afflicts one who sought knowledge. The frenzied head intensely
searched for answers. The otherworldly shadow of that grief grips us for
some time. It is only from this that real wisdom will emerge. The following
passage is from Khasak:

‘This little one’, Madhavan Nair said, ‘for him it is always the sunset. And he
has no nest to reach’.
‘Who reaches?’
‘True, Maash. No one really does’.
The cretin stood in the twilight of births and deaths. He stood alone. The last
flight of parrots receded over the horizon (Vijayan 1999, 72).

When Ravi says that in the twilight, when the bows of parrots recede over
the horizon, he becomes a prophet without wearing the mantle of a prophet.

‘… Ravi, this is me, Padma’.

It is like some voice from the crevices of the past. The cold sand on Marina
beach and the darting birds crowd into Ravi’s mind. The water snakes of
memory were surging up. After ten days, while resting in the cold breeze of
the lake, was Ravi shocked to hear Padma’s question?

‘Ravi, who are you trying to run away from?’

I know; I don’t know. I know from whom. From his own disquiet. But,
towards whom? Ravi stood looking into that essence. As he watched, the
eyes closed. Cheeks turned red. Face relaxed and dissolved. Time ebbed like
a flood. The lake of the mind filled.
Still, champak bloomed in the valley of sunset. The colour of dusk faded
due to dampness. The sky descended densely on the palm trees. Somewhere
beyond that, the monsoon grew big. On the day before returning from
Khasak, saying that he would go alone just as he had come alone, he dis-
couraged Madhavan Nair from giving him a farewell. Perhaps while lying
awake in the seedling shed that night, a little girl’s feeble talk should have
reverberated in Ravi’s heart as a distant spring festival call echoing from the
mountain glades. When we part, knowing that we will never meet again, our
tender hearts turn weaker again. Matured under the halo of Ali, with her
scarf and anklets, Kunhamina asked him again: won’t you come again?
One journeys again, leaving the nest of rebirth. To court death from the
snake among the loosened lumps of earth in Koomankav? Just like the tale
Ravi narrated to Appu-Kili, this tale too ends without meaning, without any
transformation. Futile and tragic. Still, after a few moments, when the initial
shock is gone and the balance of mind is regained, we are likely to ask our-
selves whether those lamentations are worth any meaning? Like Nachiketa
 The Music of Khasak 95

in Kathopanishad, who went in search of the secret of death, leaving behind

royal splendour or like Mitya (Dmitri Fyodorovich) in Brothers Karamazov
– what they want is not material wealth, but answers to their questions.
Can normal standards be valid in the case of Ravi who boldly set out in
search of truth behind the apparent reality? What could have Ravi meant,
like a dispassionate soul-searcher, when he turned away from the high path
of earthly glory opened up by Padma? Vijayan did not say that Ravi uttered
the words of wisdom, ‘I am it’ (In Kathopanishad, the words, ‘So … ham’ are
used to convey this). Vijayan says, Ravi laughed. What was in that laughter?
Helplessness? Sorrow of successive births? Or, is it the madness of hopeless
waiting on the beach in the twilight? Can it be the bliss of identifying himself
with the pure infinitude, chanting the mantra of liberation? If it is so, it was
only a meaningful culmination of a sacred sacrifice that had started long ago.
Can it be that this playful devotee has been descending from the barrenness
of falsehood into the fertility of truth?

Realization of Sin
If we find it difficult to accept, it is natural, because, we have been witnessing
only the benign side of Ravi’s personality so far. We have to see the deeper
undercurrents that inspired the metaphysical desire. While visiting the sacred
groves on Sundays, Ravi knows one asks nothing of those sad deities. It is not
to sympathize with Kuttadan the priest that one goes there. Then why? The
question brought Ravi to the presence of an infinity as answer. Like an end-
less palm forest, like a dusk without sunrise or sunset, he was bound to the
essence of the world which underlines everything. It was in search of this that
the seeker has traversed all this distance. From where? That ancient sin came
to light again; not the one involving himself and his stepmother. It sounded
like a divine oracle. Dusk, eager in front of it, called up the gods present
everywhere. Baudelaire had observed that realization of sin rejuvenates the
spirit. There are many sensuous moments in Ravi’s past: from the hammock,
he watches the yellow grassland; in the Ashram he observes the voluptuous,
fair-looking, women inmates; his encounters in the minarets of Khasak. He
fulfils himself variously on all these occasions. It is no wonder the boy who
sat alone with his toys, watching the shells of ethereal fruits falling from the
sky, grew into an introvert. Similarly, the sinful union with the stepmother
was inevitable. Ravi felt no sense of guilt about it. He says that it is to free
himself and his father from that memory that he does not visit that house.
The sense of guilt for having betrayed a loving father is what haunts Ravi
than the bitter memory of an illicit relationship. The erotic impulse leads to
an effacement of the self. This is what we need to explore.

Death is Natural to the Living

Freud had noted that there is an underlying desire in every creature to return
to the peaceful lifelessness of an unfeeling dead body. Schopenhauer speaks
96 O.V. Vijayan

of the masochist tendency which acts against sadism. Baudelaire remarks

that it is the ability to destroy oneself that makes man different from other
creatures. Perhaps, Kalidasa, the great Sanskrit poet, had said this long ago:
‘Death is natural to living beings; life is the aberration, sages say’. Ravi’s
aside when waiting for the wave on the last beach elucidates this: ‘Oh God!
Give me the bliss of ignorance. Enough if I could sleep. Lean my head from
one birth to another. Withdraw into the silence, like forest, shadow, soil,
or sky’. Ravi who takes Baudelaire and Rilke along with him in his jour-
neys should have remembered what Baudelaire mentioned about the eternal
silence dancing on the mountain ranges and the lake.
The strange relationship between eroticism and death has been the sub-
ject of many studies. Yet even today, psychologists have not fully grasped
the interconnection between them. Ravi receives the serpent’s bite again and
again with a great sense of joy. In the poem, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ by Browning,
the lover strangles Porphyria with her flowing hair and experiences perfect
happiness in the act. Cleopatra, the masochist lover, puts her hand into a
basket of snakes.
In the mind of Ravi waiting for a bus to nowhere in the darkness of the
monsoon, a vortex of emotions should have arisen. It is not that he has no
place to go. He could have gone to the Ashram of Bodhanand, or to Princeton
with Padma or to his home. But they will not resolve anything. They are
mirages that he had discarded long ago. There is only one thing that is to be
achieved in life; if that cannot be achieved through living, he would rather
try death. With the complex feelings of one who had always sought pleasures
of the body, Ravi takes the path of self-effacement. For Ravi, it should have
come naturally, without any further thought on it. ‘Come, Death. Let me
anchor my life to you. Let me run fast to that mystery, for the sake of a new
sensation’. Perhaps he should have thought of Baudelaire as he lies with the
eternal touch of water, with raindrops enveloping him, merging into the vast
expanse of the sky. It is there that Khasak comes to an end.

A New Path
How is Vijayan’s style different from that of other novelists? The craftsmanship
of a novel adds to its narrative structure when the mental states of characters
are projected onto nature. We can cite a passage from M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s
novel, Manju (Snow): ‘The lamp on the high metal post in the courtyard of
the boarding house can be seen dimly like a weeping star, as we see it through
the foliage, while turning towards the climb from the west side’. We have been
familiar with the weeping star seen through foliage and the dimly burning
lamp; but here, when they reflect the solitary sadness of Vimala, separated from
her husband, they acquire significance. But, most often, this kind of projection
is not easy; even if it is, it may not be relevant. It is not easy to deploy nature
to signify human situation. When you use clichés and stereotypical words, the
 The Music of Khasak 97

lyrical quality of the novelistic prose is lost. This is a crisis, which can be over-
come only by discovering new images. In Vijayan, there is a profusion of new
images: the vermillion mark of the dusk, the palm trees erupting into creative
expression as they bloom, the prosody of the memory, the chant of the rain,
the bow-strings of the parrots in their flight, the intoxication of oblivion, the
dreams of density, the post-coital fatigue of the snow, etc. All these incite our
emotions through the radiance of the language. Aurobindo Ghosh has observed
that great poetic idiom sounds like mantra (magical words).
Why is the emotionally charged scene of Kunjamina’s farewell depicted
this way in Khasak? A parallel scene from M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s Manju
comes to mind. That snowy morning in which the Sardarji who said that
‘death is a clown with no sense of the stage’ is bidding farewell to Vimala.
When Vimala says they will meet again, he responds ‘I am not sure. For the
cancer of the lung, one year is the limit … these four months have been a
bonus to me’. His detachment is noticeable. M.T. deliberately desists from
using images here as words or images will be superfluous in that context.
Only a creative artist who is in total harmony with his creation can achieve
this sense of propriety. In Khasak, this harmony is present in its meditative
essence. Therefore, we are sorry for those who accuse Vijayan of plagiarizing
the language of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Al Kapp’s cartoon
series or Vyankatesh Magdulkar’s Bangarwadi, and so on. These critics fail
to understand that it is not in elaborate and superficial descriptions, but in the
minute and meticulous rendering of the raga, that art makes its presence felt.
It is the rhythm stored in a Nanthuni, a folk string instrument. Vijayan has
embedded his vision with marvellous artistic acumen, within the portraiture
of the primitive, in his narrative. Such is the secret of the music of Khasak.
Nowhere has Vijayan attempted to make a butterfly lift a heavy stone. Vijayan
has not put on Ravi’s lips sermons or other profound statements, because he
has a clear sense of the limitations of his canvas. Because of this restraint, the
content of philosophy in the novel is not felt as a drag. It is not like the pollen
sticking on the butterfly, but something natural like the inner fragrance of the
flower bud yet to blossom. A real work of art invokes a presence.
Ravi’s search is like that of the musk deer wandering in the forest in search
of the source of the scent that is emanating from itself. After all his search,
what does Ravi find out in the end? In the search for truth, the path one
discovers oneself with great struggle is more desirable than the paths cleared
by others. Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha or Maugham’s Larry understands the
presence of an essence that is invisible to the external eyes – a being that does
not yield to the analysis by rational, objective means. When Kafka spoke of
the ‘inaccessibility of divinity’, he must have meant it on a physical level.
The ultimate truth – let us believe that there’s such a thing – can only be a
subjective experience, not an objective reality. Sandeep, a character in Swaraj
Bandyopadhyay’s Gopisamvad, understands from Gopi that there is a dif-
ference between God being a weakness and God becoming an experience.
98 O.V. Vijayan

(Sandeep was an admirer of Sartre). Is that what the meditative mantra-like

music of Khasak trying to awaken in us?

Source
Excerpts from: Menon, Asha. 1994. ‘Music of Khasak’, from Khasak Patanangal
(Studies on Khasak). Edited by Karthikeyan, K.G., and M. Krishnan Namboothiri.
Kottayam: D.C. Books, 64–72.
15 The Paternal Clock
P.K. Rajasekharan (Translated from
Malayalam by Arunlal Mokeri)

The memory of the father is an intimidating scream that echoes inside every
human being. The father figure exists as one of the hallmarks of culture and
genealogy in human consciousness. In the cultural activity of writing, the
father figure appears again and again like a tormenting clock. In writing, the
father is more a cultural symbol than a personal truth. In the consciousness
of the society and the individual, the eternal presence and trace of the father
figure keeps repeating itself. In bitter and mild forms, in the mould of hatred
and kindness, the father figure is stamped in every mind. All through the his-
tory of culture, one could see that the themes of one’s feud with the father
and the indebtedness towards the father figure have been very prominent.
The love and despair towards the father figure are represented at various
levels. At the spiritual level, it rises to touch the relationship with God. In the
factuality of material levels, it is enmeshed in the problems of parting, guilt,
and power. This experience of the father which involves a quest and worship,
tinged with compassion, hatred, and desire receives its best expression in the
intimate engagements between the father and the son. The organic touch of
this complementary relation permeates all genetic streams that start from the
first savage who offered a sacrifice to the unknown creator. It is repeated in
the lives of mythical characters like Shunashepa, Upamanyu, and Puru; in
Jesus’s cry for his Father; in the journey of Telemachus; in the travails of the
Karamazovs; and the chisel that Perumthachan’s son held in his hand. The
relation of the father and the son, in all these instances, becomes a philo-
sophical medium to represent the deeper complications and conflicts of life.
The father–son binary is a fundamental issue in O.V. Vijayan’s stories.
The relation of the father and the son enters his narratives as a primary prob-
lem whether it is in The Legends of Khasak where he elevated the hesitations
and grief of a son who fled from his father into an extreme philosophical
dimension, or in The Way of the Prophet where the story ends in the experi-
ence of a person amused by the secret messages regarding childbirth. It is the
narrative of paternity that informs Khasak which gets elaborated in the lat-
ter works. The pervasive figure of his father that haunts Ravi in connection
with his sense of sin and guilt expands itself into the experiential worlds of
the binaries of the master–disciple, the bureaucrat–citizen, human–God, and
prophet–God.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-22
100 O.V. Vijayan

The relation between the father and the son is one of the basic formu-
lae of Vijayan’s vision. This binary imagination that begins in the guilt and
grief of the son who hurts the father later develops into relations that resem-
ble father–son relationships. The subject of fatherhood in Vijayan is not
restricted to only heroes. The philosophical issues ingrained in the father–son
relationship and the issues of the hurtful father and son are both analysed in
Vijayan’s works. The Legends of Khasak has a hurt and hunted father; The
Saga of Dharmapuri has a disciplinarian father; Gurusagaram (The Infinity
of Grace) and The Way of the Prophet have troubled and wise fathers; and
Madhuram Gayathi has the Godly father. Ravi, Parasaran, Kunjunni, and
Narayanan return to the complexities of their experiential cosmos. These
looped journeys from the father to the master and to God are all in essence
journeys towards the father. At this stage, the symbol of father deviates from
a plane of subjective truth to that of a cultural element.
Khasak is a theatre of troubled fatherhood. The hunted fathers and lonely
sons spend their cycles of season in Khasak. Most men in Khasak have a trace
of sadness born out of a troubled relationship with their fathers. Ravi reaches
this place with the complex mind of a child rife with paternal and mater-
nal expressions. Nizam Ali hunts Mollakka in the marshes of Khasak with
his stubbornness and youth. With his belligerence, Madhavan Nair hunts
his uncle Thevarath Sivaraman Nair. Kuppu-Acchan has sex with Narayani
Amma and thus hunts Sivaraman Nair, the feudal lord. The school inspector,
Mungankozhi, Kuttadan Poosari, and Thangalu Pakkeeri are all legendary
father figures in Khasak alongside the supernatural horse-rider Sayed Mian
Sheikh, who fill the ancient atmosphere of Khasak. Certain irrational fears
pervade their lives. Each of these traumatized fathers tries to forget the bit-
terness their lives incur by losing themselves in cycles of deep and mysterious
reflections.
Ravi reached Khasak because he wanted to escape from the gloom of
paternal care. His flight from life itself ends in Khasak where he enters a dif-
ferent realm of duty; from the mould of a sceptic student to that of a teacher.
This is not running away from life, but a re-entry to it.
Vijayan has clarified that the incestuous affair with his stepmother is
only an incidental cause of Ravi’s flight. Many a reading of The Legends of
Khasak have fallen into the trap of this plot and have generated dangerous
conclusions regarding the narrative. Many critics connected this with other
hints in the novel regarding incest and sin and concluded that this is the
central issue in The Legends of Khasak. Those who marked this novel as
a narrative that revolved around sin overlooked its multi-centred structure
and uniquely polyphonic narrative. This is a criminal negligence and sin in
the history of Malayalam literary criticism. The Legends of Khasak does not
progress through a linear plot development. This work has a narrative struc-
ture that brings together space-time and life through a magical configuration
of experiences. This narrative form with its multi-centredness is an innate
resistance mechanism in the art of that novel.
 The Paternal Clock 101

Ravi’s personality is not a unicentric one. His is a mind fractured deeply

with the conflicts and hesitations of dualities. The lonely boyhood that he
spent wondering about the miracles of the material world and the youth
where scientific doubts regarding the material universe crowded inside him
are both responsible for this fractured state. This mental state is also founded
on his sense of loss of father that he experienced with father’s second mar-
riage and the unsatisfied oedipal desire towards his deceased mother. The
relationship that he had with the stepmother completed the impending wreck
of his mind torn between binaries. The blanketing care of the father who
knew nothing of these is what finally compels him to flee. He wanted to dis-
tance himself from the pain of paternal care.
In the thirteenth chapter of Khasakkinte Ithihasam, titled ‘Achchan’
(Father), these facts can be found severally scattered. Ravi sees father in the
figure of the aged inspector who visits to inspect the working of the one-
teacher school. Vijayan uses the chapter to narrate the life-long struggle that
Ravi had to undergo. During his hostel days, away from home, Ravi writes
a dissertation on how Upanishads meet astrophysics. This fascinates an
American Professor. Vijayan writes:

They sat down and talked. Mysterious space. The Ganges of Time.
The Sadness of Mystery. Ravi’s story turned to his childhood. In the
afternoon Sun, immortal gods quenched their thirst in the azure sky.
The husks of Kalpaka vriksha kept falling down. The boy who sat
alone in front of the toys felt like counting the husks. (Vijayan, 2001,
p. 86)

This context illustrates not just Ravi’s introvert nature, but his sense of the
mother’s loss. The absence of a father is also suggested here. In the struc-
turing of the society, a father needs to execute many duties: that of a Guru
is one of those. As civilizations developed and became more complex, the
father lost the place of a guru. A new person evolved to execute that duty.
This creates an absent father in the consciousness of a person. The traces of
the absent father flock towards the Guru. At the same time, in the conscious-
ness of the individual, the invisible father will be looming large. As Ravi is
in the hostel, absorbed in the complex world of academics, his life experi-
ences the absence of his father. Father was always Ravi’s Guru. He often
remembers how father took him for evening walks among coffee bushes,
holding his hand and teaching him condensed lessons of life. It is in one of
these walks that Ravi learns of the weaver bird that puts leaves together to
make a nest. This teaching–learning and exchange of knowledge with the
father is repeated in Gurusagaram and Pravachakante Vazhi. Later, when he
completely immerses himself in the hostel in his dissertation on astrophysics
and Upanishads, he had already lost his father. This disconnection happens
one day before the examination starts. Ravi quotes the letter that father sends
him before the tragedy happens.
102 O.V. Vijayan

l am not seriously unwell, Son. I feel nausea, and dizziness. But there’s
nothing to fear. However, these anxieties – I don’t know why I am
plagued by anxieties. I am not unhappy because of this bed-ridden state
that I’ll not escape from. All sunsets make me sad. I drown in the splen-
dour of that sadness … Son, if you were to see me now, you wouldn’t
recognize me. Why am I writing all this to you? Do not let this affect
your focus on studies. Your father is doing well. I am glad that your
professor is pleased with you. It is good if you can go to Princeton to
research in Astrophysics. You’ll be in Princeton for another four to five
years, right? Sitting in this Sunset l’m also gazing at those stars. I always
come to the veranda to watch the sunset. Your step-mother brings me
here, on my wheelchair. Do you remember, I had told you many stories
sitting in this veranda? Write the exams well. Right after your exam
is done, dear son, you should come home. You will be with me for a
month a two, right? That’ll be enough.
Hope your friend Padma is doing well
Wish you the best, Son
(pp. 87–8)

Ravi is running away from the gloom born of this affection. He leaves behind
the evening walks on the mud road in the company of his father and the
weaver bird’s nest sewn out of leaves. His flight is not provoked by an imme-
diate experience. It is an extension of the experiences from his infancy. There
are two fields that weaken or reject the father–son relation: affective contacts
and objective relations. Infant’s relation with his mother exists outside this
realm. Eric H. Erikson calls this vital relation that the infant shares with
its mother, basic trust. In this relation, the infant experiences the security
and harmony of emotional experiences of the conscious and the unconscious
realms. As the self forms in the child as part of its character, it fashions itself
independently, through instructions and learning. At this juncture, primary
conceptions regarding mother and father are internalized. The vanishing of
the father figure is deeply connected to the roots of civilization. Along with
this, associations of teaching connected with the father, also vanish. This
alienation of the father from the son is a basic feature of the patriarchal soci-
ety. The relation between Ravi and his father has these resonances.
The father image signifies Ravi’s own past which is lost. It haunts him like
a lost home. Ravi perceives a father figure to whom he can hardly return in
all aged men who enter his life in Khasak. Kuppu Acchan’s face reminds him
of the faces of his father and grandfather. Father’s paralytic face that stank,
lemon juice dripping out of the corner of the droopy lips. Grandfather’s
face he saw in the Valluvanadan village by the banks of river Thootha. Ravi
remembers the idiotic smile his grandfather smiled, opening eyes seriously
damaged by cataract.
 The Paternal Clock 103

Did that smile carry love? Ravi was not sure. Love might feel like a
memory from the previous birth that puts a smile on sleeping children.
In the depths of memory, as they move, the old man holding a white
umbrella opens his failing eyes and toothless mouth to smile. Did that
smile suggest helplessness? The grief of the endless sequences of lives?
Or was it the madness of hopeless waiting at a seashore during sunset?
(p.154)

Father and grandfather are also the signs of a patriarchal society. Ravi’s
escape is a rejection of the values of that system. Ravi moved away from
the father images from his past, like a wandering sage, only to land in the
patriarchal society of Khasak where the nerve patterns of ancient history lay
unerased. The scenes that he left behind were repeated in Khasak, the sacrifi-
cial altar of involuntary, unconscious patricides. Ravi falls into the parallels
of his own past in Khasak.
The narration of this irreversible loss of father can be seen in the identi-
fication of Ravi with the School inspector. After he sees off the inspector,
Ravi lights up a rustic torch and walks back. On the way he hears the prayer
call from the mosque. ‘O God’, said Ravi, ‘that word did not sound harsh
and meaningless now’ (p. 89). Ravi was reminded of vanishing spaceships
when he saw the fibre torches twinkling through the vast night of Khasak.
Vijayan talks about this melancholy message of parting and separation later,
in Ithihasathinte Ithihasam:

The rustic torches were not just details of narration for me. They were
the curses of that granary, my father’s futile labour, and the witness for
my grief. They crawled out of me, and went around in the wasteland
of Manali. They went up the skies of summer. They became boats for
the son who was fleeing from the gloom of father’s love. That’s why the
torches light up again in Ravi’s world as he imagines his own father in
the school inspector.
(1989, 59)

The separation between the father and the son is repeatedly presented in
Khasakkinte Ithihasam. Its profound grief is found in the relation between
Allah-Pitcha Mollakka and Nizam Ali. Mollakka is a destitute father who
sings the glory of the Sheikh through the hillsides of Khasak. The hurting
wound in this wanderer’s feet is an emblem for every other father figure
in Khasak. The relation between Nizam Ali and Allah-Pitcha Mollakka
manifests a different side of the relation between Ravi and his father. The
16-year-old orphan aroused passion in Mollakka. But later, with the vigour
of his uncropped, curly hair and youth Nizam Ali tormented him. Nizam Ali
won over his daughter, Maimoona, took over his profession of being a reli-
gious teacher, and also his priesthood: he tasted the intoxicating subversion
of father-dominance through all these. Mollakka remembers all that: ‘he is
104 O.V. Vijayan

kicking me around as if I am a football in the field of Khasak. I gave you all

my love and care. I never deserved this from you’ (p. 49).
Mollakka is a father who yearns for intense communications with his son.
He wanted to repeat himself in Khasak through Nizam Ali. He believed in
the revelation that Nizam Ali who reached Khasak as a refugee, will be, like
Mollakka himself, the next prophet. It is his self-indulgence, his desire to see
himself in Nizam Ali that becomes his undoing. Mollakka looks at Chetali,
the hill that called him and Nizam Ali to the path of the prophet like a
magnet:

Lord, you showed me this trail. I climbed hills and trod by the fields
on the slope; I hurt my feet. How many years? I cannot remember.
Behind Chetali, dry-leaves cover up dark and untrodden pathways.
Muddy currents of monsoons rushed down from them, depositing the
mud slide of old age in me. Up above, in the minars of Chetali, Lord
Sheikh stood guard.
(p. 43)

Mollakka is lost in his solitary dialogue with God. This speech that has no
audience is not a confrontation with solitude. A desolate and sad man, in his
moment of fatigue and grief, he submits himself to a transcendental essence.
The tortured voice of a hunted and sacrificial father that we see here is also
present in Ravi’s father’s letter.
One difference between Ravi and Nizam Ali is that Ravi does not return
to his father.

Along the valley, lost in the mist, their house lay. He saw his father in
it. Ravi felt his father saying, I am lying here, thinking of you, again
and again, growing weak. Ravi replied, father, you shouldn’t expect
me. I am keeping away from that house so that the memories don’t
haunt us. Like a sage, I am walking away from those memories. When
I wait for tides to turn at the final shore, I must be bereft of memories.
Then father said, I shouldn’t die like that. If I die like that my death will
remain incomplete.
(pp. 158–59)

This is Ravi’s experience. But Nizam Ali returns to his father. He leans
Mollakka against his body and gives him his medicines. Vijayan writes that
they looked at each other and were lost themselves in an ancient conversa-
tion. This marks the end of the disjunction between the father and the son.
The death of the senile father restlessly turning in the primal space is com-
plete here. Nizam Ali’s journey back is almost a funeral rite. This is the only
father–son relationship that has a fulfilling end in The Legends of Khasak.
The father figure for Madhavan Nair is a bitter embodiment of hatred.
He hates his father for their striking resemblance. Madhavan Nair’s learning
 The Paternal Clock 105

of Vedic wisdom was a flight from his mother who sought to identify her
husband in him. This is akin to the relation Mollakka had with Nizam Ali.
Vedic wisdom did not save Madhavan Nair from the desire that the mother
in her mid-thirties felt for the son barely in his adolescence. His mother led a
wayward life openly. Vedic wisdom failed him in the sights that drained all
meaning from what he saw. Like Ravi, Madhavan Nair also had no going
back. Vijayan clarifies this situation through the symbol of the house. Ravi
carries the memory of a house lost in mist. The barn that is lost in distance is
a symbol for of Ravi’s homelessness.
Khasak is an ancient father-centred society where time is stagnant. The
fragile, old Sayed Mian Sheikh is the founder-father in the cultural conscious-
ness of that society. There are different father figures in the social constitu-
tion of Khasak. The feudal lord Thevarath Sivaraman Nair, the teacher and
prophet Mollakka, the wizard and priest Kuttaadan Poosari – each one of
these constitutes an institution in the father-centred social structure. In this
primitive system, sin and virtue cannot be separated. They come together to
create the father–son conflicts and the ultimate disconnections. Every single
human relation in Khasak is predicated on instinctual nature. Father–son
relations that bring together sin, virtue, hatred, and kindness are part of the
worldly living whose fundamental nature is that of separation. That is the
destiny of societies that centre on the father figure. As he narrates the story
of the two spores of life which separated in their journey of evolution, Ravi
hints at this truth: ‘This is the loveless tale of the sequence of Karma. There
is only parting and sorrow in this story’ (61). This universal pattern repeats
in the father–son relationship too. Through this, Vijayan adds a spiritual
dimension to the destiny of patriarchal human societies.

(2)
Every social formation that is patriarchal, has connections with primitive
magical structures of experience. The primary binary of fathers and sons
develops into several equivalent binaries there. Ruler–subject, Guru–disciple,
God–human, and God–prophet are all part of this proliferation. The writer
partakes of the magical structures of life and experience and engages with
them to construct texts of this binary. Vijayan’s novels have always plumbed
these binaries. The narratives of paternity that he began with Khasak find
continuations in his later works. Through these texts of father–son relations,
Vijayan elaborates his vision.
The father figures in Khasak are being hunted by their sons. In
Dharmapuranam, the father is the hunter. The sinning son becomes the mor-
ally upright devotee in search of purity. He is on a saintly quest towards
God, by resolving riddles of justice, even as he is being hunted. Unlike in
Khasakkinte Ithihasam, the sources of the symbolic punishing father in
Dharmapuranam have to be seen in the wakeful and rebellious political
counter-consciousness and historical vision. Siddhaartha reminds one of
106 O.V. Vijayan

Buddha who left his wife behind and journeyed on. Siddhaartha may be
seen as a reincarnation of the figure of Ravi who fled leaving behind similar
burdens on his soul. But the dissimilarities between journeying and fleeing
mark the fundamental difference between these novels. At the same time, the
vision that Vijayan brings forth through Nizam Ali’s return to his father is
echoed in Siddhaartha’s return to God. The individual’s encounter with the
enigma of grief and the journey to solve it are dealt with on the social plane
in Dharmapuranam.
Siddhaartha comes up to Dharmapuri seeking the empire that has no
boundaries. The place is filled with the historical garbage of autocracy. In
Dharmapuri, suffering from the torture and torments of the state, Siddhaartha
who is unlike Ravi in his convictions, uses a spiritual ideology to unite the
grief of the individual and the suffering of the society. He tries to resolve
the conflicts therein. Vijayan writes about this second birth: ‘the shell broke
away from the sceptic and sad king. From the shards, Bodhisatva rose on his
arms and looked around in primal curiosity’ (p. 60).
The autocratic father is the central figure in the patriarchal social struc-
ture. Rebellions against that carry suggestions of patricide. Quarrel with a
father would mean a rebellion against the institutions of society, value sys-
tem, and pedagogical traditions. These rebellions can happen in different
trajectories such as anarchy and compassion. Siddhaartha and Parasaran are
the ones who have opted for these different paths. The novelist shows that in
the end, the two paths unite in a compassionate defeat.
The objective of Siddhaartha is to redress the original sins of history
and power. For that, he intervenes using the principle of compassion in the
empire of Prajapathi, the punishing father figure. In the end, Siddhaartha
evolves into a banyan tree profuse with the bitterness of atonement. This
failure makes Siddhaartha’s life tragic like Ravi’s. Siddhaartha who set out to
peacefully resist the satanic discourses of power and history comes to know
the pointlessness of the same. He who broke up with the general order of
the world is a tragic character in search of the meaning of life. Through
his benign quest, Siddhaartha travels towards the eternal values. Lucien
Goldman in his book, The Hidden God, has shown that the life of a tragic
man becomes meaningful only when it is submitted to the quest of eternal
values and wholeness. When the soul of the tragic man receives the touch of
eternity, it transcends human realm and attains immortality. This quest that
has a spiritual air is present in Vijayan’s art since Khasakkinte Ithihasam. It
is one version of the life in Dharmapuranam. On the other, the tragic fate of
the individual in the society rings in desperate screams. In Dharmapuranam,
father image has both dark and bright faces: the dark faces of Prajapathi and
other senile rulers and the bright faces of Gosayi ammavan (who reminds the
reader of Gandhi) and Siddhaartha. The image of the tormented father calls
for special attention. The emotional plane of this novel combines images of
both tormented fathers and tormented sons. It connects with Vijayan’s vision
which combines vedic wisdom and spirituality. When Siddhaartha reveals
 The Paternal Clock 107

the vision of life to Parasaran, the novelist says they identify their father–son
bond. Their lives are in a world far away in an imaginary realm. It is impos-
sible that someone in the contemporary society will ever encounter such a
transcendental guru. He needs a medium. In a father-centred society, guru
has that duty. It is this thought that puts the image of guru in the place of
father in Vijayan’s novels.
From Dharmapuranam onwards, the father figure becomes the centre of
a spiritual conflict related to values. The stream of his narratives runs into
father-like presences of guru, prophet, and God. These are all versions through
which the desire to return to the father is realized. One could see Kunjunni
in Gurusagaram (The Infinity of Grace) coming home to his father with all
the wisdom transferred from the guru. Kunjunni returns to the sequence of
Karma that Vijayan repeatedly mentions in Khasakkinte Ithihasam. This
experience is repeated in Pravachakante Vazhi (The Prophet’s Way). That
sequence of Karma ends as Narayanan gives holy water to his father in his
deathbed. Narayanan gets excited about his son and returns home. The prob-
lem of separation of father and son that began in Khasakkinte Ithihasam gets
resolved here. Like the pendulum of a clock, it comes back to where it began.
This is a vision that Vijayan gives us to take from the griefs of sensuality to
the peaceful wisdom of spirituality. Father and son are fundamental figures
that Vijayan uses to construct this vision with spiritual undertones. Guru,
prophet, and God are part of spiritual projection of the same relation. They
need to be probed in a different and special register.

Source
Translated by Arunlal Mokeri from Rajasekharan, P.K. 1994. Pithrughatikaaram:
O.V. Vijayante Kalayum Darsanavum (The Art and Vision of O.V. Vijayan).
Kottayam: D.C. Books, 21–33.
16 Orality, Literacy, and Modernity
A Reading of The Legends of Khasak

E.V. Ramakrishnan (Translated from

Malayalam by Dhanesh Mankulam with
the author)

What is the relationship between literacy and culture? It is not possible to

give a simple answer to this question. Eric Havelock, while commenting
on ancient Greek culture and literacy, observes that the classic culture of
Greece had attained an advanced stage even before the emergence of Greek
script. It continued to exist as an oral culture for a long time (Havelock 1963,
117–120). A culture without a script is not uncivilized or underdeveloped.
Havelock observes:

One can propose with assurance that the pre-Homeric epoch – the
Dark Age – yields for the historian what might be called a controlled
experiment in non-literacy. Here, if anywhere, … we can study those
conditions on which a total culture, and a very complex one, relied for
its preservation upon oral tradition alone.
(pp. 117–18)

It is the collective knowledge of the society and its mechanisms of expression

of that knowledge that enable a culture to sustain itself.
What were the methods that enabled the Greek society to share their
knowledge of religion, politics, and jurisprudence among the people who
were yet to be literate? It was the use of metrical language that helped them
pass down their knowledge through generations ensuring a common lifestyle.
Havelock states that till the time of Euripides, Greek literature continued to
be a product of an oral culture, and this cannot be evaluated based on the
criteria of the literary productions of a literate society. We know from our
everyday experience that the metrical rhythm of verse enables us to store
more information in memory. Understandably, the Greek term ‘Muse’ which
means ‘goddess of poetry’ also signifies ‘the daughter of memory’. The mode
of communication in an oral culture uses verse. Culture stores knowledge
and also enables its retrieval for future use. Metrical rhythms recur in several
social situations, through various forms like music, dance, and ritual. The
oral cultures need social situations to bring together listeners and specta-
tors and disseminate knowledge among them. An oral composition partakes
of elements of a performance or a ritual. A society internalizes its cultural
texts through repeated exposures to them. Such occasions preclude personal

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-23
 Orality, Literacy, and Modernity 109

or private communication. The lonely reader can emerge only in a liter-

ate society. It is no coincidence that the word ‘Ezhuthu’ in Malayalam has
two meanings: ‘something that is written’ and also ‘a communication/letter
addressed to someone’. Literate culture constitutes individuals. As an indi-
vidual acquires literacy and becomes privy to new dimensions of culture, he
gets detached from society as a lonely reader. This is an inevitable irony of
our progress into literacy.
Kerala can claim a long history of reading and writing, dating back to the
fourteenth century or even earlier, but it became universal only from the end
of the nineteenth century. In her book Knowledge Before Printing and After,
Ananda Wood has studied the oral cultures that existed in Kerala before the
arrival of print. It was towards the end of the nineteenth century that a new
book-centred culture emerged in Kerala. To know how within a generation,
Malayali’s assumptions about knowledge changed radically it is enough to
take note of the differences in perceptions between Punnasseri Neelakanta
Sharma (1858–1935), who belonged to the old Gurukula tradition of schol-
arship, and Kesari Balakrishna Pillai (1889–1960), who accelerated Kerala’s
modernization through critical essays and translations. The social trans-
formation that the Western countries witnessed in a span of five centuries
after the invention of printing took place in India in about a century, while
in Kerala it happened in lesser than a century. Modernity implied a new
definition of knowledge and what is to be known. Since literature is also
an epistemic domain, the definition of literature came under close scrutiny
during this period. The anxieties and aspirations of a culture that was mov-
ing from orality to literacy came to be widely discussed in the period after
the 1960s. These debates may date back to the controversy over the use of
rhyme in poetry that happened in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Modernity in literature has occasioned a crisis concerning the production
and dissemination of knowledge. The eminent Malayalam poet Vyloppilli
Sreedhara Menon (1911–1985), commenting on the rebellion of the mod-
ernists, wanted to know where they did their schooling. He had a point.
Modern writers did not look up to the teacher as a source of knowledge.
Many of them walked out of the crowded classrooms in search of knowledge
and experience and encountered the world through books. M. Govindan, the
well-known Malayalam critic, rightly points out in his essay ‘Ezhuthukaarum
Vaayanakkarum’ (Writers and Readers) that a new generation of writers
emerged in Malayalam because a new generation of readers came before
them. The vision of Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), the Argentinian writer,
who envisaged the world as a huge library, exemplifies the modernist writer’s
way of looking at the world. This essay will examine O.V. Vijayan’s novel,
The Legends of Khasak, in the next part, to bring out the complex relations
between orality, literacy, and modernity. The self-consciousness concerning
knowledge and literacy becomes a strong undercurrent in Vijayan’s Legends
of Khasak.
110 O.V. Vijayan

There is an element in the architectonics of Khasak that resists the ‘photo-

graphic gaze’ that modern Malayalees came to acquire through Western edu-
cation. A. Balakrishna Pillai, the well-known Malayalam critic, observes that
this ‘photographic gaze’ makes Malayalees incapable of appreciating abstract
painting while being devoted to the classical, romantic, and realistic painting
of the West. The disquiet that Vijayan’s imagery communicates originates
from the abstract depths of language. Images such as ‘the latched bows of
palm parrots receding in the sky against the fading light’ (1990, 81; this was
left out in Vijayan’s translation), ‘the gorgeous filigree of the blue veins on
Maimoona’s bare arms’ (1994, 24), ‘a flight of complaining crows rising in
the distance like pterodactyls into the crystal arches of the sun’ (1994, 9) are
the products of a visionary apprehension of reality. The sense of the elegiac
and the tragic that Vijayan communicates through his imagery speaks of ‘the
haze of memories that resist narration’, suggesting primordial states of mind
inaccessible to the linearity of the mimetic mode. Vijayan re-enchants the
language drained by the mechanical age, restoring to words the aura of the
experiential density derived from an oral culture.
Critical studies in Malayalam on Khasak have been, by and large, centred
on the character of Ravi. The concept of character as a chain of actions
that reflect psychological realities is an extension of the photographic gaze
mentioned above. The triad of space–time–cause that we produce through
this kind of reading reduces Khasak into a museum of exotic human mod-
els, into an ethnographic document. Milan Kundera has said that he does
not write ‘psychological novels’. He observes: ‘The novel is not the author’s
confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap that the world
has become’ (1991, 221). Vijayan’s concept of the novel may be described
as a poetic meditation on human existence to seek out its possibilities. He
counters psychological readings through the use of irony and the magical
dimension that the narrative acquires through its imagery. All this leads to
polyphony which characterizes the narrative structure of Khasak.
We should remember that there are no books in Khasak. What appears as
Khasak’s primeval ‘decadence’ is in fact an effect of its distance from moder-
nity, or to be more precise, from the linear continuity of the book-centred
culture. In a world without books, identity is constituted through phenom-
enological reality mediated by myths, fables, social experiences, and every-
day encounters. Lévi-Strauss mentions in his book, Triste Tropiques, that
‘the fight against illiteracy is connected with an increase in governmental
authority over the citizens’ (Levi-Strauss, 1976, 393). One of the main uses
of literacy is to establish order by integrating a large number of people into
a political system. The culture of writing is sustained by a belief that there
is a transcendental essence behind reality. The print culture played a role in
shaping the discourse of Indian nationalism since the end of the nineteenth
century. It was through educational policies and institutions that the sub-
nationalities that flourish outside the domain of nationalism were assimi-
lated into the mainstream promoted by the state. An illiterate person is a
 Orality, Literacy, and Modernity 111

serious threat to the state’s authority. The nationalist discourse and its power
centres would not want to understand indigenous cultures such as those of
Khasak on their own terms but would do everything possible to assimilate
them. Lévi-Strauss is emphatic when he concludes that ‘writing seems to have
favoured the exploitation of human beings, rather than their enlightenment’
(393).
Vijayan constructs the cultural map of a subculture through the sym-
phony of the names of places and people, and the local dialects heard in
Khasak. Vijayan’s novel is not a confessional narrative; its polyphonic narra-
tive explores the possibilities of existence through the medium of the novel.
‘Polyphony’ is used here to imply something larger than Vijayan’s compe-
tence to represent the other side of things. The dynamics of social imagina-
tion that uses mythical and fabulist narratives to interpret experiences makes
polyphony a defining feature of the narrative in the novel. The following con-
versation that takes place in the sixth chapter of the novel, ‘The Schools’, will
illustrate the visionary dimension of the polyphonic structure. The people of
Khasak are not able to come to a consensus regarding the school, as Allah
Pitcha Mollakka opposes the school and Nizam Ali, the self-styled Khazi,
supports it. This is how the scene is described in the novel:

Allah Pitcha Mollakka had asked them not to send the children to the
school. Now Nizam Ali wanted the children to learn the new skill of
writing. What gives Nizam Ali the right to say so? Midnight baths in
the cursed Araby pond, the sleep at the Sheikh’s mosque, the traces of
burnt gun powder in the marshes, the prophetic voice that whispers
along outside the village in the nights.

‘What’s his truth?’ they asked one another. They remembered how
Mollakka had cursed Nizam Ali. Mollakka had swayed and
almost fallen down when he threw a fist-full of dust at him, after
casting a spell on it.‘The Sheikh’s truth’, they said.
‘If it is so, is Mollakka a lie?’ they asked again.
‘Mollakka is also truth’
‘How is it so?’
‘Truths are many’.
They grew restless.
(1990, 38)

The above translation by the present author differs from Vijayan’s self-trans-
lation where Vijayan chooses to translate the original sentence, ‘Truths are
many’ as ‘Many truths make the big truth’ (1994, 36). (In Chapter 28, Chitra
Panikkar discusses this issue in her essay on ‘Vijayan as Self-Translator’).
The fact that the speakers are not named in the above conversation indi-
cates that it happens in the collective psyche of the community. The rev-
elation that ‘truths are many’ is an insight that can only emerge from the
112 O.V. Vijayan

open-mindedness of the social imagination rooted in community. Khasak

stands for this inclusive vision that does not reject contradictions, conflicts
and paradoxes and recognizes the complexity of experiences. The diversity of
the spoken vernaculars of Khasak indicates the range of the existential pos-
sibilities inherent in Khasak’s society. When Vijayan narrates how Chatthan
and Perakkadan dropped out from school, he writes: ‘Ravi was puzzled; after
much persuasion, the wild visitors deigned to let him into the clan’s secret.
Their language had no script, as only the scriptless language could help them
penetrate the forest depths’ (51). In fact, in the original, Vijayan writes, ‘The
dialect of Kavaras has neither script nor songs, only the tales of souls trapped
in the mountain passes’ (1990, 49). The polyphony of this novel is founded
on the insight that the dialects and vernaculars are the repositories of social
imagination and local knowledge and that it is the experiential sediments of
these subcultures that enhance the existential possibilities of a society or even
the nation.
The hollowness of the claim that Kavara dialect is superior to all other
dialects shows the introverted nature of these subcultures and the possible
marginalization they will suffer in the high tide of modernity. Khasak is a
borderland where Malayalam mingles with Tamil, and the new literate cul-
ture confronts the orality of primeval memories. Its relation with the city of
Palakkad has an undercurrent of conflict. The charges against Nizam Ali,
who was beaten up and locked up in a prison cell at Palakkad, included trea-
son, attempting to overthrow the elected government through violent means,
and instigating murder. This political convict who decided to be the Khazi of
Syed Mian Sheikh had come to realize that he would always be a criminal in
the discourse of power. In reclaiming an identity that makes sense only within
the boundaries of Khasak, Nizam Ali becomes a symbol of Khasak’s being.
The moment Nizam Ali supports the single-teacher school, the opposition
among the people vanishes. It shows how fundamental changes in Khasak
can come only through Nizam Ali. He turns into a stranger at times while
remaining rooted within Khasak. When Ravi asks Madhavan Nair ‘What is
this Khazi’s secret?’, Madhavan Nair replies: ‘Who knows? Who is certain
about the truth and the non-truth? Isn’t that enquiry itself the fate of human
life?’ Nizam Ali, who lives with the scars of his torments, represents the
rebellious element in Khasak’s culture. For Mollakka, the orthodox priest,
the journey to Palakkad ends in death. The people of Khasak are reluctant
travellers because they feel alienated in the world outside. Kuttappu-Nari,
who had gone to Palakkad to escape from the deities of Khasak, did not
stay there for long: ‘On the maidan of the old Sultan’s fort, a meeting was in
progress. The red flag fluttered over the speakers who were debating things
that concerned the Tiger as well – work and wages. He sat down on the grass
among the listeners, but soon lost interest, because his was the more fear-
some struggle’ (1994, 76). Kuttappu-Nari, walked back to Khasak, broke
into a song that he composed instantly on the road, ‘Come pootham, get
me if you can, Ta Ra Na Na!’, under the influence of the local brew (Ibid).
 Orality, Literacy, and Modernity 113

The moonlit silhouette of Chetali’s mountain appeared to him as a colossal

Rawuthar. The next day he died of high fever. The Khazi who wanders in the
marshes of the mosque cemetery carries within himself the existential strug-
gles of Khasak. Those very qualities which are assets in the micro-world of
subcultures turn into liabilities and burdens in today’s modern world where
boundaries fade.
Transactions between power and knowledge complicate the quest for
identities. It is the ambivalence towards the nature of knowledge that ani-
mates the imagery of Vijayan’s work. Ravi who is convinced that textbooks
do not help you discover your own self is, ironically, assigned the task of dis-
seminating formal education through the single-teacher school. Ravi’s paths
of enquiry pass through both the Upanishad and astrophysics. They are part
of grand narratives and great traditions, belonging to ancient and modern
literate cultures. Madhavan Nair who had pursued Vedanta at the age of 21
had known the disjunction and despair knowledge brings. After Ravi, it is
Madhavan Nair who is most haunted by the absurdity emanating from the
hybrid culture of tainted knowledge. His deep bonding with Appu-Kili and
Ravi carries an awareness of his own tragic isolation. However, this tragic
sense, unlike that of Nizam Ali, is not the rebellion that turns inward. Instead,
Madhavan Nair experiences extreme exhaustion before the absolute abyss of
existence. In this passage, Vijayan describes the dress that Madhavan Nair
stitches for Appu-Kili:

In embarrassment, then in pain, he thought; that he stitched a dress for

Appu-Kili; an ankle-length motley toga made up of cut-piece scraps of
cloth. Pictures of a trident and a sickle-and-hammer on the front, and
the pictures of Gandhi and peacock that he scissored out from a gunny
bag on the rear.
(1994,57)

Appu-Kili who stands outside the confines of print cultures and literate
knowledge defies the boundaries of religions as well. The question regarding
Appu-Kili’s name in the school register had perplexed Ravi earlier. The mot-
ley toga made up of cut-piece scraps of clothes suggests that nationalism is
an amalgam of various grand traditions and script-cultures stitched together.
The withdrawal of Nizam Ali into Khasak’s marshy wilderness, like a cave-
man, signifies his rage against the system; this also brings out the recalcitrant
elements in Khasak’s cultural life. Appu-Kili embodies the innocence and
vulnerability of Khasak beyond the domain of linguistic purity. Khasak feels
threatened by a new order which modernity brings. Deep within, Appu-Kili
appears to recognize that he is a victim: he feeds the scapegoat meant for
sacrifice on the day of annual festival, tender leaves, and the leaves of the
Moringa tree.
The toga that Madhavan Nair stitches for Appu-Kili exemplifies the gulf
between Khasak and the mainstream of modernity. It is the distance between
114 O.V. Vijayan

the rich and compassionate vision that suggests ‘truths are many’ and the
notion of history as a singular and linear movement towards ‘progress’.
His exposure to Khasak convinces Ravi that history is institutionalized
knowledge, and it invalidates the possibilities of existence. Ravi arrived at
Khasak with some of these books in his baggage: The Bhagavad Gita, Prince
Thiruvankulam, Rilke, Muttathu Varkey, and Baudlaire. It ranges from
the sacred text to the Western Classics to the popular Malayalam novels.
The contradictions in Ravi’s mental make-up are evident here. The pictures
adorning the walls of the seedling house are those of Gandhi, Hitler, and the
monkey-god, Hanuman. What condemns Ravi into a limbo of passivity and
ambivalence is the incoherence at the heart of the institutionalized knowl-
edge. The sense of absurdity that haunts Ravi does not affect Maimoona,
Nizam Ali, or Mollakka. The priests who come to Khasak are dispossessed
nomads and orphans, with no roots in written history. They have no pasts.
On the other hand, Padma comes from the outside world seeking Ravi. In
rejecting the fellowship to pursue research in Princeton, Ravi was turning
away from the book-centred knowledge systems and the idea of the modern.
Finally, when Ravi collapses dead between Khasak and the world outside,
he is an outsider to both. Vijayan’s relation with modernity is subjected to
a critique through the character of Ravi. In the chapter titled, ‘The Mask of
the Stranger’, Vijayan describes how after a drunken night of wanderings,
Ravi calls out the muezzin’s cry: ‘He saw the dark silhouette of the mosque
far away. With his hands pressed against his temples, he bitterly called the
muezzin’s cry: Allaho Akbar! Allaho Akbar!’ (175). The chapter dwells at
length on the fate of relationships, how the most intimate people turn into
strangers. When he takes on the role of the muezzin, he was enacting the
sense of the absurd arising out of the misfitting identities one cannot discard.
Vijayan discovers that in the cultural context that we live in, any quest for
identity will culminate only in a sense of discontent arising out of paradoxes
and contradictions.
In the foundational myth of Khasak, we hear the saga of Sayed Mian
Sheikh, a holy man who stopped the entire cavalcade of a thousand soldiers
to nurse an old and ailing horse. The compassion for the helpless and the lost
is at the heart of the legends of Khasak. What Vijayan conveys in his refresh-
ingly candid treatment of sexuality in Khasak, uncontaminated by the sense
of guilt, is desire as life force, that issues from the social imagination of an
oral culture. The voluptuous femininity of Maimoona should be understood
against the backdrop of the bleakness of death that pervades Khasak. The
polarities of the spiritual and the erotic reflect the ambivalence inherent in
the relations between nature and culture. Vijayan does not rationalize experi-
ences to formulate philosophical propositions, in his depiction of sexuality.
It is instructive to remember how the erotic and the metaphysical are closely
related in Indian Bhakti poetry as well as Indian painting. The saffron dhoti
that Ravi was wearing on his way to Khasak carried the memory of a sexual
union in an Ashram. The seedling house that was turned into a school had
 Orality, Literacy, and Modernity 115

a past of similar indulgences. In the recurring images of the rain in the novel
(such as ‘the orgasmic momentum of the fresh showers’, 1990, 48), there is a
suggestion of fertility. In the last chapter, this becomes tinged with death in
the image of ‘the waters of the Timeless Rain’ (1994, 203), as Ravi lies dying.
The chapter titled ‘Vilayattam’ (the word in Malayalam signifies festivity,
play, and carnival) describes how the epidemic of smallpox turned Khasak
into ‘a vast flower-bed’. Vijayan writes: ‘Nallamma strung garlands of pus
and death, she raised bowers of deadly chrysanthemums; the men of Khasak
saw her and lusted, the disease becoming a searing pleasure in which they
haemorrhaged and perished’ (1998, 124). Fertility and mortality become
inseparable in this vision, where life is seen in relation to its opposites. The
double-voiced polyphonic narrative style that critiques life as it is portrayed
emerges from the recognition that love and death are the two phenomenal
manifestations of the same truth. It is this vision that invests The Legends of
Khasak with its capacity for critical self-reflection which comes through in its
luminous language, complex symbolism, and incandescent imagery.

References
Havelock, Eric A. 1963. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
Kundera, Milan. 1991. The Unforgettable Lightness of Being. Michael Henry Heism,
Trans. New York: Harper Collins Publisher.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1955 (1976). Triste Tropiques. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Vijayan, O.V. 1990 (2001). Khasakkinte Ithihasam. Kottayam: D.C.Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1994 (1991). The Legends of Khasak. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1998. Selected Fiction New Delhi: Penguin Books.

Note: Wherever the Malayalam edition of Khasak is mentioned along with the year
1990, the translations are by the present authors. When the English edition of
Vijayan’s self-translation is mentioned with the year 1994 and 1998 in brackets,
the translations are by O.V. Vijayan.

Source
Ramakrishnan, E.V. 1992 (2001 SPCS Edition, 2020 Kerala Sahitya Akademi
Edition). Aksharavum Aadhunikatayum, Thrissur: Athira Publications, 5-17. .
Section 3

Vijayan’s Oeuvre as a Fictionist:

Dissent, Terror, Grace, and
Beyond


118 O.V. Vijayan

Figure 5 Vijayan statue – at Thasarak, Credit: Vijayan Memorial at Thasarak

17 O.V. Vijayan
A Sage and an Iconoclast

K. Satchidanandan

Now the knowledge dawned on Siddhaartha: the love of one’s country

demands the killing of children … Siddhaartha sat in contemplation
with no papal tree to stretch its merciful canopy overhead: and the
Judge finished the last cantos of the judgement, and all around were the
sounds of the people … God, God! Siddhaartha reflected, what voice is
this which is not of man nor animal, neither of the mate nor of the off-
spring? I know now! He listened with the seeker’s alertness and heard
its echo down the centuries through the dark valleys of memory. It is,
Siddhaartha realized, the eunuch voice of history.
(O.V. Vijayan: The Saga of Dharmapuri from Vijayan,
O.V.1998. Selected Fiction, 277-278.)

A PROFOUND anguish over a world turning absurdly violent day by day cast
its sombre shadow on whatever Vijayan did: his novels, short stories, politi-
cal columns, why, even his cartoons. His was the trauma of an intellectual
who had witnessed the irrationality of a sanguine age that had revolutions
stand on their heads, wars waged on the most irrational grounds, tragi-comic
conflicts staged in the name of God and religion, caste and race, language,
region and nation and the endless exodus of refugees fleeing the soil that had
once nurtured them and was now turning into minefields: he was caught
between weeping for the children ever under the scimitar on the sacrificial
stone and laughing at the cruel Sisyphean absurdity of human history and
the fragility of the protagonists it had thrown up over centuries. Not that he
lacked faith completely: he had faith in Marx and Gandhi, in transformation
through compassion, and as years went by, even in some unnameable cosmic
presence whose radiance illuminates the loneliest of minds: but his faith only
deepened his agonized concern for the strange destiny of Marx and Gandhi
reflected in their painfully comic afterlives and for the poor human mind
fighting over the self-created illusions. This double awareness gave him a
kind of detachment that was the source of his laughter that was closer to that
of a Vyasa than, say, of a Mark Twain.
Vijayan happened in Malayalam much before Gabriel Garcia Marquez
and Jose Saramago had become daily bread for the reader in Malayalam.
It is ironic that the translation of Khasakkinte Ithihasam (The Legends of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-25
120 O.V. Vijayan

Khasak) in English happened much later and those who knew him through
the English version identified his unique narrative mode with the magic real-
ism of the Latin American masters. The other end of the absurdity was that
a fiction writer in Malayalam accused Vijayan of plagiarizing an ordinary
realistic Marathi novel as that too had a teacher in a one-teacher rural school
for its protagonist, like Ravi of The Legends of Khasak.
This novel literally revolutionized Malayalam fiction. Its interweaving of
myth and reality, its lyrical intensity, its black humour, its freshness of idiom
with its mixing of the provincial and the profound and its combinatorial
wordplay, its juxtaposition of the erotic and the metaphysical, the crass and
the sublime, the real and the surreal, guilt and expiation, physical desire and
existential angst, and its innovative narrative strategy with its deft manipula-
tion of time and space together created a new readership with a novel sensi-
bility and transformed the Malayali imagination forever.
The characters of the novel have now become legendary: there is Ravi, the
protagonist who lives at two levels, a mundane, instinctive level of lust and
longing and a transcendental meditative level of detachment and spiritual
quest. He is haunted by a sense of guilt for his past incestuous relationship
with his stepmother and his desecration of an ashram by committing a sin
with a yogini that prompts him to leave the peace of that shelter and walk
into the blazing sun of Khasak to run a single-teacher school in that remote
village. An intellectual who had tried to correlate astrophysics and upani-
shadic metaphysics and was all set to go to the United States for higher stud-
ies, Ravi was driven by his shame and came to Khasak to expiate his sin: he
is an alien among the rustic folk, seeing them with a kind of philosophical
detachment, even while mixing with them at the level of everyday experience.
But here too, desire overwhelms him and at the end of a series of events, fac-
ing the threat of suspension, he keeps his word to his beloved Padma to leave
Khasak: he lies down in calm detachment in the white monsoon rain, waiting
for his bus, affectionately watching the blue hooded serpent that had struck
him withdrawing content into its hole surrounded by the newborn grass.
And there are the rustic folk: Allah-Pitcha, the maulvi who considers mod-
ern schools the devil’s institutions teaching the king’s angular script and the
kaffir’s sciences and is a potential foe for Ravi ending up as the school’s peon;
Nizam Ali, an orphan brought up by Allah-Pitcha, now a khaliyar support-
ing Ravi, the self-appointed representative of Sayed Mian Sheikh, the ghost
of whose lean horse still gallops in the wheezy east wind and helps invalids
and widows, carrying them on his back across the valley; Madhavan Nair,
a tailor by profession, a Communist with Vedantic training and Ravi’s con-
fidante; Maimoona, the village beauty, once Nizam Ali’s beloved and now
Ravi’s, but married by her father to the lame and ugly Chukkra Rawuthar;
Appu-Kili (Appu, the Bird), a dull and deformed man-boy ever hunting for
spiders and butterflies in Khasak’s valleys; Kuppu Acchan, a toddy-tapper,
a victim of prohibition; Kuttadan, the temple-priest whose oracles twice a
week were God's words to the villagers, trying hard to convince the educated
  O.V. Vijayan 121

Ravi of the authenticity of his revelations; Sivaraman Nair, a Hindu funda-

mentalist who ‘found’ a conspiracy between Madhavan Nair the Communist
and Ravi the anarchist out to destroy Hinduism …
Vijayan’s visionary energy converts what could easily have been an
ordinary naturalistic rural narrative into a magical experience of mythical
proportions. The novel that came out in 1969, after 12 years of drafting
and redrafting, became an instant hit with the young while infuriating the
conservatives and the progressives alike, though for different reasons, the
only common reason being its ‘sexual anarchy’. It was ‘anti-status-quoist’ in
every sense; and readers with orthodox sensibilities charged it with obscurity,
partly because of its new idiom and partly its play with space and time that
went against the familiar, chronological narration. But as years went by,
resistance cooled down, and the ‘elitist’ novel has now crossed 30 editions
and is still one of the bestsellers in Malayalam.
C.V. Ramnan Pillai, the author of historical romances like Marthanda
Varma, Dharmaraja, and Ramaraja Bahadur, had in the early decades of the
twentieth century created a world of myth and used the Malayalam language
like a polyphonic musical instrument and Vaikom Mohammad Basheer had
shaped a simple yet philosophical idiom out of everyday speech: Vijayan had
learnt from both and striven to go beyond them to transform the very texture
of his people’s imagination. I still remember how we, the young, used to wait
for the thrill of imagination that the novel gave week after week when it was
serialized in the weekly Mathrubhumi.
Vijayan’s next novel Dharmapuranam (The Saga of Dharmapuri), how-
ever, demanded a different reader. Here was a savage political satire that
reminded one of Swift and Voltaire at the same time for its fierce loathing of
what unethical politics has made of India and its outrageously hilarious ridi-
cule of public postures and ideological pretensions. It revealed Vijayan at his
incisive best as it pressed into service even scatology in its utter contempt for
an immoral leadership that had abandoned Gandhian values in its unscrupu-
lous pursuit of selfish power. The novel was to be serialized in Malayalanadu,
a literary weekly, from July 1975; it was advertised too but the Emergency
declared on June 25 that year intervened. Neither the writer nor the editor
was eager to be a martyr. The novel appeared only in 1977 after the lifting of
the Emergency. What was originally a dark prophecy now appeared to be a
report of what had happened.
This novel also met with disapprobation from the allies of the state in dif-
ferent garbs; no publisher would dare touch it as the memories of the dark
days of the Emergency were still fresh and they were afraid too of the pos-
sible public disapproval of its sexual-scatological language and imagery. It
found a publisher only in 1985 when the tempers and fears had cooled a lit-
tle. Its English translation, done by Vijayan himself and published by Penguin
Books in 1987, created a storm anew on a national scale. David Selbourne,
writing in The Times Literary Supplement, referred to it as ‘… dangerous
stuff and cut close to the bone’, while Khushwant Singh remarked: ‘Not the
122 O.V. Vijayan

kind of novel you forget in a hurry’. Vijayan himself described it as a cleans-

ing act that he had no desire to repeat.
There are many who believe that with these novels Vijayan the sceptic ceased
to be and Vijayan the believer took over. The words of V. Rajakrishnan, an
admiring critic, reflect the feelings of many of his readers: ‘His quest took on
a serene affirmative tone in his later writings starting with Gurusagaram (The
Infinity of Grace, 1987). It looked as though he had found some temporary
solutions to the perplexing problems of human existence through the spir-
itual order of affirmation. Personally, I prefer Vijayan the doubter, Vijayan
the questioner, to Vijayan the man who had found his answers’.
Vijayan always had a spiritual streak in him that is evident already in
Khasakkinte Ithihasam that had followed his first book Moonnu Yuddhangal
(Three Battles), which belongs to his ‘progressive’ phase. Certain agonising
experiences in his personal life along with the torments of his doubting self,
his instinctive diffidence and feelings of insecurity and his horror at the vio-
lence he witnessed all around must have deepened this aspect of his subjectiv-
ity. His visits to ashrams, particularly to Shantigiri where he was impressed
by the teachings of Karunakaraguru, became more frequent now.
However, it is wrong to dismiss his later novels like Gurusagaram,
Madhuram Gayathi (Sweet is the Music, 1990), Pravachakante Vazhi (The
Way of the Prophet, 1993), and Thalamurakal (Generations, 1997) as mere
exercises in metaphysics. First, because many of the great writers of modern
times from Dostoyevsky to Kafka and Kazantsakis have a strong metaphysi-
cal streak in them that in no way diminishes their greatness. Second, Vijayan
kept on reacting actively to the events around him through his political col-
umns and his powerful cartoons. And third, all these novels have a pro-
found human and social content: for example, Gurusagaram, set against the
backdrop of the Bangladesh war, dramatizes the grief of a broken family
and delves into the meaning of human relationships; Madhuram Gayathi
is an allegorical fable of the post-Holocaust world with its lovelessness and
disharmony; Pravachakante Vazhi reveals the illusory nature of man-made
differences and Thalamurakal, an autobiographical novel, is full of political
and moral overtones.
But one must admit that these novels did not create the kind of impact
that Khasakkinte Ithihasam did. His six collections of short stories also show
him as a master of the genre. The stories, which range from the comic to the
philosophical, show an astonishing diversity of situations, tones, and styles.
His own translations of his stories into English – After the Hanging and
Other Stories and Selected Stories and the novels, The Saga of Dharmapuri,
The Legends of Khasak, and The Infinity of Grace – have had a pan-Indian
appeal, though fellow-writers like N.S. Madhavan have been openly critical
of the freedoms he took with his own works as well as his English style and
would have them translated again.
As a political commentator, Vijayan always showed his firm commitment
to democratic values as revealed by his six collections of political articles. At
  O.V. Vijayan 123

times, he was criticized by friends like Paul Zacharia for his suspected right
leanings: but, he never compromised his secular credentials. Even while hav-
ing unsure thoughts about spiritual politics, he always distinguished between
the Haindava and the Atihaindava (the Hindu and the extremist Hindu), to
use his own words. His criticism of the Left as well as the Right was done
consistently from an ethical, liberal, democratic point of view. Vijayan was
easily one of the greatest cartoonists of India. His cartoons were not for the
passive spectator who wanted just to be amused or vicariously appeased,
but for the thinking, polemical viewer who wanted to be provoked and chal-
lenged. His style was economical to the core: simple, terse, geometrical, mer-
cilessly minimal; and his comments always sharp, cerebral, subversive. He
stopped cartooning during the dark years of the Emergency; he refused to
draw under constraints. Still, the series he drew for the weekly Kalakaumudi
during that period, Ithiri Nerampokku, Ithiri Darsanam (A Little Fun, A
Little Insight) said all that had to be said in its wordless lines.
Vijayan was a true visionary intrigued by the paradoxes of history that
he went on turning into words and lines. He represents ‘a break’ in the his-
tory of Malayalam fiction as well as in that of Indian cartooning. His defiant
creativity was full of a primordial energy that drew equally from the sage and
the iconoclast in him.

Source
Satchidanandan, K. 2006. “A Sage and an Iconoclast”, O.V. Vijayan: Ormappustakam,
Ed. P.K. Rajasekharan, Kottayam: D.C. Books, 170–175. Originally published in
Frontline, April 22, 2005.
Vijayan, O.V. 1996 (First published in Malayalam in 1987). The Infinity of Grace
(Gurusagaram). Trans. by the author. New Delhi: Penguin Books, India.
Vijayan, O.V. 1998. Selected Fiction. Gurugram, Haryana, India: Penguin Books.
18 At the Sign of the Goat
David Selbourne

The Saga of Dharmapuri is one of the great works of modern Indian litera-
ture. O.V. Vijayan’s parable of post-colonialism – in India a world of folly,
corruption, lies, and ancient languor – is an excremental satire, Swiftian in
its savage hatred for the Indian body politic. But beneath this can be detected
the lyric voice of a South Indian storyteller, for whom the ‘plenitude of cre-
ated things’ and the omnipresence of the gods provide a dreaming subtext,
ostensibly beyond the reach of political India.
Set against Vijayan’s heroic and scatological new Candide – originally
written in Malayalam and finely translated into English by the author – the
timidity of our own old English talent for political satire is embarrassingly
laid bare. For this is dangerous stuff, and cut close to the bone.
In Dharmapuri (or India), the President is attended by hangers-on at his
ceremonial ‘Hour of the Second Defecation’, who in their sycophantic ardour
and desire-for-grace devour his faeces; ‘departing Imperialism’ has bequeathed
to the decolonized State little more than ‘costume kits’ and obsolete, rusting,
weapons; scholars from the ‘White Confederacy’ stream across the seas to
the morally prostrated nation in order to witness ‘their own baroque past’;
while Dharmapuri’s deferential emigres to Britain (Feringheeland) earn their
livings by ‘snake-charming and selling trinkets’. The nation’s principal export
to the West is cadavers for medical research and as canned meat products; in
exchange come limousines, aphrodisiacs and striped candy for Dharmapuri’s
rulers.
There is a loathing, prurience and surrealist hysteria in Vijayan’s images
of India in which the ‘delusions of the freed slave’, the apophthegms of a
mendicant Buddha-figure, and the drivellings of cuckolded politicians who
foul their dhotis when in the grip of panic vie with each other for our atten-
tion. This is India as zoo, roaring bestiary or bear-garden, not the India of the
pietist’s ashram or of nostalgia’s hill-station; we are a world (and a genera-
tion) away, too, from the homely, provincial anxieties of an R.K. Narayan,
another consummate fabulist of South India. Instead, Indianness or, at
least, a certain version of it – and Western credulity about India are mocked
together: the President of Dharmapuri’s intermittent ‘goat-noises’ are actu-
ally being studied by the ‘renowned Tartar[sc Soviet] orientalist, Barbakov’.

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 At the Sign of the Goat 125

Equally hilarious, or funereal, is Vijayan’s assault on the canting ‘anti-

Imperialism’ of Dharmapuri’s corrupt rulers. The assault is just. For the slo-
gans of anti-imperialism have provided a convenient alibi, in the real India,
for many acts of political turpitude, Mrs Gandhi’s 1975 Declaration of
Emergency, for example. Fiercest of all is Vijayan’s Voltairean recoil from
Indian cringing to power. His base citizens actually ‘bare themselves’ and cry,
‘Geld us, sires, as you do the beasts of the plough’. For the reader, however,
there is a saving grace in Vijayan. It rests in that prophetic, or mystical, vision
by means of which he seeks constantly to exorcize the Furies of the crazed
Indian metropolis, aspires to gain redemption in rusticity, and in his hut,
with ‘a lamp to see my woman by’, hopes to discover Nirvana. In the green
shade of Kerala, with wings folded, even the most rapacious of modern souls
will, he muses, find its quietus.
The best of Vijayan’s short stories in After the Hanging breathe this pacific
spirit, in which a magical epiphany can carry us out of nightmare, translate
us from present to past, or spirit us from death-in-life to memory’s elegiac
dream world. The trouble is that no amount of verbal sorcery can erase the
traces of a deliquescent corruption, physical and moral, which besmear the
pages of these two books, nor soothe their disconsolate and greatly talented
author. Vijayan himself is yet another of Dharmapuri’s victims.
(The Times Literary Supplement, July 12, 1990)

Source
Selbourne, David. 2006. “At the Sign of the Goat”, from Rajasekharan, P.K., Editor,
2006. O.V. Vijayan: Ormappustakam. Kottayam: D.C. Books. pp. 176–177.
19 Vijayan the Sceptic Visionary
A Reading of The Saga of Dharmapuri

P. P. Raveendran

Compared to The Legends of Khasak (1969), Dharmapuranam (1985; trans.

The Saga of Dharmapuri, 1985) is a different kind of text and is set in a
different context. A dark parable on the political developments in post-Inde-
pendence India, and often regarded as a satire on Indira Gandhi’s Emergency
regime, the novel has had a chequered publication history. As in the case of
Khasak, it too underwent a lot of transformations before receiving its pre-
sent shape. Vijayan started on the novel in 1971 and completed writing it in
1975. The Malayalam weekly journal Malayalanadu was to have serialized
the novel from July that year. But this could not be done because of the dec-
laration of the Emergency in the country in June 1975. The censorship rules
that were in force during the Emergency prevented the journal from pub-
lishing any material that could be interpreted as anti-government. Though
Malayalanadu eventually serialized the novel in 1977 after the Emergency
was lifted, the novel had to wait for long to get a major publisher to bring
it out in book form. This was partly because of the general perception of it
as being obscene and scatological. Finally, when the novel was published as
a book in 1985, it deviated a great deal from the original version that had
appeared as a serialized work. Vijayan subjects the novel to minor revisions
in successive editions and is seen to revise the work in a more serious way in
the fourth edition of 1988. Alternatively, the 1988 edition can also be seen as
a revision of the novel done in accord with the English translation published
a year earlier in 1987.
The novel is about a fictitious country called Dharmapuri whose ruler
Prajapati (‘President’ in Vijayan’s English translation) is surrounded by an
assorted crowd of corrupt and sycophantic ministers and officials. Prajapati
is an ugly and mighty tyrant who rules the country with an iron fist and
with the support of a brutal army. His poor and helpless subjects suffer
horribly at his hands. Though the departure of the Imperialists who once
ruled Dharmapuri is made much of by Prajapati and his men, nothing in
essence has changed for the common people. This is because Dharmapuri
still thrives on the ‘costume kits and other obsolete equipment’ that departing
Imperialism has bequeathed to it. The country’s international diplomacy is
an instance of organized deception that governments perpetrate on ordinary
people. The government of the White Confederacy, a transoceanic capitalist

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 Vijayan the Sceptic Visionary 127

power that practices ‘the sorcery of consumerism’, and of the Red Tartar
Republic that practices ‘communard politics’ are willing collaborators in this
deception. The ritual defecation of Prajapati at daybreak and sundown at
which the ministers, the members of the press and the bureaucracy as well
as the public are required to be regularly present is symbolic of the obscene
state of affairs in the country. The tyrant never tires of tormenting his sub-
jects, whose women are to be made sexually available to him. Even ministers
make it a point to send their spouses to Prajapati for his sexual gratification.
The subjects are tormented in other ways too. They have to keep up the
pretence that Dharmapuri is a peace-loving country while state violence is
rampant everywhere. The violence is evident not only in the way in which
innocent women and children are physically assaulted by those in power, but
by the vulgar manner in which the country exports to wealthy Feringheeland
and the White Confederacy, cadavers for medical research and the bodies of
youth processed as canned meat products.
Though it is the languor and sordidness of the political world that Vijayan
seeks to present through the novel, aspects of this world that resist sordid-
ness also appear in parts of the novel. A positive character emerging into this
dismal world is the sage-like Siddhaartha. A crownless king, whose mission
is to alleviate the sufferings of the people. Siddhaartha represents the hope
and optimism of the common people of Dharmapuri. More than that he
represents the gravity of the mysterious guru culture in uncultured and untu-
tored Dharmapuri. He acts as a guide to Laavannya, who has been subjected
to multiple rapes by the rulers, provides solace to the suffering residents
of Dharmapuri, and makes common cause with Parashara, the defecting
General of Prajapati’s army, in resisting the misrule of the tyrant. There is
however no indication that Siddhaartha’s efforts will bear fruit, as what he
leaves behind at the end is a trail of dead soldiers and disciples.
Vijayan is keen on insisting that Dharmapuranam is not about the India of
the Emergency days. Its story according to him transcends time and place and
concerns the absurdity, in abstract terms, of war, governance and leadership.
It provides insights into the operation of modern civilized societies. In his
prefatory note to the fourth edition of Dharmapuranam, Vijayan says: ‘The
knowledge concerning war, governance, and leadership is instinctual and not
derived from learning. Even animals are in possession of it. Man seems to
have lost sight of this knowledge somewhere down the line in the history of
his cultural development’ (Vijayan 1988a: 6). Vijayan further states in this
note that once the historical immoralities of a society get institutionalized
in the form of legal and administrative protocols, society as a unit becomes
blind to these immoralities and it is left to isolated individuals to see them
for what they really are. It is the insight of such isolated individuals that
political novels like Dharmapuranam express. What Vijayan wants to drive
home in making this point is that Dharmapuranam should not be treated as
an allegory of the ways of any particular social system but is to be treated as
a novel that tells the story of the universal truth regarding human history.
128 O.V. Vijayan

In fact, we see Vijayan revising the novel through successive editions in such
a way as to eliminate all topical and historical references from the text.
There was a prophetic quality about the first draft of the novel which, when
completed in early 1975 before the declaration of the state of Emergency in
mid-1975, carried a chapter (Chapter 5) with the title ‘Atiyantaravastha’,
meaning ‘emergency’. Vijayan states that he resolved to substitute that title
with ‘Pratisandhi’, meaning ‘crisis’, in the published version. The name of
the tyrant ‘Rashtrapati’ of the original version likewise was replaced by
‘Prajapati’ in the published version. Both changes were meant to take the
novel away from history. We see Vijayan carrying toward this de-historiciz-
ing project in later editions of the novel by removing the obvious political
parallels that existed in the earlier versions between Dharmapuri and post-
colonial India.
The correspondence between the political situations in Dhamapuri and
India however can hardly be overlooked. Indeed informed readers, even non-
Indian readers, find it difficult to ignore the allegorical connection between
the two invoked in the novel. David Selbourne, in an interesting review of the
novel published in Times Literary Supplement (1990), points out how this
mythical extravaganza of humour, scatology, and eroticism presents India
‘as zoo, roaring bestiary or bear garden, not the India of the pietist’s ash-
ram or of nostalgia’s hillstation’ (Selbourne, 1990: 176). In fact, the allegory
remains barely concealed in certain segments of the novel. Look at the fol-
lowing passage, for example:

This was the city they called Shantigrama, the Village of Peace; an
apter re-christening there could not have been for the old capital of the
Feringhee Empire’s freed colony, for it summed up the spirit abroad in
the new nation, its need to improvise selfhood and historical anteced-
ents. As a result the legends of Dharmapuri’s ancient forest dwelling
sages and their paths of peace were resurrected. No other country had
anything similar to resurrect, and Dhamapuri found itself in a pure and
legendary state, with no contender for the spiritual leadership of the
world
(Vijayan 1988b: 15)

That this disgust of the spiritualist boast of the political leadership runs deep
in Vijayan is indicated by a cartoon that he sketched during the time which
states that India should ‘withhold spiritual assistance’ to the U.S. in response
to the report that the latter plans a review of the aid programmes to India
(Vijayan 2006: 68).
While the selfish motive behind the nationalist rhetoric of the ruling elite
is very clearly brought out in the Dharmapuranam passage quoted, the hol-
lowness of its socialist rhetoric is conveyed elsewhere, especially in the pas-
sages that discuss Dharmapuri’s close relations with the Red Tartar Republic
(‘Chuvanna Tartarikkudiyarasu’ in the Malayalam original). The Tartar
 Vijayan the Sceptic Visionary 129

Republic, the novel says, is the former empire of Tsariana, a sprawling ter-
ritory, which the Great Midsummer Revolution turned into a Republic. The
‘infallible dialectical and materialist sorcery’, it is said, is the guiding princi-
ple behind the running of the Republic that claims to be the natural ally of all
sections of the de-colonized world. It is quite transparent from the narration
that the reference here is to India’s friendly relations with the Soviet Union
in the days of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule. Vijayan indeed had reasons
to feel unhappy about the Soviet Union’s strategic support to the Emergency
regime. In spite of his criticism of the suppression of personal freedom in the
Soviet Union and his strong reservations about the official Communist policy
in Eastern Europe, Vijayan must have nursed fond hopes of a redeemed com-
munism to emerge at some phase of future history. That is why in a note
prefixed to the 1988 edition of Dharmapuranam he expresses his excitement
about the newly evolving environment of democracy and openness, of glas-
nost, in the Soviet Union. In that note he states that had the Soviet Union
cared to accommodate the spirit of glasnost a little earlier, in the seventies,
the very form of the novel would have been different (Vijayan 1988a: 23).
He was furious, he says, with the Soviet Union, long considered a natural ally
of the working people, for its collaboration with a dictator and some of this
fury, to be sure, has gone into the text of Dharmapuranam.
The initial readers of Dharmapuranam, more particularly those belonging
to the progressive sections of society, cried the novel down for what, accord-
ing to Vijayan, they thought was ‘its imperialist slant’ (Vijayan 1988b: 8).
But to be fair to Vijayan, one must acknowledge that he has been critical
of Dharmapuri’s covert liaison with the Imperialists as well. It is the White
Confederacy that represents imperialism in Dharmapuranam. Theoretically,
the Confederacy is billed as one of the traditional enemies of Dharmapuri,
but at a practical level, it is the Confederacy that supplies candies to Prajapati
and replenishes the nation’s armoury. Much of the weaponry that is displayed
at the ceremonial monthly parades taken out on the streets of Dharmapuri
bear White Confederacy patents and are obsolete by a century. That is why
scholars from the Confederacy are seen streaming into Dharmapuri to study
ancient military artefacts, the likes of which can be sighted in the armoury of
no other nation in the world. What is allegorically represented here of course
is India’s ambivalent relation with the Western powers, especially with the
United States. In spite of India’s anti-imperialist rhetoric, it depends a great
deal on the imperial powers for an uninterrupted supply of weaponry and
consumer goods. The ruling elite in the novel practices double speak on this
relation, as it does in designating its military budget ‘a budget for Sorrowing
and Persuading’ or its soldiers ‘Persuaders’. The double speak and self-decep-
tion are loud and clear in the following passages:

During the Great Decolonization, the departing Imperialism had

bequeathed costume kits and obsolete weapons to their freed colonies;
there were interminable parades in all the new republics which could
130 O.V. Vijayan

devise no better use for their newfound sovereignties. In Dharmapuri

there was a parade every month. Weapons were taken out of silos and
towed along, the people saw the heraldic emblems and the shine of
metal and rejoiced.
(Vijayan 1988b : 18)

Imperialism had its presence in Shantigrama in the form of the

Confederate trading houses: these fortress-like structures caused
the citizens, as they passed them, to rage and smoulder. However,
the Imperialists had their uses: as many as fourteen members of the
President’s family, sons and sons-in-law, held ceremonial vice-presiden-
cies in these establishments. The common citizens saw these as their
country’s hegemony over Imperialism.
(1988b : 20)

In spite of the excess of eroticism and scatology that the narrative revels in,
Vijayan would like Dharmapuranam to be treated as a philosophical work
that makes an analysis of the perennial conflicts within human history. Live
spontaneously: this seems to be the message that the author hands down to
his readers. Spontaneity of life indeed is an important aspect of the natural
world. Animal and plant species experience life in the most natural and unme-
diated manner. Human beings have lost this naturalness in the progress of
culture. Human experiences are mediated by culture. Culture itself is based
on a kind of knowledge that stays clear of naturalness. Aspects of culture such
as patriotism, class consciousness, and ideological commitment are also forms
of knowledge that alienate the individual from nature. This is what makes the
conflict, in Vijayan’s reckoning, between the natural and the cultural, the
most crucial conflict in human history (1988a: 6–7). It is in such a scheme of
things that the Buddha-like figure of Siddhaartha in Dharmapuranam emerges
as a character who, placing himself firmly on the side of nature, attempts a
spiritual cleansing of the morally corrupt Dharmapuri. This to be sure is the
meaning that the later Vijayan would like to attribute to the ending of the
novel, in as much as his own translation of the closing sentences of his excre-
mental satire can be treated as echoing the authorial intention in this regard:

Then he saw it before him, resplendent and miraculous: a great pipal tree
risen from the moss and the bare stretches of the river bank. Parashara
lifted his gaze to its majestic canopy, and tears streamed down his face.
He kneeled down before the tree, he flung his arms around its trunk.
‘Siddhaartha, my King’, he cried, ‘is this you?’
Each twig and leaf trembled in response; in tide upon tide its deluge
gathered over the uncomprehending Parashara.
‘Speak to me, my King’, Parashara implored.
The tremor of the twigs and leaves ceased and the Great Pipal fell
silent beside the eternal Jaahnavi. Alone beneath the great Plant, the
 Vijayan the Sceptic Visionary 131

warrior sat and sorrowed for the sins of the Beast, he wept disconso-
lately and long. And the weapon, slung over his shoulder, lay quiet, like
a child that had cried itself to sleep
(1988b: 159)

The innovative quality of Dharmapuranam however lies not in the thematic

content of the story, but in the way in which the story has been narrated.
Critics have described the novel variously as Swiftian, Voltairian, Kafkaesque,
and Orwellian in the way in which it deploys language. Scatology and eroti-
cism are used in the novel not for their own sake but as specific techniques
for communicating aspects of reality that cannot be communicated by other
means. It is less of the language of violence than an instance of violence com-
mitted on language. That is why the Malayalam critic K.P. Appan, in his
reading of Dharmapuranam given as an appendix to the novel, lauds Vijayan
for transforming his language into an aesthetic equivalent for the philosophi-
cal insights transmitted by the narrative (1988a: 249). Appan describes the
novel as ‘the graceful strip-show of history.’ David Selbourne contrasts the
boldness with which Vijayan moulds his language for the purpose of politi-
cal satire with the English writer’s inherent timidity in using language in such
contexts and describes the material of Dharmapuranam as ‘dangerous stuff’
that ‘cuts close to the bone’ (Selbourne : 176). Language in this novel is semi-
otically rich and acts as its own vindicating force. As in the case of Khasak,
it is the polyphonic nature of narration that distinguishes Dharmapuranam
from Vijayan’s later novels. This quality of narration is also related to the
writer’s philosophical uncertainty, an uncertainty that expresses itself in the
dialogical nature of his imagination.

Notes
Selbourne, D. 2006. "At the Sign of the Goat," TLS (1990), reprinted in Rajasekharan,
P.K. 2006. O.V. Vijayan: Ormappustakam. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan O.V. 1988a. Dharmapuranam, 4th ed. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan O.V. 1988b. The Saga of Dharmapuri, Trans. Author. New Delhi: Penguin
Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2006. Tragic ldiom, ed. S Ramanathaiyer and N Hudson-Rodd.
Kottayam: D.C. Books.

Source
Raveendran, P.P. 2009. O.V. Vijayan (Makers of Indian Literature Series). New
Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 35–43.
20 The Quest and After
A Reading of The Infinity of Grace
(Gurusagaram)

V. Rajakrishnan

Cartoonist, political commentator, and novelist, O.V. Vijayan (b. 1930)

seems to have come a long way, from the time he startled the Malayalam lit-
erary scene with his trail-blazing work, Khasakkinte Ithihasam (The Legends
of Khasak) in 1968. There was about this novel a deep sense of metaphysical
discomfort which owed more to the author’s private feeling of crisis than
to any passing literary fashion of the day. The hero of this novel, a guilt-
obsessed young man who undertakes a symbolic journey which plunges him
into the night side of existence, turns all questions inward and reduces all
encounters to diseased reflections of his being.
After the writing of this novel, Vijayan went through a series of transforma-
tions. He shared something of the hope and defiance of the resistance move-
ment launched by Jayaprakash Narayan in the early 1970s and subsequently
lived through the collapse of the Janata experiment. Vijayan’s second novel
Dharmapuranam (1985; published in English as The Saga of Dharmapuri
in 1988) was shaped by his confrontation with the ‘Indira epoch’ in Indian
politics and his general critique of the fascist tendencies manifesting in the
third-world countries in the post-colonial era. Dharmapuranam was in the
nature of a scatological recreation of the Indian political scene at the time of
the Emergency, providing some surrealist glimpses into the systematic per-
version of the political process taking place under the guise of democracy.
With his third novel The Infinity of Grace (Gurusagaram), Vijayan seems to
have arrived at a new phase in his artistic development.
The three novels do not form a neat trilogy. Still the interconnections work-
ing through them are obvious enough, and in some measure suggestive of the
organic nature of Vijayan’s evolution. The hero of Khasakkinte Ithihasam,
Ravi, is a quester bereft of answers. (At one point in the novel Ravi reflects on
the vanity of all seeking.) The second novel has at its centre an ‘avatar’ figure
named Siddhaartha, who represents a state of mystical transcendence. The
central character in The Infinity of Grace is one who has found a master. The
‘guru’ cult informs the novel in a seminal way, casting direct allusions back
to the Upanishads and Vedic times. It will not be an exaggeration to state
that the presence of a teacher-cum-godman who is endowed with superior
insights permeates the whole of The Infinity of Grace.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-28
 The Quest and After 133

What distinguishes The Infinity of Grace from the common drift of mod-
ern Malayalam fiction is this high degree of spiritual solace conveyed in it,
which derives its sanction from the ancient Indian habit of learning. There is
very little of the Foucauldian terror of discipline-and-punishment, so deeply
ingrained in the Western tradition, in this learning process. Here the disci-
ple in all humility seeks the help and assistance of the master, and the latter
transmits his wisdom to him, sometimes through unconventional ways. The
Infinity of Grace resounds with the mysterious dialogue – wordless some-
times, expressed in the form of a look, or physical touch – between a ‘guru’
of high spiritual attainments and the restless seeker of a disciple. There is
about this novel a sense of plenitude, resulting from a totally a-logical way of
finding an answer to the riddle of existence, mediated by strange visionaries
who hold the key to an elusive faith. It is doubly significant that the author
has dedicated his work to a godman residing in an ‘ashram’ in the southern
part of Kerala.
It is possible to fault The Infinity of Grace on aesthetic grounds. It lacks
the careful construction of Vijayan’s earlier works. There is something
patchy about this novel, as parts of it read like a rehash of Vijayan’s journal-
istic writings. But it may be noted that the challenge experienced by Vijayan
while writing The Infinity of Grace was not very much different perhaps
from the one which confronted some of the great European novelists of our
century like Hesse and Kazantsakis, that is, how to seek fictional validation
from one’s newly won spiritual insights. But the trouble with him is that he is
unable to curb his tendency to fly off into the sublime manner, which works
into excesses and is out of proportion with the emotional potential of the
realized encounters in the novel.
The thin line of plotting could be traced to the mid-life crisis of Kunjunni,
journalist, brooder, and cuckold. He is estranged from his wife Sivani, who
has an affair with her colleague Pinaki. The two things which keep him
attached to his home are, one, a cat and secondly his daughter Kalyani. We
follow Kunjunni through his odyssey as a war reporter in Calcutta during the
Indo–Pak conflict in 1971. The latter part of the novel contains harrowing
vignettes of the plight of refugees during the Bangladesh war, the continental
dimensions of which are traced back to the time of Partition and the trau-
mas it left behind. Kunjunni is wounded in a bomb blast and hospitalized.
He wakes up from a long coma only to learn that his daughter is dying of
leukaemia. At her daughter’s deathbed, Sivani confronts him with a bitter
truth; Kalyani was born of Pinaki. For Kunjunni this makes little difference.
Over the years, he has grown so attached to the child that he does not wish
to besmirch the memory of her departing soul with any impure thought.
He is in a mood to forget and forgive, and to look upon the whole flux of
the phenomenal world as part of cosmic ‘leela’. The initiation which he has
received under Nirmalananda ‘guru’ has fortified his heart against rancour
and malice. Kunjunni decides to quit his profession and go back to his village
in Kerala. The references to a symbolic water ceremony are repeated at the
134 O.V. Vijayan

end of the novel to suggest the cleansing of his body and spirit. (In fact, the
entire story is narrated in flashbacks, as recalled by Kunjunni after having
returned to the serene environs of his native village).
Into the troubled political climate which provides the backdrop to
Kunjunni’s voyage of self-discovery, the author has drawn a number of topi-
cal references which include the Prague Spring of 1968 and Naxalism. Since
Calcutta provides the main locus of action in the novel, we come across
a number of Bengali characters and Bengali situations, used to revive the
memory of the menacing and charged political atmosphere of this period.
The fate of the revolutionary youth, Thapasachandran, which strikes a
sympathetic chord in the hero’s heart, is etched against this background.
Thapasachandran belongs to a generation which took to armed insurrection
heeding the call of the ‘thunder of spring’ which shook the sleepy Bengali vil-
lages. His arrest and its aftermath provide some reflections on the morality
of terrorism, on the question of ends and means and the relation between the
individual and the group. There is an arresting moment in the novel when
Thapasachandran living in exile in a small hut, is suddenly confronted by
female beauty and erotic desire. There is another incident where an illiter-
ate villager, who is brainwashed by the comrades from the city to set fire to
the house of his cruel landlord, hesitates before his task because he is moved
by the sight of a cow in the cowshed in the latter’s house breast-feeding its
calves! The accumulated suggestion here is that a genuine revolutionary is
defined more by such ‘weaknesses’ and ambivalences than by the urge to kill.
Another interesting figure who surfaces in the early part of the novel is
Volga, a gypsy girl from Czechoslovakia whom Kunjunni accidentally meets
at a newspaper office. Volga, a voluntary exile from her country which had
been turned into a satellite nation of the Soviet block, invokes the memory of
the Prague Spring and the fate that befell the man who heralded it, Alexander
Dubcek. Admittedly Volga emerges more as a motif than a fully grown char-
acter. Through her, the novelist introduces us to the theme of the tragic
collapse of modern-day revolution which leaves its victims stranded and
broken-hearted. Echoing a line of argument which has now become all too
familiar to us, the author points out how the Communist revolution slowly
devoured its own children and degenerated into one of the worst instances of
organized terror in history, its fanaticism matching medieval orthodoxy. The
gypsy girl Volga is also the representative of a free-spirited nomadic tribe,
which lost its independence and self-identity to hegemonic nation-states. It is
one of Vijayan’s favourite themes that the superpowers, which are alike sus-
tained by white man’s expansionist drive, have, divided the world between
themselves. There are smaller nations, tribes, and communities which exist
on the periphery, and the entire ‘third block’, whose interests are threatened
and, who suffer from a progressive loss of political will as the result of this
power game. Vijayan occasionally sounds like the angry prophet of the other
World, calling for the solidarity of the colourless people on the globe to resist
all forms of consumerist propaganda and high-tech imperialism.
 The Quest and After 135

The Bangladesh war provides the nucleus of the political happenings out-
lined in the novel. The author turns this terrible event into an occasion to
pause and reflect over the fratricidal wars fought between India and Pakistan,
and on the pointless horror of all invasions and military triumphs. The novel-
ist juxtaposes the rousing spectacle of the victorious Indian army marching
into the freed territory with the hapless sight of a refugee consoling himself,
or a destitute girl offering her body to strangers. What engages the attention
of the novelist is the essential humanity of the inarticulate masses of peo-
ple in these countries which is undermined by the double-crossing ironies of
history.
There is a vivid scene in the novel where the protagonist tries to picture
the Durga-like image of Indira Gandhi at the time of the war with Pakistan
armed to the hilt, and ready to fight. Now in a sudden switch of narrative
code, she is changed into a homely maiden, smelling of ‘champak’, who lights
up the evening lamp in her ancestral house in Kerala! Kunjunni asks her:
‘Sister, couldn’t you have been happier lighting this lamp? Why did you fire
those bullets?’
It was certainly a daunting task for Vijayan to create a fictional form
which would embody this newly gained sense of spiritual humility. Perhaps
Vijayan did not apply himself fully to this. Instead of a narrative structure
which conceals layers after layers of inner complexity, we have here a story
sequence which is hastily put together, lit by gentle flashes of lyrical beauty.

Source
Originally published in Indian Literature, 146 (November-December, 1991) and
republished in Indian Literature, 226 (March-April, 2005), 90–95.
Vijayan, O.V. 1996. The Infinity of Grace. (Gurusagaram, first published in
Malayalam in 1987). Trans. by the author. New Delhi: Penguin Books India.
Vijayan O.V. 1998. Selected Fiction. Trans. by the author. Gurugram, Haryana:
Penguin Books.
21 The Rite of Expiation for the
Accumulated Guilt
A Reading of O.V. Vijayan’s Thalamurakal
(Generations)

Thomas Mathew (Translated from

Malayalam by K.C. Muraleedharan)

Reading is not a unidirectional, linear experience. As reading proceeds, the

reader happens to come across various points of vantage. From each of such
points of vantage, the reader reconstructs what is read up to that point mak-
ing use of the perspective inevitably afforded by that position and creates
new terrains of experience. The reader senses that the meanings gradually get
denser and tend to direct towards some new connotative possibilities. That
is, the reader is given a subterranean feeling that something more than the
surface meaning and relevance already sensed in the first grasp is in the off-
ing. These remote significations develop into experiences of increased percep-
tion of meaning when reading progresses. Innumerable furrows of meanings
are formed, constantly enriching what is already read. So a creative reading
experience is thus the organized sequence of views from various points of
vantage. Through a sequence in perception, the text may all the same have an
overriding point of view as well. The novelist may compel the reader who has
viewed from various standpoints to return to the authorial point of vantage
and thus underscore that perspective. It is not an overt invitation to review,
but only an indirect persuasion, only that. Viewed from there, all experiences
appear reordered in a new way.

Hong Kong: A Vital Point of View

Thalamurakal (which in Malayalam means ‘generations’) has Hong Kong as
its vital vantage point. This place is referred to at the beginning and end of
the novel. The second chapter has these lines:

Twenty five years later: it is dusk in Hong Kong, people hurry home.
Traffic comes to a standstill. The island city was getting ready to face a
cyclone named Typhoon Angela. Standing by the window of his house
in the seventh floor in Marine Drive, Chandran sent his eyes at the
extensive view rolling out before him. The unchanging grey, moment of
hope. Total stillness …
(Thalamurakal, 1997, 23)

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 The Rite of Expiation for the Accumulated Guilt 137

Chandran and Rosemary were waiting for Angela’s visit. Thirty-fifth chapter
mentions Chandran’s letter to his father and mother detailing Hong Kong
just before he stepped into the embrace of Angela’s wild vortex:

What script is Hong Kong city enacting untiringly through its days and
nights? Lights, sounds, halving snakes alive and watching it die eat-
ing the cut and roast pieces, the black humour of hunger, transgender
dances transcending the extremes of eroticism for the futility beyond.
One will have to believe that these are the values of the century …
(329)

Hong Kong is the backdrop of Chandran and Rosemary’s relationship. The

tone of description tells us that it is more than a mere backdrop, the descrip-
tion itself will be different otherwise. The cyclone is named Angela, doesn’t
the name signify a messenger sent to fulfil god’s will? The novelist posits the
temptation and terror of desire, the distorted values of the century, unleashed
and raging, in a way we should never miss it. We never miss the foul smell
of thick darkness in the dazzling light. Hong Kong becomes vital as the sac-
rificial platform of the sacred marriage also. It is here that he decides to
confront Angela and end his life, believing against reason that the life within
Rosemary would invariably survive. Records are also made accordingly.
Hong Kong has more relevance than a mere place among a set of places in
the novel. Chandran ignores his anxieties of breaching law and merges with
the maddening speed with Rosemary at the wheel. They were responding to
the call of fate from Angela.

Now, Chandran’s anxiety left him. Even he doesn’t know that. A

peaceful triangle instead of anxiety shone in the sky. In Angela’s greyish
whiteness a pure black great triangle … in glory in the Moon’s sky, ris-
ing high. What is this triangle? The simplicity of Creation, Sustenance
and Merger, wooing death …
(340)

It is in the perfection of the simple philosophy that Chandran and Rosemary

shed tears of bliss. The holy sacrifice is fulfilled in the car that has been an
exhortation of absolute movement and in the overwhelming knowledge of
the foetus with the Sudarshana Wheel in disguise as sentinel. Doesn’t the
wheel and foetus suggest the ruthless revenge embodied Ashwathama and the
merciful Krishna who averted the brahmastra (the ultimate weapon) aimed
at Abhimanyu in Uthara’s uterus?

Sacredness of the Sacrificed

The union between the young generation of the Ponmudi clan and the
orphaned victim of Nazism happened in Hong Kong. Though a sprout of
138 O.V. Vijayan

Ponmudi, Velappan’s son Chandran had a proud heritage. Velappan cor-

rected the warlord’s tradition of inflicting pain, humiliating and loot-
ing the vanquished. Velappan remembers that he learned the meaning of
Yudhivikraman from the eyes of the Muslim woman he saved that day. He
redefined treasures as the wealth he would let go when he is old. Velappan
left his job in protest of shooting innocent children. Chandran was the son
of Velappan. Chandran’s mother took over Ponmudi’s heritage of pain and
punishment. Rosemary too had a tradition of this kind.

Rosemary wandered about in the distant terrains of mind. Returning

from the mental Odyssey, Rose Mary asked:
‘Chandran, do you know Hanna Von Dulong?’ ‘Hanna Von Dulong?
Who’s that?’ Rosemary moved around Chandran like Angela and said:
‘Myself’.
‘Von Dulong?’
‘I got it from a piece of paper. My name is Hanna Von Dulong. My
father died before I was born. He was an officer in the German army.
He was not a Nazi. He was asked to shoot a group of Jews by the SS
and they shot him when he disobeyed. He was buried along with the
half-dead Nazis. My mother also died leaving me in the desolate ruins
of war when I was four years old. When I grew up, the title, the tail
piece, felt like a joke and I discarded it in the graveyard of post -war
Germany. I asked myself what name you wanted. The inner voice said
‘Rosemary!’ Then ‘Wagner’. I told my inner world. Wagner’s music
had a crucial role in designing this graveyard. Wagner’s music that has
faltered and lost its harmony must be restored to its virtuous streams’.
(25–26)

She returned from her wanderings in the lands of annual rituals to the dead
with the virtuous tales of exploration for the relics of the ancient people
vanquished in the fight for survival. Chandran carried with him a palm leaf
document and style, which he thought were the most precious of his ances-
tors’ legacy: ‘A cyber highway stunning the human imagination is in the
making but these machines are never a match for the lines on the palm-leaf
document’ (334).
Only the sanctified virtuous deserve to be a sacrificial animal. These lives
attaining sanctity of self from the legends of the violently subdued and the
lost have offered their lives as expiatory sacrifice for the sins inherited and
coded genetically in the human race. Vijayan is interrogating a civilization
and its values through the story of generations of Ponmudi.
The story of Ponmudi is presented in Thalamurakal in the form of descrip-
tions to Chandran by elders in the family, or Chandran’s flashing memories.
It is also conveyed through Chandran’s conversation to Rosemary. Chandran
felt that he carried the burden of the sin that was passed on to him by his
uncles who had gone astray in their pursuit of knowledge. He peers into the
 The Rite of Expiation for the Accumulated Guilt 139

gloom of the barn-house giving way to iniquitous darkness, and imagines the
moving shadows around it as human figures and offers them due places in
the line of ancestors.

The Story of Sin and Curse

Even a bird’s chirp on a sunny day would transport Chandran to a state of

bliss, ‘satchitananda’. Devaki grandma also felt a fraction of this bliss in
moments of affection for him. But, what use? It was not possible to satisfy
the endless curiosity of the impatient Ponmudi mind because the stories she
had to tell had no light and goodness in them. Those dark stories were not
meant for kids. ‘The grandma was cautious to keep those stories out. To
fill those gaps here and there, she would say, this family is accursed, child.
But the story of Ponmudi was the story of sins and curses. It is not merely
the story of an extended family’ (33). ‘Land, barns, cows, women – what
Dharmadeva promised Nachiketa, sources of mundane pleasures. Ponmudi
was overflowing with such resources and knowledge … Deva, I walk the path
of righteousness, mundane things won’t delude me’ (31). Nachiketas was
so resolute, unlike most of the people in the world. The ascetic who wished
Alexander to keep aside and let him bask in the sunshine when Alexander
promised him anything he wished was born to such a tradition. The earth
is brimming with the insatiable successors of those who rushed to grab the
forbidden fruit thinking of it as desirable and savoury and fell to perdition.
Vijayan tells this story of lust and consuming desire with a rigorous sense of
history in Thalamurakal.
I think that the sense of being born in the low-caste that afflicts the pros-
perous patriarchs of Ponmudi should be seen in relation to this sense of his-
tory and universal emotion. The ideology of supremacy whether or not racial
or caste-related carries within it an inhibition to come in the open, a feeling
of being low in some way. The Nazi mind that advocated the Holocaust
upon the Jews, out of a sense of racial purity and its arrogance was intolerant
of the Jewish worldly success. The Nazi intolerance of the Jewish intellectual
and business excellence and their world standard achievements. The Jews
who did not have even a land of their own carried in their imagination and
memories of bygone days a glorious past to be realized in future. The Nazis
frustrated by this resorted to the easy path of violence and genocide. It was
not for nothing that Chandran who wished to atone for the sins of Ponmudi
and Rosemary who wanted to restore the virtuosity of Wagner’s music set
out to sacrifice themselves to the furies of Angela.
‘What do we lack?’ the elders of each generation of Ponmudi asked. This
question constantly comes up as they lack something and know well and
for certain that they lack it. See how the discerning knowledge of the lack
is thrown up. Mundachi Amyar comes for alms and she is seated in the
outer hall. Appu Karanavar fills her begging bowl with the extravaganza of
Ponmudi and asks her: ‘My Lady, what do I lack?’ ‘Hey you Appu! What do
140 O.V. Vijayan

you lack!’ she replies. Her blunt and typically upper caste address ‘Hey, you
Appu’ contains the answer. He thought he could resolve the complex caste
bias by buying her daughter pouring handfuls of coins into the improvised
loose end of her sari. But, he was dissatisfied. Sivakami recites Gayatri man-
tra perfectly. He couldn’t match that perfection, however he tried. That she
witnessed his repeated futile attempts was what worried him more. Waking
her up in the wee hours of the morning without even giving her time to dress
and making her chant Gayatri in a weeping tone and failing to reproduce it
rightly and finally giving up Sanskrit forever, what actually flourished in Appu
Karanavar, vanity of wealth or the feeling of being low in caste? Ponmudi’s
affluence was becoming a means to violate everything sacred in a despicably
egoist and sinful way. Vijayan shows how knowledge flattened ego and afflu-
ence bred sin. Knowledge without wisdom becomes arrogance and what can
affluence without wisdom do but indulge in sin. Concerned about the shape
of the world beyond the solar system and its movements, Galileo turned the
telescope he discovered towards the great skies putting himself to torturous
work. Kittappan acquired an expensive telescope, meant for the search for
truth, but used it for the pursuit of sin. In Ponmudi’s karmic course, learn-
ing and instruments of learning were employed merely to strip the gorgeous.
This marvel of science was turned into a pair of lusty eyes intruding into the
privacy of young beauties frolicking in water in the seclusion and safety of a
remote place. Ponmudi echoed with the maledictions impending for the lust
indulged in without a trace of love. It is not simply the story of an Ambika.
Many Ambikas, many Sivakamis walked that path!
These voyages of blind lust are not without reverses. Madhuras seducing
Theethayis peopled the inner chambers of Ponmudi. ‘Let me try whether the
rust on this weapon can be removed’, (85) those Cheriyappans quip in abun-
dant black humour, after decapitating the secret lovers, trivializing violence
and easing the burden of sin by fantasizing severed heads dripping blood.
Ponmudi’s inner chambers were fated to witness the sleepless nights of
disturbed youth looking for the masculine gender of mistress, simultaneously
cursing the male vanity engaged in wanton revelry elsewhere during the
Moon festival. The stories about concupiscence with transgression of con-
jugal faith, snapping of Mangalsutra and even planting discord in the family
to revengefully terminate the lineage played hide and seek in the whispers of
the corridor.
Countless were the stories. It was the innumerable and accumulated sins
of several generations – the long narrative of degeneration that the insane
affluence acquired. Along with it runs the sub-plot of arrogant learning. The
futile quests start with Krishnan uncle who was troubled by the genuine sor-
row of learning at first but was later frustrated by the vulgarity of brahmin
arrogance and still tried to keep within command all virtues. It culminates in
Appukkaranavar who found self-realization in the pitch darkness of sorcery
and used the resources and spells of sorcery for persistent erotic frenzies with
generations of women. Arrogance continuously eclipses the light of learning.
 The Rite of Expiation for the Accumulated Guilt 141

Vision in this pitch darkness comes at a cost that is fatal. Somewhere in the
wisdom of the palm leaf Chandran keeps, there was a simple line that a sad
experience is penance itself. The dead souls of Ponmudi sensed the impending
calamity. Those who were immersed in the blind desire of sin didn’t. Those
who are to sense it and receive it were just forthcoming. Chamiyarappan was
fortunate that way. He had the goodness to accept the fortunes of suffering.
He was compassionate with love and affection. When tear drops falling on
the burning candle scattered the light, ’you aren’t wearing chappals, are you,
Devaki’ – tenderness of this kind was quite unknown in Ponmudi. A show of
such consideration goes not only to the wife but to the trees in the compound
and the rains as well. ‘To those who sought the meaning of life, everything is
revealed’ – Rosemary’s words to Chandran in its variants and deep meanings
can be located throughout the novel. It is the offspring of such people who
transformed penury into sacred splendour, atoned for the sin that was made
to flourish wilfully all along and handed down the line.
It would be unfair to think that the novel is confined to this single theme,
sin. The resonances of whatever Kerala society has gone through in its three
centuries of transformation make the atmosphere of the novel dense. What
Kerala has learned from the historical changes in the world at large, the
lapses in the process, the desirable aspects in that learning, everything regis-
ters its presence in the novel. Caste, its toxicity on others, and the depth of
such traumatic existence are portrayed with the veracity of history. We find
the striving to overcome caste successful temporarily, but it later turns out to
be futile and ends in distress. The ridiculous situation of old stories growing
to legendary status, together with the sweetness of mutuality in existence and
life, broadens the experiential dimensions of the novel. Thalamurakal may be
interpreted from the locations of each of these motifs. The inevitable incom-
pleteness need not be seen as the limitations of the reading or the critic’s
lapse. The novel does not find its fulfilment in the atonement and the release
of Ponmudi from generations of sin by the pilgrimage of Chandran’s and
Rose Mary’s son, nor does it find its worth in the resonances from history
or social sciences. It is through the spiritual aspect that pervades all these,
the novel fulfils itself. The spiritual, through its suggestive elements makes
Ponmudi’s story the larger narrative of humanity and thereby restores the
sanctity and virtue of the music of humanity.
Vijayan, O.V., 1997. Thalamurakal (Generations). Kottayam: D.C. Books.

Source
Mathew, Thomas M. 1997. “Papapaithrukathinu Prayaschithabali” (Rites of
Expiation for the Accumulated Sins: A Reading of O.V. Vijayan’s Thalamurakal
(Generations), Mathrubhumi Weekly, Dec 7–13, 41–44.
22 From Transgression to Transcendence
A Reading of O.V. Vijayan’s Short Fiction

E. V. Ramakrishnan

Vijayan has published about 120 short stories in 9 volumes, from the 1950s
to the 1990s. His self-translations of stories in English appeared under the
title, After the Hanging and Other Stories in 1989. The division of sto-
ries into four sections, ‘Allegories of Power’, ‘Fantasy and Romance’, ‘The
Stream of Harmony’, and ‘The Diversions’, appears arbitrary and does not
reflect his evolution as a storyteller or his underlying socio-political concerns.
He was an accomplished craftsman who could use irony and satire, parody
and understatement, grotesque realism and fantasy, the absurd and the sur-
real, all with consummate ease as the situation demanded. His best stories
are informed by an awareness of the growing contradictions between man’s
spiritual yearnings and his predatory impulse to control and subjugate. His
dissident sensibility, his distrust of dogmas, and his deep faith in the folk wis-
dom of the unlettered masses inform his short fiction, as a whole.
Most of his short stories are set in rural Kerala, where local myths and
rituals form part of the everyday reality. His immersion in the rural dia-
lects and their layered nuances transforms his stories into meditations on the
complex nature of Kerala modernity. In an early story such as ‘The Pedal
Machine’ Pangi leaves the village with a German missionary and gets con-
verted into Christianity. The evangelists who came to preach in the village
used Malayalam as it is written in the dictionary, which make people laugh:
‘They met the Gospel with heathen laughter, and laughed for days after the
evangelists were gone’ (1998,571). Pangi returns to the village as Patrose
after ten years and sets up a makeshift office dealing in cattle insurance.
When cattle in the village begin dying in an epidemic, the villagers learn
that claiming compensation as promised by Pangi is a lengthy legal process.
Vijayan shows how colonial modernity ensnares the people and leaves them
impoverished. Pangi vanishes with their money and the village is left with its
old gods and rituals. Vijayan’s use of the term, ‘pedal machine’ for the com-
mon bicycle, transforms it into a curious marvel, enabling the voice of the
illiterate villagers to be heard in the narrative voice. Pangi is caught between
his past and the present with no clear identity. His sense of inadequacy before
the white man shows that he will remain on the margins of society with
no clear sense of belonging. This is what colonial modernity does to Indian

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  From Transgression to Transcendence 143

villagers. It denies the villagers their legal rights and reduces them to helpless
victims.
Vijayan’s early stories document Kerala’s encounter with modernity in a
variety of situations. The arrival of modern medicine and modern education
disrupts the traditional community’s social bonds. Their rituals and folklore
were rich with imagination and wonder and had the resources to help them
in times of crisis. In a disenchanted world, the villagers lose their sense of the
sacred. The anti-colonial movements of Asia and Africa were founded on the
freedom of the individual as citizen. Vijayan comments: ‘As Gandhi repeat-
edly said, freedom should widen the potential of each individual, and it is
through this process of maturing that we overcome slavery’ (2005, 248). The
institutions created by modernity which were meant to ensure social justice
and equality turned out to be corrupt. In a short story titled ‘Spring Thunder’
(1998, 644–645) Vijayan presents a scathing critique of the modern bureau-
cratic state which has created a self-perpetuating labyrinthine bureaucracy.
Any attempt to disturb the status quo becomes a punishable offence. He can
see that India has lost its moral compass in its blind pursuit of Western model
of development. The tragedy of Afro-Asian countries is that their independ-
ence did not lead to decolonization of culture and politics. They used educa-
tion, media, and cultural organizations to legitimate the prevailing feudal
attitudes and colonial mindset.
It is those stories where he submits himself to the logic of the storytelling,
without imposing his ideological orientations, that carry the stamp of his
creative imagination. He helps the reader reimagine the world from the per-
spective of those excluded from the mainstream. In a story titled, ‘The Little
Ones’ ( 1998, 612–616) we meet an old man called Nagandi-appan who
roamed around the paddy fields in the evenings with a mud-pot of paddy,
propitiating ‘the little ones’. For years, he had taken care of the farms of the
family. Every evening, the narrator and his sister came to him to listen to his
stories. He spoke of ‘the poltergeists encountered in the fields, the winged
tortoises which dived in and out of streams and tiny serpents who mocked
his faltering steps’ (612). The children knew he spoke the truth. On a couple
of occasions, Nagandi-appan performed rituals to invoke the powers of the
little ones and it cured their mother of rheumatic pain and helped the sister
to pass a difficult test. He spoke of these little ones as if he saw them all the
time. On his deathbed, he asks the narrator, now a grown-up young man, to
go out and look at the sky. In the moonless, starry night outside, he saw an
ethereal sight: ‘In the far segments of the sky appeared gentle luminescences,
soft green and red, glimmering like star dust’ (616). They emerged from the
caverns of space, crossing the vast distances between stars, their flight paths
forming a milky way. Obviously, they were answering a call from their mas-
ter, who was about to relinquish his body. When he returned to his hut to
tell Nagandi-appan what he saw, he was no more there. He had become one
with the world of little ones. People like Nagandi-appan belong to the oral
traditions of storytellers who stand witness to a reality which cannot be fully
144 O.V. Vijayan

comprehended through empirical evidence. In the story ‘The Return’, we

find an old grandfather who leaves all his possessions to creatures like rats,
snakes, and bats around him. He, along with the ancestral house, dissolves
and returns to dust and the soil.
In the story ‘The Sacred Eagle’, the idyllic village, where the coffee shop
run by the benevolent Shivarama Pattar has a benign presence, soon loses
its peace and harmony once a pathological lab begins to function there.
Dakshayani Amma, the pathologist, finds pollution everywhere and wields
power over the entire village. The search for the microbes soon turns into a
hunt against the helpless Shivarama Pattar and his family. His wife suffers
an ignominious death and Shivarama Pattar goes insane. The story ends with
the image of the monstrous bats with red eyes flying in pursuit of the sacred
eagle, which symbolized a sense of the divine harmony for the entire village,
before the advent of the medical lab.
Vijayan tends to see the invasion of modernity in dystopian terms. The
metaphors of violation and disease recur in his stories. He invokes the prin-
ciple of folk religion as a resistance to the violence unleashed by modernity
and its predatory politics. Vijayan grasped the authoritarian impulse behind
the modern nation-state which manifested itself in its constant invocation of
colonial laws. He was opposed to nuclear weapons and capital punishment.
His cartoons stand witness to his strong sense of outrage at the nuclear race
of the Indian sub-continent. Despite crippling poverty and malnourishment,
India and Pakistan spent millions on their war preparedness. In one of his
cartoons, we have a child asking his mother, ‘Ma, what is heavy water?’,
as the caption proclaims, ‘Drinking water ten miles ahead’ (2006, 233). In
another cartoon, we find Indira Gandhi speaking to Abdul Gaffar Khan, who
was known as ‘Frontier Gandhi’, from the top of an armoured tank: ‘The
more we think of the frontier, the less we think of Gandhi’ (63). Gandhian
emphasis on the Indian village and its economy came to be increasingly dis-
cussed in the wake of the growing awareness of the environmental crisis
brought about by big industries and dams the world over. Tropes of disease
and morbidity figure in many of his stories in the wake of the Emergency.
‘The Wart’ is an allegorical representation of the Emergency as a morbid
condition that afflicts the body politic. What appears as a tiny wart on the
chin becomes a monstrous growth acquiring a life of its own, the man getting
reduced to a puny vermin. The cancerous growth becomes a parasite, eating
into his body, reducing the host to a prisoner. The nightmarish narrative has
Kafkan overtones in its depiction of dictatorial power. The overpowering
sense of physical degradation and malignancy the story recounts in detail
points to the decay and breakdown in the basic human values of society. With
unerring accuracy, Vijayan traces the dissolution of the self under the totali-
tarian set-up. The narrator loses his will and his desire, as the wart takes over
his physical functions including his sexual life. Finally, he sees the wart fall
from him, having grown into an elephant. Now it roams round the village,
accepting offerings. The narrator, now reduced to a worm-sized human, says
  From Transgression to Transcendence 145

in the end: ‘The wart had given me my freedom, the wart, my prison warden.
Then like a deluge came the awareness of the living force which fulfilled itself
as much in the toxic microbe, as it did in the seeds of life’ (1998,477). The
rage and anguish which propelled the narrative forward suddenly melt into
an awareness of the larger scheme of things where evil also plays its part in
the evolution of life and history. One is left with a nagging feeling that such
an ending appears forced and far-fetched. This ending suggests that Vijayan
was going through a phase of self-doubt and reflection. His exacting criti-
cal voice, ever present in his cartoons and most of his political essays, loses
its edge in some of these stories which meander into metaphysical domains,
mystifying experiences of terror and trauma.
It was his concern for democracy and its value system that occasioned
some of these stories in the first place. In the long story ‘Oil’, Vijayan shows
how the young children of a village come down with a crippling disease of
paralysis, due to the adulterated oil sold by the local grocer, Ayyan Chettiyar
who also owns an oil press. The people of the village, farmhands and share-
croppers subsisting on uncertain wages, were at the mercy of Chettiyar as he
was the only source of loans in times of need. The villagers tethered to their
tormented existence project a picture of stupor and inertia. The officers who
came to enquire into the case of adulterated oil stayed over to accept the
Chettiyar’s generous hospitality and the villagers knew things would remain
as they are.
In his later years, Vijayan begins to explore the possibilities of compas-
sion and empathy in his stories, particularly in the context of suffering
and silence. ‘After the Hanging’ (‘Kadaltheerath’), one of the finest stories
Vijayan wrote, brings the nation-state and the helpless Indian villager face
to face. Vellayi-appan, living in a remote village of Palakkad, sets out for
the central jail at Kannur to meet his son, Kandunni, a convict on the death
row. Vellayi-appan has never travelled that far and has no idea what his son
is accused of. The entire village mourns the fate of his family, illiterate as
they are, living in extreme poverty and ignorance. The imposing prison has
no mercy for the illiterate villager. For the wardens and the officials, hanging
is a part of their bureaucratic routine. When Vellayi-appan meets Kandunni
after a long wait, they are in no position to speak, overwhelmed as they are
by the enormity of their sorrow. Kandunni’s words, ‘Father, don’t let them
hang me!’ echo with the helplessness of a man who does not know what
crime he has committed to deserve the sentence of death by hanging. They
commune in silence, in their extreme helplessness. The next day morning,
he receives his son’s lifeless body from the guards, ‘like a midwife a baby’
(1998,638). The body is buried unceremoniously, in the outskirts of the city
by the scavengers in the presence of Vellayi-appan. Then he wanders in the
gathering heat to the seashore. This was the first time he saw the sea. He
becomes aware of the bundle of rice his wife had given him, when he set out.
The story ends with these two sentences: ‘He scattered the rice on the sand,
in sacrifice and requiescat. From the crystal reaches of the sunlight, crows
146 O.V. Vijayan

descended on the rice, like incarnate souls of the dead come to receive the
offering’ (638). It was an instinctive act of a grieving father who was not
spared ignominy and humiliation at the most tragic moment of his life. N.S.
Madhavan, a fictionist in Malayalam, has been very critical of the ending
of the above story. He asks: ‘how can a dalit like Vellayi-appan observe the
ritual of rice-offering to the crows, which is a ritual observed by the upper
castes of Kerala?’ Madhavan argues that Vijayan’s fascination with the meta-
physical is part of a larger process of ‘Sanskritization’ which lowers castes
resorted to, in southern states, to acquire status and prestige in the hierarchy
of castes. Sanskritization, as an ‘operating system’, is particularly susceptible
to the ideology of soft Hindutva, which negates the values Vijayan held all
his life. The emotional charge of the story lies in the plight of the illiterate,
old villager standing before the sovereignty of the state which can take life of
his son with absolute impunity. Kandunni is reduced to bare life shorn of all
its human or social attributes. Faced with the loss of his human agency and
subjectivity, Vellayi-appan makes a gesture to reclaim humanity for his son
and himself. The symbolic gesture cannot be interpreted as an elitist caste
practice to assert one’s superior status. What Vellayi-appan, starving for the
second day, asserts is his humanity as he stands before the vast sea, an image
of transcendence.
Vijayan has written erotic stories which celebrate sexuality as a potent
source of renewal. They display a carnivalistic sense of transgressing all
authoritarian laws. Transgression is a means of resisting authority. In a story
titled ‘Feces’, he retells the story of the Ramayana in a manner that questions
its sacred status. It is a political act of defiance, which assumes significance
when individuals lose their sense of power to resist the violence of the state.
Such irreverence becomes a defining feature of his stories like, ‘The Banyan
Tree’, ‘The Spider’, and ‘The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler’. K.P. Appan has
observed that in stories of this kind, Vijayan was bringing out into the open
the forbidden desires of the repressed mind of the modern man (2000, 783).
As the civilized society subjects the individual to controls and subjugation, he
resorts to transgressions to locate himself outside such authoritarian spaces.
In many of his stories such as ‘Airport’, ‘Going Back’, and ‘The Blessing
of the Wild-Fowl’, an ecological critique of the devastation perpetrated by
man in his quest for mastery of the earth’s resources is built into the story. In
‘The Blessing of the Wild-Fowl’, the narrator stops his friend, Unnikrishnan
from hunting down a wild-fowl in the forest. When he returns home, he
finds that the old hen, his only companion at home, has laid eggs as if she
knew of the mercy he has shown to the wild-fowl. In ‘The Airport’, a disused
airport becomes a meeting point between the narrator and an elderly man
who believes that he will meet his son alighting in the airport soon. One day,
he claims that he had seen his son in the airport the other day, but could
not talk with him. To the question, ‘Did that make you sad?’, the old man
replies: ‘It did. But then, who is whose child, whose father? We meet during
this journey, we love and grieve. That is our lot, this journey and this twilight
  From Transgression to Transcendence 147

in which we wait’ (1998,619). The story ends when strangely some soft and
noiseless airplanes alight over the gold-green konna (laburnum) flowers, as in
a dream, in the dying twilight, as the old man had predicted.
Vijayan knew that there is something innate in the human psyche which
fulfils itself through conquest, mastery, and subjugation. Art and imagination
need to grapple with these forces which are subterranean and subversive. In a
story like ‘Parakal’ (The Rocks), he imagines the world after the nuclear war,
where only two people, an Indian, Mrigangamohan, and a Chinese woman,
Tanvan have survived. They choose to end their own lives, as they do not
think it is worth raising a family in a world which has become a heap of
atomic waste.
Vijayan was seized of the larger issues of his times which continue to
haunt us. His stories portray life as it is shaped by the ideologies of the ruling
power structures over the years. The questions of social justice, democratic
rights, human rights, and freedom of opportunity were issues on which he
relentlessly spoke through his columns, cartoons, and short stories. He was a
visionary who subjected the social practices and political organizations of the
post-colonial India to critical scrutiny. He was distressed by the doublespeak
of the politicians and the duplicity of the intellectual elites. He caricatured
their wanton disregard for the fundamental values of a democratic society.
His fiction alerts us to the moral failures of the project of modernity and the
postcolonial nation-states and compels us to introspect and reflect on our
complicity in perpetuating the prevailing impasse in matters of fundamental
significance for the survival of the human race.

Bibliography
Ramanathaiyer, Sundar, Nancy Hudson-Rodd, 2006. The Tragic Idiom: O.V.
Vijayan’s Cartoons and Notes on India. With a Foreword by Bruce Petty.
Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1998 (1999). Selected Fiction. Delhi: Penguin Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2005 (2010). O.V. Vijayante Lekanangal (O.V. Vijayan’s Non-fictional
Prose). Edited by P.K. Rajasekharan. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2000 (2013). O.V. Vijayante Kathakal (The Complete Stories of O.V.
Vijayan). Edited by Asha Menon. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2023. Indraprastam (O.V. Vijayan’s political columns). Compiled and
Edited by P.K.Rajasekharan. Kottayam: D.C. Books.

---0---
Section 4

Vijayan in the Twenty-First

Century


150 O.V. Vijayan

Figure 6 O.V. Vijayan on the Beach. Credit: K.R. Vinayan

23 Vijayan’s Journeys
P. Pavithran (Translated from Malayalam
by K.C. Muraleedharan)

Vijayan and the writers of his generation have been viewed as exponents of
literary modernism. The leading critics of the 1970s in Malayalam attempted
to evaluate these writers using the critical concepts of European modern-
ism. Their critical explorations used the framework of liberal humanism
which emphasized the universality of human condition. The modernist
texts of Malayalam, during this period, were read by placing them in the
reflected light of the French, German, and English works. The generation of
O.V. Vijayan and Anand were known to take well-defined, uncompromis-
ing political positions. But, unfortunately, they were taken up for serious
study mostly by apolitical critics. As a result, they came to be known chiefly
as the interpreters of the absolute, universal human condition, committed
to the aesthetics of language. The Marxist critics failed to cut across this
dominant interpretation and address the political issues modernist writers
like Vijayan and Anand raised. It was in the 1990s when Hindutva forces
came into prominence at the national level that the left critics began to view
Vijayan seriously. They concluded that Vijayan’s works favoured the ideol-
ogy of Hindu cultural nationalism that was gaining momentum. It cannot
be denied that Vijayan’s works, the later ones especially, conveyed an ori-
entalist national consciousness that was text-centric. But they were far from
being justifications for Hindutva. The writers’ pursuit of an agenda of radical
decolonization of culture should not be construed as mere traditionalism or
communalism.
Vijayan’s works up to (and including) Dharmapuranam are mainly cri-
tiques of modernity and the nation-state. The artistic techniques of modern-
ist works succeeded in portraying the fragmentation of identity. Modernist
works, in terms of their techniques, moved away from the integrative
approach of literary works with social commitment. For this reason, works
up to Dharmapuranam were hailed as artistic successes, while later works,
which put forward new values and solutions that contradicted the modern
sensibility, were sidelined. A search for alternatives to the values of colo-
nial modernity which begins in Dharmapuranam gets progressively ampli-
fied in later works, Madhuram Gayathi (Sweet Is the Music) in particular.
This essay primarily examines how the critique of modernity begins with

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-32
152 O.V. Vijayan

Khaskkinte Ithihasam, continues in Dharmapuranam, and develops into an

integral logic finally in Madhuram Gayathi.
Vijayan’s later works which clash with the received novelistic form are
closer to traditional Indian legends and philosophical tracts. This happens
because values replace the society as the protagonist. The later works have a
unique form, one that blends personal memoirs with mythical and puranic
texts. Concepts like ‘father’ and ‘guru’ that integrate memories with the cul-
ture of the classics gain focus in these works. These conceptual categories
which are central to Vijayan’s vision consciously move away from the demo-
cratic character of modern works of art. But a continuity between the earlier
and later works of art can be located at the level of the philosophical quest.
This sense of a continuity is also evaluated in this article.
Before we take up the works of Vijayan, it is necessary to interrogate
the idea that modernism is a monolithic process. What depoliticized the
interpretation of modernist works in Malayalam was this assumption. For
long, it was argued in Kerala that modernization resulted from the impact of
Western capitalism. This was a colonial view. Now it is recognized that the
anti-colonial struggle set the ground for the process of modernization in the
third-world communities like India. Such an approach can radically alter our
perceptions about modernity. Seen from this point of view, the chief sources
of modernization of India, are Gandhism, Marxism, and Ambedkarism. All
the three modes of thought and action inspired Indian villages and instilled
an attitude of resistance in the life of peasant communities. A search for the
native tradition of these three streams if sought philosophically would lead
us back to the cultural foundations of Buddhist thought.
Gandhi modernized Buddhist thought when he viewed the individual
culture as the basis of political culture and transformed non-violence and
satyagraha into potential means of political struggle. He was upholding
Buddhist culture when he interpreted the Bhagvad Gita as a philosophical
rendering of the principle of non-violence. Modernity as seen through the
native thought, afforded a mode of resistance to the third world struggling
against the hegemonic culture of European nationalisms. Buddhist thought
has inspired the Indian Marxist approach towards a materialistic worldview,
providing a critique of the prevailing social system and an alternative model
of society. Indian Marxism laid the foundations of its modern political strug-
gle by transforming the ancient materialist philosophy into the science of
modern social analysis and the liberationist culture of the Buddhist mendi-
cants (bikshu) into proletarian organizations. It is not incidental that many
of the earlier leaders of Indian Communism emerged from various popu-
lar spiritual traditions seeking alternatives to the feudal Hindu society. The
movement from the cosmic soul to the universal solidarity of the proletariat
was the outcome of a radical process of enquiry.
The marginalized castes of India positioned themselves historically against
the caste hierarchy in all domains of life by aligning themselves with the
Buddhist tradition. The long engagement with Buddhist thought in the case
  Vijayan’s Journeys 153

of many leaders of subaltern modernity including Ambedkar and Periyar

E.V. Ramaswami points to the crucial influence of this tradition. Conversion
to Buddhism was mooted in the debates within the Sree Narayana Dharma
Paripalana Yogam (SNDP), set up by the followers of Narayana Guru (1856–
1928) in Kerala. Kumaran Asan (1873–1924), the well-known Malayalam
poet, put forward a Buddha-centred alternative worldview about Indianness.
The colossal Buddhist tree with its huge spread was Asan’s place of refuge for
poets and society from their endless sorrows.
The colonial modernity shaped by capitalism gave rise to the nation-
state. It was an imposition of power from above. A different modernity was
shaped by the working class and subaltern class through people’s struggles.
Political activists followed their party’s dictates, keeping themselves within
their party’s boundaries, but in the case of the writers, these two streams
intermingled. Indian writers in general, as evidenced by Mulk Raj Anand
and Premchand, have been influenced by both Gandhism and Marxism. The
Progressive Literary Movement of Kerala in the 1930s had many followers
who were influenced by both. Eminent Malayalam poets such as Vyloppilli
Sreedhara Menon (1911–1985) and Edassery Govindan Nair (1906–1974)
manifest both the conflict and confluence of Gandhian and Marxian thought.
O.V. Vijayan’s early stories appeared in the 1950s when the writers of
Progressive literary movement were active. Vijayan’s stories reflect the rural
conflicts with the capitalist colonial modernity. The social realities repre-
sented by the progressive writers appear in Vijayan’s early writings too, but
he maps these realities differently. The cold war was intensifying during the
post-Second World War era. The nationalist modernity shaped by the anti-
colonial struggles that followed Gandhian ideas was in crisis. By the early
1950s, the Communist Party had moved away from their radical Calcutta
thesis and was exploring democratic alternatives.
The social criticism of Vijayan’s early stories has several things in com-
mon with the progressive literature movement. But Vijayan’s critique was
not based on the Marxist ideology. It was against the modernization process
in the villages. Spirited resistance to capitalist modernization had its begin-
ning in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. Gandhi criticized the series of modernizations
introduced by the English colonial administration. He viewed the railways,
the judiciary, and modern medicine including doctors as the calamities of
modernity. The Gandhian impact was visible in Vijayan’s early stories.
Two of his early stories ‘Parayoo, Father Gonsalves’ (Tell Us, Father
Gonsalves, 2000: 53–63) and ‘Oru Yuddhathinte Arambham’ (The
Beginning of a Battle, 2000, 64–91) reflect the elements of social realism as
in the writings of progressive writers. In the former story, a priest is being
interrogated by a destitute who steals from the church to feed his desperately
hungry child. One is reminded of similar stories by Ponkunnam Varkey and
Vaikkom Muhammad Basheer. The critique of the church in these works is
to be seen as a response to the collusion of religion with the capitalist forces.
Notable for its narrative excellence, the latter story, ‘The Beginning of the
154 O.V. Vijayan

Battle’, concludes with the exploited peasants marching towards the meeting
place, Chalappara, defying their tragic plight.
How can one interpret Vijayan’s evolution from these early stories of
social commitment to the portrayal of Ravi in The Legends of Khasak, and
the narrative technique of modernist literature? Was it an arbitrary regres-
sion from progressivism? Are the later works of Vijayan apolitical? Seeking
answers to these questions will provide insights into Vijayan’s personal evo-
lution, and also the limitations of the politics and political consciousness of
Kerala society in the past half century.
Vijayan, unlike the progressive writers, does not define human liberation
in terms of struggles between the upper and lower castes/classes or the feu-
dal lords and tenants, on an even social plane. He viewed the class struggle
at a more complex level. A character in the story, ‘The Return’ remarks:
‘Generations fought each other over property. One generation succeeded
another. But none cared for the rights of the earth’ (2013, 528). As Gandhi
learned before, Vijayan too recognized that modern civilization does not lead
to liberation. Gandhi’s perception of modern institutions being opposed to
Swaraj has been crucial in defining the language and sentiments of Vijayan’s
works. He laments in ‘Krishnapparunth’ (The Sacred Eagle, 1998: 593–602)
the loss of privacy of the village when a medical laboratory begins to function
there, for testing blood, urine, and sputum.
Modernity’s conquest of villages is portrayed in the realist mode in many
of his earlier stories. In the later political allegories like ‘Enna’ (Oil), the vil-
lage acquires the symbolic dimensions of the nation. ‘Chavittuvandi’ (Pedal-
Machine, 1998: 571–593) reveals to us the excitement accompanying the
arrival of the first bicycle in the village. Animal insurance comes in its wake
along with cattle death certificate. This is modernity’s invasion into the inte-
riors of a pre-modern village. The people of the village know that printed
letters signify truth and law, though they are illiterate. They were helpless
before the white people. They feel the same helplessness before the bureau-
cracy. Modernization was never problematized in the political writings of
the Left. Vijayan’s works fill this gap with its folk spirituality. The diffuse,
organic, popular spirituality one sees among the working class has its roots in
the Gandhian cultural politics. In the concluding moments of ‘Chavittuvandi’
(Pedal Machine), the village is depicted as suffering from plague. This epi-
demic thwarts the animal insurance scheme.
Progress in Nehruvian times became synonymous with urbanization and
westernization. Writers like Vijayan questioned the view that the middle-
class value system being shaped in the urban spaces was preferable to the
value system of the countryside. The distrust Vijayan shared with other
writers about colonial modernity is not shared by the middle class which
was enchanted by the capitalist value system. With urbanization, desires
were being refashioned to suit the capitalist mode of social relationships.
Accepting the values of modernity meant surrendering to the capitalist
interests.
  Vijayan’s Journeys 155

It has been argued that European modernity privileged the individual while
the third-world modernity was focused on community. The anti-feudal and
anti-colonial movements have created a different type of human being in the
third world. These are reflected in the characterizations in the fictional works
of M.T. Vasudevan Nair and O.V. Vijayan. Some critics have remarked that
Vijayan’s characters have developed from the characters created by M.T.
Vasudevan Nair. This may be true about the class background of their char-
acters. But M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s characters are individualists, concerned
only about their personal development. They show hardly any sense of social
commitment. The political life of the characters Vijayan and other modern-
ist writers have created cannot be seen in the works of Vasudevan Nair. The
alienation and the isolation that the capitalist desires breed within the feudal
society are qualitatively different from the pervasive alienation and isolation
caused by the crisis in the politics of resistance. The left critics who reject the
works of Vijayan and other modernists for openly critiquing the left parties
do not see such threats in the works of M.T. Vasudevan Nair or his contem-
poraries. What is never recognized is that a work that engages in political
critique is always preferable to those which are indifferent to the significance
of political engagement in life and art. The capitalist and individualist values
M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s generation considered as emancipatory are subjected
to critique by Vijayan’s generation of modernist writers.
Indian writers had to engage with modernity at various levels. They had
to address the decline of the values of modernity shaped through anti-colo-
nial struggles. They also had to expose the hegemonic logic of the capitalist
modernity imposed from above through various forms of power structures
on Indian villages and cities. They had to distinguish the hegemonic form of
modernity from the people-friendly modernity. This mission of strengthening
people’s modernity was taken up by the leftist ideology as well. Writers who
were associated with modernism were concerned with the modernity that
was rooted in the people and shaped through anti-colonial movements. They
were also opposed to the institutions of modernity which carried colonial
attitudes.
Madhuram Gayathi (Sweet Is the Music) takes forward the narrative of
the two spores of life, recounted in the Legends of Khasak. They had set out
on an incredible journey on an evening, long before the lizards and dinosaurs.
But the little one who walked away with a vow to never forget her elder sis-
ter, fails to recognize her sister, now turned into a champak tree. This eco-
logical vision, along with the critique of the nation-state in Dharmapuraram,
gets elaborated in Madhuram Gayathi. Siddhaartha who was the principle of
resistance in Dharmapuraram now becomes a more developed nature prin-
ciple in this novel.
The bonding between the girl and her sister, who is now a champak
tree, represents the underlying unity of the human and the plant worlds.
This is transformed in Dharmapuranam into the relation between the white
girl from the developed world and her counterpart in the third world, an
156 O.V. Vijayan

unequal relation between the exploiter and the exploited. The injustice in
evolution gets into history in the form of the binary logic of the developed
and the undeveloped, giving rise to social contradiction. The flora preyed
upon by fauna is the third world preyed upon by the first, in the course
of evolution. This history anchored in the idea of progress is critiqued in
Dharmapuranam. Rumannuaan, the minister of war who has to surrender
his wife to the Prajapati, tells Lavanya, the wife of the frontier soldier, and
the present object of the minister’s wantonness: ‘One wishes one could stop
with the Sacrament … But it does not suffice, O my kitchen maid! One has to
part with one’s woman too. Such is the awesome process of history’ (1998,
203). Later, Lavanya asks him, ‘Were we not taught history is the struggle
of classes? … My lord, if such is the substance of history, let us repudiate
history’. But such thoughts are unthinkable for Rumannuaan. Rumannuaan
justifies history with a big no. ‘Were there no history, what will become of
nations, what will become of frontiers?’ (203).
Buddha gives Lavanya who is weeping over history and God, the promise
of pristine nature with the bliss of trees and rivers, as consolation. The woman
demands the rejection of history but male authority needs history to sustain
itself. Gandhi was one of the first thinkers who found that history and its
thought-processes reinforce patriarchy. When history moved forward from
its pristine tribal phase, it entered a period of division, between the ruling
class and the ruled. The gradual change that happened in history is depicted
by Vijayan, not in the discourse of history, but using metaphors. Marxism
usually relates it to the origin of classes and the surplus value. Vijayan locates
the archaic grammar of this change in the progression from the plant king-
dom to the animal kingdom. Works starting with Dharmapuranam views
this mutation as a mistake in the natural process. The plant world signifies
the common people, and the animal world stands for the logic of the state
that exercises authority over it. A cartoon from the emergency times makes
this evident. An array of questions are shot at some plants: ‘Don’t you want
to be a fish? A reptile? An animal? Not a monkey even?’. The answer is a firm
no, that it is incapable of it. More questions follow about the desire to be
human, progressive, establishing empires, ordering massacres, revolutions,
and counter-revolutions. But the plant quietly praises god for its incapability
to be anything other than itself (1999, 18).
Vijayan’s pro-flora stance may be easily taken for a morphological misun-
derstanding that is unscientific. But it has levels that transcend mere artistic
strategies. The enlightenment logic shaped by the Cartesian thought giving
rise to the modernist perspective justifies the subjection of nature, women,
and blacks by the human world, the male, and the white race, respectively.
The western education imparted to us marked plants and animals in the
binary mode and established the natural authority of the animal species over
nature. Darwin’s theory of evolution furthered the logic and reinforced the
authority of the more evolved over the less evolved. Around the same time
the authority of the historically more developed over the less developed, as in
  Vijayan’s Journeys 157

Hegel was also validated. This was essentially the capitalist logic of colonial-
ism and ruthless exploitation of nature.
The worldview of the third world living in harmony with nature was
entirely different. For the Adivasis who considered trees and plants as divine,
the plant–animal binary was quite unfamiliar. Capitalism that saw trees in
terms of profit taught the third world that trees are inanimate and tree-felling
is quite acceptable. Botany as a discipline was informed by the logic of capi-
talism. The organic intellectuals of the third world had to face a crisis when
caught between these two conflicting worldviews. Jagdish Chandra Bose
couldn’t believe that trees are lifeless. For him, it was a moral issue, besides
a scientific one. If trees are inanimate, they can be felled with impunity.
This great Indian scientist understood the logic of violence implicit in the
Enlightenment modernity, in the early part of the last century. He destablizes
the boundaries between Botany and Zoology that western science proposed.
The Buddha–Gandhi tradition found its expression through Bose.
Horkheimer and Adorno also spoke of the violence of Western enlighten-
ment modernity which finally led to the Holocaust. They concluded that pro-
gress and the scientific discourses underlying them are inherently problematic
if human communities turn out to be predatory in nature, in proportion to
their progress. According to them, the logic of science has reached a stage
where it attributes life to the nation-state, but considers the people as lifeless,
colluding with state terrorism. Vijayan’s critique was directed against the
violence that modernity bred through the creation of binaries such as ani-
mate/inanimate, animal/plant, and state/people. Vijayan dealt with the politi-
cal manifestation of this violence in the novel, in Dharmapuranam.
As a novel, Madhuram Gayathi is situated differently. The novel as a
genre has been considered to be a celebration of individual consciousness.
The dominant Western form of the novel has been complicit with colonial-
ism. It reproduces the exploitative relations for capitalism to thrive. Vijayan
in Madhuram Gayathi rejects the dichotomic concept of the living/non-living
present in the novel form as well as in science, thereby resisting the capital-
ist consciousness underlying the novelistic form. In Madhuram Gayathi, the
narration resembles the symbolic language of puranas, as the modernist lan-
guage of scientific register typical of the novel here moves closer to the mythic
style. The novel form is reconstituted to distance itself from the dominant
cultural artifact of European enlightenment and bring it closer to the eastern
puranic traditions.
Madhuram Gayathi describes the process of modernization in these words:

The scientists of the global north performed miraculous discoveries,

tapped minerals and energy through invention of technology thus
establishing a distinct and incomparable civilization. A matching
philosophical framework to nourish and further its interests was also
created. People worked hard day and night to grab such instruments
and devices. The strain from such pursuits disturbed even sleep. The
158 O.V. Vijayan

enjoyable indolence that followed each possession and the unending

cycles of insatiable desire and greed become the identifiable features
of modern life. Though this amazed the peoples of the Southern hemi-
sphere, they didn’t join this frenzied pursuit
(Madhuram Gayathi, 2022: 61–62)

These observations in Madhuram Gayathi evidently point to the fact that the
North/South corresponds to the first and the third world kind of division.
In the novel, the acute technological development ends up in the creation of
robotic humans. Mrutyunjay and Sumangala are caught within the mechani-
cal existence of the Northern hemisphere. Sukanya is their daughter. The
novel depicts the search for the daughter separated from parents.
The opening and closing chapters of the novel are titled purana. The
nuclear war concludes with a conflagration and explosion that breaks the
earth into the North and South hemispheres. In the nuclear winter and
pitch darkness everything froze to death – everything green, animals, birds,
atoms. The South where real beings lived, their spores hibernated. The
artificial humans were caught in the winter sleep in the North, amidst its
technological excellence. The Guru and disciple in centuries-long medita-
tion opened their eyes. They resumed the meditation, their cells awaken-
ing the dormant seeds. The artificial creatures of the North also wake up.
The moon revolves around the South now, the debris of the artificial satel-
lites revolve around the North. Vijayan ensures the continuity of the theme
and language of the story ‘Parakal’ (Rocks, 2000: 665-672) by this kind of
beginning in the novel. Vijayan’s solitary men and women who address the
universe as a monolith speak and think in absolute expressions and sublime
idiom.
The novel envisages a plant world that is mobile. A mobile fig tree with
divine capabilities, now moving on its roots, its branches transformed into
wings, visits Sukanya who has lost her parents. That tree was saved by her
teacher from the axe of the ignorant Devadatta. The robotic North bom-
bards the South with toxic emissions and the verdure of the fig tree shields
Sukanya’s ailing mother from its radiations. The fig tree with its eight attrib-
utes represents an undivided, potential life form from the infancy of evolution.
This strategic image destabilizes the hegemonic imbalance of power between
the plant and the animal species that enlightenment modernity valourized.
The fig tree problematizes evolution, saying that it was not necessary for the
aquatic fish, terrestrial reptiles, and the winged species of the skies to evolve
into different bio-entities. Parting from one another they took to hunting,
hunting themselves in fact. The most disastrous mistake was the evolutionary
seclusion of flora and fauna. At its zenith, static consciousness defined plants,
while human psyche got alienated from itself and turned mechanical.
Plants surrendered to the temptation for mobility, desired for the locomo-
tor organs and the heat of copulation instead of pollination. Consequently,
they evolved into animals and once it was completed, they returned to shades
  Vijayan’s Journeys 159

of the tree. The immobile tree and the ever-violent axe are constructed as a
binary, like the South and the North hemispheres.
The South is a space of emotions. Instrumental rationality drains emotions
and creates robot-like people of the North. The great machine of modernity
in the North is like Frankenstein who outsmarts its creator. The machine
tries first to outlive its progenitor who relates to others, lives with imperfec-
tions and is compassionate. The progeny of the great machine also prefers to
excel its creator by surpassing the human limitations. The novel traces how
the plant–animal conflict acquires dangerous dimensions as plant–human
and plant–machine confrontations.
The lapses that occur beyond the domains of absolute rationality make
humans organic beings. These lapses that belie rationality are the means for
the forefathers to connect with us. The Greek concept of ‘hamartia’ (mean-
ing, ‘a fatal flaw leading to the downfall of the tragic hero’) is an instance.
The unbroken thread of continuous lapses unites humanity as a race. These
lapses, according to the novelist, enable us to connect with ethnic knowledge
and the part of our forefathers. At one stage the robotic people of the North
realize they have no soul and are led solely by reason. Their desperate cry ech-
oes all over the hemisphere. This section is titled as the Lament of the Cities.
The trees planted by the logic of reason and the animals farmed to satisfy
the appetite of the mechanical people were despondent. That despondency
became the desperate cry of reason. The hue and cry grew into a tempest that
shook the hemisphere. The mechanical beings grieved over the loss of their
soul and heart that leave enough room for mistakes, pain, and even madness.
It was with the help of Mrutyunjayan and Sumangala, captives in the
southern hemisphere, their daughter Sukanya and the fig tree who came in
search of her parents, that the mechanical culture of Northern hemisphere
liberates itself from the unfeeling culture of machines, and regains its organic
character. Then the split hemispheres reclaim unity, the burnt artificial plants
return to their elemental state, completely liberated. The vast human-made
mechanical system shrinks into an infant at Sunanda’s breast happy with its
primordial curiosity in Earth’s rivers, blades of grass, insects, and smells. The
novel concludes with the reversal of evolution and reverse mutation of the
world to plants. Birds evolve back into bunches of fruits hanging down from
trees. Sukanya and the fig tree retrace the evolutionary course into a tree and
creeper couple.
Vijayan appears optimistic in Madhuram Gayathi as in Dharmapuranam
that the undeveloped South would outlive the developed North and ulti-
mately mend the ways of the latter. The novel looks forward to a future when
humans, the species of Homo sapiens representing the animal world, correct
its past mistakes, based on the lessons learnt from the plant world.
The novel as a modern literary form has always looked for alternatives in
the contemporary world. The novel carries the ideology of modernity in its
very structure. But Vijayan goes beyond the form of the novel in his quest for
understanding the crisis of modernity. He uses the novel as a means to invoke
160 O.V. Vijayan

the great time of the mythical narratives. He listens to the organic narratives
that manifest themselves through the plant and animal kingdoms.
In our final analysis, how shall we locate O.V. Vijayan as a novelist? Here,
we need to go beyond the categories such as ‘reactionary’, ‘progressive’, ‘reli-
gious’, ‘secular’, etc. He is not a leftist writer influenced by Marxian ideol-
ogy. Nor is he shaped by the pure logic of rationalism. His works offer a
critique of the nationalist discourse fashioned after the European colonialist
model, rejecting the indigenous productive resources, from the Nehruvian
times onwards. One may notice the traces of Marxian or Ambedkarite influ-
ences in his works. But, in the final analysis, the foundation of Vijayan’s
vision may be located in Buddhism and its reincarnation in Gandhism.
Gandhism in this context has vast dimensions. Besides being an unparal-
leled exponent of anti-colonial ideology, Gandhi has to be seen as a thinker
who put forward an integrated critique of modern civilization. He ques-
tioned the age-old male-centred values of Brahminism, with his feminine
mode of resistance. This is what led to his assassination. Vijayan rejects the
‘Hemingway’ mode of masculinity as an ideal. Vijayan shares the Gandhian
view that both history and the nation-state enforce the logic of masculin-
ity. He felt that the same forces inform the industrial civilization. Colonial
approach put the industrialist above the farmer, in the order of modernity.
History and the nation-state find the industrialist more acceptable. The
industrialist is not a producer, his masculine aura issues from his role as a
capitalist. The farmer partakes of the process of production. A similar atti-
tude can be seen in the way gender roles are understood in modern period.
Both savarna culture and the colonizers saw men as producers and women
as passive consumers.
The Legends of Khasak portrayed the crisis of subject-formation in an
agrarian society transforming itself into industrial culture within colonial
domination. In Ravi’s retreat from the role of a teacher whose assignment
was to reduce the polyphony of the cultural diversity of Khasak to the logic
of the nation-state, and his rejection of Padma’s invitation to the rest-house
built beside the dam over the Malampuzha river, we can discern his rejec-
tion of the masculine models defined by colonial power structures. In the
light of the above discussion, we can conclude that Ravi’s refusal to accept
the invitation to move to the U.S. implies his rejection of modernity rooted
in the regime of machines. Ravi gets soaked in the endless rain of a deluge,
waiting for the coming of an organic world beyond the prevailing order of
modernity. Vijayan’s novels evidence this strong faith in the human yearning
for organic unity of life. He was aware that such a vision will be fulfilled only
after our times, as suggested by the symbolic language of his works.

References
Vijayan, O.V. 1990. (2022). Madhuram Gayathi. (Sweet is the Music). Kottayam:
D.C.Books.
  Vijayan’s Journeys 161

Vijayan, O.V. 1998 . O.V. Vijayan: Selected Fiction. Gurgaon, Haryana: Penguin
Random House, India.
Vijayan, O.V. 1999. Ithiri Nerampokku, Ithiri Darshanam (A Little Fun, A
Little Vision, Collection of Vijayan’s Cartoons done in Malayalam during the
Emergency). Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2000 (2013). O.V.Vijayante Kathakal (The Complete Stories of O.V.
Vijayan in Malayalam). Compiled by Asha Menon. Kottayam: D.C. Books.

Source
Excerpts from: P. Pavithran, Bhoopatam Thalathirikkumbol (As the Globe Is Turned
Upside Down). Kottayam: D.C. Books, 213–273.
24 Vijayan’s Women
Beyond the Deterministic Dogmas

G. Ushakumari (Translated from

Malayalam by E.V. Ramakrishnan)

Vijayan’s characters never speak standard Malayalam. The Malayalam he

used carried the vigour and vibrancy of the Palghat dialects with their tribal
antiquity and subaltern rusticity, stunning the readers of modern Malayalam.
His stories such as ‘Chavittu Vandi’ (‘Pedal Machine’ 1998, 571–592) and
‘Chengannoor Vandi’ (The Train to Chengannoor, 2000, 343-351) tell us
not to surrender life to the precision of deterministic dogmas. His works
prompt us to seek pleasures in the narrative and aesthetic possibilities of
adventure offered by life, organic being, compassion, and recognition. We
are living in an age when the usual ways in which we conceive of religion,
secularism, nation-state, nationalism, identity, gender relations, sexuality,
body, desires, family, and the idea of freedom face challenges. The trans-
formations that have overtaken in the place–time relations and the contents
of common life can destabilize our perceptions of reality. Hence, we can
approach the man–woman relations Vijayan portrays only if we internalize
a new sensitivity and sensibility towards gender relations and sexuality and
recognize the differences beyond the deterministic dogmas. When we think
of Vijayan’s perceptions of women, we are put off by the mechanical and
customary approaches that have become common among Malayalam critics.
My attempt here is to look at Vijayan’s women from a different perspective.
Vijayan’s fictional worlds explore the possibilities of the multi-stranded
human life and history, beyond the deterministic discourses of social real-
ism. Despite the efforts of several critics who have approached him with
analytical rigour and sociological insights, his works do not reveal all their
secrets. A coherent and committed feminist approach based on Indian models
may not be rewarding in interpreting Vijayan. This is because of the unique
visionary and aesthetic elements that inform his works. The feminist initia-
tives in Kerala have taken the activist mode. As a thought system, they have
influenced the way we interpret texts and attitudes. As a movement, femi-
nism cannot claim much of an organizational structure in Kerala. In another
sense, it has the organic power of something unseasonal and unpredictable.
But the academic feminism has not developed here as an extension of such
activism. In today’s world, feminism is not conceived as a rigid set of pre-
determined principles. Intersectional feminism has made inroads into activist
and academic fields. It has developed into a more democratic ideology and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-33
 Vijayan’s Women 163

has moved from a woman-centred bi-polar position towards a multi-pronged

approach towards gendered society in general, rooted in difference. This does
not mean that the victim/victimizer binary has lost its relevance. The new
approach is to deconstruct the hegemonic positions and the constraints and
conditions they impose, moving away from the binaries. We live in an inter-
connected world where woman, man, queer groups, and living beings all of
us function through interdependence. It is an ever-changing world of mutual
relationships and not a vertical world of power relations.
In Khasak, there is the affective environment of companionship and car-
ing which envelopes it in a mist of melancholy. In the story that Mollacka
(the mullah) tells the children, Sayed Miyan Sheikh travels on an old, ailing
horse. To the question, ‘Why an ailing mount, Mollacka?’ the mullah replies,
‘Where is succour for the old and dying except in Allah and his beloved
Sheikh?’ (10). The thousand soldiers waited to nurse the ailing horse. The
people of Khasak trace their origin to those soldiers. This care for the helpless
becomes their ancestral rite.
Abida suffers from disability in her feet. A motherless child, she is seen
always alone. She would sit on the big ridge across the paddies or by the
lotus pond. When Thithi Bi would ask her, ‘Have you no friend, my child?’
she would reply, ‘None, Umma’. Thithi Bi would bless her, ‘The Holy Sheikh
be your companion!’ (1990,64). She looks for a caring voice from everything
around her, from the dragonflies caught by Appu-Kili and from the carpet of
arasu flowers. When she said, ‘Holy Sheikh, are you with me?’, ‘the brook
turned a deeper blue, and there was a rain of flowers’ (1990, 65). Language
here pulsates with the helpless orphan’s innermost feelings. The sorrows of
the Diving Fowl, Kunhamina, Ravi, Abida, and Appu-Kili become parts of
the same affliction.
In an interview, Narendra Prasad conducted with Vijayan, there is a
section, where Vijayan says, ‘I am completely naked, I melt away from all
bonds’. In one of the most touching scenes in Khasak, the Diving Fowl (His
real name is ‘Chukkru Ravuthan’) dives into a well and goes deeper into the
well within the well. Vijayan writes: ‘Chukkru made his way past crystal and
silk, and moved towards the mystery that had lured him all his life’ (Vijayan,
1998, 60). In this journey into a new state, transcending one’s misery, there is
the search for companionship. By measuring Vijayan against the imperatives
of social realism and social commitment, Malayalam critics missed what he
was trying to convey.
Chand-Umma and her children confront extreme helplessness and isola-
tion. They live on the outskirts of the mosque compound, in a hut which
is in disrepair. Her children, Chandu Mutthu and Kunhu Nooru, present
a heart-rending picture of destitution. Chand-Umma and Chandu Mutthu
would pamper the boy, saying ‘Let the boy grow up fast’ (99). In Ravi’s rela-
tion with Chand-Umma there develops a relationship which is a mixture of
tenderness and desire. She does not yield to Ravi’s advances:
Ravi laid a gentle hand over her shoulder.
164 O.V. Vijayan

‘You do not know, Saar …’ she began.

‘Do you know what?’
‘The sorrow of little children’.
(1998, 104)

Ravi had known the sorrow of growing up motherless. He identifies with

the misery of the Chandu-mutthu and Kunhu-Nooru. Holding her close,
Ravi wipes the tears of Chand-Umma, with a deep sense of empathy. It may
appear that Vijayan’s perspectives on women are informed by contradic-
tions. We have mentioned above the difference in approach to the question
of reality and representation, among writers in Kerala. Vijayan’s works sub-
scribe to the vision that truths are many and address the polyphony inherent
in human life and history.
Ravi does not sexually abuse any woman. Some feminists find fault with
Ravi in his treatment of women. Women including Padma, Maimoona, and
Keshi return to him repeatedly, but in none of these unions, there is any sug-
gestion of sexual aggression. Having relations with many women in itself
does not indicate ‘masculinist’ aggression. Maimoona does not confine her
sexuality to a single person. She shares with the land of Khasak, a sense of
sensuous desire. We should remember that Vijayan is scathing in his attack
on the vulgarity of power in Dharmapuranam, where women willingly sur-
render to the sexual demands of the ruling class. Maimoona’s self-willed
flaunting of her sexuality invests her subjectivity with an agency, that makes
her a different woman. Both Narayani Amma, Sivaraman Nair’s wife and
Maimoona break out of the male-centred authority. Padma, on the other
hand, views love and sexuality as a means of founding a nuclear family,
where a woman is devoted to her husband. This shows how Vijayan goes
beyond the essentialist views on women, compared to many other writers of
his times.
Appu-Kili has five mothers. Vijayan elaborates on the care and concern
showered on him. Ravi’s memories of his mother have the same tenor of
attachment. Mutual relations in Khasak are very intimate. Ravi goes to the
town of Palghat to buy medicines for Appu-Kili and others, beyond the call
of his duty. Whether it is the school inspector suffering from headache or
Chand-umma breaking into sobs thinking of her destitute life, Ravi’s ges-
tures of concern are spontaneous. If Ravi had been a predator male, he had
enough chances to find preys in Khasak. Ravi’s behaviour does not conform
to someone who exploits women. The portrayal of women in the modern-
ist Malayalam novels of M. Mukundan, Kakkanadan, etc. is characterized
by the lust and the predatory nature in their protagonists’s relations with
women; this has been projected onto the Vijayan’s treatment of women. The
difference in Vijayan’s treatment of women has not been taken into account.
When critical interpretations are led by the characteristics of a literary move-
ment, individual differences get erased. In all of Vijayan’s works, we come
across a certain tenderness and sensitivity in the treatment of women, that
 Vijayan’s Women 165

does not speak of ‘masculinity’. His choice of words and manner of narra-
tion reflect this attitude. The question remains whether this element has been
sufficiently understood by Malayalam readers. The decentralized narrative
structure of Khasak turns the protagonist into one of the many characters in
the novel. On the other hand, other reputed modernist Malayalam novelists
like Mukundan and Kakkanadan use a unified, protagonist-centred narrative
even when the central characters are set in fragmented emotional contexts.
This makes them ‘male-centred’ narratives.
Ravi comes as a teacher, but he ends up a learner in Khasak. Khasak helps
him unlearn the effects of literacy. The claim ‘Kavara dialect is the greatest of
all languages’ opens his eyes to a new recognition. This informs the manner
in which the conflicts of modernity and gendered social relations are por-
trayed in the novel, directing the characterization and the movement of the
plot. Khasak is the site of chaotic and pre-modern dispersal of a subjugated
society. Nizam Ali to Mollacka are part of this landscape. The mosque, the
horse, Chetali mountains: all these partake of the primeval, primitive, and
feminine elements. What makes Khasak aesthetically distinctive is the reso-
nances of self-liberation that rise from an ‘effeminated’ landscape.
Travel is a recurrent and concrete motif in Vijayan’s works: as sexual
acts, return journeys. In Khasak, there is a retreat from capitalism and the
violence of modernity and development. In one of his cartoons, Vijayan asks
these questions mockingly: ‘Don’t you want to be a man? Don’t you want
to achieve development, found empires, carry out mass murders, stage revo-
lutions and counter-revolutions?’ In a story called ‘Cattle’, a teacher tells
students that cattle are not born, but men begin sprouting horns and become
cattle through formal education, and gradual domestication into the ways of
modern society (2009, 201).
Khasak has an elliptical structure on a horizontal plane. It seeks solace
but ends where it began, with none making any progress (except Sivaraman
Nair, perhaps). Return journeys recur in its structure. Ravi sheds all his bur-
dens and withdraws into the womb of Khasak. This strong desire to return
to the primitive nature becomes a surrender to the feminine land. It is natural
that it ends in mother-worship. The Siddhaartha of Dharmapuranam and
the Kunjunni of Gurusagaram are also engaged in quests for their true selves.
Occasionally, they catch a glimpse of their true being or destiny. In the last
chapter of Khasak, Vijayan writes of a type of fish in Khasak: ‘The fish with a
silver crest and red spots hibernated in the crevices of Chetali for long years,
said the villagers. This was the messenger of the Sheikh, and it swam down in
times of elemental catastrophes. On an evening when the rain let up, bathers
in the brook saw the crested one’ (2001,180). Khasak is about the chain of
beings where nothing is low or high.
Nizam Ali’s characterization is defined by the inner contents of jour-
neys. From an orphan dependent on Mollakka to a beedi worker, convict,
Communist, and trade union leader, he finally becomes a Khazi crossing many
paths. What makes him a traveller is his agitated and restless disposition.
166 O.V. Vijayan

There is a scene towards the end of the school when Nizam Ali meets the
Communist workers who were his former colleagues. Vijayan describes the
scene with a sense of irony, losing none of its undercurrents of politics:

‘Comrade …’
The visitors were promptly corrected, ‘Call me Khazi’.
‘Ah, yes’ the peasant leader said. ‘Our Khazi is no stranger to the situation’
‘Of course not’, the Khazi said.
‘It is a conspiracy’.
‘What doubt is there?’
‘Imperialist forces are at work’, the troll said. ‘We in the peace movement
know it only too well’.
‘Be not afraid!’ said the Khazi, and chanted a spell against imperialism leav-
ing the comrades mildly disconcerted.
(200)

When one of the comrades suggests that Khazi should return to the
Communist movement, the Khazi ends the conversation with another prayer
ending with ‘al fateha’. Despite its irony, the scene makes it clear that there
are meeting points between spirituality and politics.
Spirituality in Khasak has nothing to do with Hindu religion or Hindutva.
Today, anything to do with the spiritual is seen as theological and Hindutva-
centred, because of a strong belief in binaries. Abida, who looks for the
Sheikh’s spirit in her isolated, forlorn state, and Kuttappu who tries to chase
off the spirit who is out to haunt him, by disrobing his back and buttocks,
experience Khasak with a sense of awe. When Ravi listens to the muezzin’s
call, late in the evening, he murmurs to himself, ‘God’, and Vijayan writes:
‘No longer was that harsh or distant’ (1998, 80). In the original Vijayan puts
it more directly, ‘the word sounded neither harsh nor meaningless’ (2001,
89). The spirituality that pervades Khasak is the other of religion and God
as understood through the framework of theology. The female deity of the
Tamarind tree and Sayed Mian Sheikh are part of the same faith. Here the
subaltern and non-Brahminic perspectives of religion empower the people.
They reflect a pre-modern cultural space where the secular-modern attitude,
religious domination of culture, and belief in one God are unknown. The
child in Vijayan’s story, ‘The Length of Lightning’ recognizes the lightning
as the single lesson of God we need to internalize. Dialogues on God con-
tinue in many of his other stories such as ‘The Last Tin-coating’ and ‘On the
Sea-shore.’
Vijayan has extensively written on democracy. No writer in Malayalam
has understood how much anti-democratic and autocratic the state and the
administrative set-up of the nation have become. His stories, articles, and
cartoons are filled with the terror, grief, and despair of bleak and oppressive
times. His desperate battles against these realities turned him into a wreck,
mentally and physically. Themes such as sexuality, belief, spirituality, and
 Vijayan’s Women 167

knowledge, which are considered subjective, were understood and inter-

preted by Vijayan in their social and historical significance. He articulated
them not within the conventional binary structure, but as epiphanies of lived
experiences and perceptions of nuanced variations as revealed by multiple
levels of consciousness.
As P. Pavithran comments in his essay, ‘Vijayan’s Journeys’, Khasak does
not subscribe to a single dominant ideology and hence, it communicates crea-
tive independence that is liberating. The primitive infancy of Appu-Kili who
cannot be described as male or female, human or bird, and the spirits of
Khasak which belong to multiple worlds, all these lie beyond the determin-
istic frames of modernity. Lacan makes a distinction between reality and
the representation of reality. This distinction is important when we look
at Vijayan’s works from the common feminist point of view prevalent in
Malayalam. This is controlled by a hegemonic idea of development and the
‘common sense’ approach to the woman question. It is from this perspective
that most of the interpretations of Vijayan’s treatment of women have been
done. They use preconceived notions about standardized reality to interpret
Vijayan’s writings which are about contingent and ever-changing realities.
This is why he is often seen as anti-woman, in their writings. This creates a
crisis of reading Vijayan. Towards the end of the novel, when the local com-
munist leaders come to meet Ravi, Kanni Moothan, their leader presents a
class analysis of Khasak, by saying ‘there is no national bourgeoisie here’
(1998, 170). To Vijayan’s question, ‘what is that’ he replies: ‘I was speaking
generally. For example, the outcaste women are not allowed to wear blouses
while transplanting the paddy seedlings. Just imagine! Women stooping
bare-breasted–’. To this, Vijayan responds with the remark: ‘I can imagine.
… Must be gorgeous’ (170). This has been cited many times to brand Vijayan
as a male chauvinist. However, another reading of Vijayan’s comment is pos-
sible. He is politically incorrect because he does not equate ‘wearing a blouse’
with ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’. There is an attempt here to move away from
the imposed ‘progressive’ views on masculinity. Lived reality cannot always
be understood with reference to the ideas of political correctness.
If we can read Vijayan’s works in relation to the experiential conflicts
regarding prevailing reality, their artistic riddles unravel themselves. He
questions our common sense views of reality, and in doing so, subjects to
criticism the prevailing conventions of writing and their hegemonic power.
In a short story called, ‘Chemmeen’ (The Shrimp), he uses its intertextual
relation with the famous novel by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai to taunt the
false and affected sensibility that controls the literary field, along with the
bureaucratic power and the Brahminic hegemony. In many other stories, he
directs his irony and satire at the narrow-minded provincial and political
power structures.
In matters of sexual experiences, while dealing with the body and the
sexual unions and in elaborating their sensuous possibilities, his works mani-
fest the presence of a third or fourth gaze about reality. Vijayan’s fiction
168 O.V. Vijayan

accommodates the reality of the spontaneous urges of the organic body to

bond with each other, with all its secretions and slipperiness. Vijayan defies
the boundaries of the prevailing value system in such writing, regardless of
the sanctity of family relations centred on mother, father, and children. He
designates the site of values as a conflict-ridden terrain to reveal the real-
ity. It is his vexed search for the reality behind reality that turns him into a
sceptic who cannot compromise on the normative assumptions and rooted
orthodoxies of the society. In stories such as ‘The Foetus’, ‘The Spider’, ‘The
Banyan Tree’, and ‘The Wart’, in treating the carnal pleasures and orgasmic
heights from a purely physical and demonic plane, his third eye is riveted on
revealing the truth. Both the progressives and the traditionalists will frown at
his depiction of sexual union between three people and bodies which trans-
gress beyond the masculine and the feminine. Pavithran argues that these
stories show the crisis of desires in our times. However, in the adventurous
transgressions of the boundaries of the normative, Vijayan exposes the pre-
tensions of the rhetoric of emancipation. We need to recognize that Vijayan
recovers possibilities in such treatments, by locating the possibilities of agency
in the world of longing and transgressions.
An approach based on new materialism will help us understand Vijayan’s
nuanced treatment of questions of women and belief, rooted in sensuous-
ness and spirituality. New materialism emphasizes the material dimensions
of women’s identity. One can locate the question of belief in God in material-
istic circumstances by deconstructing the transcendental idea of God. God as
experienced reality is more important than a transcendental God. New mate-
rialists say that any thought system that resists hegemonic structures and
shapes a new order of life against them enables women’s liberation. Women’s
liberation is not about the liberation of women alone. It is invested in the
emancipation of all subaltern societies, life forms, and nature as a whole.
Eco-feminist thought addresses the materialistic conditions of women. An
important stage was reached when ecological feminism was seen as essential-
ist in its perspectives on women. Y.T. Vinayaraj comments: ‘New material-
ism at the very outset questions the idea that women embody the vulnerable
aspects of nature, and they represent the role of care-givers for ever’ (80).
While humanism talks of the human capacity to act outside the domain of
the material world, new materialist feminism emphasizes primarily on the
relational and the contingent which manifest themselves in the act of becom-
ing (81). Vijayan’s women characters take shape within the world of inter-
active human existence. Their agency is exemplified variously through the
actions of Maimoona, Narayani, and Padma. There are other characters such
as Kujamina, Abida, and Chand-Umma who dwell in the world of mutual
concern and care, identifying with others and extending hand for others’
protection. As in the case of self-asserting world of desires, the selfless world
of care and concerns also enhance the possibilities of being.
Critics in Malayalam repeatedly refer to the question of guilt while dis-
cussing Vijayan’s treatment of sexuality. This approach is traceable to the
 Vijayan’s Women 169

Euro-centric value systems of modernity. Sexuality and women’s sense of

pleasure are associated with sin and guilt, according to Western views. In the
third-world societies, brought upon colonial modernity, all transactions of
desires invoke a sense of guilt. The colonial logic that confines desires to the
domain of guilt, haunts the progressive writers with a sense of sin. Within
the Muslim social sphere, such sense of sin and guilt associated with physi-
cal desires is not very strong. Such feelings are also absent in the indigenous
societies of non-European countries. In Hinduism, physical desires includ-
ing erotic longing, are seen as seats of sin and guilt. However, there was a
time when a treatise such as Kamasutra could be written, and eroticism was
celebrated openly. The social formation of women’s identity in indigenous
societies has developed and evolved through the history of colonial domina-
tion in the last couple of centuries.
Seen from this perspective, many questions arise: should we examine the
physical desires of Vijayan’s women in the context of masculine aggressive-
ness, or in relation to the feelings of guilt. In a character like Padma, despite
being a modern, ‘liberated’ woman, a sense of ambivalence persists towards
questions of amorous passions and their function in human life. It is in such
situations that new structures of identity turn into prisons of modernity. It is
impossible to define them in relation to a single point of reference. Maimoona’s
sensuous outreach to the world, which moves through many males, cannot
escape the moral conflicts imposed by the same normative prescriptions.
This article has been an attempt to bring out the limitations of evaluating
Vijayan’s works with reference to the prevailing notions of political correct-
ness and recover their emancipatory dimensions that have been marginalized
by the deterministic dogmas of various kinds. When we examine his depic-
tion of intimate sensuousness, through his women characters, using insights
provided by some of the recent theoretical frameworks, we discover the harm
done by the discourse of man-woman relations rooted in modernity, to his
works. Following this argument further, we recognize that Vijayan’s works
destabilize the binaries of sin/merit (‘paap’/‘punya’) and victim/victimizer.
This alerts us to the manner in which his works enact the process of becom-
ing through lived reality. The sensitivity of caring, the quest of endurance,
and the paternal love with a suggestion of femininity, rather than masculine
assertion, all constituted by a fundamental vision of ahimsa, open up paths
to the discovery and recovery of the other. This is how his works become dif-
ferent. They are not centred on one point, but spread out in multi-directions,
open and plural, defying our attempts to define them. They attain greater
meaning, through their capacity to accommodate contingency, contradic-
tions, and ambivalence.

References
Ashraf, K. 2022. Post-Secularism. Kozhikode: I.P.H.Books.
170 O.V. Vijayan

Karthikeyan, K.G. and M.Krishnan Namboothiri, 1994. Khasak Patanangal.

Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Pavithran, P. 2022. Bhoopadam Thalathirikkumbol. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Rajasekharan, P.K. 1994. Pithrughatikaram: O.V. Vijayante Kalayum Darshanavum.
Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Ramakrishnan, E.V. 2020. Aksharavum Aadhunikatayum. Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya
Akademi.
Vijayan, O.V., 1998. Selected Fiction. Delhi: Penguin Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2005. O.V. Vijayante Lekhanangal. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2011 (49th Edition). Khasakkinte Ithihasam. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2000 (2017), O.V. Vijayante Kathakal. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vinayaraj, Y.T. 2021. Navabhoutikathinte Kaalam. Kottayam: Konrad Publications.

Source
Ushakumari, G. 2023. “O.V. Vijayante Pennungal: Nirnayavaadathinappuram”
(Vijayan’s Women: Beyond the Deterministic Dogmas). Anyonyam Quarterly,
June 2023​.p​p. 37–55
25 O.V. Vijayan’s Politics
V.C. Sreejan (Translated from Malayalam
by K.C. Muraleedharan)

Vijayan was a cartoonist, columnist, and novelist who explored the possibili-
ties of these three spheres of creativity to engage with politics. He watched
the political developments of his times closely, made interventions as a keen
observer, and expressed his views as a commentator. A large section of the
Kerala society viewed him as nothing more than a partisan ‘politician’ with
some hidden agenda and vested interests. They took Vijayan the writer as a
propagandist, pushing his political views subtly through the long and short
fiction he wrote. Vijayan was often labelled as an anti-Communist, a CIA
agent, and an author of pro-Hindutva sympathies. He was also portrayed as
an apolitical but objective commentator who responds to any issue from the
ideological standpoints of humanism.
In Kerala where cultural figures come out with loud statements on issues
at large, it is doubtful whether such vocal responses can be considered as
political activity at all. The ideological commitment of the writer manifests
decisively in silent actions, not in statements and speeches disgustingly pomp-
ous and verbose. The latter are usually calculated strategies to push forward
certain personal interests of the speakers. Even the number of speakers in a
discussion hardly makes any difference for most of them usually speak from
pre-decided positions as spokesmen do. The cultural figures relay what the
political outfits and platforms decide. Political parties too are only rarely
honest about their opinions, their spokespersons speak to placate communi-
ties for votes. Personal gains and positions are aimed at by many cultural
activists. Though the political leaders are aware of such tendencies, they do
accommodate or shut their eyes to suit their short-term vested interests.
The dire consequence of such an attitude is that discussions never reveal
the actual state of issues and there is hardly any attempt to resolve them.
Instead, discussions are held to neglect issues and prolong them endlessly
until a final and disastrous resolution is called for. It is not an exaggeration
to say that our national wisdom is not in resolving issues but in ensuring
procrastination. The significance of Vijayan as a political observer and com-
mentator is that he discussed issues that everyone else wished to sweep under
the carpet. Not all issues of course, but several ones that he took up. Again,
not all aspects of these issues but only some of their aspects he discussed and
the solutions he offered, one should admit, were sometimes unrealistic too.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-34
172 O.V. Vijayan

Notwithstanding these limitations, Vijayan was able to throw open some

issues that would never have entered into what Habermasians rapturously
call our public sphere. This was specifically and obviously his significance as
a public intellectual. The organized attacks on him invariably indicate that
his approach to the issues was right and he responded precisely when it was
required.

The Unspoken Side of Communism

Vijayan’s first and foremost response was to issues related to Communism.
The general impression given to Keralites about the Soviet Union and other
Socialist nations was that these states were ideal in all respects, with only
the proverbial paradise as precedent. The beautiful photographs in publica-
tions like Soviet Land reinforced that belief. But some people were whisper-
ing that Soviet Russia had a dark side too. But most of the people believed
the counter-propaganda that the anti-Communist American regime and CIA
were spreading those lies. It was necessary for the people to keep up their
dream of Socialism. Vijayan wrote later that in his youth he was emotional
and romantic. Later he found that there is something in human beings that
resists changes however one tries. In fact, it was something connected with
the primordial urges of the human. An evolution-shy entity seems to oper-
ate in human beings as we enter from pre-historic and historic periods to
contemporary politics. It brings to nought all changes. International issues
like the persecutions during the Stalin regime and the occupation of Slovak
and the Czech lands have had a decisive role in shaping Vijayan’s critique. In
Vijayan’s perception, Communism was not at all a powerful presence in India
and hence a party confined to Bengal and Kerala, he thought, wouldn’t be
able to commit the atrocities that Stalinism was said to have perpetrated. He
was not bothered about who would come to power in Kerala. The chance for
the Communist parties to unite and capture power was very remote accord-
ing to him. If somebody supports such a move, Vijayan observed, it would be
absurd like lending support in the present to any of the warring sides of the
Kurukshetra battle fought and lost a few millenniums ago.
There were some people at least who misunderstood that Vijayan was a
nihilist when he was writing The Legends of Khasak. He was not against
values even remotely. It was only that he opposed some simplistic notions
and philosophies associated with unqualified optimism. During the period he
wrote that novel, he was an exponent of a kind of humanism that embraced
all forms of life. It developed into a strain of holistic spirituality in his
later works and it is during this phase of transition that Vijayan’s critical
engagement with Communism became most confrontational. His spiritual-
ity inspired him to launch the critique. The trouble with such spirituality is
that though it is highly inclusive, it cannot be used to oppose anything. If
you are spiritual, you can never oppose Stalin or Hitler, instead, you will
endeavour to make them a part of the hallowed spiritual sphere. The spiritual
 O.V. Vijayan’s Politics 173

person who strives to be inclusive may perceive the opponents as manifesta-

tions of Brahma or Parameswara or the abstract god. There the differences
and the otherness associated with the binary I/You become irrelevant. If a
spiritually oriented person sees somebody as a rival, that person will be a
materialist in his actions and spiritual in his words. Organized religions and
spiritual establishments have two distinct groups of people, those who speak
and those who practise, may be to resolve the philosophical contradiction
between word and deed. Hakkim Sab in The Infinity of Grace tells the young
pregnant woman, a victim of rape, to let the innocent child growing inside
her be allowed to live and taken care of in the spirit of compassion and ful-
filment (one should say these are, perhaps, Vijayan’s most revolting words).
Where is room for conflict or opposition in spiritual humanism when friend
and foe coalesce into one?
Vijayan has raised many issues with an infant-like innocence. One is of
course, about Israel. He explored why extreme political attitudes are taken
demanding the dissolution and erasure of Israel from existence. He found the
short-term interests of nations at work there also. What will the others think
is a worrying question that may make us go mild in personal issues. It seems
what bothers Vijayan is the question, why this is not happening in the case of
nations. In short, when selfish interests control the central logic in bilateral
policies, worse things may happen.

Communalism
Communalism was indeed another issue that troubled Vijayan deeply. He
knew that the long history of communalism can be traced back to the days
of partition and beyond. He was also conscious of the fact that keeping that
history in memory may worsen the situation further. But he had the convic-
tion that the objective history of communalism unaccompanied by emotions
should be a valuable part of one’s memory. All believers see their own reli-
gion as the best. Most of them sincerely believe that other religions and their
gods are false. Vijayan observes that a prophet’s words like ‘me alone’ and
‘I am the way’ need not be taken literally. How many believers would accept
that there are many ways to god? None to be frank. Liberation should be
looked for in the confluence of all religions despite designating one religion
as the one and only path, Vijayan gently says. One should admit sadly that
this proposition is not pragmatic at all. Training all children from their child-
hood onwards to think in the way Vijayan proposed is one option. If they
start believing in the infallibility of their religion deeply ingrained since child-
hood, it wouldn’t be possible even for god in person to correct them. Human
beings generally do only what they are trained to do. Human brains can be
programmed and conditioned. Once wrongly programmed, there is no way it
can be corrected easily. Learning religious lessons is programming the mind
forever. No question of any change afterwards. There is a Salman Rushdie
character who chases the religious instructor out of the house caning him.
174 O.V. Vijayan

Later he told his enquiring wife that the instructor was teaching their chil-
dren to hate human beings. Rushdie’s portrayal of the holy man is something
that our times long for.
A regular presence of remembrances of the history of communalism is vis-
ible in most of Vijayan’s writings. He had no immediate and easy solutions
to offer for the complex communal issues. But for him it was an easily resolv-
able issue if dealt with a little kindness and compassion and he has stated it
elsewhere too. For tackling communalism, he returns to spiritual human-
ism. But who is so kind and compassionate? To whom should we appeal for
mercy? Who will be compassionate to whom?
Vijayan has constantly reflected on the Kashmir issue. Indeed about the
ethnic conflicts all over the world since the fall of the Soviet Union also.
On one side, the world is becoming a global village through technological
revolution, on the other side, ethnic wars are being waged on all over the
world. Ethnic conflicts produce an impression that the ideas of the postmod-
ern thinkers like Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Virilio
have assumed human form on the earth. The budding thinkers of Kerala
churn out postmodernist interpretations of minority, dalit, and gender issues.
These smokescreen interpretations which take us nowhere, provide neither
answers nor an attitude, look like the ghosts of the human avatars who
wooed postmodernism. Tribes and clans indulge in mutual fights and what
Vijayan sees in these riots is the existential agonies of the tribes trapped in
contemporary conflicts. Vijayan writes that the two immediate commonsen-
sical solutions at hand are quite unacceptable in this case. Nobody is at fault
here. Two idiotic things may be done. First, allow tribal groups who intend
to secede from the nation or, as the second option, prevent them from leav-
ing. Both options are beset with pitfalls. Vijayan reminded us to be kind and
compassionate in handling such situations and thought it would bring good
to all. But this is only wishful thinking, hardly viable. Those who wish to quit
the nation should be allowed to. That would be good. Stop clinging on to the
impractical notion of integrity of the nation for a workable solution. Vijayan
must have been aware of the drastic consequences of such a resolution which
he thought could be alleviated if compassion is prioritized as a middle path.
But in this case, precautions in the form of treaties should be signed to avoid
further divisions. People out of their own volition should not resort to riots.
If those who mislead people frame mutual peace treaties, all such riots would
stop.
Vijayan has only one path to suggest for tackling political issues and
that is compassion which will not be admissible or acceptable as a political
strategy, neither will it be technically possible. Politics becomes unavoidable
when the general moral and ethical codes fail to be compassionate. With
ample compassion, politics may become irrelevant. Since an absence makes
politics irreplaceable, using what is lacking, compassion, the discontents
of politics could not be resolved. Despite this limitation in his arguments,
Vijayan’s thoughts are valuable for he took up for discussion certain issues
 O.V. Vijayan’s Politics 175

that political parties usually only equivocate about or never mention in their
manifestoes.
Vijayan braced himself up to confront all types of communalism. Perhaps,
he may not have spent as much time to criticize the Hindu communalism as
he spent for his critique of the left. Such balancing is not always possible.
Could Zacharia who raised a charge of that sort against Vijayan do that?
No. Vijayan’s spirituality was a consequence, as he himself stated, of his fear
of death, quite subjective. Finding political bias behind Vijayan’s attitude is
quite unfair. What if intellectuals loathe communalism? Who in the world
does not detest communalism? There is no point in proclaiming at the top
of one’s voice that one hates Hindu or Islamic communalism. Intellectuals
should do this: remain silent and let them fight or bring up for open discus-
sion in the public sphere the seemingly harmless but potentially toxic strate-
gies the fanatics devise for whipping up hatred and alienation in the society
endlessly. Open discussion about the arguments of communalist forces for
self-justification may also serve the purpose. The communalists may be
asked to state openly and briefly what they really want. There won’t be any
response sometimes since every communalist pretends to be a secular person.
How can they come up with an answer then? Whitewashing the communal-
ist efforts to divide people using conceptual categories like polyphony and
identity-making may lead to riots, and then crying the wolf will be of no use.
Those among us who have the courage of conviction speak out the facts
that most of the cultural figures dare not at all. Vijayan dared to speak up but
he is no more. Countless unpleasant facts remain to be spoken about. Who
is going to bell the cat?

Source
Sreejan, V.C. 2006. “Vijayante Rashtreeyam” (Vijayan’s Politics), O.V. Vijayan:
Ormappustakam, Ed. P.K.Rajasekharan, Kottayam: D.C. Books, 157–169.
26 The Saga of Dharmapuri in the
Twenty-First Century
Ajay P. Mangat (Translated from
Malayalam by K. Ramachandran)

The romantic reminiscences which The Legends of Khasak evoked in writers

and readers cannot be compared with the responses generated by The Saga
of Dharmapuri. Khasak which showcased a new mode of writing, seductive
in its appeal, turned out to be a pleasant experience. It bred disinterestedness
which laid to rest the evils and ills of life. It kept ethical concerns and politi-
cal consciousness at a safe distance and led the urban readers into the depths
of a blissful forgetfulness by invoking an indolent rusticity. Therefore, even
today, Khasak can be read from beginning to end or backwards with great
nostalgia. It was by promoting nostalgia for a rural past that Vijayan’s first
novel won the hearts of youths.
The Saga of Dharmapuri, on the other hand, had no such romantic expe-
rience to offer. It would not yield to a reading which can evoke nostalgic
memories. The author must have been apprehensive of the reactions of a
conservative society such as that of Kerala, to such a work. Vijayan revised
certain parts of the work and provided long prefaces to new editions. In those
prefaces, the author kept affirming that he had noble intentions in writing
the novel.
This may be the reason why it was argued that The Saga of Dharmapuri
needs to be viewed only as an experiment. Actually, it was no experiment. It
was a genuine literary work, highly accomplished in every aspect. The devel-
opment of Indian politics, its history, and Vijayan’s social role as a writer
made such a work inevitable. The Saga of Dharmapuri was born of the mon-
strous loneliness produced by the modern nation-state. The morbid and rot-
ten state of the civil society and the draconian forms assumed by the political
power emerged from the work to invade the privacy of the individual reader.
In such circumstances, revising the writing was the writer’s attempt to coun-
ter the physical deadness of the work. The author intervened again and again
in his work to avoid the direct representation of history in the contexts of the
story and to reinforce the historicity of the work.
Dharmapuri is located in a period when childhood and nature have dis-
appeared. The sound of the gentle wind that blows through the pristine
childhood is one of the tropes that the author has used in the novel. A dys-
functional childhood will pave the way for self-fragmentation in any indi-
vidual. It is this self-dissolution that paves the way to dictatorship even in a

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-35
 The Saga of Dharmapuri in the Twenty-First Century 177

democracy. Forms of nature manifest as wisdom that imparts the capacity

to overcome this self-dissolution. The voice of the wind or the murmur of a
river in the wilderness is enough to trigger an unusual maturation.
See how Parasharan, the commander-in-chief who runs away from the
battlefield undergoes a process of purification:

In the room where he spent his boyhood, playing with hoppers and
ladybirds, a great boyhood joy returned to Paraashara. In the joy of
play, he plucked off his medals one by one, medals from which the
scent of blood had gone and which were now like the playthings of a
child; he cast them away without hate like a child does his toys. Next he
peeled away his general’s costume and stood naked before the mirror.
(1988b, 28)

The stench of excrement was gone from his body. Gone too was the evil
of war, and he laughed like a stranger. And like that precious find of
his childhood, the caterpillar, he slid over the maids in larval gratitude,
while from outside, once again, the distraught colonel tried to remind
him of the threat from Imperialism.
(28)

This is the scene in which the body is shirking off the evil influences of power
and war and returning to its organic wholesomeness. It is when society rec-
ognizes the resilience and gentleness of the human ethos that it recovers the
natural rhythm of living nature. But, the nation-state sets its identity within
the boundaries drawn by someone else. A nation needs boundaries and sol-
diers who guard them. Without defining an enemy, without waiting for an
enemy, one cannot be a citizen. Dharmapuri needs an enemy. Prajapathi says
that it should be an enemy who understands things and cooperates. Vijayan
is reiterating the absurdity and ludicrousness involved in the process of turn-
ing a human being into a patriot and a citizen by the nation-state. The third
world’s love of war is the legacy of colonial rule. But, demonstrations of war,
which are expressions of power are between the rusty equipment rejected by
the first world. What else can this rusted nation do other than revelling them-
selves in the excreta? Vijayan describes the human condition in Dharmapuri
as the ‘darkness of ignorance’. This is the social condition of modern nation-
states; it is not the unique experience of a single country. That was why
Vijayan was unwilling to confine Dharmapuranam only to India’s political
history.
Society sinks into darkness when the light of knowledge is lost and blind-
ness affects every individual. One can recall in this context several similari-
ties this work has to Jose Saramago’s famous novel Blindness. Saramago
also creates an atmosphere similar to that of The Saga of Dharmapuri. Both
the books proclaim the decay of the human ethos. Saramago’s idea is that
humankind which accepts dictatorship and war carries one’s own blindness
178 O.V. Vijayan

within. No one can prevent or cure such a blindness. This sentence reveals
the recognition of the depth of the loss by a character in Saramago’s book:
‘If at all I regain my vision, I will look deeply into the eyes of each man as
though I am looking into his soul’. Once the people of Dharmapuri lose the
curiosity to look into the soul’s light of others through the eyes, they turn
into worshippers of faeces and filth.
What is the objective of writing the work The Saga of Dharmapuri’? The
phase of Emergency is now distant past; it has been reduced to a histori-
cal memory. Babri Masjid was demolished. Several hundreds of people have
been burnt to death. If all these vanish into the pages of history, why should
there be literature?
Ultimately this is a work of fiction. Fiction can transcend the ineffective-
ness and immobility of history. Therefore, it is the kitchen maid Lavanya
who reveals the meaning of Dharmapurana. This work can be said to be her
story. She is the kitchen maid of the Minister. Her husband is in prison as he
ran away from the army. Her son is afflicted by the pain of illness. On one
occasion she asks the minister to abandon history. The minister replies:

‘No!’, Rumannuaan said, ‘Were there no history, what will become of

nations, and without nations what will become of frontiers, and with-
out frontiers where will your Persuader-husband stand guard?’
(1988b, 33)

Everything is in it – history, nation, frontiers. These three are the liabilities

of modernity. Nation and power grow, clinging to these. Who will imagine a
nationless person? Dharmapuranam is a book that rejects the liabilities of a
nation. Vijayan tried to imagine a utopia of a nationless experience by mov-
ing away from the deceptive desire for frontiers.
It was to escape from the unbearable burden of frontiers that Siddhaartha
left home. Siddhaartha’s aim is an empire without borders. He tells everyone
that he is a king. Whose king is he? This is an important question. Because,
even after quitting royal power, he does not relinquish his status as king.
Distaste for the deceptions of democracy was part of O.V.Vijayan’s vision.
The hero who continues as king even after giving up power over the country
reminds us of the model of Plato’s philosopher king. But, the Siddhaartha of
Dharmapuranam is the Bodhisathwa who is Jyothirdwija, the king of those
who have gained illumination through knowledge.
The setting sun, as it sinks into the sea spreads on the ocean sur-
face, in golden colour. Nietzsche’s Zarasthushtra wanted to disappear
among the humans, as the sun dissolves in the sea. What Siddhaartha in
Dharmapuranam does is the very same thing. This Siddhaartha combines
the prophet’s mercy with the king’s power. Siddhaartha’s female companion
is Lavanya who rejected history and the state. Siddhaartha gets illuminated
from the love of such an enlightened person.The dictatorial state is scared of
the power of sexuality that cannot be subjected to rape or prostitution. It is
 The Saga of Dharmapuri in the Twenty-First Century 179

not just a coincidence that sex was regulated by strict authority in the rule of
Joseph Stalin, Hitler and Khomeini. Power cannot bear a boundless world.
Awakening, in Dharmapuri manifests through the immense joy of the body.

Quietly Laavanya undid her garments, and when she had put them all
away, she said, ‘Look on me, Siddhaartha!’
Siddhaartha rose over her, his legs like stupas; behind him spread
the dark foliage of the kuvala tree and behind it the hood of the night,
outspread and serpent-blue. Soon Lavanya was still, spent with the lov-
ing, and a great joy in her spirit.
‘Merciful King’, she said, ‘you healed my son, and now you have
healed me.’
‘The river and the trees and the sky healed us’, Siddhaartha said.
‘May rivers no longer divide peoples, may bodies fulfil bodies’
(1988a, 82)

This scene in Dharmapuranam is the declaration of the larger political desire

of that work. It is also the meeting ground of politics, philosophy and imagi-
nation. What Lavanya says is ‘Look on me!’. This seeing, freed from the
darkness of ignorance, is a moment in which the human condition is noble.
On the other hand, free body and blowing breeze did not do away with
boundaries. Thousands of bodies weeping within with lust for and separa-
tion from loved ones stood on guard on the frontiers of each country. Their
homes fumed along as huge camps of discontent. At least a few who stand on
guard at the frontiers happen to ask:

What are we guarding? What? Palaces where courtesans reside? Or, this
mountain range? Ghrini was disturbed by the arrogance and foolish-
ness of guarding that vast mountain range. For whom is this guarding?
That question seeped into Ghrini’s inner self. Ghrini heard someone
laughing, as though an answer to that. That laughter rippled on the
mountainside as a lake of micro-waters. The movement and the dance
of those ripples filled everywhere. Through them the king’s prayers
were uttered: Let Rivers and mountains be no frontiers to anything.
Let bodies relieve bodies. … In the brightening sunlight Ghrini stripped
and threw away his slave garments one by one and stood immersed in
the vision of his own body (1988a, 86).

This is the scene in which soldiers give up their guns; a scene in which man
is liberated from the rust of weapons into the freshness of bodies. It is not
difficult to read this part as an assertion of anti-war attitude. The nakedness
of the soldier without weapons recurs as a central metaphor in Dharmapuri.
This contrasts with the filthy, degraded nakedness of Prajapathi. Body here
is the manifestation of human nature and instinct to resist rape and dictator-
ship. The soldiers wanted their bodies back and liberation from lust.
180 O.V. Vijayan

A similar philosopher-king or an enlightened woman does not figure in

Saramago’s Blindness. The temptation of metaphysics does not touch that
work. But Saramago also asserts the victory of the values of empathy and
mercy over blindness.
The cultural orthodoxy constructed by the left tradition in Kerala did not
recognize the possibilities of a human condition devoid of nationality and
history. The philosophical imaginings of the Hindu-Buddhist tradition and
the disinclination towards modern political ideology tempted many people
to confine Dharmapuri to the treatment of the Emergency. What they took
from Dharmapuri is only the ruthless obscenity in it. They lost their way in
the filth and felt nauseated.
Secularism and democratic rights which we upheld with great excitement
25 years ago no more inspire us today. Confronted with the multi-faceted
power of international civilization, the democratic state and politicized civil
society have become hollow concepts.
Is there any mission left for literature? Vijayan always plumbed his depths
to extract the truth of life. He has often admitted that he felt himself stupid
in front of the contemporary sense of justice. We know that the Legends of
Khasak will continue to exist as quotations. What shall we do with The Saga
of Dharmapuri? When the heroes of the Emergency period unite to demolish
a mosque and to prepare for genocide, a work with its corrections and revi-
sions is facing a new century. What will The Saga of Dharmapuri give a new
reader in this century? How will the book be remembered? Today we don’t
even have the confidence or hope of the arrival of a prophet or a visionary
through the winds of wilderness and suburbs of twilight. When the arrogance
of nationalism gives rise to new centres of powers and divisions in society,
The Saga of Dharmapuri, as a book that has identified the stupidities and
illusions of nationalism and frontiers, will be a text for the present society
to return to and learn from. This work has the necessary aesthetic depth and
spiritual strength to confront the challenges of a climate of hate.
Note: All translations from the Malayalam original, identified in the text as
1988a, are by the present author. The English translation of Dharmapuranam,
titled The Saga of Dharmapuri, done by O.V.Vijayan is identified in the text
as 1988b.

Source
Mangat, Ajay. P. 2005. “Ini Dharmapuranam Engane Vaayikkum” (The Saga of
Dharmapuri in the Twenty-First Century). Madhyam Vaarika, 15 April, pp.40–43.
Vijayan, O.V. 1988a. Dharmapuranam. Kottayam: D.C.Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1988b. The Saga of Dharmapuri. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
27 Thalamurakal (Generations)
The Caste System as Seen through the
Cracked Mirror of the Present

E.V. Ramakrishnan

In each of his novels, O.V. Vijayan focuses on an area of experience that

is different. Gurusagaram (The Infinity of Grace, 1987) and Pravachakante
Vazhi (The Prophet’s Way, 1993), set in the metropolitan cities, have little
in common with the densely layered inwardness of Khasakkinte Ithihasam
(1969). Dharmapuranam (1988), a political novel that captured the trau-
mas and terrors of a totalitarian state, and Madhuram Gayathi (1990), a
pioneering experiment in eco-fiction, are vastly different from each other in
the tenor and tone of their treatment of human destiny, though both can
be read as allegories of power. Thalamurakal (Generations, 1997), his last
novel, returns to the setting of his childhood, to the labyrinthine history of
his extended family from Palghat. The central character of Chamiyarappan is
modelled on his maternal grandfather, Chami, who had mobilized the mem-
bers of the ‘untouchable’ castes in the 1920s, to fight for social justice and
equality against considerable odds. This novel has not received the critical
attention it deserves in Malayalam for various reasons. Apart from the fact
that Vijayan came to be typecast as a novelist of metaphysical inclination
after his middle phase, the critics failed to notice Vijayan’s complex represen-
tation of the psychopathology of the caste system in Malabar (north Kerala)
presented in the novel.
The House of Ponmudi is now in decline, after achieving the heights of
wealth and power. They belong to the Ezhava caste, considered ‘avarna’ in
the caste hierarchy. Chamiyarappan, having lost all his ancestral property in
litigation, is a shadow of his former fighting self. His grandson, Chandran,
an arms dealer in Hong Kong, treasures the tales about his forefathers heard
from grandparents. We return to the ignoble and vicious past of the family
through Chandran’s memories which meander through the strange ways in
which the caste question came to haunt the family. Chandran appears to be
the alter-ego of the author himself.
Despite their infinite wealth and power, the patriarchs of the Ponmudi fam-
ily, generation after generation, were haunted by a deep sense of deficiency
in their identities. Vijayan writes: ‘Paddy fields, barns, cattle and women: the
wealth Dharmadeva had promised to Nachiketas was made up of these. The
Ponmudi house overflowed with all these and also learning. Still, the patri-
arch of each generation kept asking, what is it that we lack?’ (Vijayan 1997,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-36
182 O.V. Vijayan

31). Each one of them was given to futile and disastrous quests. Krishnan, one
of Chamiyarappan’s great grandfathers, took to the study of Sanskrit from
Chathunni Vaidyar, a learned member of the lower caste. He travelled to
Varanasi, wearing a borrowed sacred thread, to become Krishnan Somayaji.
However, the knowledge he had acquired did not assuage his deep-rooted
sense of inadequacy. He threw Manusmrithi into the waters of the Ganga
and drowned himself in the sacred river. Another forefather, Appukaranavar
brought home a Brahmin woman as mistress, to learn gayatri mantra from
her. He would force her to recite it in the middle of the night to show his
absolute authority over her. Each time he tried to imitate her, he felt the
shame of being an outsider to the sacred language. He took refuge in sorcery
and black magic. Pangelappan, another patriarch, orders his serf to murder
a Nair landlord because he had treated his niece as an untouchable, forcing
her to move away from his path. Kittappan purchased a Brahmin woman,
Ambika, who had to leave behind her husband and children. The children
born to his wives became sworn enemies of each other, one taking the life of
the other. Cheriyappan beheaded his wife and a young serf, Theethayi whose
only crime was to have brushed aside a strand of straw from her hair. None
of them lived in peace and spent their later lives in a haze of regret and mad-
ness. Ignatius Absalom, a senior district administrator of Palghat, once took
Chamiyarappan to a well near an abandoned barn belonging to a branch of
his family and showed him a boxful of children’s skulls. This was how the
patriarchs of the joint family system enforced ‘family planning’ to perpetuate
their ownership of property. The wealth of the landed aristocracy was mired
in blood.
The spectral presence of Kandath Nair, whose disembodied head flies
about in the sky, prophesying doom, adds a touch of magic realism to the
narrative. He presides over a meeting of the family ghosts to announce to
them the impending decline of the family: ‘In Ponmudi knowledge has turned
into arrogance, and wealth into sin. This way lies the doom’ (47). Vijayan
shows how deep were the psychological scars left by the stigma and shame
of the caste discrimination. The guilt and violence besiege their selves, trans-
forming them into their own worst enemies. The worst thing the caste sys-
tem did was to rob them of their self-worth and destroy their capacity for
self-introspection. The banality of evil is a reality in the caste system where
violence is routinized. Thalamurakal is a searing indictment of the legacy of
the psychopathology of the caste system. The victim and the victimizer never
recognized each other because they never saw each other; they confronted
only their distorted images seen through the caste’s cracked mirror.
The story of Gopalan, the talented nephew of Chamiyarappan, brings
out the parallels between casteism and racism. He goes to England to com-
plete his advanced studies in Engineering from Glasgow. Instead of returning
to his ancestral village, he goes to London. Vijayan writes: ‘Gopalan was
haunted by his private sorrow. Wherever he turns he confronted the glare of
the empire where the sun never sets. Where will he hide? He will remain an
 Thalamurakal (Generations) 183

untouchable wherever he goes’ (42). He converts to Islam and becomes Imtiaz

Hussain. He goes to Berlin where Jessica Bloom, a French Jew becomes his
companion. Trapped in Nazi Germany, their attempts to flee to Paris fail.
Gopalan could have escaped from the clutches of the Nazis, if he was willing
to denounce his Jewish wife. He refused to do so. His father, a mental wreck
who never stirs out during the day, complains to Chamiyarappan that he
hears the wails of his son from the gas chambers.
Chamiyarappan is suspended between many lives. He was beaten badly
by the thugs of upper caste when he led a march of the members of the lower
castes for the right to use the public road near a temple. When he gained con-
sciousness, he converted himself to Christianity. His new name, Theodore,
becomes another burden he carries, as he never identified with Christian
belief. Years later, he confesses to a longtime friend: ‘I understand the truth
behind the sense of deficiency that always haunted us. We observe lavish ritu-
als for the dead, but in our offering there is no love or affection for others’
(101). The word he uses in Malayalam is ‘nenchalivu’ which literally means,
‘a melting of the heart’. Chamiyarappan confesses that he has never felt any
love for his own son. This incapacity to identify with others or show affec-
tion runs through the Ponmudi family. It is their false sense of ‘masculinity’
that cripples their minds. The victims of the family’s authoritarian ways were
always women and the servants from the lower castes. Chathunni Vaidyar,
known for his wisdom, remarks: ‘Each medicine has its relevance, but above
all is the human touch (which can cure diseases)! The savarna physicians will
never practice this’ (15). He adds that Christ never felt any revulsion when
he touched those who needed his help. On the lips of the Brahmins the verses
of the Ayurvedic text, resound as empty sounds, in the absence of empathy
for the helpless.
Compassion and companionship are values the patriarchs of the Ponmudi
house could never understand. In one of his finest poems titled, ‘Anukampa
Dasakam’ (Ten Verses on Empathy), Narayana Guru wrote: ‘Grace, love,
empathy … should be the guiding star of life … He alone lives who loves’
(2022, 19). Narayana Guru, the poet-philosopher who set the social agenda
of Kerala Renaissance at the turn of the twentieth century understood how
the caste system dehumanizes the entire society. In one of the temples he
established, he consecrated a mirror in the place of the deity. It was a meta-
phorical way of asking people to look into their own selves.
Vijayan’s novel is littered with a trail of damaged lives from his family’s
past, tracing the vortex of violence to the deep-rooted alienation and aggres-
sion built into the caste system. Vijayan unravels the dark underside of caste
as an institution and the way it destroys the finer elements of one’s sensibility.
The recurring motif of madness in the novel is a pointer to the dissolution of
the social bonds that reduces individuals to demonic figures. Chamiyarappan,
despite being a rationalist, failed to grasp the subterranean ways in which
caste shapes one’s everyday lives. Once, in the dead of night, a few children
from the neighbourhood had sought his help, as their father was dying. It
184 O.V. Vijayan

was a stormy night with fierce flashes of lightning. Chamiyarappan asked the
children to wait outside and went in to get a torch. By the time he came out,
the lightning had struck with such ferocity that only ashes remained where
the children stood shivering in the rain. He could never pardon himself for
not asking the children to come inside. He could never mentor his son, and
he lost his talented nephew to the gas chambers of Europe. Chamiyarappan
tells his wife, ‘I carry the burden of generations on me. From the time of
Uncle Krishnan, our forefathers and their descendants indulged in wanton
feuds and were consumed by darkness (of their own making)’ (258). Finally,
Chamiyarappan, the rationalist who never deviated from the path of right
conduct, and squandered his wealth to help the poor, could not escape the
curse of his forefathers: he loses his sanity and withdraws into silence and
stupor.
The themes of alienation and aggression are intricately related to humili-
ation and self-respect in the history of caste discrimination. Two episodes in
the novel illustrate the strange forms it can take. Chamiyarappan approaches
the Municipal Chairman with a request that a lamp-post be erected in mem-
ory of Ratnavelu, an untouchable ICS officer who had been the collector of
Palghat. Ratnavelu once hosted a dinner for two subordinate officers and
their wives, who were all British. During the dinner, one of the women joked,
‘Four cranes and a crow’. After the dinner, Ratnavelu saw off his guests,
retired to his bedroom, and shot himself. Chamiyarappan says: ‘This is the
story of struggle of the entire untouchable castes’ (55). The other episode
concerns Velappan who never forgets the humiliation he suffered as a child
when the upper caste owner of the local tea shop asked him to wash the tea
cup after taking tea. Many years later, he returns there as Subedar Major
of Malabar Special Police and orders tea. When the shop owner asks him
to wash the cup, he breaks the cup, slaps him on the face, and walks out.
Vijayan understands that the caste question is psycho-pathological and can-
not be understood in terms of the discourse of rights and resistance alone.
Thalamurakal weaves into its narrative, images and fantasies that rise from
the collective unconscious of a society.
While analysing the complex psychology of racism in the West, Frantz
Fanon wrote: ‘The neurotic structure of an individual is simply the elabora-
tion, the formation, the eruption within the ego, of conflictual clusters arising
in part out of the environment and in part out of the purely personal way
in which that individual reacts to these influences’ (1967, 59). Casteism and
racism give rise to formative patterns of aggression and alienation which
get progressively entangled in the desires and demands of the unconscious.
Vijayan’s novel addresses this repressed domain of drives which repeatedly
erupt into inhuman acts of violence. The inability to recognize and relate to
the other is what occasions the mindless acts of violence from generation to
generation. The only way to exorcize this burden of guilt and sin is to recover
the hidden sources of humanity within oneself. When a society is caught in
such a spiral of violence, progressively giving into self-destructive passions, it
 Thalamurakal (Generations) 185

can be saved only through collective social movements or a massive political

upheaval (like the ‘revolutions’ of the past). Vijayan raises the larger ques-
tion of whether the Kerala Renaissance could exorcize the ghosts of the caste
system from its collective unconscious. The project of modernity in Kerala
has had a chequered trajectory.
The missionary schools in Kerala enabled the members of the lower caste to
access western education and acquire mobility. Once they entered government
jobs, the hierarchies of caste began to lose their primacy. Velappan remarks
that ‘the Malabar Special Police was the country’s national liberation move-
ment’. Chandran understands the truth of this statement much later in life
and writes to his father that ‘like MSP, English too has become a tool of our
nationalist movement’ (340). Sanskrit could not become the language of lib-
eration for the patriarchs of Ponmudi, despite their desperate efforts, because
it was implicated in the history they were trying to move out of. Chandran
tells Rosemary that Manusmrithi is the Indian Mein Kampf. As the language
of command, Sanskrit spoke from the unattainable heights of sublimity.
Sanskritization, as a cultural phenomenon, is an attempt to erase one’s roots.
The patriarchs of Ponmudi could never make peace with it because their lives
were lived in the dialects of Malayalam which were marked with stigmas
and prohibitions. The very first chapter of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White
Masks, is, ‘The Negro and Language’. Fanon writes: ‘By calling on humanity,
on the belief in dignity, on love, on charity, it would be easy to prove, or win
the admission, that that the black is the equal of the white. But my purpose is
quite different: what I want to do is help the black man to free himself of the
arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment’
(18). Sanskritization often flounders on the pulls of the ‘arsenal of complexes’
produced by Sanskrit. When Sanskrit is replaced by English, it ceased to be
the language of command. Indulekha, the first novel in Malayalam which
captured the popular imagination, stages a transfer of power from Sanskrit to
English. Indulekha was about a Nair tharavad (joint family of landed aristoc-
racy) that fell apart under the onslaught of the stormy waves of social reforms.
In the presence of Indulekha, the educated and articulate Nair woman, Soori
Namboothiri, the Brahmin feudal lord, fumbles and loses his air of supremacy.
For a new generation, English opens the doors of emancipation. Chandran
quotes from a letter written by Stella Stanley, who is the daughter of an
untouchable from their own village. After securing a degree in English in
the first class, she worked on her English pronunciation and excelled in it
through sheer hard work, leaving the Iyers and Nairs behind. That is how
she broke the shackles of caste. She wrote in the letter: ‘In my liberation
English became a powerful vehicle, something Sanskrit, Pali or Adidravid
could never have been’ (339). Fanon writes, ‘To speak a language is to take
on a world, a culture’ (25). The ghosts of caste discrimination can be laid to
rest only when a new generation acquires mobility and transcends the mental
blocks (‘the arsenal of complexes,’ as Fanon says) ingrained by the century-
old customs and rituals of caste system.
186 O.V. Vijayan

Chandran marries Rosemary Wagner, whose father was shot dead by the
Nazis because he disobeyed the orders to kill Jewish prisoners without legal
sanction. Chandran remembers how Velappan, his father had disobeyed the
orders to kill seven college students who were political prisoners. Vijayan
remarks: ‘The story of victims, the story of compassion which takes many
forms, all of them fulfill themselves in unexpected ways’ (338). Rosemary
Wagner feels that human history is one of betrayal of the human cause. The
house of Ponmudi, the Nazis and the Brahmins share the same hubris in cre-
ating a prison house of evil.
There are close parallels between the structure of the family and that of
the nation. Fanon thought that the roots of neurosis in an individual can
only be uncovered by studying the infantile elements and conflicts that origi-
nate in the ‘family constellation’ (109). The pathological aspects of racism
or casteism are internalized by the child at a very early stage in life and
those who are trapped in the caste system are hardly aware how they are
shaped by its psychic forces. The public institutions in India become cari-
catures of their Western counterparts because they reproduce their family
environment familiar from their feudal past. In one of his cartoons, Vijayan
caricatures Rajiv Gandhi who says: ‘I stick to Lenin, comrades – the state
is the private property of the family’, inverting the title Family, Private
Property and the State (Vijayan 2006, 177). (However, the book, The Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State is by Friedrich Engels, and not
by Lenin. Maybe it hardly matters, as Vijayan was making a larger point).
Chamiyarappan’s struggles are aimed at extending the authority of the civil
society and its ethical foundation. As a cartoonist and columnist, Vijayan
always remained a part of the civil society, articulating dissent and contribut-
ing towards alternative thinking. Thalamurakal suggests that the failure of
the democratic institutions of modern India has to be sought in the complex
socio-psychological dynamics of its caste system.
Dharmapuranam was about how the human subject was completely sub-
jugated by the nation-state, exhausting his power of imagination. When
language is taken over by the state, the civil society and the public sphere
disappear without a trace. Fiction is about the possibilities of survival on
the planet. Vijayan’s larger themes in Dharmapuranam and Thalamurakal
concern the limits of human endurance and the assertion of the primacy of
human imagination. Those who endanger themselves to uphold the cause of
compassion, whether in the forests of India or the concentration camps of
Auschwitz, light a path and offer hope.
In portraying Chandran, his alter-ego, as an arms dealer who profits by
the accumulated hatred between nations, Vijayan hints at the heritage of sin
that still haunts Ponmudi. All his life Vijayan had been a staunch critic of the
Western militaristic-industrial capitalism which ruthlessly suppressed critical
thinking to reproduce its ideological supremacy. Was Chandran undone by
the curse that haunted the Ponmudi family or was it a failure of the rapac-
ity bred by modernity? The novel does not provide a clear answer. When
 Thalamurakal (Generations) 187

Chandran and Rosemary drive into a typhoon which claims their lives, they
were confessing to their inability to find peace within themselves. Rosemary
was pregnant at that time. Their child survives and was brought up by a
Christian priest. He was named Theodore Vel Wagner: the name combines
the east and the west, and their worst memories of traumas and terrors.
The novel ends with Theodore Vel Wagner’s visit to the house of Ponmudi
which now lies in ruins. The novel’s ending is its most unconvincing part. It
appears forced and far-fetched. However, in the elegiac tone of the novel,
in the texture of its imagery and its depiction of a besieged underworld of
pathological passions and fears, there are glimpses of an artistic vision that
can exorcize the forces of alienation and aggression that haunted the ances-
tors of Theodore Vel Wagner.
Note: Unless otherwise stated, all translations in the article are by the
present author.

References
Chaitanya, Vinay, Trans. 2022. A Cry in the Wilderness: The Works of Narayana
Guru. Gurugram: Harper Collins Publishers.
Fanon, Frantz. 1967 (1952). Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.
Vijayan, O.V. 1990 (Ninth edition, 2022). Madhuram Gayathi (Sweet is the music).
Kottayam: D.C.Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1997. Thalamurakal (Generations). Kottayam: D.C. Books.

---0---
Section 5

Vijayan in Translation


28 Self-Translation as Self-Righting
O.V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak

Chitra Panikkar

O.V. Vijayan’s self-translation of his Malayalam novel, Khasakkinte

Ithihasam (1969), into the English version, The Legends of Khasak (1994), is
used in this essay as a model to discuss the phenomenon of self-translation. In
the case of Vijayan, it emerges that the process of self-translation designates
a form of self-righting, and a minimal detailing out of this process comprises
the body of the essay.
O.V. Vijayan has consistently and successfully translated himself into
English and belongs to a group of recognized bilingual, self-translating writ-
ers in India – Girish Karnad, Kamala Das, Qurratulain Hyder, Bhisham
Sahni – to name a prominent few. I choose O.V. Vijayan’s novel for the
analysis here not only because I have direct access to his work in Malayalam
but also because he has been noticed as having shifted himself ideologically –
from an agnostic to a believer – over a period of two to three decades. In the
1950s, Vijayan was a Communist card-carrier; in the 1980s, he had become
an ardent devotee of Karunakara Guru whom he acknowledged as his spir-
itual master. The Malayalam novel, Khasakkinte Ithihasam, and its English
translation happened during the phase of this change spanning nearly three
decades.
The novel in question, the source text, Khasakkinte Ithihasam, has an
unrivalled place in modern Malayalam fiction. The habitual critical refer-
ence to modern Malayalam fiction in terms of pre- and post-Khasakkinte
lthihasam testifies to the position accorded to Vijayan’s novel in the history
of Malayalam literature. That Vijayan has effectively and successfully trans-
lated this novel into English, gestures to Vijayan’s supreme command over
both Malayalam and English. It shows up Vijayan’s tendency to write his
novels and stories first in Malayalam and then translate them into English (a
bit like Beckett’s attempts to constantly move between English and French).
Vijayan’s medium of creative expression in English has been, otherwise,
political cartooning. As part of a wider scenario, his example has to be pos-
ited against the larger backdrop of bilingualism which has been a regular
feature of the Indian literary reality. Vijayan’s self-translations may be read
as reflections of an ongoing tendency to get works from regional languages
translated into English.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-38
192 O.V. Vijayan

Given these multi-accented contexts, the analysis of the chosen texts (the
Malayalam and English versions of the novel) promised to be challenging.
Though, as a lay reader, I was enamoured of the English rendering no less
than its Malayalam version, it took me many more readings to get a sense of
the mechanics of Vijayan’s translation procedure. Finally, what helped the
actual analysis was a close textual reading of the English piece in conjunction
with the Malayalam text, keeping in view some theoretical frames used by
Steven Connor who had once examined Beckett’s self-translating strategies
(1988). Even before spelling out the details of those frames of reference, I
would like to engage with the ideational planes of self-translation.
It has been noted by critics that the self-translated text, unlike the text
translated by someone else, is the expression of the encounter not with the
Other-as-Another but with the Other-of-Oneself. We may have to concede
that there is a marked difference between translating another’s work and
translating one’s own work and that the latter involves the problematic
sphere of the Self. The translator who is not the author, it appears, enjoys a
different kind of freedom with the text than the author-translator. The non-
author-translator is a reader-interpreter for whom the act of translation is an
act of reading. And in many of the effective translations, as we know, what
seeps through finally is the quality of critical reading which brings out the self
of the interpreter-translator. But, in self-translation, the mechanics involved
is entirely different. The author-translator cannot approach the source text,
as a reader-interpreter. Or in this case, the reading becomes a reading of
his/her own self at a particular point in time and space. What consequently
demands a translation is not just the source text but a translation of the self-
embedded in the source text as well. The choice left to the author-translator
seems to be that s/he can vow allegiance to that self or choose to assert and
forward a slightly different self that s/he presently wishes to project. Thus,
grappling with multiple selves representative of different times and different
spaces actually sums up the difficulty of the author-translator. The tussle
with one’s own self becomes all the more pronounced whenever there is a
huge time-gap between the text and its translation. This becomes clearer in
writers like Vijayan in whom ideological shifts were apparent during the
specified time-gap.
Given this complexity, it is interesting to look at how Vijayan views his
own translation. In his statements, Vijayan seems to be highlighting the dif-
ficulty of linguistic translation – translating a regional language text rich in
dialectal overtones into a standard dialect of English. He laments the loss
of the richness of the Malayalam language in the process of this transfer.
He elevates the narrative potential of Malayalam to that of the imperial
languages, and at a certain point during this defence, becomes conscious of
the larger project of decolonization. In his ‘Afterword’ to the novel, The
Legends of Khasak, O.V. Vijayan says: ‘No language, however physically
confined, however historically deprived, is left without spring-heads of regen-
eration. There is as much narrative potential in Malayalam as in the imperial
 Self-Translation as Self-Righting 193

languages. Khasak has given that assurance to successor generations’ (1994c:

206). He continues, ‘I have strayed into the theory of post-decolonization
diglossia without intending to’.
Vijayan is referring particularly to the rich play of dialects in the Malayalam
version of the novel. He admits to having drawn some material and much
inspiration from a backward village, Thasarak, situated in the Palakkad dis-
trict of Kerala (Thasarak gets translated into Khasak in the source text itself).
And Thasarak, as Vijayan portrays it, is a place where time is in no hurry,
where modernization peeps in from time to time only to withdraw. But, the
language of Thasarak as evoked in the Malayalam novel shows a rare density
and variety. Dense images of nature true to a place unique in its isolated back-
wardness, folk customs that relate to a people whose deities are a mixture of
Muslim prophets and Hindu Goddesses, a pervading array of evil spirits and
ghosts – both good and bad, caste differences and the baffling hierarchies
therein – all these are evoked in the Malayalam text through the use of dia-
lects. Many have said that Malayalam has never been the same again after
Vijayan proved its narrative potential through Khasakkinte Ithihasam. The
author seems to be all too conscious of this achievement and that is where he
is compelled to lament the loss of ‘so much’ in translation.
Despite this consciousness, or precisely because of it, Vijayan himself trans-
lated this rich mine of dialects into The Legends of Khasak. Khasakkinte lthi-
hasam (1969) was born of a labour of love that lasted 12 years. The Legends
of Khasak came out in 1994. True to the translator stereotype, Vijayan goes
apologetic while talking about the English: ‘So much has been lost, there was
no way it could have been salvaged’ (1994b: vii). This tone continues, ‘I have
tried to make the narrative depend on its own energy as much as possible and
preserved the pace and rhythm of the original’ (ibid.). This authorial declara-
tion takes us to issues related to translation activity as also to the specifics of
self-translation as a process to be studied and examined in isolation. What
appears to loom large in Vijayan’s apprehension however is the standard fear
of the translator – a much talked-about fear actually – that the translation
may not be true to the ‘original’, that the translation may emerge ‘unfaithful’
and so on. And in this realm, translation theory seems to have made major
breakthroughs. As a consequence, what gets discussed now is not the anxiety
of the translator to be true to the original but the anxiety of the original to be
faithful to the translation.1
What then is the relevance of asking forgotten questions in relation to
Vijayan’s voicing of his fears? As I said earlier, the process of self-translation
is slightly more complicated than the usual method. Let us note that in all
his statements, Vijayan seems to be projecting translation itself as plain lin-
guistic transference.I suspect that the new sense and sensibility that informs
his English translation is what is consequently underplayed by Vijayan. P.P.
Raveendran in ‘Translation and Sensibility’ (1999: 177–86), N.S. Madhavan
in ‘It’s Dusk at Khasak’ (2005), and E.V. Ramakrishnan in ‘Translation as
Literary Criticism’ (2002) have remarked on the change of sensibility in
194 O.V. Vijayan

Vijayan’s English translation. I would like to elaborate on that and argue that
Vijayan’s professed close adherence to the Malayalam version acts as a cover
and defers the possibility of a find related to the mechanics of his self-trans-
lation. I would also like to forward the thesis that Vijayan, while translating
Khasakkinte Ithihasam into The Legends of Khasak, has corrected himself or
‘right’ed himself at three levels: (a) aesthetically/cosmetically; (b) in terms of
tone and meaning; and (c) ideologically.
But before these are detailed, let me concede that Vijayan is partially right
about his efforts at trying to achieve verisimilitude. For instance, the episodes
recounted in the chapters show a one-to-one correspondence between the
Malayalam and the English versions. The outlining of these episodes is also
accomplished in a rather meticulously ‘faithful’ manner. At this level, the
major difference induced seems to be in the narrative style. A buoyant vigour
is built into Vijayan’s English sentences as if to compensate for the non-use
of the Khasak dialects. The rustic vigour of a racy, pithy English punctuated
with local proper names and borrowed items from Eastern cultures show
Vijayan’s clear mastery over the language which enables him to tame it to
suit his needs. And it is Vijayan’s rare fortune that he has developed distinct
effective creative styles of his own in both Malayalam and English. Let me
give a few examples of this restless energy stored in words:

• Thithi-Bi saw her daughter growing up, maturing visibly each day,
impatient and challengingly beautiful like no woman Khasak had seen.
(Vijayan 1994a: 24)
• The caption on Nizam’s Beedi: ‘Makes you hungry, incinerates even
putrid food stuck in the gizzard’. (ibid.:26)
• Local humour: (the tailor’s words) ‘I made these shirts roomy enough
for them to grow up in’. (ibid.: 45) (Not there in the Malayalam version;
there is a subtle humour at play in the English version.)
• The road was a thin spine of macadam with ploughed-up sides, yet it
had the state’s majesty and freedom and the illicit drink was a merci-
less intoxicant. In a burst of delusion of power, Kutappa threw a chal-
lenge, ‘Come on Pootham of Chethali, haunt my backside if you dare’.
(ibid.:75)
• The Malayalam word for ‘endearment’, ‘Kanne’ (eyes) translated as ‘my
precious’. (ibid.:153–54)
• On a tree stump sat a fat lizard in all his regalia, a scion of the vanished
saurians. (ibid.: 129)
• Garlands decorated the slender neck of Madhavan nair’s Singer sewing
machine. (ibid.:135)

In fact, Vijayan’s ease and sureness with English range from simple expres-
sions like how ‘Mother scoops him up in a rejoicing embrace’ (Vijayan
1994a: 146) to forceful expressions like the transcription of the smallpox
epidemic:
 Self-Translation as Self-Righting 195

The village was one vast flowerbed. Nallamma strung garlands of pus
and death, she raised bowers of deadly Chrysanthemums. The men
of Khasak saw her and lusted, the disease became a searing pleasure
in which they haemorrhaged and perished. Little children died as she
suckled them in monstrous motherhood.
(ibid.: 148)

If one goes for a literal translation of the Malayalam text, the last sample
may read as:

People of Khasak lay like a garden decked up for a festival. They built
flower-huts made of yellow pus-flowers. Nallmma plucked out those
flowers, wore them on her hair, and danced. In fever and delirium, in
semisleep, the villagers saw her and desired her. Like the sex-ritual, the
disease changed into pure pleasure. And they died.2
(Vijayan 2011: 120)

The previous samples from the English text may definitely speak for them-
selves and project Vijayan as a forceful translator. Whenever he has deemed
it fit, he has chosen to delete, edit, or add words, never letting the tempo of a
smooth-flowing English suffer. We may therefore conclude that aesthetically
he has not compromised. In fact, he has righted himself as best as he could, to
choose the rhythm and style of the target language, carving his own stylistic
niche within it while translating. But here, to help further analysis, I bor-
row a few ideational frames from the critic, Steven Connor (1988). Speaking
in the context of Samuel Beckett’s self-translation, Connor forwards a few
perceptive observations. These may be summarized as follows: (a) If there is
a time-lag between the versions, there is a corresponding increase in dispar-
ity between the first and the second text; (b) Omissions and additions often
serve a cosmetic purpose; (c) Entropic revisions (denoting drastic changes in
attitudes) emphasize the intensive complexity of translation; (d) Sometimes,
repetition (here Connor means repetition in the form of self-translation) is an
attempt to ‘unsay’ what has already been said. I suspect these observations
made in the context of Beckett, apply to Vijayan’s methods of self-translation
as well.
At this juncture, it may be useful to summarize the central thematic thread
of Vijayan’s source text, Khsakkinte Ithihasam. One way to approach this
would be through the central character, Ravi. The Malayalam text may be
interpreted thus: Ravi, the intelligent astrophysics student of yesteryears, for
some unknown reason, leaves the path of a promising life and career, leaves
his house, and settles in the remote village of Khasak to teach at the primary
Government school there. The village life in Khasak, through its puzzling
diversities, strange life-embracing formulae, and raw life-accepting patterns,
intermittently punctuated with pleasure, death, disease, and misery, ulti-
mately renders Ravi even more passive and indifferent; allowing him to slip
196 O.V. Vijayan

into an invited death, perhaps recognizing it as the beginning of yet another

journey. Even as the village and its life as also his own life close in on Ravi,
we are conscious of a Ravi who is outside the purview of all these – maybe an
honest outsider who submits unfeelingly, indifferently, maybe even smilingly
to the call of life and death. The English text, The Legends of Khasak, how-
ever, underplays the absurd element in the source text and characterizes Ravi
as definitive spiritual traveller. My thesis is that Vijayan in his translation for-
wards Ravi differently and through that designs a different self for himself.
For instance, it sometimes looks to me that critics of Malayalam text have
shaped Vijayan’s perception of his self. It was while going through the abun-
dance of critical material on the Malayalam version that it struck me with
renewed force that Vijayan’s purpose is predominantly a self-righting strat-
egy. The translation of the title itself tells a story of self-righting. Khasakkinte
Ithihasam which till date surfaced as the history/epic of Khasak is translated
by Vijayan as ‘The Legends of Khasak’. Ithihasa has historical overtones;
‘legends’ are free from time. I feel that this is characteristic of Vijayan’s ‘right-
ing’ through subtle but effective ways. Critics like N. S. Madhavan (1994),
who questioned Vijayan’s delineation of the economics of Khasak and
blamed him for a wrong sense of history, were answered through the shift in
title. N.S. Madhavan, who wrote an article on ‘The Economics of Khasak’,
understood Vijayan’s portrayal of Khasak’s history as a skewed one; blamed
Khasak’s ideology as one similar to those of colonial intellectuals; and criti-
cized Vijayan’s facts as historically distanced from reality (Madhavan l994:
21–36). In his ‘Afterword’ to the English translation, Vijayan remembers to
handle these issues. He says: ‘Lots of people come now to Thasarak … if
they come looking for the Khasak software, they are bound to go back dis-
appointed because the Legends is not the story of Khasak’ (Vijayan 1994c:
208).
It may also be remembered that Vijayan was accused by many critics
for taking an existential stand on life. That the predicament of the modern
man has been drawn along lines true to Kafka, Camus, and Sartre and
not as true to the Indian situation had been thoroughly voiced by his crit-
ics (Chelembra 1994 [1972]; Menon 1994). I suspect that Vijayan tries to
counter this too by correcting or righting it in the English version of the
text. Let us note that the blurb of the English version characterizes Ravi’s
problem as ‘restlessness born of guilt and despair’ (Vijayan 1994a: back
cover). The guilt is clearly spelt out in the English rendering which speaks
of it in vivid terms, ‘It was in this house that he had sinned with his step-
mother. He was at college then: he had come home for the holidays. That
was ten years ago’ (ibid.: 91). The Malayalam version does not spell out
the guilt; it leaves it ambiguous. It says: ‘This is where he had known his
step-mother’ (Vijayan 2011: 77). By translating ‘known’ as ‘sinned with’,
Vijayan has introduced into the English version a definitive moral stand.
While the verb ‘know’ is free of the associations of guilt, the verb ‘to sin’
carries the weight of guilt. In the same way, in chapter 20 of the Malayalam
 Self-Translation as Self-Righting 197

text, while recounting the intimate rendezvous with his step-mother while
the wheezing, paralysed figure of his father is in the next room, the text
records a conversation between the two where Ravi clearly declares that he
does not feel that he has sinned, that he actually feels nothing. The English
version carefully edits this exchange and says: ‘He asks her what remorse
is. There, over there, she says, listen. It is the sound of his father’s wheez-
ing as he lies paralysed and wheezing’ (Vijayan 1994a: 146–47). Thus, the
English text seems to carry strong moral overtones which are not suggested
by the Malayalam text.
Since by the 1990s Vijayan had evolved as someone more inclined to spir-
itualism than materialism, and was busy proclaiming this new allegiance to
the world, he would have been hurt by critics’ claims that his novel can only
lead the youth to more waywardness and indecisive inertia (Chelembra 1994
(1972): 125–37). He therefore rights himself in the English translation by
describing Ravi’s journey as a spiritual quest and characterizes Ravi as a spir-
itual traveller. The blurb says: ‘Ravi is bewitched and entranced as everything
around him takes on the quality of myth’ (Vijayan 1994a: back cover). Ravi’s
sexual encounters with the women when their husbands are away, which
would be disapproved of as unbecoming of any spiritual traveller, are taken
care of by Vijayan through an additional use of a non-commital twilight
language in the English text. If Ravi gets beaten up by Maimuna’s lover for
his clandestine affair in the Malayalam version, that episode is conspicuously
absent in the English version. One gets the feeling that Ravi experiences the
consequences of his indulgences only in the form of a sweet internal unrest
characteristic of the spiritual wayfarer.
Vijayan has also taken care to remember the strong points of his first text
as noted by some of the critics. Death and disease are evoked along stronger
lines and for that, he seems to have taken critical cues from Satchidanandan
and Rajakrishnan, who appreciated these as the main strength of the
Malayalam novel. Satchidanandan’s essay on the novel is titled ‘Mrthiyude
Oosharacchaayakal’ (Hot Glades of Death) (1994 [1971]). In this essay,
Satchidanandan speaks about the novel poetically, explaining the potential
of the death-metaphor used by Vijayan. ‘Death’ itself figures as a subtitle
seven times in this critical response, and the essay closes with the observation
that ‘after this great insight of Release (where Death is Nirvana), it is impos-
sible for this epic-writer (Vijayan) to feel or stay bound by anything’ (ibid.:
16–20). In a similar vein of appreciation, Rajakrishnan’s article (1994 [1979])
on the novel titled ‘Flowers of Illness’ underlines the power of death and
disease in Vijayan’s Khasakkinte Ithihasam. Rajakrishnan notes how dur-
ing the 12 years of its composition, Vijayan changed utterly from a believer
in Marxism to one who lost his belief, to emerge bewildered. According to
Rajakrishnan, it is a bewilderment that may find cruel and callous results. He
remarks on the indifference that characterizes Ravi in his intimacies with the
yogini, Maimoona, the 40-year-old prostitute, and his step-mother. Finally,
placing the suicide of Ravi within the context of twentieth-century fiction as
198 O.V. Vijayan

a whole, Rajakrishnan sees Ravi’s movement as the Heideggerian progress of

the being towards Death (ibid.: 50–57).
The numerous references to death in the English version are noticeable,
and many of these are additions. To give a few examples:

• Thangal Pakeeri refuses to give away his beloved grandchild’s dead body
for burial. When Madhavan Nair announces the commotion to Ravi,
Ravi says: ‘Let us have some tea first, Madhavan Nair’, to which Nair
says: ‘You are wise, Maash. There is no use racing with death’ (Vijayan
1994a: 155) (Nair’s comment is an addition). In the Malayalam ver-
sion Nair says, ‘Yes, Maash, no use hurrying; now on, let’s take it easy’
(Vijayan 2011: 124).
• Again, ‘he laid down the beloved body amid the minarets of rock. He sat
beside it and sang a lullaby of death’ (Vijayan 1994a: 156) (The second
sentence is absent in the Malayalam version). The Malayalam version
says: ‘He lay the body on his lap and guarded it’ (Vijayan 2011: 125).
• Chapter 26, which records the Mollakka’s death, has this addition: ‘After
the burial, the villagers went through the ritual bath to clean themselves
for another encounter with death’ (Vijayan 1994a: 182). The Malayalam
text stops short: ‘The burial was at dusk on Sunday. On that ground,
Nizam Ali erected sandal sticks. As the wind calmed, threads of smoke
rose up in the air like strands of grey beard’ (Vijayan 2011: 145). In the
Malayalam version, there is no near equivalent for the above English
sentence on death.

Let us also traverse a few examples from the English version to reiterate my
earlier point on Vijayan’s deliberate introduction of the spiritual streak in his
narrative via self-translation:

• The last sentence of chapter 22 says: ‘Out of these infinities, a drizzle

of mercy fell on his sleep and baptized him’ (Vijayan 1994a: 165). In
the English version, from chapter 23 onwards, Ravi’s attitude is defi-
nitely more spiritually inclined than in the Malayalam version. It is as
if Vijayan made ample use of the reference to baptism in chapter 22.
Additions abound in the last chapters (chapters 23–26) (ibid.).
• The crisp translation in chapter 23 is noteworthy: ‘The wages, reckoned
across this void, became a Karmic debt’, says the English translation
(ibid.: 169). The Malayalam version says: ‘As if sifting through the mem-
ory of a previous birth, Mollakka was trying hard to get clarified in his
mind the five-rupee monthly wage he took for sweeping the frontyard’
(Vijayan 2011: 134).
• In chapter 23 of the English text, there is a dialogue addition:
‘Maash’, Madhavan Nair asked, ‘What is his illness?’‘Existence, civili-
zation - ’
‘Surely, you are not jesting?’
 Self-Translation as Self-Righting 199

‘No’
‘What is the remedy?’
‘The muezzin’s cry, Nizam Ali was making the prayer-call’. (Vijayan
1994a: 170).

In the Malayalam text, Ravi does not answer Madhavan Nair’s question. He
just defers it, ‘O that … I’ll tell you’ (Vijayan 2011:135), and then changes
the subject.

• In chapter 24 of the English text, we have the addition: Madhavan Nair

thought of blind Kuppu Acchan who had still not tired of seeing and of
his Guru to whom blindness had given the vision of peace. Madhavan
Nair could not solve the puzzle, he was content with the day and night.
(Vijayan 1994a: 175)

The Malayalam text just says, ‘Nair envied the peace that the blind enjoyed’
(Vijayan 2011: 139). Following this reference, in the same chapter, in the
Malayalam text, after visiting the prostitute, Ravi sarcastically imitates the
Muezzin’s prayer-call, and laughs loudly at God. This laugh is deleted in the
English version.
Sometimes, dialogues are replaced by fresh, more mystical ones in the
English version. For instance:

‘What examination is this?’ Madhavan Nair laughed. ‘The same class,

the same teacher.’ ‘Like human destiny, isn’t it?’ Ravi observed
(Vijayan 1994a: 183)

These are not there in the Malayalam text. Chapter 27 records several such
changes to arrive at Ravi’s silence – ‘Ravi spoke inside his own impenetrable
silence. Ravi answered from within his silence’ (ibid.: 193). The Malayalam
text says: ‘Ravi stood there, staring at its meaning. Stared and stared till the
eyes ached, till eyelids reddened, till the eyes melted and became one with
that’ (Vijayan 2011: 156). This indeterminacy in narration is what character-
izes the Malayalam text.
The addition in the last chapter of the English text is interesting: ‘I
intruded on this Sarai, said Ravi, for too long, desecrating its primeval night
with lamps and incense, while Time untamed and awesome, cried beyond
the time-pieces, cried out as dark blue winds’ (Vijayan 999a: 198). The
Malayalam text says: ‘He had guarded this Sarai all this time with lamp and
incense. Outside, blind Time shrieked in the form of black and blue winds’
(Vijayan 2011: 159). What is perceived as ‘guarding’ in the Malayalam
text is transformed into ‘intrusion’ in the English text. The indifference in
Ravi’s person is shaken in the English rendering and metamorphosed into
self-awareness verging on a self-conscious, almost self-accusing sensitivity.
Likewise, we may also note that Appu-Kili already favoured by the readers
200 O.V. Vijayan

and critics of Malayalam is given more attention in the English version.3 His
responses always go recorded and the mysterious mystic depths of his exist-
ence as an uninvolved child-man, a free bird, Nature’s freak (i.e., a cretin),
are all explored and especially attended to in the English rendering.4
With such interpolations and elisions, readers of the English version,
unlike his reader-critics in Malayalam, cannot accuse Vijayan of ‘the lack of
an overall vision’ (Chelembra 1994 [1972): 129). Vijayan has gone against
his own declared aims of fidelity and ‘righted’ himself both morally and cos-
metically without quite admitting this outright. His ideological drift to the
Right, in terms of strong religious inclinations at least, is apparent in the
English version. Self-translation thus also connotes self-writing where self-
righting carries two levels of signification: self-writing as autobiography, and
self-writing as self-translation – as offering a resistance to being written by
others, or getting translated by others. As a coda to this attempt at analysing
yet another form of translation, I invoke Steven Connor’s words on self-
translation. He says: ‘the translated text alludes all the time to its depend-
ence upon the signifiers of the earlier text, even as it tries to curtail or reject
that dependence’ (Connor 1988: 106). And hence, ‘the “final” text comes to
seem less like an end-point than just a stage in the continuing process of self-
division and self-modification’ (ibid.: 109).
To wind up this case-study of a specific text, one may also have to invoke
an important piece on the theme of self-translation, namely Mahasweta
Sengupta’s article on Tagore titled, ‘Translation as Manipulation: The Power
of Images and Images of Power’. In this study, Sengupta examines the self-
translations of Tagore ‘to explore how he manipulated his own works to
conform to the image of the East as it was known to the English-speaking
world of the West’ (1995: 160). Sengupta convincingly argues that the
demands of an English readership dictated the choice of matter and man-
ner of Tagore’s translations of his own poems into English. She analyses
Tagore’s self-translating strategies, locating the Bangla-into-English render-
ings of his own works within an orientalist-colonial paradigm. This study
may however clarify that it may not always be possible to locate the practice
of self-translation from an Indian language into English within a recogniz-
able frame like the colonial reality. Vijayan’s self-translations may have to
be read as symptomatic of unconscious projections of the mutable self of
the writer-translator. The determinate spiritual traveller, Ravi, in Vijayan’s
English text is not a conscious tribute paid to the oriental stereotype as in the
case of Tagore but an unconscious manifestation of an inner ideological shift
in the writer-translator. Thus, with every new case-study in this area, what
gets interrogated would be traditional notions within Translation Studies like
an immutable author self, the sanctity of the Original, loyalty to the Source
Text, and the idea of the Inviolable.
 Self-Translation as Self-Righting 201

Notes
1. Lawrence Venuti’s work, The Translator’s Invisibility, illustrates this
inversion in the usual hierarchy of values.
2. The edition of the Malayalam novel, Khasakkinte Ithihasam used for
this article is the forty-ninth impression which came out through D.C.
Books in February 2011. All literal translations from Malayalam into
English used in this chapter are mine.
3. See, for instance, T. Ramachandran’s article, ‘Papabodhathinte
Punyadhara’ (‘The Virtuous Flow of Guilt’), on the novel where he
understands Appukili as one of the most powerful ‘disabled’ characters
of our fiction.
4. There has been no published feminist reading of Vijayan’s attitude to
women in the novel as yet, and one wonders whether its presence would
have added yet another stroke to Vijayan’s self-righting techniques.

References
Chelembra, Unnikrishnan. 1994 (1972). ‘Ithihasaparihaasam’, in K.G. Karthikeyan
and M. Krishnan Nampoothiri (eds), Khasak Paddhanangal. Kottayam: D.C.
Books, 125–137.
Connor, Steven, 1988. Samuel Beckett: Repitition, Theory and Text. London: Basil
Blackwell.
Madhavan, N.S. 1994 (1983). ‘Khasakkinte Sampadvyavastha’, in K.G. Karthikeyan
and M. Krishnan Nampoothirii (eds), Khasak Paddhanangal. Kottayam: D.C.
Books, 21–36.
Madhavan, N.S. 2005. ‘It’s Dusk in Khasak,’ Outlook Magazine. http://www​
.outlookindia​.com​/article​.aspx​?227073 (accessed on 4 September, 2012).
Menon, M.K. 1994. “Khasakkinte Ithihasam: Oru Cartoon Novel”, in K.G.
Karthikeyan and M. Krishnan Nampoothiri, eds. Khasak Paddhanangal.
Kottayam: D.C. Books, 103–109.
Rajakrishnan, V. 1994 (1979). “Rogathinte Pookkal” in Karthikeyan and Krishnan
Nampoothiri. Op​.ci​t.
Ramachandran, T. 1994. “Papabodhathinte Punyadhara” in K.G. Karthikeyan and
M. Krishnan Nampoothiri. Kottayam: D.C. Books, 73–78.
Ramakrishnan, E.V. 2011. “Translation as Literary Criticism: Text and Sub-
text in Literary Translation” in Locating Indian Literature: Texts, Traditions,
Translations. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.
Raveendran, P.P. 1999. Translation and Sensibility: The Khasak Landscape in English
and Malayalam. Indian Literature, 191: 177–186.
Satchidanandan. 1994 (1971). “Mruthiyude Oosharacchayakal” in K.G. Karthikeyan
and M. Krishnan Nampoothriri. Op​.cit​., Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Sengupta, Mahasweta. 1995. “Translation as Manipulation: The Power of Images and
the Images of Power” in Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier (eds.), Between
Languages and Cultuers: Translation and Cross-Cultural Text. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press.
Venuti, Lawrence, 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation.
London and New York: Routledge.
Vijayan, O.V. 1994a. The Legends of Khasak. Delhi: Penguin Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1994b. ‘Author’s Note’, in The Legends of Khasak. Delhi: Penguin
Books, vii–viii.
202 O.V. Vijayan

Vijayan, O.V. 1994c. “An Afterword”, in The Legends of Khasak. Delhi: Penguin
Books, 204–208.
Vijayan, O.V. 2011. Khasakkinte Ithihasam. Kottayam: D.C. Books.

Source
Chandran, Mini and Suchitra Mathur. 2015. Textual Travels: Theory and Practice of
Translation in India. New Delhi: Routledge India, 21–34.
29 The Writer as Translator
Self-Translation in O.V. Vijayan’s
The Legends of Khasak

Sanju Thomas

The process of translation itself is many-layered, and self-translation makes

it all the more complicated. The trepidation about being answerable to the
author will not mar the creativity of the self-translator as he can, in princi-
ple, take any amount of liberty with his own text. For many self-translators,
the process of translation is a chance to rewrite the original text. Two great
examples of self-translators who have ended up rewriting their own works in
another language are Samuel Beckett and Rabindranath Tagore, both Nobel
prize winners. In Alan Friedman’s 1987 collection ‘Beckett Translating/
Translating Beckett’ and Brian Fitch’s 1988 monograph ‘Beckett and Babel’,
Fitch concludes that there is ‘one work’ but two texts to deal with: ‘it is obvi-
ously desirable to allow for the possibility that no satisfactory synthesis of
the two Beckettian texts is, in the final analysis, feasible’. He points out that
Beckett has taken great liberties not just at ‘lexical and grammatical level’ but
also at the ‘textual and discursive level’ (qtd in Butler 115). Sujit Mukherjee
traces the growth of a reluctant Rabindranath who believed that translating
his poems into English would be like ‘disrobing Draupadi in court’ (2009:
115) into the confident, renowned ‘English’ poet Tagore. The conscious lib-
erty Tagore took with his own work could not have been done by anyone
else. He quotes Tagore:

My right with regard to my own work is not of an adventitious sort.

Had it been otherwise than inherent, I would have, unlike what I do, to
account for each word I use. I intend to carry the essential substance of
my poetry in the English translation, and this means a wide divergence
from the original.
(2009: 119)

Mukherjee also writes about the ‘growing uneasiness’ Tagore had in his later
years about his own translations and regretted his ‘incompetence’ and ‘care-
lessness’. He felt that ‘languages are jealous sovereigns, and passports are
rarely allowed for travelers to cross their strictly guarded boundaries’ (2009:
120).
This, however, is not the case with many other bilingual writers who
can handle two languages with elan. For example, Sarang mentions three

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-39
204 O.V. Vijayan

poems of Arun Kolatkar — ‘The Hag’, ‘Irani Restaurant’, and ‘Three Cups
of Tea’ — which were included in an anthology edited by Dilip Chitre as
‘English versions by the poet’ while the same poems when published in a
special issue of Quest did not mention that they were written in Marathi first.
This issue had showcased the best of Indo-Anglian poetry. Tagore too was
considered an English poet in the West since nowhere did it get mentioned
that Gitanjali was translated from Bangla. In fact after widespread criticism
recently scholars have been re-assessing the contribution of Tagore to the
field of world literature, and how his poetry was a welcome change from
the kind of poetry written in English during his time. The prose-poetry that
he created had ‘Biblical overtones and was easily translatable to other lan-
guages’ (Bassnett 2013:16). Ayyappa Paniker, the renowned Malayalam poet
and academic is also the translator of his own poems. Dilip Chitre is another
poet who has experimented with both English and Marathi (Sarang 1981:
35). V.K.N. the celebrated Malayalam writer known for his deeply rooted
analogies and experimental puns translated many of his stories into English.
Thus, one would understand that self-translation is not a marginal activity at
least in the Indian context.
Why does a self-translator choose to do this activity and how does s/he
do it are interesting questions that might yield different answers. Aranda
writes about ‘Rosario Ferré, whose novels are published in both Spanish and
English as if they were originals, has declared that she writes in English and
then translates into Spanish to ‘correct mistakes’ (2009: 31). This obviously
is not the reason for all writers to turn self-translators. A writer, who is
sometimes forced to live in another country for a considerably long time
because of adverse conditions in his own nation, might start writing in the
new language. Another reason could be the dissatisfaction of previous trans-
lations done by others and the faith that only the writer would be able to do
justice to the translation. Many times a writer translates his/her own work
after an interval of some years as in the case of O.V. Vijayan. O.V. Vijayan’s
Khasakkinte Ithihasam (1969) has been termed a pathbreaking novel, so
much so that Malayalam literature is divided into pre and post-Khasak
phases. The work heralded postmodernism in Malayalam literature1, and it
delves deep into the question of identity. The novel opened a new world of
possibilities where reality and myth merged, where the individual became the
universal and the sinner and the saint became one (Satchidanandan 2013).
The novel published in 1969 is in its thirtieth edition and is still considered to
be one of the most important novels in Malayalam. O.V. Vijayan translated
Khasak as The Legends of Khasak into English in 1994 almost 25 years later.
In such cases, the worldview and the intensity of experience of the author
might have changed which allows him to look at the text from a distance.
But this might result in rewriting of the text to suit his new perspective.
There are others who simultaneously translate a text into another language
as they write it in their mother tongue. Ayyappa Paniker is said to have done
his translations this way. Here the distinction between the original and the
 The Writer as Translator 205

translation gets blurred to a great extent. But considering that the creative
energy of a translation is increasingly appreciated lately and that the abso-
luteness of the source text is something that is considered to be non-existent,
self-translation should be considered as creative translation. But it is then
also true that in a multilingual country like India where almost every edu-
cated Indian can speak at least two languages, self-translation many times
becomes rewriting. A classic example is the self-translation of Qurratulain
Hyder’s Aag ka Dariya (1998). M. Asaduddin in his article ‘Lost/Found in
Translation: Qurratulain Hyder as Self-translator’ details the many liberties
taken by the author-translator so much so that the novel almost became a
new text in translation. According to him, ‘the two texts cannot be substi-
tuted for one another. They remain complementary despite belonging to their
own fictive universes’ (2008: 248). O.V. Vijayan’s translation The Legends
of Khasak of his original Malayalam masterpiece can be considered one such
novel.

Self-translation as Rewriting the Self in The Legends of Khasak

P.P. Raveendran in his essay ‘Mapping the Khasak Landscape: An Essay on
Translation’ (2009) analyses the translation The Legends of Khasak against
the Malayalam text Khasakkinte Ithihasam to find out that Vijayan has
taken great liberties in his rendering of the Malayalam novel into English.
Raveendran opines that though the larger narrative is true to the original, the
translation displays a drastic change in the sensibilities from the Malayalam
text. Considering that Khasakkinte Ithihasam is hailed as the novel that
brought in a new sensibility in Malayalam fiction and heralded in modernism,
this is not a small alteration. Still, the question remains as to whether sensi-
bility (rooted in specific time and space) can be translated from one language
to another or from one culture to another, or will a particular sensibility of
one time period be relevant in another, or more importantly is it imperative
that sensibility gets translated? The original Khasak as was mentioned earlier
was a new experience to Malayalis who were only fed on realistic novels till
then. Thus it ‘challenged the dominant sensibility’ of the day to offer some-
thing absolutely fresh and novel in material and method. Raveendran points
out that there is a significant change in the worldview represented in the
original and the translation. He also feels that the translation cannot be read
as ‘a worldview transcending modernism, [a]s the articulation of a nativist,
ecofeminist, communitarianist … postmodern view’ (2009: 131) as Vijayan’s
trajectory as a writer is not similar to that of the trend of Malayalam lit-
erature. Raveendran claims that while Malayalam literature went through a
politicized modern phase to ‘find shelter under the rubric of postmodernism’,
Vijayan briefly went through a political phase to move ideologically closer to
‘versions of Indian metaphysics’ (2009: 131). Vijayan translated Khasakkinte
Ithihasam in this later phase, and Raveendran elaborates upon the implica-
tion of this on the translation:
206 O.V. Vijayan

Though there is a pronouncedly spiritual dimension to Khasakkinte

Ithihasam too, the dialogically structured text of the novel does not
allow a metaphysical reading to assert itself there. It is this possibility of
a dialogic and compulsive misreading that has been denied to the text
in the process of translation.
(2009: 131)

The Malayalam text offers itself to multiple readings from ‘social, political,
sociological, or even ecological terms’ while in English, Khasak ends up being
the metaphysical musings of a wandering soul. Raveendran highlights this by
way of a simple example from Malayalam and its corresponding translation.
In their discussion about truth, the natives of Khasak who belong to different
faiths, come up with the conclusion that ‘truth is varied’ while the English
translation says ‘Many truths make the big truth’. The transition from ‘var-
ied truths’ to ‘the big truth’ is what marks the original from the translation,
according to Raveendran.
Khasakkinte Ithihasam is Vijayan’s first novel and was published in
1969. But the translation came in 1994, when Vijayan had already written
Gurusagaram (1987), Pravachakante Vazhi (1992), and Madhuram Gayathi
(1990). All these novels are concerned in one way or the other with the meta-
physical search of the oneness of God and The Legends of Khasak fits in
perfectly within the fold of these works. The quest about the truth which he
started with Gurusagaram continues through the tormented self of Ravi. But
Vijayan’s Ravi when he alighted from the bus at Koomankavu years before in
1969 was a cheerful young man though at times haunted by the ghosts of the
past. He got burdened by the quest of truth only years later, in 1994, when
Vijayan translated his Malayalam text into English. This progression from
the text to the translated text can be substantiated through a close reading of
the very first chapter of both the texts.

The First Chapter of The Legends: A Close Reading against the

Malayalam Text
Ravi in Khasakkinte Ithihasam reaches Koomankavu and stays in the bus
for a short while even after the others started leaving, as he was feeling dizzy
after the long winding bus journey and needed some rest before he started his
walk towards his destination. It was as if he has reached a ‘dasa sandhi’. This
astrological term only means the lull in one’s life after one phase and before
the next one gathered momentum. It need not necessarily be astrologically
considered bad for all people. But Vijayan in the translation makes it the
‘ominous transit in one’s horoscope’ (Vijayan 1994: 1) to make it feel that
Ravi is indeed going to start a more difficult phase in his life. Thus the tonal
variation of the two novels is set in the very first page of the translation itself.
When the bus conductor gets someone to carry Ravi’s luggage, he alights
from the bus with a grateful ‘thank you’. But in the translation, ‘Ravi stepped
 The Writer as Translator 207

out of the bus, still wrapped in thought and the earth seemed to slip away
from under his feet (Vijayan 1994: 1)’. This seems like a loaded statement
while in the Malayalam text, Ravi was feeling dizzy because of the tiring
journey. The Malayalam text says, ‘it was funny, it felt as if he was stick-
ing his head out of a bus that was negotiating a narrow ghat path’2 (Vijayan
1969: 9). When he spots the shack selling sherbet, Ravi asks for two sherbets.
When the porter protests that he doesn’t want it, Ravi in good-humoured
camaraderie insists that he has it. He calls the porter ‘karnnore’ which liter-
ally means ‘the elder one’ but the term is used not in a sombre way as in the
English text. The very line ‘Ravi encouraged him: Have it Karnnore. Isn’t
there quite a distance to tread from here?’ (Vijayan 1969: 10) tells the read-
ers that Ravi is a social being interested in engaging with people while the
dialogues have been paraphrased in the English version not to interrupt the
alienated reverie of Ravi: ‘The old man declined with peasant ceremony, but
Ravi took him along anyway to the shack that sold sherbet’ (Vijayan 1994:
2). He adds: ‘Ravi sat over another drink and desultorily scanned the knick-
knackery in the shack’ (2). In the Malayalam text, Ravi only looks at the dif-
ferent things in the shop. Looking at the gramophone in the shop he feels an
overwhelming mist of memories enfolding him. But in the English, Vijayan
qualifies the memories: ‘mists of memory rose from its damp, rusted flues and
spoke to Ravi in sad and tender voices’ (Vijayan 1994: 3, my emphasis). In
the Malayalam, it is mentioned that within the time of having the sherbet,
the shopkeeper extracted all the information from Ravi. He too takes part
in the conversation: ‘Ravi elaborated. It is a single teacher school. A new
experiment of the District board’ (Vijayan 1969: 10). In the English version,
Vijayan has added dialogues, but Ravi seems to be not too interested in the
dialogue.

‘Where might you be going?’ asked the vendor.

‘Visiting relatives?’
‘No. I’m going there to teach’.
‘Teach? In Khasak? There isn’t a school there, at least there wasn’t till the
other day …’
‘One of the District Board’s new single teacher schools. I am supposed to
get it started’.
(Vijayan 1994: 3)

About his saffron dhoti, in the Malayalam text, Ravi says that he has the
fever of philosophy while in the English, Ravi somberly tells the shopkeeper
that the dhoti is from an ashram, which complements his air of alienation.
Vijayan even gives the old porter a philosophical line in the English text:
‘Loads are loads always’ (Vijayan 1994: 3). Here Ravi offers to help the
porter though he does not actually do that. This bit of conversation is not
in the Malayalam text. The original Ravi seems to be very much a part of
the feudal set up of India and does not mind the elderly man carrying his
208 O.V. Vijayan

load. When Ravi pauses on the way to look at the bus going back, the old
man asks Ravi whether he is tired. He further asks him: ‘You were lost in
some thought, weren’t you?’ (Vijayan 1969: 13) while the translation says:
‘Something made you sad?’ (Vijayan 1994: 5), thus imposing the possibility
of sadness on Ravi. On their long walk to Khasak from Koomankavu, the
elderly man keeps on talking. While talking about the rain and its vagaries,
the man asks Ravi: ‘Isn’t it Maya, kutty?’ The Malayalam says Ravi had an
urge to display some philosophical skill but decided not to because ‘he was
tired. He just wanted to reach his destination somehow’ (Vijayan 1969: 13).
The English version reads as the following: ‘For a moment he had a frivolous
impulse to play the mystic; he smothered it. No, not on this journey of many
lives, this journey of incredible burdens. Let me reach my inn, the village
called Khasak’ (Vijayan 1994: 6). In the Malayalam text, the old man talks
against the dam which is being built, while Ravi supports it: ‘One needn’t be
so anxious about the rains then’. Vijayan writes: ‘the ease of the conversation
snapped’ (Vijayan 1969: 13). But Ravi regrets it and feels that he shouldn’t
have said that. In the translation, this part is deleted so that Ravi seems to
be a disinterested listener to the old man’s chatter. When they reach Khasak,
Ravi first just takes in the scene. But in the English version, Vijayan under-
lines the purpose of Ravi’s visit with the thought: ‘… so this is my transit
residency, my sarai’ (Vijayan 1994: 7).
Once Sivaraman Nair, the landlord, leaves Ravi alone, the children and
women throng to see the new teacher. ‘The children spoke in chorus, like so
many anklets; these silver voices were soon to soothe his sorrow’ (Vijayan
1994: 8). This ‘sorrow’ is completely absent in Malayalam. There he is ‘so
tired and a little annoyed with the children that after a while tell them firmly
that they should leave’ (Vijayan 1969: 15). Later when he sits down to rest
‘[His] calves hurt, his bones ached, the pain travelled through them, trav-
elled dully through his mind …’ (Vijayan 1994: 9). In the Malayalam, Ravi
experiences only body ache! When he goes to the river after his sleep, Ravi
finds two women bathing, half naked. In the Malayalam, ‘Ravi remains neck
deep in water desultorily looking at them. When they left wrapping their sari
around them, Ravi became alone’ (Vijayan 1969: 15, my emphasis). In the
English version, Ravi never even felt the company of the women; rather he
sits alone on the riverbed.
These examples from the very first chapter make one thing clear: that the
protagonists of the Malayalam source text and the English translation are
very different in spirit. The Ravi of Vijayan’s Malayalam novel is an interest-
ing young man who has come away to a village from an urban setting. He has
good social skills and strikes up a conversation with the shack owner, the old
porter, and the children. He is a youngster full of life, very easily drawn to the
opposite sex: he is quick to observe the women who came over to his house
in the pretence of fetching their children; he is comfortable stepping into the
river with the women bathing close by. Though Koomankavu seems vaguely
 The Writer as Translator 209

familiar, he never betrays any belief in a predestined sarai. Rather, he is not

even aware that he is on a painful journey of burden. Only Vijayan knows
this as he rewrites the novel and he feels obliged to display it in no uncertain
way, years later in the translation, that Ravi is an unhappy man. Thus the
very first chapters of the original and the translation sketch two different
portraits of the same character, Ravi: one a spirited young man, seemingly
carefree and the other a melancholic who carries the burden of his life.
Apart from the changes in the protagonists’ response to the world out-
side, there is a palpable change in the landscape of the novel as well. The
Malayalam language in the novel has an intimate quality about it to match
the warmth of its protagonist. In the first chapter, when Ravi reaches the
school he observes the scene with delight to identify some birds that are com-
mon in rural Kerala. He takes in the greenery, the sight and sound (a mother
calling out first Khadeeja, and then the more endearing Khadeejo) of the
countryside which evoke a kind of familiarity in the Malayalam reader. This
personalization is missing in the English version.
More importantly, the first chapter of the translated text also makes one
wonder whether Vijayan was writing exclusively for his international read-
ers. Many details added in the narrative would give one the feel that Vijayan
was interpreting or even adapting his text for a foreign audience. For exam-
ple, in the shack where Ravi drinks his sherbet, he observes ‘gothic’ lemon-
ade bottles with deep green irises (Vijayan 1994: 2). In the Malayalam, the
reference is to ‘lemonade bottles with irises’ (Vijayan 1969: 10). Another
addition is the mention of the ‘plantation’s infirmary’ and the nurses ‘who
held him back’ when his dead mother’s strange ‘palanquin’ was taken away.
This can only be interpreted as an attempt to recreate a colonial atmosphere
which the English readers might be familiar with. Most of the coffee planta-
tions belonged to the British and a small clinic or infirmary would be part
of the colonial master’s charity enterprise. As a translator, Vijayan seems
to have been thinking more about facilitating his readers than being ‘loyal’
to the original text. Thus, from an analysis of the very first chapter, we can
conclude that the literary landscape of Khasak does undergo a mutation in
translation as a result of the ideological shifts of the author and the transla-
tor’s interpretative interventions to such an extent that Vijayan ended up
rewriting his original by way of translation.

Conclusion
An ideal translator is one who has proficiency in two languages and has
knowledge of two cultures. Just as the original text is a result of controlled
subjectivity, the translator is bound to bring in his own subjectivity in the
interpretation of a text. According to Barthes while ‘a text consists of mul-
tiple writings issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with
each other, into parody, into contestation’ (2006: 6), all this gets unified in
210 O.V. Vijayan

the reader. Thus, the role of the translator is that of a reader and an author.
Just as an author’s work will have the collective pastness of her culture and
her own personal past and present which come together in her in a par-
ticular intensity to result in a creative work, all these factors will determine
the interpretation of the reading of a text by a translator which she in turn
tries to recreate in a different culture and context, the effectiveness of which
will be determined by the interpretation of another reader who might be far
removed from the original text and culture. A translator does not exist in
vacuum; she is very much a product of her own context. This is all the more
true in self-translation. It is also ‘a reminder that no act of interpretation can
be definitive’ (Venuti 1998: 46). Self-translation more often than not becomes
rewriting, but an understanding of the thought processes and the evolution of
the writer adds to the appreciation of the translation as an independent text
in another language. Self-translation thus becomes the translation of the ‘self’
into a different context.

Notes
1. The term ‘athyadhunikam’ (ultramodernism, high modernism) was used to qualify
the novel since the term ‘utharadhunikam’ (postmodernism) was not in vogue in
literary circles. (as mentioned in ‘Nation and Nationality; Concepts of Modernity
and Nation in Malayalam Literature’ by Manu Sudhakar Kurup).
2. All alternative translations are mine.

References
Aranda, Lucía V. 2009. “Forms of Creativity in Translation”. Cadernos de Tradução,
Brasil Florianópolis 1(23): 23–37.
Asaduddin M. 2008. “Lost/Found in Translation: Qurratulain Hyder as Self-
translator”. Annual of Urdu Studies 23: 234-49.
Bassnett, Susan. 2013. “The Self Translator as Rewriter” in Anthony Cordingley
(ed.) Self Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture. New York and
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 13–26.
Butler, Lance St. John. 1994.“A Solution to the Problem of Beckett’s Bilingualism”.
Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 3(Intertexts in Beckett’s Work/Intertextes de
I’ oeuvre de Beckett): 115–135. JSTOR. Web. 30 May 2013. http://www​.jstor​.org​
/stable​/41337856.
Hyder, Qurratulain. 1998. River of Fire (Urdu original published in 1959 under the
title, Aag Ka Dariya). Translated by the author. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.
Mukherjee, Sujit. 2009. Translation as Recovery. New Delhi: Pencraft International.
Raveendran, P.P. 2009.“Mapping the Khasak Landscape: An Essay on Translation”.
Texts Histories Geographies: Reading Indian Literature. New Delhi: Orient
Blackswan.
Sarang, Vilas. 1981. “Self translators”. Journal of South Asian Literature 16(2):
MISCELLANY. 33–39. JSTOR. Web. 30 May 2013.
Satchidanandan, K. 2013. “A Sage and an Iconoclast”. Frontline 22: 12–25. 24 April
2013. www​.frontline​.in​/static​/html​/fl2208​/stories​/20050422003113200​.htm.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of
Difference. London and New York: Routledge.
 The Writer as Translator 211

Vijayan, O.V. 1969. Khasakkinte Ithihasam. Kottayam: D.C. Books.

Vijayan, O.V. 1994. The Legends of Khasak. New Delhi: Penguin Books.

Source
Thomas, Sanju. 2019. ‘Writer as Translator: Self-Translation in O.V. Vijayan’s The
Legends of Khasak’. Translation Today 13(1): 157–165.
30 From Text to Performance
Deepan Sivaraman’s Stage Adaptation of
Khasak

A Conversation with Deepan Sivaraman

by Manila C. Mohan (Translated from
Malayalam by E.V. Ramakrishnan)

[Introduction: In 2015, Deepan Sivaraman directed and produced

Khasakkinte Ithihasam on the stage, on a scale and in a form that rewrote the
novel as well as the conventional ideas of theatrical representation in Kerala.
After his training in the art of theatre in the School of Drama, Thrissur,
the University of Pondicherry, and St. Martins College, London, Deepan
Sivaraman had successfully produced a series of plays such as Kamala (Vijay
Tendulkar), Peer Gynt (Henrik Ibsen), Ubu Roi (Alfred Jarry), and It is cold
in here (inspired by a novel by Garcia Marquez) before choosing to create
a stage version of Khasak. He chose to locate his first staging of Khasak
in Thrikkaripur, a village in north Kerala, primarily because it has had a
long tradition of Theyyam performances which combines ancestor worship
with ritualistic invocation of dead souls, apart from a large number of rural
theatre groups staging plays on various social themes. Deepan defies the con-
ventions of the proscenium theatre in his production, using multiple frames
of visual images which create an interactive space of dialogue between the
past and the present as well as the narrative and visual images. He believes
that Indian theatre traditions such as Kootiyattam, Kathakali, Koothu, and
Theyyam are physical forms, not textual. They follow the method of physical
enactment, transforming the text into an emotional experience. We cannot
speak of Indian theatre traditions in the singular, as they are multi-layered,
multi-religious, and multi-lingual. He brings out these aspects in his treat-
ment of Khasak, by foregrounding the Islamic elements in Khasak, relating it
to the shared memories of common folkloric elements of worship in a society
where boundaries of identities are fuzzy. The wide-ranging interview that
follows between Manila C. Mohan and Deepan Sivaraman throws insights
into the problematic of adapting a modern classic in Malayalam to the stage.
Intermedial translation offers insights into the subtexts that remain implicit
in the original text. Deepan Sivaraman’s dramatic version overcomes the tex-
tual limitations of the novelistic medium through innovative modes of visual
representation. He is able to incorporate the idea of the sacred which runs
through the original novel as part of a larger ecological vision, into the reso-
nance of his performative language.]

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-40
 From Text to Performance 213

The conversation between Manila C. Mohan and Deepan Sivaraman

follows.

Deepan’s Khasak questions the collective amnesia the society has cultivated
at a time when the Muslims and the socially backward sections of the
society, including Dalits, are being subjected to ill-treatment by the
savarna power structures. The society has lost its collective memories of
living together despite complex diversities and differences. The produc-
tion reminds the audience that we can live together, regardless of our
differences and divergences. The play enacts the march of dead souls,
suggesting the union of people in life and death, beyond sectarian divides.
Theatre is not confined to what we see on the stage. When Khasak was staged
in Thrikkaripur, in northern Kerala, the entire village participated in the
production. It was a historical occasion when the local people thronged
the galleries and the stage. It was again staged at the International Drama
Festival held at Thrissur.
Manila C. Mohan: When did you read Khasak first? How many times have
you read it?
Deepan Sivaraman: I read it first 22 years ago. I must have been about 18
years then. I must have read it several times.
Manila: Did you think of producing it on the stage, giving it a visual
expression?
Deepan: Way back in 2006, we had worked on the text. That was after I
joined St. Martins College, London. As part of the scenography course,
we had a placement programme. Seven students from there came to the
School of Drama at Thrissur (Kerala) and collaborated in the production
of a play based on Khasak. I was the co-ordinator of the scenography
for the play. The play lasted two hours. I did the script and scenography,
while Abhilash Pillai directed the play.
Manila: Was it related to the present play?
Deepan: It had more narrative, textual narrative. In the present production,
there is hardly any text. It is more like a ritual. The scene resembles a
graveyard. The setting presents broken mud pots, burials, and the act of
exhuming the body from the earth. People are searching for the dead.
The play has changed a lot from the earlier version prepared a decade
ago. At that point, a lot of work was done on the text. We could organize
only two shows. Abhilash and myself had several discussions at various
places regarding how to proceed with the play. It did not take off. Then
this project came up, and I decided to direct it.
Manila: Why did you choose Khasak for the stage production?
Deepan: When a play was to be produced in Thrikkaripur, I was looking
for a text. Any art form has to make sense to the local audience, they
have to appreciate it first. This is true of painting, music, or cinema.
I thought of a text that can relate to the life, experiences, and taste of
the local audience. Thrikkaripur is known for Theyyam performances.
214 O.V. Vijayan

Theyyam is primarily a celebration of the collective memories of the

dead. Thrikkarippur landscape is dotted with hills, mountains, ponds,
and sacred groves. That is how we chose Khasak.
Manila: Most of the readings of O.V. Vijayan’s Khasak were centred on the
character of Ravi. In fact, there are not many scenes in the novel that
focus on Ravi, but it was largely read and critically analysed as a novel
about Ravi. But, your Khasak is not about Ravi. The other characters fill
the stage. You have also reinvented each character.
Deepan: We read Khasak in the 1960s and 70s, as a novel about Ravi’s exis-
tential quest. The generations of the 1970s and 80s projected their exis-
tential problems onto Ravi’s story and made a spectacle of it. The novel
is not about his existential issues. It is the story of Kuppu Acchan, Allah
Pitcha Mollakka, Nizam Ali, Maimoona, Thithi Bi, Kunhamina, and
characters like them. Ravi passes through Khasak as a traveller. Hence,
we should recognize that Ravi is not being marginalized in this play. He
is another character like Kuppu Acchan or Allah Pitcha Mollakka.That
is how I viewed it.
The novel uses the mode of telling stories by the souls of the dead.
Along with the story of the soil and the people, we also come across the
story of Ravi’s visit to Khasak and his relations with the local people. We
confront the fact of Vijayan’s death. The world he created does not exist
anymore. When we visited Thasarak, the village that became Khasak, we
found it deserted. All the people mentioned in the novel are dead. Only
memories are left. There are layers of stories and endless graves. We feel
as if characters like Kuppu Acchan are telling stories from their graves.
The undertone of death dominates everything. We begin the play with
a procession of the dead. In Kerala, we often hear stories of the dead
people walking with a torch in hand. That is what is invoked here. They
have heard the muezzin’s call and are going in that direction. The voice
sounds as if it is coming from underground.
Ravi carries his death around him. It is not the snakebite that kills
him. The snake was within him. It was within his box, under his pillow
all the time. The snake has already become a fossil. Ravi comes into this
graveyard, hauling his trunk box. He dies there. He also joins the proces-
sion of the dead souls.
This is a re-reading of Khasak. This is a dramatological reading of the
novel.
Manila: As you said, the generations of the 1970s and 80s were projecting
their angst and alienation onto Ravi. When you read it through their
eyes, and bring it into theatre, are you able to incorporate contemporary
political readings of Khasak?
Deepan: The novel, Khasak, is about a community of people, who have died
and disappeared. There is no trace of that community left now. The
social structure we find in Khasak no more exists. Kerala villages have
changed. Almost every village in Kerala now has people working in gulf
 From Text to Performance 215

countries. People can communicate each other now much faster. The
time of Khasak belongs to the past. With it, social amnesia has set in. So
the play is an attempt to retrieve the past, a reminder, to bring back a
wave of memory.
Manila: We live in times when purdah has become a part of everyday life.
Against such a background, it is indeed a reminder of bygone times,
when you present children wearing ‘kuppayam’ and ‘thattam’ (both were
commonly worn by Muslim girls in the past) and their intermingling
with children from other communities.
Deepan: Yes, such memories are important. That is the reason we chose this
text. Kerala has a history of reformist movements in the fields of politics,
culture, art, and literature. In the present, we have no towering leader
to look up to. None in politics. Are there exemplary film-makers, art-
ists, writers? None who can lead from the front. The question is, what
happened after those times when Vijayan’s works came out and found a
new generation of readers. Life has undergone vast changes. Information
Technology has transformed society. We have gained access to world
literature and world cinema. However, we have not moved an inch for-
ward. Socially and politically, we have regressed in alarming ways. In
this context of social amnesia, we need to remind people of what they
forget. My play is a re-reading of Vijayan’s novel, against such a context.
There is a celebration of Islam in the play. Muslim women wear-
ing their characteristic colourful clothes, scarf (thattam), Muslim food,
accompanied by songs and music are all part of our childhood memories.
Those days of celebration are over. The play celebrates those memories.
That is the politics of the play. There is a scene in the play where a person
is buried alive. It reminds one of the Middle Eastern custom of ston-
ing people to death. Mollakka (Moulavi) draws a circle around Amina
and asks her not to go to school. But she erases the circle and goes to
the classroom. The novel is fiercely satirical. When Nizam Ali speaks of
communism, there is subtle black humour. We have tried to bring it out
into the open.
Manila: Unlike your earlier plays, Khasak was staged as rural theatre. How
did you land in Thrikkaripur? What were your experiences of staging
the play here?
Deepan: It is the K.M.K Art Society that produced the play, bringing promi-
nent actors from nearby places like Vellur, Annur, and Payyanur. There
are also actors from many theatre groups in Kannur and Kasargode. We
spent about five months to produce the play. Much research and discus-
sion preceded this actual production. The rehearsals were conducted in
four schedules. It was not possible to do it at a single stretch. It was
done between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. for days. Rehearsals were conducted
near a paddy field, using its environment. The houses, fields, ponds, and
wells all became the setting for the rehearsals. It came on stage after
these rehearsals. The script and dramatic versions emerged through this
216 O.V. Vijayan

process. We did not conduct rehearsals based on a ready-made script.

The script was completed only about four days before the actual pro-
duction. There were times when the script was improvised on a daily
basis. The written version came after it was enacted. The music com-
poser, Chandran Veyattummal, stayed with us for two months, watching
the rehearsals and witnessing all the activities that went into them. All
technicians spent a lot of time with us. Music and lighting evolved along
with the play. Puppets and costumes were finalized in this manner. The
torches (made of dry coconut fronds) used in the play were locally made.
An entire village participated in the production and staging. There are
people who have seen the play eight or ten times.
Kerala has had a history of village drama societies. After that cul-
ture vanished, plays were being produced only through funding from
academies or similar agencies. This was not an urban production with
funding by donors. It was through the voluntary contributions by local
people and their wholehearted efforts to generate crowdfunding. For me,
it was an effort to evaluate myself self-critically, after my exposure to
metropolitan ways of theatre in London and Delhi.
Thrikkaripur is known as the land of the ritualistic folk performances
of theyyam. It still retains the social energy of the performative culture.
Its enabling role in shaping a space for this kind of rural theatre, and a
specific language for it, is significant. We have used several methodolo-
gies of modern theatre such as land art and installation within the play.
This is an evolving language of theatre. Those who have watched my
plays will recognize the continuity. It is not something that is unique to
this play. Those who have watched my play will recognize the continuity
in my work in this play.
Manila: Normally, when a novel is recreated as a play or a film, there are
many challenges. We come across the criticism that the soul of the nar-
rative or the story is lost. But in the case of Khasak, this has not hap-
pened. Vijayan’s Khasak, Deepan’s Khasak – both exist simultaneously,
and they have come to stay, in their separate ways.
Deepan: The novel is a narrative art. A play is not verbal art. In reality, it is
a physical form. The play uses words, but it is a hybrid form. Literature
forms only a part of it. In Kerala, there is a tendency to look at theatre
as a literary form and to celebrate it as verbal art. The playwright does
not follow the writer here in my production. It is a collaborative work.
I form only a small part of it. In Vijayan’s novel, there are lines like, ‘As
Chukkru journeyed on, the last of the crystal doors closed behind him’
(70) and ‘Overhead, a million dragonflies sallied forth into the bland sun’
(106). How do we transform these beautiful texts into a physical form?
We cannot transcend or transform these texts. That is how literary texts
become different. You can overcome a literary text only through another
literary text. We have to view them from a different perspective to dis-
cover its dramatic potential. That is how I came to use puppetry, land
 From Text to Performance 217

art, and video art in the play. They happen in different locations. The
play has a fragmented form.
Vijayan speaks through Kuppu Acchan in the context of Chukkru Rawuthar,
who is also known as ‘the diving fowl’. He says he will answer your call
if you spread some grains of rice before him. I used it in my stage version.
It is like fixing stumps to construct a cage. It is also like a well. He is
called into this space after spreading grains of rice. The diving fowl walks
into it. It is theatrical. I overcome the peculiar literary effects of the novel
through many such visual narratives.
I don’t plan anything when I am directing a play. I did not have any
plan when I went to Thrikkarippur to direct this play. It took shape
during my stay there, through my interactions with the people and their
environment there. Dramaturgy evolved not according to a well-made
plan. We did it scene by scene and then organized into a script later.
Usually, I write the play and also plan its architectural and scenographic
designs. This gives me a certain freedom. It offers a qualitative opportu-
nity and also poses a challenge. How do you arrive at a dramaturgical
solution? I approach it visually, not textually. I cannot convey this to a
writer convincingly.
Khasak has an episodic structure. The novel progresses through events, one
after another. Time progresses through many contexts. The narrative
strings them together.
Traditional drama demands a setting in a particular place. This play
was set in a performative space, an architectural space. What I attempted
was to shape a dialogic space where the spectator and the actor can enter
into a conversation. The events are set in such a performative space. This
space is like an open field which you excavate. The samovar (for making
tea), the sewing machine, and things like that appear like archaeological
findings excavated. Many people appear out of the tombs. Ravi goes to
a tomb for mating with his lover.
Manila: Many things happen simultaneously, in multiple forms, at different
locations, in the play.
Deepan: Yes, there is multiple narration. This fragmentation challenges the
spectator. Usually, the structure of a play resembles a coconut tree, while
the structure of a novel is more like that of a banyan tree. The plot in
the play finally reaches a point of climax which is more like a firecracker
exploding. The novel spreads out in different directions. When you bring
a novel of this kind into a univocal narrative structure, it is reduced to a
conventional frame, with none of its resonances. When Ravi is presented,
a woman in a puppet form, almost 20 feet high, is walking towards him.
The woman is half buried in the soil. At the same time, father is presented
at a distance, sitting in a wheelchair. On the screen, there are visuals of
the father lying in the I.C.U ward. On this side, we see Padma standing,
calling Ravi. Thus, the spectator has to grasp the events presented in the
five different locations. Only then it will communicate to him. This also
218 O.V. Vijayan

marks an entry point into the narrative of the play. For me, theatre is a
hybrid form where painting, architecture, sculpture, cinema, literature,
dance, puppetry, and many such diverse forms meet. Theatre has always
been like that. Some directors will pay attention to literature, some oth-
ers to dance, and there are some who pay attention to the body of the
actors.
Manila: The way you presented the sexual act on the stage was very innova-
tive. The scenes between Ravi and Maimoona, for instance, communi-
cated the intensity of the moments very effectively.
Deepan: They are rolling in the mud, covered with gruel. Their bodies do not
touch. She removes her garment and breaks the boils on his body before
enacting the sexual intercourse. Maimoona just stands there, watching
the rain. It captures the emotional surge forcefully.
This theatre is interactive and scenographic. What I do is visual thea-
tre. It is not about understanding the story but experiencing it. Theatre
becomes an experience of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. I con-
stantly try to reform myself and better the communicative power of my
theatre through my productions. People who have seen my earlier plays
will understand it. I am happy to know it communicates to people.
Manila: Will the play communicate to those who have not read Khasak?
Deepan: It is difficult to say. I have read Khasak several times. It is a many-
layered text. People will understand its narrative has many layers. Each
reader will have her own version of the text. Vijayan’s novel demands to
be read several times for a full understanding of its richness. However,
one who has not fully understood Vijayan’s novel in the first reading will
also be able to appreciate the form of the play.
Manila: Your productions have interpreted and recreated texts. Why have
you used this method frequently?
Deepan: I have never produced a play based on a completely new text. It
has always been re-readings of prior texts. Rewriting and deconstruction
are rooted in post-modern approach. It holds out possibilities. You can
relate it to contemporary times, renew it structurally. One can view it
from many angles.
I did Ibsen’s Peer Gynt recently. It tells the story of a mediocre young
man, greedy for success. He leaves behind his country and his mother.
He makes money through unfair means. In the play, he looks back on his
life. The text resonates with contemporary life. We come across people
who want to migrate to the U.S at any cost. Many lack moral scruples.
Manila: Did you interpret Khasak politically, from a contemporary perspec-
tive? Are there elements in its narrative that defy such interpretations?
Deepan: There is a scene in Khasak, towards the end, where the Communist
comrades tell Ravi, ‘The outcaste women are not allowed to wear blouses
while transplanting paddy seedlings in Sivaraman Nair’s field’. Ravi
replies, ‘I can imagine. Must be gorgeous’ (199–200). Ravi’s character
 From Text to Performance 219

carries such paradoxes within. These cannot be brought into the play. In
the novel, Maimoona is a headstrong woman, seducing many men.
Manila: In the play, her character is different.
Deepan: We do make additions in the text and explore other possibilities.
Excessive innovations can completely fragment the play. Our additions
should be in harmony with the play’s central narrative. Many things
which the novel says about Ravi cannot be shown on the stage.
Manila: How does your theatre redefine space? Is Indian theatre now moving
away from conventional theatre?
Deepan: Drama is now the art of the director, not that of the playwright. The
prevailing notions of drama have been challenged by the scenographic
innovations.
It is with the arrival of the scenographic thought that the language of
drama changed. The avant-garde has reinvented theatre. We say, we are
going to watch a play, not hear a play. Directors like Jerzy Grotowski
(1933–1999), Eugenio Barba (b. 1936), Richard Schechner (b.1934),
and Peter Brook (1925–2022) came to India to study Indian theatre.
Indian theatre is not textual. Performance forms like Theyyam,
Kathakali, and Kootiyattam are not textual, they are physical forms.
Their accent is on physical enactment, not on delivering the dialogue by
the actor. The story part will be presented at the beginning. Grotowski
was greatly inspired by Indian theatre. It was after colonization that we
went after the proscenium play. Modern Indian dramatists began imi-
tating Ibsen and Chekhov. The experimental theatre movements have
been trying hard to go beyond the representational theatre. The search
for indigenous theatre has not really yielded a new language of theatre.
The Indian women’s theatre has succeeded to a great extent in creating
a new language of theatre. They are politically aware and experimental.
They represent the true Indian avant-garde. They did not go in search of
Indian roots. Many of them like Maya Krishna Rao, Anamika Haksar,
Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, Amal Allana, and Anuradha Kapur were
liberated women, who did not search for an ‘Indian’ identity.
My own concept of theatre is that of a hybrid variety. What is
described as ‘Indian’ has many layers. How do you keep the Muslim, the
Buddhist, or the British elements out of Indian theatre? Modern man is a
complex being with many layers and many cultures.

Source
Deepan Sivaraman, and Manila, C. Mohan. “O.V. Vijayante Novel Raviyude
Prashnanglalla” (From Text to Performance: Deepan Sivaraman’s Stage
Adaptation of Khasak: A Conversation with Deepan Sivaraman by Manila C.
Mohan). Mathrubhumi Weekly, Jan. 31, 2016, 9–27.
Section 6

Vijayan the Cartoonist


222 O.V. Vijayan

Figure 7 Picture of Vijayan. Credit: Sreedharan T.P.

31 A Cartoonist’s Workshop
O.V. Vijayan (Translated from Malayalam
by P.N. Venugopal)

It could be treated as an admission of failure, if one were to say that a

‘humorous cartoon’ does not require either humour or pictorial depiction.
But, a cartoonist like Jules Feiffer, who responded ardently to contemporary
realities, often minimized the visual and instead endowed the narration with
visual qualities. Such a style of presentation could not have even been imag-
ined during the time of David Low or before. There could be controversies
as to whether cartoon evolved or became stunted since then, but obviously,
the structure of cartoon assimilated new elements and art forms and as a
result of the interaction, created nascent aesthetic experiences. It is not that
we are not loyal to classics. But there is a linear history to every art form, a
growth which can be numbered as step one, two, three, and so on, through
time. Vicky (Victor Weisz), who came after David Low, Feiffer who became
prominent after Vicky and our young cartoonists, who are to become promi-
nent in the course of time, are all milestones in this process.
Cartoon grows; it imbibes more and more argumentative facets. This is
not a growth or refinement of the craft or form. It is merely the wholesome-
ness and complexity that has overtaken man’s general knowledge is affecting
the cartoonist too. And if this were not to happen, the result would have been
the degradation of the cartoonist into mediocrity.
I have already pointed out in an earlier article that this diversification has
not taken place in the Indian media and also why it has not happened. Not
only our cartoonist, but also our littérateur, scientist, and politician too is
afraid to stand on his own feet. He has to lean on the crutches obtained from
the developed world. That the developed world is incapable of providing us
with crutches, and that they quite often undergo inspirational poverty worse
than us, is not comprehended in a comparative study of the colour of skins.
Cartoon, primarily is a media tool functioning in the realm of social sci-
ence and politics. The social reality of the Westerner is simpler and straight-
forward in comparison to ours. Even a doctor in Houston will not have to
encounter the variety of illnesses encountered by an average Indian doctor in
his small town because they have already gone beyond that primitive phase.
But as for us, our doctor and our cartoonist are trapped in the fantastically
diverse and thick forests of sickness of the body and the society.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-42
224 O.V. Vijayan

Thus the responsibility of an Indian cartoonist is heavier and more mean-

ingful than those of the cartoonists in England or America. If he can fulfil his
responsibilities, his cartoons will take birth as classics. But treacherous traps
are inherent in the creation of classics. One who creates classics must neces-
sarily be sceptical of one’s own creations. Can I, living in an impoverished
and emaciated milieu go to this extent? The tradition of our media becomes
an accomplice in denying a meaningful answer to these questions.
The genesis of our newspapers is Western and colonial. The moral code of
Bentinck, which outlived its noble intentions, is still pursuing us as a colonial
liability. David Low straddled the British media like a colossus during the
eventful years of the Second World War. It was but natural that the colossus
of the British media became our colossus too. A historical cartoon within a
cartoon.
If we had been able to imbibe the growth and development that occurred
in Britain after Low (not that I justify such a process), perhaps we too could
have experienced some of the gains of that growth. But we have not reached
even up to Low. We are even now trying desperately to attain the outdated
sensibilities of Low. It is not sacrilege when I describe Low as outdated. That
we all become outdated is a historical necessity and also our fulfilment. Only
if we recognize this can we escape from our present predicament.
As indicated in a previous article of mine, an Indian cartoonist may not
be able to afford the luxury of attaining fulfilment by drawing a humorous
cartoon if he is aware of his historic duties. I have already raised an analogy
from the medical field. It is the diversity of ailments that provides or ought
to provide an Indian doctor with augmented creativity over his Western col-
league. The same applies to the Indian cartoonist too.
It is often said that the Indian cartoon does not evolve because Indians lack
the capacity to enjoy humour. This argument is not valid on many counts.
The average Indian cartoon races after humour with an obscene levity. It is
another matter that such humour ceases to be humour because it does not
have any social responsibility. But it has the outer shells of humour. So it is
not as if we do not have forms of humour; the problem is that these forms do
not achieve dignity and relevance. Non-achievement of these qualities is due
to the contradictions that exist between the tragic character of the social real-
ity and this tool of humour. The reader unconsciously understands this con-
tradiction. Thus the reader gets influenced by the illogical knowledge that a
cartoon cannot say anything that matters. There is also some truth in the gen-
eral feeling that Indians lack the capacity for enjoying humour. This incapac-
ity points to the purity and culture of our people. If someone comes forward
to enjoy humour in the uncertainties of lndia, in the genocide of Uganda,
in the drought of Ethiopia, it does not broaden the scope for humour but
exhibits sheer sterile cynicism. But cartoon cannot take the form of a poster.
Even though cartoon is not editorial, it certainly is editorial commentary. It is
criticism presented in crisp words and in sharp symbolization of the drawing.
Thus even if there is no humour in the technical sense, a cartoon must have
 A Cartoonist’s Workshop 225

certain factors that provoke and activate our response. The challenges faced
by the sociology of the West are gentle and calm (this opinion too is not a last
word). Almost all the social institutions of the West have attained stability.
They need no apprehension that these institutions will collapse even when a
war is on. This is why they can sit back and laugh.
What should we do in this context in order not to deteriorate into post-
ers? One, adopt the harsh medium of black humour. Western cartoonists and
writers have resorted to this for depicting the cruelty and pathos of war. The
humour used for depicting the terror of Auschwitz and Buchenwald is what I
refer to as black humour. Varying use of black humour can be seen in social
cartoons also. An old cartoon I had come across in Punch (or was it The New
Yorker) comes to mind. The ghosts of the members of a family, all of whom
died in a mishap are gathered in a large house and are playing cards. A tiny
little ghost is complaining: ‘Grandma, you are playing foul!’. This cartoon is
a humorous cartoon. But normally it would not make anyone laugh.
The second option for an Indian cartoonist is to delve into all the dimen-
sions and depths of a definite political issue, instead of common humour. A
leader exposed through such a shredding is shorn of all his feathers. Dressing
of a chicken and the undressing of a man in the thoroughfare do not result
in the same nudity. But both help to nullify illusions. This too is not humour
in the technical sense.
Destroying illusions is the most important among the duties of a cartoon-
ist. But whose illusions! The isolated and non-representative illusion of a
citizen is only an aberration. Likewise are the groups, which are in the oppo-
sition. The vanities and falsehoods of those who occupy leadership posi-
tions in government, society, economy, etc. are the themes of a cartoonist.
In essence, it means that the cartoonist will always have to function as an
opponent of the establishment. This is one of the fundamental principles
of democracy. It is not to say that the profession of a cartoonist cannot be
carried on ignoring this principle. Cartoons do appear in the newspapers of
countries with dictatorships and anti-democratic set-ups. But it is not these
cartoons we are discussing here.
While talking about the media outside democracies, let me add one thing.
It is possible to make meaningful criticism through cartoons even in an order
where media is not free. But it may not be about one’s own government.
There are two types of slavery now prevalent in Africa. Annihilation of
democracy in the free African countries is one and the other is the apartheid
in South Africa of which we all are aware.*
From South Africa, one can draw cartoons criticizing the breach of democ-
racy in other African countries, while from Kenya or Nigeria, apartheid can
be made the subject. Only that this will not be ethical. This article is being
written with the belief that cartoonists have a code of ethics.
I drew a cartoon based on the last military coup in Nigeria. But I could
not get it published in any of the newspapers. Two African figures standing
face to face. Look-alikes as if twins. One is South Africa and the other is free
226 O.V. Vijayan

Africa. Both of them have shackles around their feet. The shackle binding the
feet of South Africa is the slavery of apartheid; the other shackle is the slavery
of the annihilation of democracy. The free Africa is telling South Africa: ‘In
our kind of apartheid the colour doesn’t show’. Why were the Indian news-
papers reluctant to publish this cartoon? We harbour a few anti-imperialist
superstitions. If we destroy those superstitions, the feathers of the chicken
that we are will be plucked off and we will stand trembling in front of the
tandoor.
However, does cartoon have any other option? No, is my view of it. In this
sense, cartoon becomes extremism and rebellion. But the difference that it is
a virtuous rebellion like Satyagraha provides it with approval in the media
and among the people. Just like anti-imperialist superstitions, the supersti-
tions of nationality and national goals too become obstacles for the cartoon-
ist. One more obstacle can be added to the list: that of national security. I’ll
attempt to describe here another cartoon I could not get published. Some
other countries had supposedly stolen our military secrets through Coomar
Narayan (Narain) and his typists and they were manufacturing arms in their
armament factories and endangering world peace. In the first few months
of this revelation, it was impossible even to speak of this. I did not attempt
to question this security wrath, nor was it possible. What else is more fool-
ish than making faces at a military march or at a troop of police! With the
misery and distress of a worm, I drew a small picture. But, yet no one dared
to publish. The khaddar store where I buy my readymade khaddar garments
was the scene. A white man with a mask enters with serious intent. Two
congressmen who were at the store whisper in trepidation: ‘He is a spy of the
French textile industry’.
Spy-phobia and war were forever the tools in the wicked workshops of
the ruling class. India which is sufala, sujala, subhashini, and suhasini (bright
with orchard gleams, rich with humming streams, speaking low and sweet,
laughing low and sweet) too cannot be different in this. The aim of the car-
toonist is to attract the attention of the citizen to this state of reality. In other
words, reminding the citizen that it is calamitous to share the fundamental
notions of nationalism with the establishment is the responsibility of the car-
toonist. I’ll be in a quandary if you ask me whether this responsibility has
any validity.
This applies not only to the notions of nationalism. A cartoonist should
be in a position to question any and all notions. When this is done, the scope
of cartoon becomes infinite. It could be comedy, it could be sorrow, and at
times, it could be discussion or philosophy. Similarly, there should not be
stipulations or conditions regarding the style of cartoons. Relevance is equal
for academists like David Low and those who stylize by fully distorting facial
features. Whatever be the style, what is being said should not be idiocy. The
cartoon which evokes laughter through idiotic statements is the enemy of
humour. What it really evokes is inferiority complex and the deep sorrow
emanating from it.
 A Cartoonist’s Workshop 227

This process requires an indispensable mindset. Creative and humble

irreverence. Reverence is gaining the dimensions of a fatal disease in India.
You can ridicule the one beneath you, but not the boss. This is not the cen-
sorship of the newspaper or the establishment, but of the people. People have
to be liberated from this censorship with patience and love. But, for this, the
cartoonist has to have a general awareness of the history and the anthropol-
ogy of this censorship.
I will conclude this article with the description of two episodes. First, the
story of an oil painting exhibition which was to take place at the Tate gal-
lery in London; secondly, a British cartoon. The oil paintings were of nude
women. Nudes as you know are ever so common in arts. The canvases were
by a young and unknown artist. The director of the gallery went around
and viewed the paintings a few hours before the inauguration. Suddenly, he
cancelled the exhibition. All the nudes had the same face – that of Queen
Elizabeth. I am not suggesting that this trend is worth emulating. All that I’m
trying to do is to point out to the reader the sense of equality the queen and
her subjects shared through this deliberate obscenity.
And now the story of the cartoon. There was a demand in the British par-
liament for increasing the allowances of the Royal family. We see the interior
of a home. The wife is reading a newspaper in the drawing room. The news
item: to what extent is the Royal family bankrupt? The husband glances out
of the window. A four-horse driven carriage has halted in the street outside.
The rattled husband asks his wife: ‘Darling, you remember advertising for
a part-time maidservant?’ No need to mention that it was Queen Elizabeth
who had arrived in the horse-drawn carriage!
Such a creative irreverence may be possible in a stable society like that
of Britain. It should be possible for us too. But when we do it, it will not be
humour, but rebellion.

Note
1. A plural democracy was established in South Africa in 1994 ending 46 years of
apartheid rule introduced in 1948 – The editors.

Source
Vijayan, O.V. 2006. “A Cartoonist’s Workshop” in Sundar Ramanathaiyer and
Nancy Hudson-Rodd (eds.) Tragic Idiom: O.V. Vijayan’s Cartoons and Notes on
India. Kottayam: D.C. Books, 11–18.
32 Foreword to the Volume, The Tragic
Idiom
O.V. Vijayan’s Cartoons and Notes on India

Bruce Petty

The O.V. Vijayan collection Tragic Idiom is a fascinating set of observations

on India, told through various literary and cartoon prisms.
Cartooning could be older than story telling. There must have been some
interesting Palaeozoic contests between the person inventing words and the
cave artist. The image and the written and spoken word tell parallel sto-
ries. In his interwoven drawing and his writing, O.V. Vijayan underlines his
personal modern version of this characteristic of information. The cartoon
remains a curious voice in the huge assembly of modern media messages.
Various studies of its peculiar relevance and effect have been put forward.
Academics have observed its positioning. Many cartoonists have at times
reflected on their weird craft and usually left it in the tradition basket.
This collection is much more than a retrospective of clever observations.
Vijayan seems to represent a rare restless witty intelligence, moving from
literature to political cartoon, intertwining the two, searching for a way to
affect opinion in the most complex and challenging of nations and at the
same time reflecting on the process itself.
In exploring the day-to-day events of a nation he is obviously devoted to,
drawing them, and reflecting on them, he has done much more than provide
a comic synthesis of events for a particular set of literate Indians. He has set
his mind off in pursuit of the puzzle of the human race. In a way his country
left him no alternative. His concern for an India searching for a just society is
the great story of modern humanity. Equity is the global issue.
The issue of Indian poverty in the context of Western institutional systems
is relevant to the global problems of the day. What Vijayan has commented
on all his career is relevant to human future in a way Western cartoonists can
never be. Vijayan writes about this. In the West the professional world and
his citizenship are two parallel universes. For him it has to be one.
He was inspired, as were many Western cartoonists, by people such as
Cruikshank, Low, Vicky, Feiffer, and Thurber. From his reading and these
models he got concepts and motivation. These people seem to have affected
European public opinion.
But that’s all the help he got.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-43
 Foreword to the Volume, The Tragic Idiom 229

European issues were specific and arrogantly local – the drama of the
world wars, the iconic characters representing good and evil, and the theatre
of the Western wealthy.
The East was another story.
It was colonial, post-colonial, racially divided, caste layered, operated by
borrowed institutions, subverted by corruption. His world was encircled by
Western economic barriers and neo-colonial processes. His targets were sys-
tems and vestiges of the past. The people he wanted to address were always
in survival mode. Indian illiterates were the basis of his concern. The world
Vijayan had to comment on was always global.
So it seems to me Vijayan had to invent a satirical language, a vocabulary of
style, sarcasm, and irony in order to satisfy his own hopes. He had to reinvent
the cartoon heritage left to him. He devised a unique drawing style for himself,
a hybrid of European, Eastern, and intuitive images, an aesthetic of his own.
So he has left a trail not only of a special history of his times but a set of
perspectives from which to observe a village, a nation, and a world. One
of the subject headings in the collection is Rite of Rhetoric. Another is the
Domestics, the State of the States. This breadth of concern and ingenuity,
satirists in the West could well give attention to. The written comments on
each chapter in the book show the difficult task Vijayan took upon himself –
the understanding of the two converging worlds in which he was enmeshed.
Paradoxes, frustration, irony, misgiving are his concern. There is love and
passion here. So the title Tragic Idiom seems most apt.
The Western cartoonist I would suggest, comments simply on the Western
world somewhat complicated by the chaotic East.
For a Westerner, the Vijayan cartoons themselves have to be deconstructed
into the elements of a particular fragment of Indian history. It is a history we
should know about.
What Vijayan seems to reveal is a reminder of a kind of poetry and impres-
sionistic approach to observations familiar to the voices of India. He pre-
sents satire and political comment in a manner we see in Salman Rushdie,
Arundhati Roy, novelists, editorial writers, filmmakers, and musicians.
We all live by simplistic image representations of events, it seems to me.
Cartoon type representations of events are probably what we file away in the
receptors of our brains. For all the elegant verbal analysis, the massive precise
information that is available, a series of shorthand images may well be what
we make decisions on.
I think Vijayan, as a great master of words, felt this and so his venture into
the cartoon world.
So we have this fascinating book.

Source
Petty, Bruce. 2006. “Foreword” in Sundar Ramanathaiyer and Nancy Hudson-Rodd
(eds.) Tragic Idiom: O.V.Vijayan’s Cartoons and Notes on India. Kottayam: D.C.
Books, 7–9.
33 He also Cartooned
On the Fading Half of O.V. Vijayan

E.P. Unny

Like eccentric billionaires who bequeath crazy wills, O.V. Vijayan left a leg-
acy hard to handle. At the memorial the Kerala government built for him in
a village called Thasarak in the suburbs of his hometown Palakkad, the ver-
satile creator is keenly remembered on his birth and death anniversaries. It is
then that the event enthusiasts realize what they are up against.
Multi-tasking is a mild word to describe the range of work Vijayan did
over the decades mostly from home. He wrote fiction in his first language
Malayalam, cartooned and ran editorial columns in English and Malayalam
besides being his own translator into English. Much of this output came from
an anteroom in a large nondescript apartment in Delhi’s diplomatic enclave,
Chanakyapuri.
The private workplace was almost as productive as Satyajit Ray’s. Unlike
the filmmaker’s much-photographed study on Kolkata’s Bishop Lefroy Road,
Vijayan’s, however, was barely documented. A big miss is his younger days
when he wore self-designed bush shirts, smoked the occasional pipe, and
cartooned vigorously.
By the time a persistent photographer like K.R. Vinayan caught up with
him, he had already left Delhi and his health had begun to fail. The long-
haired bearded frame in flowing kurta that Vinayan portrayed most sensi-
tively was a resigned soul, a fragile version of Tagore. This is the going image
and it suits diehard fans who must read a certain profound sadness into his
writing.
You have to get around this synaptic grip to find the scathing cartoon-
ist and it is not easy. Memorialists wax eloquent on the writing and then
abruptly run out of words when it comes to cartooning. Naturally so because
it is easier to find abiding connects to literature than to the ephemeral daily
cartoon that Vijayan did for a living from 1958 to the collapse of the Soviet
Union.
Among many things that historic Mikhail Gorbachev brought to closure
was this brilliant cartooning career. The career itself seemed intertwined with
Soviet destiny. An early lift came with an excess from Moscow. In his late
twenties when Vijayan was more of a Communist than a cartoonist and eager
to write wholetime, Soviet troops entered Hungary and shot Imre Nagy, the
Communist Prime Minister who rebelled. This in-house Stalinist outrage in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-44
 He also Cartooned 231

mid-1958 was enough to shake this reluctant college teacher out of the lazy
leftist comfort of small-town Kerala. He accepted the standing offer from
Shankar’s Weekly and moved to Delhi to write and draw.
After ten years, Soviet Union helped some more by invading Czechoslovakia.
This time Big Brother faced a cartooning skill set in full flow. Daring experi-
ments with artwork had finally settled down to a style that marked a clean
departure from anything seen in Indian cartooning. Caricatures leapt from
the anatomic mode to geometric and the perspective from Euclidian to
Einsteinian dimensions. Vijayan’s symmetrical characters seemed to float in
a curvy space and spoke searing lines to the politically savvy.
The new defiant cartoon had to find a matching target. The left fitted the
bill. Back then in the 1960s and 70s, comrades still looked relevant and had
a visibility way beyond their parliamentary, revolutionary, and trade union
footprints put together. No cartoonist watched left politics like Vijayan, and
none could tweak Marxian jargon with such deadly flourish. Some comrades
suppressed a smile, some got irritated, and some were provoked enough to
call the cartoonist a CIA agent. It is rare that routine cartooning gets elevated
to such everyday polemics.
More, there was a unique adversarial bonding with readers. Just what
Vijayan wanted. He had famously declared that cartoonists shouldn’t get
swayed by fan mail and instead go ahead and say things readers may not
always like. This is debate at its dangerous best and if you want Young India
to sample it, you should get the cartoons back in circulation but how?
News cartoons invariably fade out. True but lately they are also fading
in, thanks to the Internet. The web has become an unorganized archive for
the cartoon and Indians are a growing online presence. Not a week goes by
without a R.K. Laxman cartoon popping up on Twitter or WhatsApp. It
seems to work as a wise old prophecy that foresaw the times we live in, the
ills that continue to plague us. Netizens seem to lap up the vintage cartoon
and retweet or forward it zestfully.
There is a calendar context to the renewed interest in Laxman. His birth
centenary was last year. Vijayan’s big day is just 8 years away and a good
way to celebrate when he turns 100 would be to curate his cartoons for the
web. Even more than Laxman’s, his cartoon lends itself to rerun. He along
with Abu Abraham and Rajinder Puri editorialized the Indian cartoon by
articulating running themes. In their prime when the Nehruvian state was
hardening under Indira Gandhi, all three voiced vital democratic concerns.
Vijayan went the extra mile.
Look at his take on the Congress party licking its wounds after the trau-
matic electoral setback in 1977. The grand old party in opposition is shown
aiding, abetting and gleefully watching the crumbling ruling combine. The
caption went: ‘Loss of power corrupts and the hope of getting it back cor-
rupts absolutely’. If this was how greed was shown within sovereign borders,
sarcasm dripped when borders were violated. The pungent cartoon should
make eminent sense to us now, in the middle of this war on Ukraine.
232 O.V. Vijayan

As always, Moscow brought the best out of Vijayan. When the Soviet
Union marched into Afghanistan in 1979, he didn’t just make the right paci-
fist noises. He framed India’s foreign policy predicament in terms that look
uncannily close to the present. In the cartoon, Vladimir Putin’s illustrious
predecessor Leonid Brezhnev on a battle tank stops to assure PM Indira
Gandhi: ‘We’re the Soviet East India Company, Lady – looking for an over-
land route’. The Statesman carried the cartoon prominently on the front page
and the story goes that the editors wondered how to publish the next cartoon
and the one after, all of which surely can’t consistently touch wartime edito-
rial heights.
Classics like this from Vijayan became memorable because the caption
more or less said it all. The writer was as much at work on the cartoon as
the cartoonist was on the writing. The result however was that most Vijayan
fans, readers more than watchers of visual arts, were taken in by the gag
more than the image. There was a lot in the punchline to warrant such atten-
tion. It was snappy, the message indeed was weighty and came with a certain
thrill in figuring out the political line and length. Many of us, his first readers,
shared this thrill and overlooked visual niceties.
The editor who took due note of this cartoonist’s visual worth was the late
G. Kasturi of The Hindu. Conventional in many ways, the Chennai-based
broadsheet was abreast of technology and it printed Vijayan the best. From
edit and op-ed pages across three and four columns, the cartoons, shrunk a
bit more than the standard column size, stood out surrounded by a thread
of white amid grey newsprint. This was a black-and-white experience at its
graphic best. This was also the phase when Vijayan picked targets across the
political spectrum from left to right – from E.M.S Nambudiripad and Charu
Mazumdar to Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Bal Thackeray. Somewhere in the
middle, Indira Gandhi had the pride of place.
This long purple patch was cut short when press censorship was imposed in
the name of internal Emergency in 1975. Vijayan left newspaper cartooning.
He began a literary cartoon column in Malayalam weekly, Kala Kaumudi.
This full-page free-flowing sequential artwork without panels had a title that
suggested the content, ‘Ithiri Neramboku; Ithiri Darsanam’ (A Little Fun, A
Little Insight). However oblique, the political overtones were unmistakable.
The wicked pencil was staying in practice to bounce back and it did when
Emergency went in 1977. Then came this cartoonist’s most mature phase in
The Statesman that awed editors as much as readers.
Today decades later, the young reader more visually literate and comic-
savvy than ever is ready for the annotated Vijayan cartoon. The advent of
the graphic novel, the latest cartoonish avatar, has widened the emotional
scope of the comic art way beyond the morning chuckle. On this count few
practitioners pushed the envelope like Vijayan. His intense account of the
post-war twentieth century through war, peace, greed, need, and the inescap-
able obscenity of power would cut across to readers who know their Will
Eisner and Art Spiegelman.
Section 7

Vijayan as Seen by His

Contemporaries


234 O.V. Vijayan

Figure 8 Entrance of O.V. Vijayan Memorial, Credit: Vijayan Memorial at Thasarak

34 The Literary Get-Togethers of
Delhi
P. Govinda Pillai (Translated from
Malayalam by E.V. Ramakrishnan)

I consider it a blessing that I befriended Vijayan in the early 1960s when

he arrived in Delhi and continued to maintain close contact with him over
the subsequent decades. Our acquaintance went back to the 1950s when he
taught at Malabar Christian College in Kozhikode. We met during his visits
to the office of Deshabhimani, which carried his caricatures and stories. As a
member of the Legislative Assembly and an active worker of the Communist
Party of India, I used to frequent the place and would occasionally spend
the nights there. He was nearing 30 but looked more like a student in his
physical appearance. It was not easy for me to make friends with him, as he
was meditative and withdrawn, and I was a little elder to him. I did not have
the foresight to locate the future cultural icon of Kerala in that shy, boyish-
looking young man.
In the first half of the 1960s, things turned upside down. The ideological
divide within the Communist Party culminated in a split within the Party in
1964. Asian politics turned murky in the wake of the border war between
India and China. Nikita Krushchev’s Destalinization controversy, Mao-tse-
Tung’s isolation of China, followed by its Great Leap Forward – all this
added to the turbulence of world politics. V.K. Krishna Menon, the Defence
Minister was forced to quit the cabinet, the towering figure of Jawahar Lal
Nehru was now in decline, his health failing. To avert the imminent split in
the Communist Party of India, S.A. Dange was designated the Chairman
of the Party, a position newly created; E.M.S. Namboothiripad became the
Secretary of the Party after the death of Ajaya Ghosh. I came to Delhi, to join
the staff of the secretariat of the Party, at the instance of E.M.S.
Vijayan reached New Delhi during this period of far-reaching changes. He
first joined Shankar’s Weekly, as a writer and a cartoonist. He also contrib-
uted to Link Weekly and the newspaper, Patriot, both brought out by Aruna
Asaf Ali, ‘the heroine of the August 1942 Revolution’, Edathatta Narayanan,
the well-known journalist and his younger brother, Viswanathan, all of
whom belonged to the CPI. Vijayan’s talents were recognized by these edi-
tors; in fact, they were afraid he would leave them for greener pastures. He
had columns in all these publications.
Shankar Pillai was not a leftist. As a Nehruvian nationalist, he could not
be anti-Communist either. Though Vijayan landed amidst Communist and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-46
236 O.V. Vijayan

left-wing followers, his friends noticed that he was no more the active sup-
porter of Communist ideas as in the 1950s.
The national headquarters of the Communist Party was housed, in those
days, in the Khanna Building which stood beside the Ajmeri Gate opposite
the Ramlila Maidan. People’s Publishing House, an organ of the CPI was
also nearby. The chief editor of the People’s Publishing House was T.K.N.
Menon, who later became the Public Relations Director of the Government
of Kerala when E.M.S. Namboothiripad was the Chief Minister. Another
prominent member of our group was Mohit Sen, a young Communist leader
of repute. Menon, Mohit Sen, and C.P. Ramachandran, who was part of
the editorial team at the Hindustan Times, would assemble on the mani-
cured lawns in front of the Communist Party Office to relax with light con-
versation and discuss current politics in the warmth of the evening sun. In
these sessions, everything from Das Capital to Ishavasya Upanishad, from
Krushchev’s Destalinization to Dange’s leaning towards Congress, from
Thoppil Bhasi’s Ningalenne Communistakki (a play written in Malayalam
against the background of the workers’ fight against feudal landlords, outlin-
ing the ideals of the Communist movement) to Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali,
from the fraudulent Pandas of Benaras to the black-goggles-wearing female
companion of P.T.Chacko, (a Kerala Minister caught in a scandal) came in
for detailed discussions, and sometimes they became heated confrontations.
Most of the people present leaned towards the left, but Vijayan would voice
his dissent in soft, but firm, words. When discussions turned stormy, Vijayan
would change the topic, by raising a philosophical riddle, calling attention to
the stars that appeared in the blue sky. He knew we were die-hard Stalinists
whom even Krushchev could not save. He would hint at it by the change of
his topic.
Sometimes we would gather at the South Avenue apartment of P.K.
Vasudevan Nair, a member of the Parliament. I used to stay there. In these
meetings Kakkanadan, an emerging Malayalam writer, and M. Mukundan,
an established Malayalam novelist would be present. Here politics was banned
in the conversations. The focus would be on literature, cinema, art exhibi-
tions, new books etc. When Vijayan and myself were together, we would
avoid heated debates. We spent our free time at art exhibitions and book-
shops, and visiting the historical monuments of Delhi. We were never tired
of seeing the Red Fort, the Qutub Minar, Feroz Shah Kotla, the Humayun’s
Tomb, and Purana Qila, where history raised its majestic head and the past
lay scattered. I still remember how Vijayan would get emotional watching
the cell where the sensitive Shah Jahan was held a prisoner by Aurangazeb,
and the royal hall where Shah Jahan fainted when Aurangazeb presented him
with the head of his brother, Dara Shikoh, on a platter. Vijayan told me that
Francois Bernier, the famous French physician, had recounted in his trav-
elogue how Aurangazeb had broken down and cried out, ‘Oh, my unlucky
brother’, seeing the head of his brother, Dara Shikoh, though it was at his
orders that the heinous act of beheading was committed.
 The Literary Get-Togethers of Delhi 237

He was deeply moved by the cell where Shah Jahan had died a prisoner,
held captive there by his son, Aurangazeb. The king could watch the Taj
Mahal through a hole in the wall, lying on the stone cot. I still remember
how Vijayan lay on the cot, watched the monument for love through the
hole, dreaming of things. Vijayan wrote his articles and novels dealing with
the essence of life and death much later. However, the traumatic suffering of
Shah Jahan and the tragic end of Dara Shikoh must have sowed the seeds of
these mysteries in his mind much earlier.
Among the painters, we were fascinated by the works of Ramkinkar,
Satish Gujral, K.C.S. Paniker, Amrita Sher-Gil, etc. Vijayan hardly spared
any time before the paintings of Ravi Varma. Nor did he like the una-
dorned simplicity of Abanidranath Tagore. He was attracted towards the
intensely sharp, thick, dark lines of Rabindranath Tagore, which reminded
one of Vijayan’s cartoon strips. Similarly, the animals and human figures of
Nandalal Bose done in the folk style impacted him deeply. When I praised
Ramkinkar’s urban scenes and drawings for their unpolished realism, he
would joke about the socialist propaganda of Malayalam writers like K.P.G
and Kedamangalam Pappukkutty, to poke fun at me. Both of us admired
Satish Gujral’s paintings which reminded one of the revolutionary Mexican
murals of Diego Rivera (1886–1957), Jose Clemnte Orozco (1883–1949),
and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974). Maybe, Satish Gujral’s physical
disabilities may have awakened the literary sensibility of Vijayan. The nihil-
ism and the negative attitude towards life that one finds in Vijayan’s Legends
of Khasak were foreign to these Mexican artists. When I argued that social
commitment and artistic merit could go together, he would reply that such
social objectives are mere outer forms and cannot constitute the soul of art.
We had two entertaining visitors to our Delhi gatherings: Thomas
Mundasseri, the founder of Current Books in Thrissur, and V.K.N, a reputed
Malayalam fictionist noted for his vitriolic satire. V.K.N was a gifted conver-
sationalist who would dominate any gathering with his inimitable parodies
of the mannerisms of Malayalam writers who were critical of the left, like
Keshav Dev, Sukumar Azhikode, M. Govindan, R. Shankar, and K. Kelappan.
Nor would he let off the leftist leaders like E.M.S and K. Damodaran, but he
would be less devastating in his tone while dealing with them. When the rest
of us roared in laughter, Vijayan would sit with a faraway look in his eyes,
meditating on the lack of our intellectual calibre, occasionally winking at me.
After I moved to Kerala and became the Editor of Deshabhimani, he came
to meet me in my office. In the meantime, I had spent two years in jail, as
Communists were accused of being Chinese spies in the wake of the Chinese
aggression. After the publication of The Legends of Khasak, Vijayan was
on the other side of the political divide. Deshabhimani had its study cir-
cles which had gained in strength in Kerala in the 1970s. Vijayan was the
major focus of their attack. After Vijayan’s bold and principled stand against
the Emergency of 1975, I began meeting him often. By now, he had drifted
away from the left-wing politics. The fact remains that till his last breath,
238 O.V. Vijayan

he fought against the violation of human rights, the wanton destruction of

environment, wars and violence of all kinds, and the suppression of citizen’s
freedom. Vijayan’s Dharmapuranam repels one with its scandalous use of
scatological language, but it can be condoned as the eruption of a sensitive
artist’s rage and anguish driven by idealism, against the ruthless and evil
nature of the repressive regime of the Emergency.
By the 1980s, Vijayan woke (or slipped and fell) into spirituality. We often
argued over these issues whenever we met. In 1989, I had made some remarks
against the Chinese government’s action at Tiananmen Square which invited
my party’s ire. Vijayan published two or three cartoons justifying my stand.
Though I do not approve of the message he conveyed, I value his love and
concern for me. He said he found my words of criticism a shower of flowers.
I still cannot make out whether it was spoken as a compliment or in jest.

Source
Govinda Pillai, P. 2006. “Indraprasthathile Sauhruda Sadassukal” in P.K.
Rajasekharan (ed.) (The Literary Get-Togethers of New Delhi). O.V.Vijayan:
Ormappustakam. Kottayam: D.C. Books, 39–44.
35 Vijayan 1975–2005
Progressive Erosion of Black Humour and
Laughter

Anand (Translated by E.V. Ramakrishnan)

I met Vijayan for the first time during the Emergency. M. Govindan had
given me his address earlier. I used to visit New Delhi often in connection
with the official engagements of the Project I was associated with, in Bengal.
The atmosphere at the workplace, as elsewhere, was filled with fear. One set
of people did all the talking. The rest of the people kept silent. One of the
slogans of the times was: less talk, more work. I will reach Delhi by one of
the trains that ran on time (another feature of the Emergency days). I would
check into a low-cost hotel at Paharganj, one that was affordable within
the meagre travelling allowance I received from the Government. I will visit
the office of our Ministry at the Shram Shakti Bhavan where the sound of
the typewriters resounded over the muted conversations. I went to Vijayan’s
house in the Safdarjung Development area, one Sunday in a chilly December
morning. Vijayan began his conversation by enquiring about the atmosphere
at my workplace.
Both of us were deeply impacted by the shock of the Emergency, its tor-
ments, and trauma. Our repeated meetings and conversations provided great
relief to us. Some evenings, Vijayan would come to my office, or I would go
to his place. We would go and sit somewhere. The subjects of our conver-
sation were not pleasant. Each week brought in news of new legislation, a
tragic event, or the declaration of a new policy. Nothing brought hope. The
names of those arrested were given by the B.B.C. Those days, people pre-
ferred to read books on Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag was also in demand. These were the subjects of our conversations.
Vijayan had stopped doing cartoons for the Statesman. He believed that
one cannot produce cartoons within the limits of the curtailed press freedom.
If the pen came into contact with the electric fence, not only that drawing
will cease, but one may suffer shock. One can carry on with cartooning only
in an open society. There are always limits to press freedom, but during the
Emergency, they came alarmingly very close, almost touching one’s skin. It
crossed into time as well as space. Imprisoning the future, beyond the present.
During one of our walks, I bought a copy of the latest edition of the Indian
Constitution with all the new amendments. It had the detailed provisions of
the forty-second amendment which had just been passed by the Parliament.
There were no opposition parties in the Parliament, as their members were

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240 O.V. Vijayan

all in jail. The forty-second amendment was yet to become law. Still the
book was out. The publishers’ comment was: ‘These will now be ratified by
the State Legislatures and assented to by the President’. The law is decided
even before the approval by the states and the assent by the President. It was
like the wonderland of Alice. What relevance cartoons had in such a society,
Vijayan observed. The state has taken on itself the job of the cartoonist, by
creating its own caricatures.
On the front page of that publication, there was a note which went like
this: ‘The Taxman publications congratulate and thank the Prime Minister
Smt. Indira Gandhi for making the Constitution a dynamic instrument’.
Such thanksgivings were common everywhere in those days. All publica-
tions, statements, and advertisements carried such expression of gratitude
to the Prime Minister at the very beginning. Sabarimala Devaswom temple
would pay tribute to the Prime Minister for saving the country from anarchy
before it hails the Lord Ayyappa, in its advertisement. So would the Tirupati
Devaswom in its advertisement for the distribution of its offering of divine
‘prasad’ (known as ‘laddus’). Hussain’s paintings had suddenly awakened
themselves to the service all of us owe to the country. Even personal invita-
tions to marriages or birthdays would pay tribute to the Prime Minister.
We would carefully scan the pages of newspapers for signs of sparks con-
cealed in what appeared in print. Some items of news would escape the cen-
sor’s eyes. The Statesman, which carried Vijayan’s cartoons, now appeared
without them. They had a column on every Monday, ‘City Notebook’. In one
of its tail pieces, the following notice, found in a public library in Calcutta
(now Kolkata), was reproduced: ‘On and from January 1, 1976, newspa-
pers will be found in the fiction section’. It was immaterial that the room
for newspapers was under repair! Beetle leader George Harrison’s comment
paid a compliment to Mrs Gandhi: ‘Hey, I tell you Mrs Gandhi ought to run
England’. There was the photograph of a taxi crushed and mangled in an
accident with this slogan on its back: ‘The nation is on the move’. There were
also moments of grief. Vijayan showed me this statement of Abu Abraham,
the cartoonist: ‘She is a tough, pragmatic woman respectful of democratic
values’. There was also a piece that resembled the one written by Kuldip
Nayar after he was released from jail.
Commercial pieces were another segment of attraction for us, in search of
critical comments on the Emergency. I remember an advertisement for a brand
of hosiery with the name, ‘Freedom’: ‘Freedom – it deserves a thought today’.
It carried the mandatory salute to the Prime Minister below. The advertise-
ment for Silvikrin, a hair tonic, was particularly artistic. It was known as an
antidote to hair loss. Their message ran like this: ‘If you were born before
the Independence Day of 1947, you could be losing hair … permanently!’ I
saw all this as new forms of cartoons. It is a fact that cartoons will survive
totalitarian regimes somehow or the other. Vijayan had begun an appar-
ently non-political cartoon series in a Malayalam weekly, Kalakaumudi, with
the title, ‘A Little Fun, A Little Insight’. It was a subterfuge to escape the
  Vijayan 1975–2005 241

censorship on political cartooning. Mythical characters like Ganapathi and

Krishna figured in these cartoons, assisting Vijayan in his effort to beat the
wrath of the censors.
I moved to Delhi in the summer of 1984, along with my family. The
Emergency was a thing of the past, by then. The experiment of the Janatha
regime (Janatha Party was born of the merger of many opposition par-
ties, after the Emergency) ended in a betrayal more painful than that of the
Congress party. Indira Gandhi had made a comeback. She was assassinated
in that autumn. One of the worst religious pogroms of independent India
was staged in Delhi by her supporters, where the members of the Sikh com-
munity were massacred on a large scale. By then, Vijayan had chosen the
path of spirituality. And that of complete submission to the Guru. Amidst my
responsibilities of finding a place to stay and getting my children admitted in
schools, we kept meeting. Vijayan kept any reference to his new interests out
of our conversations. He knew that I had no interest in such matters. There
were enough issues for us to discuss in the secular world. Those invoking
black humour. When was there any dearth of such issues! I felt Vijayan was
progressively losing his sense of humour. His physical ailments were not the
only reason for this. In his new path, there was hardly any room for doubts.
When doubts are out of place, humour becomes the first scapegoat. Vijayan
gradually lost his interest in conversations. He was withdrawing into silence.
I began losing the Vijayan I knew.

Source
Anand. 2006. “Vijayan 1975–2005: Karuthathum Kurayunnathumaya Chiri”
(Vijayan 1975–2005 : Progressive Erosion of Black Humour and Laughter). in
P.K. Rajasekharan, (ed.) O.V. Vijayan: Ormappustakam. Kottayam: D.C. Books,
24–26.
36 O.V. Vijayan
Death and Afterlife of a Writer

M. Mukundan

O.V. Vijayan has passed away. For friends, with the death of the writer
begins a new friendship with him, a friendship free from ego and chastened
by an awareness of the inevitability of death. For readers, it is an opportunity
to have a fresh look at his works without prejudices – you cannot have preju-
dices for a dead writer and enjoy reading them with a sense of loss, though.
I am both a friend and a reader of the late writer. A reader and admirer
first, who turned a friend over the years. If my memory doesn’t fail me, it
was in the summer of 1963 in Delhi that I met O.V. Vijayan for the first time
and my last meeting with him was in 2003 at Kottayam. Between these two
meetings lay four decades of creativity, passions, dreams, and despair. Way
back in 1963, the Vijayan I happened to see in Connaught Place was young,
elegantly dressed in trousers and a blazer, briefcase in hand, clutching in his
teeth a smouldering pipe. His long, ebony-dark silken hair flying in the dusty
wind, he was crossing in a hurry, the road that lay between Scindia House
and the Fire Station in the Outer Circle of the Connaught Place. In 2003,
the Vijayan I saw at Kottayam was altogether a different person – a skinny,
emaciated old man who sat on a chair clad in a dhoti, with a brittle grey
beard, and trembling fingers. A victim of Parkinson’s disease in its advanced
stage, he could hardly speak or move. A writer who wrote copiously stories,
articles, and novels both in Malayalam and English and drew cartoons for
over forty years, sat still, with a blank look in his eyes. The sparkles of black
humour so characteristic of the writer were missing. Any effort to speak
resulted in a distorted murmur blocked in the throat.
Disease-ridden as he was, Vijayan’s death didn’t come as a surprise.
All knew it was imminent, his ravaged body was beyond redemption.
Nevertheless, when death finally came through the open door, it infused his
friends with a deep sense of loss. What is interesting is the fact that though he
was an introvert to the point of being ‘anti-social’, he had a large number of
friends, more than the partying socialites of the Capital. Malayalees are born
orators, but Vijayan could hardly speak a sentence completely.
Even as his friends and well-wishers mourned his death all over the coun-
try, the media in Kerala covered it in a manner unheard of. (As he was lying
in coma on life-supporting machines in a Hyderabad hospital for several
days, the media had enough time at hand to prepare his obituary and telecast

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-48
  O.V. Vijayan 243

it with flourishes well in time. Are we to believe that if a writer wants a

large coverage of his death by the media, he should languish on his deathbed
before he breathes his last?)
No other Malayalee writer of his time has lived in the imagination of the
readers as he did. A cult figure, he was canonized by his admirers during his
lifetime itself. Tasarak, the village in Palghat against which his first novel
Khasakkinte Itihaasam was set, was already a pilgrim centre for his count-
less readers and admirers. Thus, while still alive, he had appropriated the
glory and halo that usually come to a writer only after his death. His body
was brought home from Hyderabad clad in the national flag, and his mortal
remains were consigned to fire with full State honours. O.V. Vijayan is a
writer who had nothing left to long for posthumously. As a writer, he had
achieved everything – fame, glamour, awards, and honours – in his lifetime
itself, making death redundant.
At the time of my first meeting with Vijayan, he was best known as a
political cartoonist who regularly contributed to the now defunct Shankar’s
Weekly, and then The Statesman, and lesser known as a writer. In the
1950s and 60s, all the intellectuals and writers in Kerala were invariably
Communists and Vijayan too happened to be one. Apart from drawing
cartoons regularly, he wrote articles and stories occasionally. He appeared
on the literary scene gently – gentleness: that’s the hallmark of his per-
sonality which he kept up until he died, walking gently into the waiting
hands of death, so gently that the lovers of literature used to the cacoph-
ony of debates and disputes hardly took note of his subtle writings in the
beginning.
He made his presence felt in the literary scene with that path-breaking
novel, Khasakkinte ltihaasam (literally ‘The Legend of Khasak’, translated
later into English by Vijayan himself, as The Legends of Khasak), published
in 1969. That, too, entered the literary scene gently, since no one had paid
attention to it at least for five years following its publication. And then the
word spread slowly: here’s a great novel, which is nothing short of sheer
magic, and which, later on, learned literary critics described as ‘the novel of
the century’ written in the Malayalam language. The novel revolves around
the protagonist Ravi and a host of rural folks in Khasak, the fictional recrea-
tion of the village, Tasarak. Ravi arrives there to teach in the village school.
His is a restless soul, always groping for answers to his unsettling questions.
And at the end, he commits suicide offering his foot to a poisonous snake
(the novel was written in the same decade Albert Camus died, whose Myth
of Sisyphus stated that the most important philosophical question of our time
was that of suicide). Stark realism permeates the village, the characters, and
the language. But beneath the realism lies the magic of imageries. It’s about
life in the countryside, with realistic characters, with an over-arching rain-
bow of spirituality, punctuated by ceaseless self-interrogations. In the last
analysis, it’s the story of a distant village mired in local myths and legends,
gathered in an urban gaze.
244 O.V. Vijayan

Thus came the phenomenal success of the novel and its author. If the novel
that marked a milestone in contemporary fiction in Kerala couldn’t make
the same impact in its English translation, that’s because it is impossible to
render it in any other language – its language, imageries, and subtleties which
are culture-specific are not simply translatable.
At that time, the literary scenario in Kerala was replete with the detritus
of socialist realism and the decadent romanticism. The progressive move-
ment had been pulverized in its own intense heat while romanticism refusing
to fall in disuse had turned sickening, The readers, who had begun to look
beyond the moribund socialist realism and the decadent romanticism, hap-
pily embraced to their hearts Khasakkinte Itihaasam. The style and content
of the novel was a far cry from all fictional works written before. It dis-
carded the concept of social engagement in literary production. However, it
didn’t discard romanticism. Instead, it recycled it. I would regard his writing
in general as a work of discarded communism, recycled romanticism, and
redeemed spirituality.
Until the advent of modern trends in the 1960s, Malayalee readers were
highly politicized. No literary work could escape their political scrutiny and
the merits of a literary work were solely judged on the basis of its political
involvement. Khasakkinte Itihaasam put an end to that practice, depoliticiz-
ing the sensibility of the readers, and, in the process, put out the Marxian
fury which was then so rampant in fiction and poetry writing. With this
novel, Vijayan helped an entire generation of readers to break free from the
weight of unrealized Red dreams and offered them a substitute: the novel as
a way of life. Khasakkinte Itihaasam will be remembered in the distant future
not only for its magical prose but also for fictionalizing the Malayalees’ life
and time.
Paradoxically, in the wake of the phenomenal success of his debut novel,
Vijayan wrote a powerful political novel, Dharmapuranam later translated
as The Saga of Dharmapuri. It was a prophetic work in that what the author
imagined in the novel, in fact, turned true when Indira Gandhi declared
Emergency giving the history of our country a Kafkaesque touch. The gro-
tesque, the fearsome, and the ridiculous were serenaded in this sombre novel
in such a large measure that it matched, even surpassed, the works of some
of the Latin American novelists – patriarchs of boundless imagination and
calligraphers of historical violence.
In the first place, with Khasakkinte Itihaasam, Vijayan, notwithstanding
the fact that he was an ardent Communist, depoliticized and fictionalized
Malayalee sensibility, and then, with Dharmapuranam, redeemed their polit-
ical consciousness, ridiculing the arrogance and vulgarity of political powers.
And, with the novel Gurusagaram (later translated as Infinity of Grace), he
reinvented himself seeking refuge in spirituality. Gurusagaram was the tired
writer’s ultimate search for solace. The novel is peopled with gods, souls,
remembrances of past lives, reincarnations, and death. The physicality of
characters surrenders before the abstract, the spiritual, and the invisible.
  O.V. Vijayan 245

Thus, Vijayan’s literary pursuits occupy three seemingly divergent spaces:

his early pro-Communist musings, his ridiculing of this very ideology fol-
lowed by his acerbic attack on the abuse and vulgarization of political pow-
ers, and finally his migration to spirituality. In the last phase of his life, he
was so immersed in God and subjugated to his guru – Karunakara Guru who
inspired Gurusagaram that one could say that he died as a naturalized citi-
zen in the country of spirituality. If these three spaces appear distinct, that is
only on the periphery. If in Vijayan’s rich body of oeuvre – cartoons, stories,
articles, novels – divergence and difference, conflicts and contradictions exist,
these are just meandering aberrations that set off from his otherwise coherent
dark worldview. There is a dark river of perennial unrest and anguish that
runs through his thought which gives a coherence to his writings in spite of
their intrigues and conflicts. The cliched adage, ‘unity in diversity’ could be
reversed in Vijayan’s case, as ‘diversity in unity’.
Vijayan was born in a small village but wrote all his major works living in
the city of Delhi. Traditionally, great Malayalam writers lived and worked
on riverbanks in the countryside The celebrated novelist Uroob, Jnanpith
laureates Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai and M.T. Vasudevan Nair, and the
poet Edassery were all products of the village with a river flowing through it
or set in the background. This is true of writers of other languages as well.
There are hardly any classic novels in the Bengali language without a river.
Sabitri Roy talks about the Meghna, while Manik Banerjee celebrates the
Padma. Until the 1960s and the advent of modernity, literature was more
or less a creation of writers living in the countryside who wrote about life in
their villages.
In the 1960s, O.V. Vijayan, who began to write living in Delhi altered this
tradition. By the time, cities had appropriated imagination and had turned
into seats of creativity. Milan Kundera left his homeland and settled down in
Paris, while Amitav Ghosh migrated to New York. The nameless protagonist
of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Youth too migrated to the city of London in order to
be a poet. Thus, not only novelists but even their characters headed for cities
in search of creativity.
Though he lived in the city of Delhi for over four decades, Vijayan always
carried deep within him memories of his village with its vast paddy fields and
palm trees perpetually caught in winds blowing from the Western Ghats.
Long years spent in the capital in the company of intellectuals and artists
with different backgrounds never corrupted his language. He wrote in a lan-
guage that was pristine.
In the fading days of his life, Vijayan had to face some sharp criticism.
Since the pulling down of the Babri Masjid and the pogrom in Gujarat, read-
ers in Kerala are extremely sensitive to spirituality in literature. A section of
the intelligentsia in Kerala saw in Vijayan’s overindulgence in spirituality
a veiled Hindu fanaticism. This was unjust. A writer of Vijayan’s calibre
who has ceaselessly interpreted history knew more than his critics the inher-
ent dangers of subscribing to Hindu fundamentalism. Most importantly, the
246 O.V. Vijayan

underlying glow of all his writings is compassion and humaneness, the legacy
of Marxism, which he had given up. How can such a writer embody religious
fanaticism?
Vijayan was never sure of himself. Doubts, fear, and anxiety always
haunted him. As his longtime friend and critic Paul Zacharia has said,
Vijayan was a defeatist who failed to look the realities of the world in the
face. But that is his raison d’etre. Weakness was his strength. Doubts were
his certainties. When men failed to understand what he said, Saint Francis
turned to birds and talked to them. Likewise, Vijayan regularly talked to his
cats who, he thought, understood him better than his intellectual friends.
Vijayan, who was mortified at the sight of spiders, believed that cats could
remember their past lives.
Over there, there is another world which is home to tortured souls of
immortal writers and artists who suffered all through their lives from dis-
eases and madness. Now, Vijayan is with them. When he headed towards the
yonder world, he must have left behind all his possessions, except one thing:
his black humour.

Source
Mukundan, M. 2005. “O.V. Vijayan: Death and Afterlife of a Writer”. Indian
Literature 49(2): 85–89.
37 Remembering My Brother
O.V. Usha

As I begin to write about my illustrious brother, certain sadness comes

over me. What comes to my mind at once is an image of him, weakened by
Parkinsonism. It was an unnerving experience for me to witness his physi-
cal suffering. He had an excruciating time in the last months (August 2004
to March 2005) of his life when he spent long spells in the hospital. He was
fully aware of what was happening to him, almost till the end but suffered
without complaint.
His physical ability to write, draw, speak, and move was progressively
declining through the years. But he remained strikingly sharp-witted and sen-
sitive except for the last few months. I had gone from Kottayam to Care
Hospital, Hyderabad, where he was admitted. He wrote to me ‘Never had
an illness like this’. He also added ‘It is the seventh day’. He was for a long
time communicating with us through gestures and brief notes written with
felt pens – green or black – on scribbling pads or pieces of paper. Felt pens
did not need pressing and were easy to handle.
I remember an incident when he was in Kottayam. Some friends visited
him (it was in the year 2001, I think), and among the various little notes he
wrote in response to their chat with him was a statement: ‘I feel like a pris-
oner’. He had lost even that ability to hold a pen (with least pressure) in the
last two months or so.
Let me move back to lighter days. In my earliest memory, my brother
was a young adult whom the elders called ‘UNNI’ and my elder sister called
‘Eattan’ (elder brother). I preferred to call him Unni till I was four or five.
We were three siblings, Eattan being the eldest. My sister Shanta chechi was
four years younger to him. I came to the world as a post script 14 years after
my sister’s arrival. Eattan was an irritated four-year-old when Shanta chechi
was an infant and wanted probably to finish her off, much to the mirth of
our parents, and paternal grandmother who lived with them. As time passed,
he became a loving elder brother and found a great ally and defender in her.
Chechi once told me how that development came about. She was the stronger
of the two and bullied the elder brother, in spite of her being affectionate,
whenever she fancied he needed some bullying. Our mother tactfully solved
the problem by narrating Bharata’s story from Ramayana. Very susceptible
to stories, Shanta chechi was quickly convinced that she should respect her

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-49
248 O.V. Vijayan

elder brother, as Bharata respected Shri Rama. She would follow him and
listen to the stories he would make up and present as reality.
Both brother and sister became avid readers of literature in course of time
and shared the same sensibility and interests. Here I would recall an inci-
dent narrated by Chechi. Eattan and Chechi were still students when Vaikom
Muhammad Basheer’s novel ‘Shabdangal’ was banned soon after its publica-
tion (1947). Eattan somehow got hold of a copy of the novel, read it secretly,
and stood guard when my sister also read it secretly. They were ‘partners in
crime’ as it were. Both of them were ardent admirers of Basheer and always
carried a special tenderness towards the endearing master writer. Needless to
say, their deep interest impacted me also deeply.
Years later when the first edition of Basheer’s complete works was released
(1992), Eattan came over to Kozhikode from Delhi to attend the function
and receive the first copy. He gifted to me the two volumes he received. And
to my surprise he told me: ‘I touched Basheer’s feet’. It was uncharacteristic
of my brother to touch someone’s feet to mark respect.
I recall how the plot of ‘Khasak’ was brewing between my brother and
sister. Shanta Chechi was for some time teaching in the single-teacher school
in Thasrak some ten kilometres away from where we lived at that time. (It
was a big distance for us at that time.) Shanta Chechi was a vibrant fresh
graduate and interacted genially with her students. She sometimes narrated
incidents from history, her subject for graduation. She had a captivating way
of narration, and the children were rapt listeners. They felt close to her and
would share whatever came to their mind. She on her part was fascinated by
their experiences and by the quaint village as a whole.
She had to stay in Thasrak during her stint of teaching and on the occa-
sions she came home she was full of that place. Eattan was in and out of the
house, and when sister and brother met, Thasrak would invariably come up.
Maimoona, Allah Pitcha Mollakka, and Naizam Ali became names familiar
to me from their conversations. (They didn’t mind their kid sister hanging
around). Though I don’t recall what exactly they talked as such, I have no
doubt that it was my sister’s vivid sharing of her experiences that inspired my
brother to create Khasak.
Those were the early days of the Communist movement in Kerala, and they
were completely under the spell of that ideology. As a great sympathizer, I was
impressed by those two Communists and thought I would be a Communist
all my life, little knowing that my mindset differed from that of my siblings.
An elderly friend had gifted me two pictures once – one of Goddess
Saraswati with her veena and the other of Sree Krishna playing his flute to
his herd. I was filled with love and veneration for those pictures and would
burn incense and pray (blank prayers). Eattan gently persuaded me to give
up these pictures and used the frames, replacing Saraswati and Krishna with
photos of Communist leaders.
The one I remember was of Renu Chakravarty pleasantly smiling to a lit-
tle child (or children). I was a heartbroken seven-year-old losing my Krishna
 Remembering My Brother 249

and Saraswati, but I could never bring myself to record a protest against my
brother. Somehow, I never kept pictures of Hindu deities after that.
My brother became mellowed in course of time, but his obsession with
Communism did not really wane. There was no alternative ideology as far as
he was concerned. He had an open mind nevertheless. The earliest memories
I have of my brother, as I have already indicated, are as a smart college-going
youngster. After his graduation in Palakkad he moved to Madras (Chennai)
for his post graduation. From the time I can remember in my childhood, he
had been finding time to spend for me.
He would take me out occasionally for an evening walk, for example.
During one of those walks, he explained to me how sand and small pebbles
form (we were walking on country roads). I have a vague memory of being
amazed at the description. Even now, I remember how he took me to a film
showing at a theatre in Palakkad, starring the iconic actor Dilipkumar. This
was in 1955. He took me to the movie not because of Dilipkumar. Zippy, a
chimpanzee, had a prominent role in it. He knew I would be thrilled to watch
the animal in action.
In later years, he would become distressed by my addiction to Hindi mov-
ies. He was not interested in commercial movies. As far as Hindi language
was concerned, his stance was political. He justifiably thought that all Indian
languages should have the same official status. He wilfully resisted Hindi in
spite of being in Delhi for decades.
A trip that comes to my mind was my first trip to Malampuzha Dam. It
was about nine kilometres away from our home. Eattan borrowed a bicycle
and we had a ride through country roads which had hardly any traffic those
days. I remember him stopping at a small village tea shop and buying me a
glass of milk and my favourite ‘poovan’ banana.
He used to buy toys for me and get scolded by our mother. We were going
through hard times and mother considered buying toys a wasteful diversion.
From the age of three or four, I was making monstrous drawings on the
walls, with charcoal from burnt fuel wood. (We had only wood stoves those
days.) Eventually, my brother started getting me drawing books, pencils, wax
crayons, etc. for me to indulge in my passion.
At one point, my mother and I had joined him in Madurai where he was
working as a temporary lecturer in English. Since I had to start my school
days, Eattan put me in a Tamil primary school. Though I loved to attend
that school, Eattan could not manage to take me to school regularly and we
had to drop the idea. Later, I attended Providence Convent when he worked
in Malabar Christian College, Kozhikode. My mother and I had joined him.
I was to attend the third standard and I refused to go to school after a few
days. Eattan did not get angry with me for my misdeeds.
But Eattan did make me unhappy on a couple of occasions while we were
in Kozhikode. One incident was that he did not celebrate Navaratri in spite
of my desperate requests. Also he did not help to get a ‘Pookkalam’ made for
Onam. He had broken with such traditions completely. The way I look at the
250 O.V. Vijayan

situation now is that he failed to see festivals as fruitful social or family occa-
sions. Maybe because of Communist ideas he identified festivals as religious
events and rejected them.
Eattan was generally soft-spoken and gentle in his ways. Yet his writing
reflects a remarkable inner force. As a student of literature, I am in awe of
my brother.
I have shared a few memories which bring out certain aspects of my broth-
er’s character. The picture is of course incomplete.
38 The Lean Young Man
Madhavikkutty (Kamala Das) (Translated
from Malayalam by Shyma P.)

I became acquainted with Vijayan from Delhi. I was 28 or 29 then. Vijayan

was a lean, young man. Emaciated like a skeleton. I used to write poems
in English then. Vijayan would persuade me to write in Malayalam. But, I
didn’t know Malayalam well. I studied Malayalam only in elementary class.
In 1984, I had stood for office as independent candidate to the parliament
from Thiruvananthapuram. Vijayan sent me a cassette of Malayalam songs
for the election campaign. The song went like this. ‘Who is this Charles. Vote
for Kamala’. Many said it was Vijayan’s voice.
Vijayan never harassed me. When I went for religious conversion, many
had pestered me. Vijayan and O.V. Usha were affectionate towards me. Their
family is a good friend of mine today. They call me often. I run to them when
they ask to see me. I hug Vijayan. I tug at his goatee.
Now, Vijayan cannot speak properly. But, I will share my feelings with
Vijayan openly. Vijayan loves to hear them. I tell Vijayan anything and
everything.
It gives me pleasure that I have someone to share anything personal. It
gives me strength. Balan (Balachandran Chullikkad) and Vijayalakshmi are
good friends of mine. Once I converted to another religion, the number of my
friends in the literary domain dwindled. Nobody rings me as before. Nobody
comes to meet me. There were many programmes here as part of Kerala Day.
Nobody invited me for them. How I had enriched literature! Who remembers
all that! Once I became a Muslim, nobody acknowledges me. Initially I was
deeply hurt by this. Now, I don’t feel so disappointed. As I realized their
duplicity, I understood that the closeness and love they showed me were fake.
O.V. Vijayan came home in 2001. He had come for a program in connec-
tion with Kerala Day, organized by Sahithya Parishath in Ernakulam.
Vijayan is an intellectual. I am an emotional being. Our inks are different.
Vijayan’s words fall from the intellect. Mine has more of emotional content.
The two belong to two domains. Vijayan’s thoughts and writings are on a
pedestal that is too high for me to comprehend.
I have nothing but good to speak about Vijayan. Good natured. Good
writing. Good behaviour. He is not a nuisance to anyone. A writer with zero
pride. Very plain. Hence, it is a pleasure for me when Vijayan wins awards.
For O.V. Usha too, chettan1 is life embodied.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-50
252 O.V. Vijayan

Vijayan is my good friend and strength. I have taken many photos with
Vijayan. I like to talk with him for as much time there is.

Note
1. A way of address in Malayalam, suggesting seniority and respect.

Source
Kamala Das. 2006. “Aa Melinja Cheruppakkaran” in P.K. Rajasekharan (ed.) O.V.
Vijayan: Ormappustakam. Kottayam: D.C. Books, 37–38.
Section 8

Vijayan in Conversation


39 ‘We can never accept that the black man
can say something original!’
A Conversation with O.V. Vijayan

Akbar Kakkattil (Translated by

K.C. Muraleedharan)

Akbar: As a fiction writer and cartoonist who excels in both, is it true that
you have no definite politics?
Vijayan: The function of ‘politics’ is to make life non-violent and percep-
tive. Countless attempts have been made to reform politics, some worked
partly, some failed. These advances and even failures have been assessed
differently in the past and even now. I believe that politics is discrimina-
tion and progress. Politics is for the people, it is not the other way round.
In this sense, I am constantly engaged in active politics.
Akbar: Doesn’t the statement ‘politics is for people’ also imply that ‘people
are for politics?’
Vijayan: These are the problems we face when we use language to describe a
process. It is possible to arrive at the latter by reversing the former. Those
who have perceived the two in this way became leaders and martyrs and
dedicated their whole lives to realize their political ideals. Isn’t it better
to say that both are complementary? ‘Politics is for people’ emphasizes
compassionate humanism. The other signifies the efficiency and solidar-
ity of political organizations. No need to make it a point of dispute.
Akbar: If that is so, what is your politics?
Vijayan: No one can keep away from politics. If I were born in a beehive, I
wouldn’t be writing. Instead, I would either copulate with the queen or
collect honey and live on like that. We are all born with some skills and
our circumstances provide us opportunities to develop and apply these
skills. My circumstances made me a writer. As a citizen, I have desires
about what my society should be like. Bluntly speaking, a socialist soci-
ety was my preference. If I were a factory worker, I would be an active
trade unionist. Had I been a doctor, I would have performed surgical
procedures uncorrupted by bribery. I follow the same determination as
a writer. l can only write. I make use of that ability to draw my read-
ers to the goodness I believe in. People commit blunders when they find
an unrealistic identification of the concept of politics with the organiza-
tional framework of political parties.
Akbar: Do your writings have political undercurrents?
Vijayan: Yes. But I handle them not as political controversies but as the ele-
ments of my fiction.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-52
256 O.V. Vijayan

Akbar: Why do you oppose the left tooth and nail even when you request
people to vote for them?
Vijayan: Your statement is misleading. I respond mainly to the Communist
Party (Marxist).
Akbar: You were a Marxist in the past?
Vijayan: I have had regard for Marxism in my youth. I regard the memories
of the humble relationship I had with the organization as noble. But
the lapses of the Marxist parties when they came to power, all over the
world, made me rethink.
Akbar: Wasn’t that a negation of the party organization?
Vijayan: No. I was just arguing for changes like that of the Prague Spring and
Gorbachev’s glasnost. That I spoke about the transformation ten years
before Gorbachev did was my offence.
Akbar: What about the relevance of the Marxist party now?
Vijayan: I expect that in the evolving sub-national politics, the Marxist Party
will continue to demonstrate what Kerala exists for. The safe exist-
ence and the democratization of that party have become crucial for the
Malayali community. This was the objective of my critique.
Akbar: A perfect Communist like you – the one who wrote ‘Iringalakuda’,
how can you explain the transition to writing ‘Parakal?’
Vijayan: ‘Parakal’ is a story. It is undesirable to take it literally. It was an
attempt to juxtapose the absurdities the logic of war and confrontations
lead us to and the gentle emotions that survive in us in spite of such
logic. For that, real characters had to change into symbols. The task of
the writer is to explore the areas of thought independently and render
human perspectives more meaningful. Line up various conceptions in
a comparative mode of study, some findings may emerge, small truths
sometimes, may err in a huge way, some other times.
Akbar: Are you endorsing the reader’s role?
Vijayan: I would only say that the reader should be empathetic to the writer.
Akbar: When the world as a whole is in disquiet with rebellions, is the end of
the kind you portrayed in ‘Parakal’ imminent?
Vijayan: Now I feel that the form of the ultimate crisis is rebellion.
Akbar: What else?
Vijayan: Disasters from the cracks in the Ozone layer.
Akbar: Can you elaborate?
Vijayan: Science and Technology will have to give up their present ways. To
put it differently, both Capitalism and Communism, rooted in Industrial
Revolution, should leave the stage. Otherwise, increased production will
lead to a rise in global temperature by four degrees at least, and this may
end up in polar icecap melting and sea level rising.
Akbar: Do you think it is imminent? Isn’t it a matter of grave consequences?
Vijayan: Within 20 years, roughly. The state of Kerala will be submerged.
Akbar: Are you suggesting that the ideologies should be reworked to include
these aspects as well?
‘We can never accept that the black man can say something original!’ 257

Vijayan: Yes. I raised these issues mainly to draw attention to such disastrous
changes. In a context that demands disagreement with industrial revolu-
tion, it wouldn’t be desirable to leave the driving force of history entirely
to either the working class or to the capitalists. My views will annoy both
the left and the right.
Akbar: You clubbed capitalism and communism, is it desirable to consider
these two political phenomena equal in terms of values?
Vijayan: A mechanical comparison is not intended at all. One is for profit, the
other for social justice and so there is a vast ethical difference between
them. But in the process of production and distribution, this difference
becomes reduced to an issue related to ‘management’. Modern busi-
ness management is production sans values, while communism is the
valourization of the same process of production. But communism and
capitalism seek the same ditch of satisfaction and fall into it – consum-
erism. Both are trapped by the idea of uncontrolled progress for the
sake of uncontrolled consumerism. Another point. The workers of rich
socialist lands are in search of social hedonism. This is true of the work-
ers of rich capitalist countries too, but with a difference. They do it in
confrontation with the interests of capital. The industrial worker has
rendered revolution irrelevant, by forfeiting the values of martyrdom
and its ideals.
Akbar: We Indians face numerous problems. Can you suggest some political
solutions?
Vijayan: We should free ourselves from the vicious circle of ‘politics for war
and war for politics’. We should move away from the declamations of
overstatements and practise a factual approach to things.
Akbar: How do you view the situation in North India now?
Vijayan: The phase of the freedom struggle has ended in North India. Instead,
divisive tendencies and repressive policies have taken over. There is much
suffering that lies ahead. The third world is a dark domain of several
tribal feuds.
Akbar: Now let us spend some time on your novels. Some readers have felt
The Legends of Khasak was an obscure novel. But with the publication
of The Saga of Dharmapuri and The Infinity of Grace, the charge of
obscurity thinned away but with Madhuram Gayathi there was, readers
say, a return to obscurity. What do you think? Can you explain what
prompted you to write this novel?
Vijayan: That novel combines mythology and ecology. It is a light story, a
fable, about the contradictions of science gone astray being harmonized
by Krishna’s flute music. Nothing is obscure in it.
Akbar: Which is your favourite, The Saga of Dharmapuri or The Infinity of
Grace? Though these two operate at different levels, don’t they share the
same political ideology?
258 O.V. Vijayan

Vijayan: All the three novels, Dharmapuranam, Gurusagaram, and

Khasakkinte Ithihasam, with their separate dimensions of aesthetics, are
dear to me.
Akbar: What is the context of the Head of State of Czechoslovakia appearing
in The Infinity of Grace?
Vijayan: Some friends interpreted my depiction of Alexander Dubček, the
reformist Communist leader as a noble character, a politically regressive
move. What happened there years later proved my imaginary portrayal
right.
Akbar: You dedicated only one work of yours and that was, as I recall, The
Infinity of Grace. What was behind that dedication?
Vijayan: A personal obligation occasioned that dedication.
Akbar: You have gone far from The Legends of Khasak to reach Madhuram
Gayathi. It indicates the change of perspective in you. But I feel you love
Ravi (the protagonist of Khasak) so much that you cannot leave him
behind. Right?
Vijayan: Yes, Ravi is close to my heart. He is a poor man because he has no
obsession with rules, no pretentious morality or ethical self-righteous-
ness. We too are poor people if we keep aside our arrogance.
I have never attempted to measure how far I have gone from The
Legends of Khasak to reach Madhuram Gayathi. All human beings make
such journeys, going somewhere, me too. I dare not to provide my read-
ers with a manual for living. I am just sharing with readers the ordinary
experience of an ordinary person.
Akbar: The first few sentences of the third chapter of The Legends of Khasak
you wrote in 1969 and the first sentence of the first chapter of Gabriel
García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch written in 1975 are strik-
ingly similar. How did the critics who went in search of the roots of The
Legends of Khasak miss such similarities?
Vijayan: We can never accept that the black man can say something origi-
nal. If the Malayalam critics discover that a white man has repeated a
metaphor the black man used first, the sky of Malayalam criticism would
collapse.
Akbar: Let it be so. Can we say that Kunjunni of The Infinity of Grace and
Ravi of The Legends of Khasak are close relatives of the same tribe?
Vijayan: Similarities are there, a lot.
Akbar: Fundamental ones, if any?
Vijayan: Yes, both are seekers. Ravi is abstract and lethargic as if caught in a
mist. Kunjunni’s search, on the other hand, is lost in the intense current
of wars and personal betrayal, is hindered by unkind truths, turns into
tragedy first, but later transforms itself into liberation. Ravi has no guru,
but for Kunjunni everyone he meets becomes a guru. At last, Kunjunni’s
thirst for love takes him to the experience of the Ultimate Guru, at the
Guru’s abode, with Kalyani, who left this world and whom he thought
he fathered, as his Guru.
‘We can never accept that the black man can say something original!’ 259

Akbar: But distinguishing your concept of the Guru from the primitive cult
…
Vijayan: Yes. I do understand. They have to be distinguished. Human evo-
lution and the evolution of animals and plants happen through tedious
progression from the lower to the higher truths. Guru is a person guiding
another person in this move. That means Guru–disciple relationship is
neither superstitious nor magical. The final guru of a person is one’s own
cleansed conscience.
Akbar: Now about My Experiments with History. Did it evoke the intended
response?
Vijayan: My Experiments with History is humour – pure nonsense. Why try
to compare it with my mainstream works, no need. It doesn’t take up any
analysis of history.
Akbar: ‘I’d like to perceive the fish, the kingfisher, and the river as one’ is
what you say in the story ‘Ramanan and Madanan’. Is this the philoso-
phy that leads you?
Vijayan: Ramanan likes to live an organic life in harmony with nature. I
don’t claim to have any specific philosophy. I claim moments of vision
in the sense that every person has it and tries to put it into my writing.
Akbar: If that is so, can’t you speak about your philosophy? I am keen about
which philosophers and what books have influenced you?
Vijayan: I don’t think that the philosophical experiences I had came from
a particular book. Mine is a kind of knowledge that any human being
can have by opening up the mind and body to time. We ourselves make
this opening up impossible in many ways. Caught up in the upheavals
of everyday, we wake up and sleep in its turmoil. But outside our indif-
ference, there is a sea of knowledge that surges around us. This is my
philosophy.
Akbar: This is again about ‘Ramanan and Madanan’. You provide the
shocking insight in this work that scientific progress has debased human
culture. As mentioned earlier, if the days of the earth are numbered, how
can our fears regarding the future of the earth be real?
Vijayan: Not yet time to write off the earth. Some scientific achievements
have done lot of good, but certain others are going to land us in seri-
ous problems in the times to come. Nowadays, scientists are seriously
rethinking the objectives and processes of Science.
Akbar: How will you respond if I say that in the story ‘Foetus’ there is a
return to the origin of life.
Vijayan: I intended to write ‘Foetus’ during the Emergency, to go with the
three stories ‘Oil’, ‘Examination’, and ‘The Wart’ in The Memories of a
Long Night. But I don’t know why it was not written until recently. That
accounts for the difference in tone. Foetus is the symbol of perverted
dynasty politics. We have witnessed how a such a foetus works during
the Emergency.
260 O.V. Vijayan

Akbar: Why do the three stories ‘On the Seashore’, ‘Airport’, and ‘The
Chengannur Train’ appear so different on the first reading, though writ-
ten in the same period?
Vijayan: That is not true. These three stories are in my view three pots made
of the same clay.
Akbar: In the sense that the underlying condition the stories share is one of
empathy?
Vijayan: Yes.
Akbar: Most of your stories connect cities and villages. Is it in any way con-
cerned with the ways of your life?
Vijayan: May be, in the sense that experience of the city and nostalgia for the
countryside are elements of my way of life.
Akbar: You have declared your love for the hills of Palakkad and the wind
in the palm leaves. Your language leans towards the local and the rural,
even when you portray the city life.
Vijayan: I have not been able to strike roots in the city, but the countryside
within me is far stronger, Palakkadan countryside to be specific.
Akbar: Usually when we have something to convey, it assumes the shape of
language. But have you ever felt that your language exceeds what you
want to convey, when you narrate?
Vijayan: There is no writer who is not tempted by the use of language. It is
like the improvisations a Kathakali actor uses in his performance. If the
language exceeds the content, eclipsing it, I check it consciously. But let
us remember that in Malayalam, indifference to the use of language is the
norm. Along with this, let me cite an example of an exceptional use of
language in Malayalam: Vaikkom Muhammed Basheer’s language. He
does not use words. Only a few fragments of bones. His language glows
with a great magic beyond our comprehension. Basheer has neither pre-
decessors nor successors.
Akbar: About your cartoons. Your cartoons are intensely political and sug-
gestive. What is important is the implied rather than the drawing itself.
Won’t this make cartoons tougher to appreciate?
Vijayan: Yes, it is true that my political cartoon may not reveal their meaning
easily in one go. I am working for three big English dailies. Neither their
publishers nor their readers have complained about the obscurity of my
language, so far.
Akbar: What if another cartoonist mocks at you?
Vijayan: All of us make fun of one another. Everyone has that freedom,
not merely cartoonists. Each society has a clear understanding regarding
where the joke ends and character assassination begins. That helps us to
restrain ourselves except in some moments of conflict.
Akbar: A personal question now. Does Vijayan the teacher wish to return to
teaching anytime?
Vijayan: Looking back, I feel l liked the job. I had not really matured when
I took up teaching. It is a profession to be taken up with a deep sense
‘We can never accept that the black man can say something original!’ 261

of responsibility. Now, I have only just the time and physical energy to
carry on my present work.
Akbar: One concluding question. What do you think of the new generation
of fictionists in Malayalam?
Vijayan: I have faith in them. I can see that soon the trend of slotting the
sensibility into separate units will end, and the new story will grow into
prominence.

Source
Akbar Kakkattil. 1993. Sargasameeksha: Niroopanam, Jeevitarekha, Mukhamukham
(Critique of Creativity: Criticism, Life-sketch, Conversation). Kottayam: D.C.
Books, 202–209.
40 The Lion in Winter
An Interview with O.V. Vijayan

Rajeev Srinivasan

I met Vijayan at his modest home in Secunderabad. On the gateposts, it says

simply, ‘Theresa’ and ‘Vijayan’ – one on each post. I was afraid I was disturb-
ing Vijayan and his wife – they had expected me earlier in the day, and here
I was arriving at around 10 p.m. But they were most gracious.
Vijayan (O.V. his wife calls him) is tall and slender and slightly stooped,
with a long, white, narrow beard. He tells me, apologetically, that he suffers
from Parkinson’s disease, which makes his voice weak. And he cannot con-
trol a pen. How ironic, I think, for a cartoonist and writer!
He asks me about the U.S. – his son is in Los Angeles. I ask him if he has
visited there; he smiles ruefully and admits that he almost went, he even
bought tickets but didn’t go in the end. I tell him about San Francisco and
Stanford and the Silicon Valley.
He is a charming host: attentive, thoughtful. I ask him about his political
cartoons – and he insists on showing me his portfolio from the 1970s and
80s. Bitingly satirical, incisive. And oddly enough, some of them could be
published today and would still be meaningful!
Excerpts from my conversation with O.V. Vijayan:

R.S.: You have been writing for many years now and you have written a num-
ber of books. Do you have a favourite? For instance, I understand that
when you received the Sahitya Akademi award for The Infinity of Grace,
you said you had deserved the honour for The Legends of Khasak?
O.V.: I may have been misquoted about this. I didn’t exactly say this; but it
is true that some members of the academy told me privately that when
Khasak first came out, they couldn’t relate to it or understand it, but that
Infinity was much more acceptable. Khasak was, of course, the book
that I poured myself into. As my first novel, it will always be special to
me. I had written a chapter and given it to the editor of Mathrubhoomi
Weekly (in Malayalam) for his review; but it ended up being printed as a
short story in the magazine.
Generations is very close to my heart because it talks about places and
people that are no more. I also wrote it with the foreboding – my health
is indifferent – that I might not be able to complete it.

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 The Lion in Winter 263

R.S.: In looking at your work, you seem to have metamorphosed from a radi-
cal in Khasak to a transcendentalist in Infinity to perhaps a nationalist in
The Prophet’s Way; and then you wrote the story of your ancestral fam-
ily in Generations. What has influenced you and caused these changes?
O.V.: The influences on me have changed as I myself changed and perhaps
grew. When I started, I really didn’t know what I was writing about,
except that I experienced a great joy in the wild spaces of my native
Palakkad and the solitude of the countryside. I was not even particu-
larly conscious of it, but it certainly influenced the language and the very
words that I used in Khasak. The sights and sounds were so powerful:
the wind whistling through the Palakkad gap in the Western Ghats; the
clattering of the black palm trees. As a writer, I was concentrating on the
story and not on myself; and I have not analysed it much further.
R.S.: Among Malayalam readers, young men have always been your big-
gest fans. Do you have a cult following, like The Catcher In The Rye
appealed to the rebellious young Americans? How has Khasak been a
consistent cult classic?
O.V.: I acknowledge that there might be a similarity in the effect; but then,
unlike Catcher, Khasak is not a rebellious book. It may be slightly dan-
gerous to say this in today’s charged atmosphere, but it has a subcon-
scious Hindu framework. But the experiences of Khasak also incorporate
and ingest the Muslim folk experience of Malabar.
R.S.: Khasak is a difficult book.
O.V.: It moves along, if you will, in a deeply emotional mode, in a constant
search for cosmic mystery.
R.S.: In the context of the sacred and the profane, let me ask you about
another book, not yet translated into English: The Prophet’s Way. The
treatment of Sikhs, the story of the Gadar Party, of the Komagatu Maru
– it is stunning in its historicity and its emotional impact.
O.V.: It became almost a theological essay; but it is transparent and an easier
read. I lived through the 1984 riots in Delhi, when Sikhs were targeted. I
termed it the lament of the first-born innocents – they, who have done so
much for India! People didn’t understand it, branding Sikhs as terrorists.
R.S.: Was it not a statement of protest? As are your other books?
O.V.: Not really. In Khasak too, I was an anarchist, but there was no protest;
if anything it was a soft and muted anarchy. But The Saga of Dharmapuri
is definitely a novel of protest – a predetermined offensive about the
whole concept of the state, against war, consciously written about a
future where the rights of the plant or the vegetable will be upheld. In
some ways, it is anti-civilization. As in some of the short stories, espe-
cially the ones about dystopias.
Saga was written before and after the Emergency; it was a reaction to
the Soviet-Indian left wing and its efforts to prop up both socialist–com-
munist leaders and a political dynasty. My friend S.K. Nair agreed to seri-
alize it and it was to be finished in July 1975; of course, the Emergency
264 O.V. Vijayan

was imposed in June 1975, and the book went into hiding. Not knowing
how long the Emergency would last, I meddled with the story a lot. They
serialized it after the Emergency ended. When it was to be made into a
book, I corrected some of the excesses and restored its aesthetic profes-
sionalism. Saga was written in anger; it was a cleansing and cathartic
experience.
R.S.: You return to the Emergency in many short stories.
O.V.: Yes, especially in those allegories of power: The Foetus, The Wart,
The Examination, and Oil. I kept them in cold storage until the end of
the Emergency. I looked at tyranny in various forms; one as an organic
quantity, as in Oil, then as allegory in The Foetus and The Wart, and as
comedy in The Examination.
R.S.: In addition to the allegory, I quite liked the decent protagonist in The
Wart, under attack from an implacable and omnipotent evil force in the
form of a wart; one of the things I remember is the protagonist’s memory
of his ancestors and their Ayurvedic knowledge.
O.V.: It was the story of one who could only resist in the spirit and that had
a connection to the satvic (benign) past, which is what Dhanvantari (the
physician of Gods) indicates. Good triumphs over Evil eventually; The
Foetus is redeemed with a lot of love; in The Wart, the triumph is more
ambiguous.
R.S.: The Foetus is a thinly veiled story of the excesses of Sanjay Gandhi and
his cronies. Is it fair to say that you object to the Nehru dynasty?
O.V.: No, that would not be accurate. The story should not to be reduced
to the level of personal animosity towards anybody. It is only a take-off
point to indicate human evil, evil in the state, evil in negating nature.
There is no calling for retribution.
R.S.: Speaking of evil and weapons of mass destruction, how do you react to
India’s entry into the nuclear club?
O.V.: It baffles me; and I am neither for nor against it. One cannot react to a
Hiroshima, because the magnitude of the evil is so great that one’s reac-
tion inevitably comes across as false. In India’s case, one could possibly
say that the bomb has come to implement a certain part of one’s destiny.
Somewhat beyond the scope of one’s understanding – powers that we
are not able to comprehend. Not necessarily divine, but great, unseen
forces. I sometimes wonder if the rich nations would like to incite atomic
warfare amongst the poor nations: it would be a bizarre ethnic cleansing;
easier and cleaner and more final the nuclear way.
R.S.: Infinity of Grace, and some of the short stories of transcendence (such
as Airport, Little Ones), surprised me because this is not what I expected
from the author of Khasak. Did it surprise other people too?
O.V.: Not many (laughs). Only those obsessed with ideology. You see, I was
once a card-carrying Marxist, a candidate member, a coffeehouse type.
R.S.: What caused you to break away from the left?
 The Lion in Winter 265

O.V.: It’s a long story; it began with the experiences in Hungary, the death
of Imre Nagy. I had always been a little uneasy about Stalin. And
Czechoslovakia completed my disillusionment. That also made it dif-
ficult for me, as a writer, because my very words were associated with
my left wing self-image. A brief period of stasis and then it was a simple
act to walk into the realm of the spirit: it happened naturally and I have
stuck to it ever since.
R.S.: You moved into your transcendental mode before you wrote Infinity.
Was this the influence of Karunakara Guru, whom you dedicate the book
to? In Infinity, I expected that Kunjunni would find a guru, but he finds it
in surprising places and in himself. It is a happy ending to a long quest.
O.V.: There are elements that I am not able to understand fully – in the
search and in the transcendence there are elements of bhakti that cover
and overcome the element of ideology in fiction. It is not necessary that
I have become a religious person, but I have experienced in my own life
things that must be termed magical, for want of a better word. My own
search for a guru was perhaps effect, not cause: as my views changed, I
felt the need for a guru to guide me.
R.S.: You have written some of the most surprising short stories, such as The
Little Ones, about invisible beings, benign spirits.
O.V.: This was based on a dream I had, where I saw thousands of cowrie
shells, illuminated as it were from inside. I believe there is magic around
us; we just have to look for it.
R.S.: Is Malabar magical, with its theyyams (folk dances with mystical con-
notations) and odiyans (shape-shifting wizards)?
O.V.: We didn’t actually have theyyams in Palakkad, but certainly there were
odiyans who, it was believed widely, could cast spells on you.
R.S.: I hate to even bring this up, because it is sort of the kiss of death, but
have you been influenced by Latin American magical realism?
O.V.: I wrote the surreal story of Appu-Kili, (the retarded man in Khasak),
in 1958, long before Gabriel Garcia Marquez was even published in
English, which was in 1975. People have the tendency to suggest deriva-
tive work, so it makes writers defensive when you make such statements.
R.S.: In reading your short stories, occasionally with the English and
Malayalam versions side by side, I have sometimes thought they were
actually better in English.
O.V.: I am not sure they are better in English – wouldn’t you miss something
of the background? Perhaps since you are already familiar with Kerala’s
cultural background, you find the English version appealing. It might be
less so for others from outside the culture.
R.S.: Are any of your books being made into films?
O.V.: Some have been; I am willing to work with a director if we could really
see eye to eye, and the essence of the work can be captured.
R.S.: Someone like an Adoor Gopalakrishnan or an Aravindan, perhaps?
266 O.V. Vijayan

O.V.: I worked with Adoor on one of the Film Festival committees; a very
great artiste, one who is fully in control of his material. I knew Aravindan,
of course, as a fellow-cartoonist. But we never actually worked towards
filming one of my books.
R.S.: I am astonished that you live in Hyderabad. Why did you move here
from Delhi, and why aren’t you in Kerala?
O.V.: We moved here because my wife has family property – this house. I
felt Delhi was becoming meaningless; and, in Hyderabad, I feel out of
place. I am seriously thinking of moving to Kerala. There is a problem –
I do get mobbed in Kerala, but it is home. Or it is one of my two homes,
to be precise: Delhi being the other. But even when I was in Delhi, I
wrote about Palakkad, remembering the dry Palakkadan wind whistling
through the pass in the Ghats.
I have some problems of privacy in Kerala. People come up to me
constantly – I find the celebrity status hard to deal with. But it’s a hum-
bling experience too. All kinds of people come and talk to me – not just
the middle class. Even when I travel by train, people come and tell me,
‘Vijayan saar’, how much they enjoy my work. It is gratifying that people
in all walks of life are reading my books.
R.S.: You were bereaved recently.
O.V.: My sister passed away; and I could only go there to see her dead body.
I cannot travel much. She was more than a sister, a playmate. We were
very intimate. Her death affected me very much.
R.S.: How about your work as a cartoonist?
O.V.: I am thinking of publishing my old cartoons in book form; I am not
doing any more at this time.
R.S.: What are you working on now?
O.V.: A sequel, perhaps, to Generations; and I have begun the effort of trans-
lation into English. Unfortunately, given my inability to physically hold
a pen, I must dictate my writing. I used to have a secretary who did
this well, but he has left. This makes it very difficult and my progress
is very slow. I am sort of struggling with the technology – my son sug-
gests I should get a dictaphone to do my dictation, but I am a bit of a
technophobe.
R.S.: How was Generations received in Kerala?
O.V.: With very high regard: I read a number of appreciative reviews and
the reading public liked it too, not only the critics. Although it was con-
sidered a little heavy, and some of the Marxists didn’t like me poking a
little fun at them. There were underlying levels and it was a multi-layered
narrative, although structurally it was a very simple story.
R.S.: How much of your own life and your ancestral family are in Generations?
O.V.: There is a certain element of autobiography, including some stories
that are family legends, but there is a significant element of fiction and
imagination. The ‘House of Ponmudi’ is based on my ancestral family, the
tharavad. Even when I was a child, the family home had been alienated.
 The Lion in Winter 267

It was a magical house. But I remember how I found the deity from the
family temple, a non-anthromorphic deity, shaped like an inverted pyra-
mid, abandoned as trash.
R.S.: One of the primary themes in Generations seems to be caste.
O.V.: I was not even aware of caste and prejudices until I went to college,
because I had a privileged, upper middle class upbringing even though
I belong to the ‘backward caste’, Ezhava community. But caste is still
a major part of our lives: I have come to that realization. It certainly
was a major factor in the lives of my ancestors. Moreover, I think caste
will persist; not the rigid, inflexible system we have had, which is really
casteism. But, because of inherent differences among people, we will
always have these differences which become institutionalized in caste.
R.S.: You sort of gave the book a happy ending, even though it is a tragic
story.
O.V.: It was not a contrived happy ending; it made me feel good. It was a
vision of a non-racial and compassionate future. It was optimistic and
pessimistic at the same time.
R.S.: I wrote in a review of Generations that you deserved the Jnanpith for
the body of your work. How do you react to that?
O.V.: (Laughs) I accept all statements that are nice to me. But U.R.
Ananthamurthy said recently that the literary establishment had not
been quite fair to Vijayan. So maybe there is hope…
And Vijayan indicated the interview was over. As a parting gift, he
gives me two of his books – Khasak and Prophet in Malayalam. He
inscribes them, with obvious difficulty in holding his pen, ‘To Rajeev,
with love’. I am touched by his kindness and I leave, wishing I could
somehow help him with his problem of transcription. I intend to return
to Hyderabad to speak some more with this charming and extraordinar-
ily interesting man, one of the greatest living masters of Indian fiction.
https://www​.rediff​.com​/news​/2005​/mar​/31intera​.htm (Published in
www​.Rediff​.com, 1998)
41 ‘Writing in English is like wanting a new
set of parents’
A Conversation on Language between
O.V. Vijayan and O.V. Usha

Gopi Narayanan (Translated from

Malayalam by E.V. Ramakrishnan)

An evening with a clear sky. As I walked into Vijayan’s house, ‘Oottupulakkal’,

near Kottayam, there were no guests in attendance. O.V. Usha was sitting
with her brother. They were engaged in a conversation about language.
These are some excerpts from the conversation:

Usha: Some have argued that your language is too poetic to be the fit medium
for prose. Do you think prose and verse are mutually ‘untouchables’?
Vijayan: I don’t think so. See these two lines, ‘Chirutheyi manavatti/Sreedevi
thamburatti’ from M. Govindan’s ‘Nokkukuthi’, a film for which he
wrote the screenplay and dialogues. Does this sound like poetic language
in Malayalam? Still, doesn’t it convey poetic emotion due to its evocative
power? Whether it is poetry in the strict sense or not, when experience is
expressed intensely, ordinary words will acquire aesthetic quality.
Usha: Which means, the use of poetic language in fiction does not necessarily
become a liability?
Vijayan: Poetry is not the opposite of prose. Language acquiring poetic
attributes should not be judged negatively.
Usha: The argument that your language shows attributes of savarna sensibil-
ity have found many takers. In today’s communally polarized society,
you are being identified with the Hindu faction.
Vijayan: I have clarified my political and cultural positions several times. If
such misconceptions are still in circulation, what can I do?
Usha: I know that you are not interested in this subject. Still, can’t we think
of the savarna–avarna divide in the field of language?
Vijayan: It is good to discuss the issue. My health does not permit me to
speak at length. It was the Savarna sections of society who held power.
Hence they had domination over language. Despite this, don’t you see
popular movements borrow words from the world of power or govern-
ment. ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ – this slogan is from the Urdu savarna groups.
It is being used by all avarna workers: the head-load workers, fishermen,
toddy-tappers. We have no control over the evolution of language. We
should pay attention to what response or aesthetic effect it produces in

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 ‘Writing in English is like wanting a new set of parents’ 269

the listeners or readers. If you apply the same yard sticks to nuclear phys-
ics, will there be savarna physics and avarna physics?
Usha: The appeal of science is universal. But will it apply to literature?
Vijayan: The foundations of language and literature share some universal ele-
ments. The effect a literary work produces in a sahrudaya, the vision of a
work of art, its emotional elements, aesthetic beauty, the quest for truth,
ethical concerns, we can find (universal) parallels among many such fac-
tors related to literature.
Usha: Among the intellectuals, one notices a dismissive attitude towards
Sanskrit. I strongly feel it should be made a subject from the school level
onwards. If you know a little Sanskrit you can find an entry into any
Indian language.
Vijayan: As far as Malayalam is concerned, apart from Sanskrit, our
poetry tradition rooted in Sanskrit has also been discarded. Sanskrit
is either confined to a museum relic or turned into an instrument of
regressive social concepts. In my childhood, we were made to learn
the Sreekrishnacharitam which used the manipravalam (Sanskritized
Malayalam) style. You have also learnt all that.
Usha: There is hardly any ‘Hindu’ element in these. But the aesthetic effect
of Sanskrit words in your style, creates a mistaken impression in people
(that it is Savarna-centric).
Vijayan: Commenting on our cultural heritage, should not be construed as
an invocation of Hindu religious faith. To say so is absurd. A European
cannot grasp his cultural history without knowing the Bible. Tao and
Confucius have the same significance for the Chinese. Moreover, these
traditions are not opposed to other traditions. Humayun Kabir, a lead-
ing intellectual from Bengal was a great scholar of Vaishnava traditions,
despite being a Muslim. We had Joseph Mundasseri, who was a great
Sanskrit scholar. Hyderali is a reputed Kathakali singer we all respect.
Usha: All this comes down to my earlier argument that we should have taught
Sanskrit instead of Hindi in our schools.
Vijayan: Yes, on a plane that is not moralistic or coercive. If we could teach
from such a perspective, it would have strengthened our unity. Not in the
opportunistic arguments of politics, but in the larger perspective of the
historical memory. It was the imperfection of Nehru’s historical vision
that led to this aberration.
Usha: You know that I am fond of Hindi. How can we dislike the language
in which Kabir and Tulsi articulated themselves?
Vijayan: Braj bhasha, Maithili, and Bhojpuri are not dialects, they are lan-
guages in their own right. The masters of Hindi are bent upon consign-
ing them into oblivion, demoting them to inferior dialects. On the plains
of Hindi language, battles are being fought. Hindi is the language of a
minority. It also signifies the imperial ambitions growing within. I would
like to repeat that Hindi is a hybrid language with strong links with
270 O.V. Vijayan

many communities including the Muslims. It has been put on a pedestal,

which it does not deserve.
Usha: It is being argued that journalistic language will pollute the language
of fiction. You have handled both literary language and the language of
journalism.
Vijayan: I remember some lines from Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s famous
novel, Two Measures of Rice: ‘He raised his small white palm into a fist
and shouted, “Long Live Revolution”’. This is obviously the language
of a news reporter. It also marks the remarkable ending of a remarkable
novel. When a writer employs language – whatever be its nature – when
he uses it to communicate a specific experience or idea, the language
comes alive, if he is able to transmit his frenzied emotional charges to
the reader.
Usha: What about the pollution of language, then?
Vijayan: I can quote many lines from Sanskrit Bhakti poetry which borders
on the vulgar, though they are recited with utmost devotion. People have
accepted them as the language of bhakti, though a closer examination
would find them coarse.
Usha: For long, people have been commenting on the artificiality of your
style. I feel that creative writing has a certain dimension of artificiality.
The emotion or insight that provokes the creative pursuit may be genu-
ine, and may happen naturally, but when the writer looks for a means of
expression, he gives his idea or emotion flesh and blood. I am speaking
of a general principle.
Vijayan: Yes, that is true. Creation is a conscious act of constructing
something.
Usha: The language of your career has been English. You have also demon-
strated that you can handle English creatively by translating your works
into English. It has been widely acclaimed. Do you think you could have
earned a wider readership by writing in English?
Vijayan: I have never felt the urge to write an original work in English. It is
like wanting a new set of parents. Indian writers who have not been able
to accept their own mother tongue as a medium of expression have turned
into instruments of colonization. They may not be aware of it. I am not
blaming anyone. English still has universal currency.We are forced to use
it as the medium of instruction and career language. Naturally, it creates
alienation from mother tongue. That is how some writers are forced to
choose English for their creative writing.
English has no roots in Indian culture. The blood relations between
English and European languages open up communicative channels
among them. However, similar channels of cultural communications
 ‘Writing in English is like wanting a new set of parents’ 271

are not possible between English and Indian languages. We can say that
Indian English writers turn this rootlessness into an artistic context.

Source
Usha, O.V. 1999. “Bhasha Samvaadam” (A Conversation on Language between
O.V.Usha and th O.V. Vijayan). Prepared by Gopi Narayanan. Mathrubhumi
Weekly, 15 August, 21–23.
42 Sorrow of the Traveller
S. Prasannarajan in conversation with
O.V. Vijayan

O.V. Vijayan, fragile in his crumbled robes, intense with a perennially half-
burned pipe, is more than a fugitive from a distant arcadia. The Candide of
his ancient inheritance seems to be disappearing in a mist of dread. ‘I am
trying to decipher my personal destiny’: the soft syllables break the silence.
‘What I then see is even more frightening than what it looks outside, what
it feels in the world of tangibles. My guilt is Christian but the redemption is
Hindu, the instrument is the body. I have failed to use this body for redemp-
tion, and have to realize the folly on me at the fag end of my life’.
Saint Augustine all over again? And imagine, this confession comes from a
writer whose imagination has breached the limits of language, whose verbal
melody merged with the stirrings of the soul. The balladeer of primal sin
and solemn retreat. Khasakinte Ithihasam (The Legends of Khasak), his first
novel, is 25 years old now, and the English translation of it (by Vijayan him-
self) has just come out. It is the best novel ever written in Malayalam and one
among the best in any other language of the world. For the literate Malayali,
the saga of Khasak is a sub-national heritage. And Vijayan says it is his own
spiritual diary, its protagonist a man who ‘carries his burden of sin and the
redemption which he is not working for, but expects God to bestow on him’.
The prodigal son, seeking God’s intervention. But the genesis of this book,
the passages of which are byhearted lyrics – magical and melancholic – for
Vijayan’s admirers, is steeped in innocence and romance. ‘I used to range
over the Palakkad countryside on cycle. There was no traffic. The roads were
shaded by avenue trees and the breeze coming down the Palakkad pass was
tumultuous and sensual. Even better than the roads was the embankment of
the irrigation canal. One could get off the cycle and have a dip in the briskly
flowing canal waters. If one chooses one could go on sitting in the warm
currents of the canal. During every ride, nature was seeping through me as
wind and water. The only thing I knew was to write’. Impressions come back
to him as fables and he can’t pinpoint the internal process which led to this
book except a ‘deeply moving experience, part sensual, part spiritual, full of
great sadness and ecstatic delights’.
Ecstatic delights, for the conjurer of puranic angst as well as the redeemed
reader. But the karmic bond will bring the narrator to new discoveries, new
sorrows. He has no escape, the progress of the pilgrim is salvation’s slow

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-55
 Sorrow of the Traveller 273

march. Somebody has been always calling him, from the distant Golgotha of
his private fears, and hope.
Dharmapuranam (The Saga of Dharmapuri), his next novel (also pub-
lished by Penguin), has the horror and the black humour of the Orwellian
1984, the magic of a Latin American classic, and the spiritual solemnity of
Vedic verses. Scatological and sexual politics of the classes and races is nar-
rated here through the repulsive and redeeming images of kings and courti-
ers, Bodhisatwa and avatars. In Gurusagaram (The Infinity of Grace), the
English translation of which will be brought out by Penguin, Vijayan nar-
rates a modern drama of forgiveness and love, of the unseen ties that hold
together the human clan.
Madhuram Gayathi is an esoteric, overwhelming eco-fiction. Earth is riven
into two. One hemisphere is peopled with artificial intelligences and the other
by humans fallen back on primal innocence and great thinking and speaking
trees. After much conflict, things come together, and the most horrific char-
acter, a vengeful thinking machine, transforms itself into Sudarshana, the
sacred wheel. The novel is resonant with puranic rhythm.
His next book, The Way of the Prophet, is set in the Delhi of the 1980s.
From Bluestar to the Burma War, from the story of Komagatta Maru to the
1984 riots, the grand sweep of the novel incorporates the prophet’s collo-
quies with god, and the humanness of the prophet which prevents him from
taking in the whole of the ‘Revelations’. For this book is written by someone
who is ‘surrounded by grim premonitory presences. There is neither past nor
future, but only the moment of revelation, the way of the prophet which is
Everyman’s way. But I’m not the prophet, but the prophet’s stylus’.
Once upon a time it was not so. Vijayan’s prophet was a bearded German,
none the less, whose commandments were to be obeyed, but Vijayan has
come a long way from the pre-Khasak days of Marxian phantoms. ‘Khasak
was the superstructure, putting it in Marxian terms. The base was the simple
villagers who were not literate but conjured phantoms’.
When he started writing, he was a Marxist, and writing an extension of
the Marxist dream. Today he is no more a Marxist nor a materialist but is
grateful to Marxian legacy of audacious dreaming. ‘Dreaming of that kind
was bound to cross the boundaries of matter. It was bound to discover its
own spirituality. That is what is happening to Marxism today. The freezing
of its great dream from the limits of material concerns. While on all appear-
ances, my idiom is antithetical to Marxism, I owe my dream to the chaos of
a Marxian illiterate. May be a theological illiterate’.
‘Sounds like a tribute to an ideology among whose critics you are the most
vocal’.
‘It is’.
‘Are you then providing a spiritual alternative?’
‘That will be too deterministic’.
‘But another set of dreams are clashing, from Bosnia to Russia to, if we are
allowed to say it, Kashmir’.
274 O.V. Vijayan

‘Dream and reality get distorted by words. I’m old and may not see the end
of our present civilizational debate. But I’ve my private certitudes, and these
provide me with a one-man civilization’.
‘Would you please de-personalize this?’
‘With some difficulty, yes. There is nothing positive in the technological
culture as I see it’.
‘But how does one articulate one’s disassociation?’
‘At some point it becomes necessary to delink your consciousness from
the concerns of the majority, concerns of the state. The degradation of our
civilization is best illustrated by the instant deflation of political redemptions.
When the Berlin Wall fell, we realize now, that it was nothing but an archi-
tectural spectacle. A Bastille parody, the hurt inflicted on idealistic mind is
incredible. There seems to be a total collapse of historical causality’.
‘You see no hope?’
‘I do in our attempts to transcend the historical let-down. In an eventual
search for the deeper human significance. This is a lesson of Havel’s Magic
Lantern’.
Conversation with Vijayan makes you feel that you are the accidental
intruder in the soliloquies of a fugitive. For, ‘when the beginning and end
are clouded in mystery, and you want to seek a tangible routine for life, you
inevitably become a fugitive. You are the still point of a mysterious exodus.
It is strange, I feel the experience. Flight and samadhi are complementary’.
‘But such spiritual forays of the outsider is being challenged by the arbiters
of faith. Isn’t it so?’
‘It is a staggering task and often one becomes very diffident because the job
here is not storytelling but the interpretation of a prophecy. Your critic can
turn around and ask you, do you deserve to take on this mission? My answer
will be no. I have my own burden of sin and I realize I am nothing more than a
collection of enzymes and amino acids. But what is this persistent power that
troubles my chemical configuration? In rare moments of silence and encoun-
ter this disturbance turns into a voice of tenderness inside me and I believe
and affirm. God needs this sinner, this spiritual cretin. He wants everyone’.
Saint Augustine again!
‘I share his sin but not his sainthood’.
‘You write as a sinner, not as a saint?’
‘I write as an awkward little man’. For the little man, the moment has
arrived to come to terms with his ancestry, which itself is a saga of trans-
border pilgrimages, conversion and gas chambers. One of his uncles did
engineering in Glasgow, became a Muslim, married a French Jewess, and
perished in the concentration camp. His next book will be about this genera-
tional voyage, ‘about a family’s quest for brahminhood, quest for ultimate
values, and a perfect aesthetics’. It will be about the subsequent desecration
of the achieved ideal, and then of a terminal synthesis.
As an 11-year-old, Vijayan could read Don Quixote only as an unrelieved
tragedy. Don Quixote was his grandfather and Vijayan was a witness to
 Sorrow of the Traveller 275

his humiliation. Today, more than 50 years later, Ottupulakkal Velukkutty

Vijayan carries with him the sins of fathers.
The sinner is in solitude, in prayer, and Ottakkannan Kokkippallan (the
one-eyed monster with protruding teeth), the tireless demon, keeps vigil.

Source
Published in The Indian Express, Sunday Edition, July 17, 1994.
Section 9

Vijayan in Letters


278 O.V. Vijayan

Figure 9 Vijayan, wife Theresa, and sister Usha

43 Letters by O.V. Vijayan to Anandi
Ramachandran
Translated from Malayalam by
E.V. Ramakrishnan

Anandi Ramachandran first wrote to O.V. Vijayan, sometime in 1981, after

reading an article in one of his columns in a Malayalam weekly. That piece
had dealt with the helplessness of ordinary citizens and the exploitative atti-
tude of arrogant politicians. Vijayan’s prompt reply surprised her, and she
found him unlike other writers. He was humble, humane, and friendly. She
writes: ‘Vijayan was a philosopher and an intellectual. He maintained trans-
parency and integrity in his behaviour. Above all, I found the purity of a sage
in Vijayan’ (2011, 21). Their acquaintance developed into a close friendship
which is reflected in the letters they exchanged. She had lost many of the let-
ters she received from Vijayan. But, in the book titled, Letters by Vijayan, she
has compiled some of the important letters she received from Vijayan. Two
chapters from the above book are presented here in translation.

Transparency in Sensibility
I wrote a letter to Vijayan that would help him understand me. I described
in detail my perspectives and weaknesses. I have gone through many crises
in life. I was ill-treated by others, occasioning deep pain. However, I have
not inflicted pain on anyone, nor do I harbour hatred or resentment against
anyone.
In his reply, Vijayan wrote that what I have mentioned about me, applies
to him as well, to some extent. Here is what Vijayan wrote:

Dear Anandi,
Thanks for your letter. Your self-description can be applied to me as well.
To some extent, it is correct. I am an ordinary human being with frailties
and foibles. But, I do not have the courage to say that ‘I have not ill-treated
any one’. I believe that the rage I feel (there is something contradictory and
unethical about the term, ‘moral outrage’) is genuine. I do not feel that a
person like me can always claim the purity of conscience. This is because
of desires. There is nothing that I don’t want. The unquenchable thirst of
Agasthya! It is here that one’s conscience fails. For everyone.
Still, in some rare moments I feel intense purity. That is the only justifica-
tion for sharing my views with others. It was in one such moments that I left

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159322-57
280 O.V. Vijayan

my well-paying job and comfortable life in Delhi. (See how my unconscious

revels in self-flattery).
Really speaking, I am perplexed at all things. I did not follow what you
mentioned in the last paragraph. What is it that you want me to do?
Wishing you goodness and love,
Vijayan
16-7-82

What a sincere confession that Vijayan makes in this letter! It is here that we
see his essence.
Vijayan was often put in the dock due to his open speech. Vijayan main-
tained transparency even in his family matters.
I had promised to meet Vijayan in June when the school has vacation. The
subsequent letters were about my visit to Delhi.
He did not reply to one of my letters. In the next letter, he apologized for
the delay in replying.
‘Loss of courage. Discomfort’. Vijayan was extremely sensitive. He could
become agitated over trivial matters. Things which could be sorted out with-
out difficulty, such as some repairs at home, the errors in the telephone bill.
Such things will upset him no end. I used to feel that it is because of this kind
of lack of courage that he fell ill often.
Those days, I was facing many problems. Due to the bitterness and sense
of isolation I felt, I tasted alcohol a couple of times. As if to destroy myself. I
wrote to Vijayan about it. He wrote back that I should have avoided that. I
corrected myself, after Vijayan’s suggestion. I kept away from such situations
after that.

Dear Anandi,
Two letters. Apologies for the delay in responding. I am seriously unwell.
A sudden setback. Loss of courage. I was losing weight considerably. Amidst
all this, trivial but unavoidable problems such as the errors in the telephone
bill, repair work at home. Pardon me.
Anandi’s first letter unsettled me. Why did you take drinks, just for the
argumentative satisfaction of it? Even your handwriting was unstable. I felt
that Anandi should have kept away from that drinking glass. (I say this with
the belief that I am not taking undue liberty).
Here:
The general psycho-somatic condition has hindered all my writing and
translation work. Want to begin again. With my failing health, writing gives
me shivers. I live here in isolation with no contact with the outside world.
The adolescent issues of Madhu (my son). That I have failed as a counsellor
to my son makes me sad. A Siamese cat which senses all my change of moods.
It ‘speaks’ to me and kisses me. The days are filled with the miracles of the
growing up of her two kittens. See how God provides you with remedies
when you feel dejected!
 Letters by O.V. Vijayan to Anandi Ramachandran 281

When are you coming? Please let me know in time. How long will you
stay? Should I reserve a room in a hotel? Or can you stay with us? We are
not short of space. But I have none of the modern amenities. I have banned
the radio and tv. Many essential items including a car could not be procured
due to my indifference. (My family blames me for this). Please decide as per
your convenience.
I would like to take the liberty of making a request. Could you bring me
a small item if it is available there? Anything from the Koran. The calligraph
of the first prayer. It is available here, but it is not authentic. A sculpture in
copper about six to eight inches in length and breadth will suffice. With no
embellishments. Should not be too costly. If it is not available in Sharjah,
please do not bother.
I conclude here. Please reply.
With love,
Vijayan
10-5-83

Vijayan has influenced me in many things. The adolescent problems of

Madhu pained Vijayan. He felt he failed as a counsellor to his son.
Vijayan did not ask for anything else, only the calligraph of the first prayer
of the Koran. That was the only request of Vijayan who was accused of being
a ‘Hindu fascist’.

The Weaknesses of a Writer

It was the time when my children were studying in Ooty (at St. Joseph’s
school). I was not able to visit Kerala often. The school had annual vacation
of about two and half months. From the middle of June to the first week of
September. I was eager to reach home on the very day the vacation began. I
wanted to see children and spend some days with them. If I go to the school,
they will not allow me to spend more than three days in the guest-house. I
could spend only few days with my children during vacation. I could not
afford to bring them to Sharjah during every vacation.
In the July of 1983, I could not meet Vijayan despite my strong desire to be
with him. We continued to talk over phone and exchange letters. Vijayan’s
husky voice was filled with tenderness. In one of the letters, I asked him if
he shares the common weaknesses of writers. I received a long reply. In that
letter he said, my thoughts and responses surprise him with their similarity to
the way he thinks and reacts: ‘the way I think and respond’.
Vijayan kept an intense friendship with those who shared his way of think-
ing. He did not distinguish between male and female companions. It was this
loftiness of his thoughts that brought me nearer him.
Vijayan wrote that journalism had become a mental torture from being a
profession. His friends would call it madness. Resigning his job at the time
of Emergency landed him in financial problems. It was those experiences that
282 O.V. Vijayan

prompted him to write the stories, ‘Oil’, ‘The Examination’, and ‘The Wart’.
Those stories liberated him from the romantic world view of Khasak … I felt
that Vijayan should never have given up that romantic temper.
Vijayan was afraid that I would have high expectations regarding him. I
had no such fears of that kind of fantasies, as I had understood him deeply.

Dear Anandi,
Received both your letters. The letter giving your reasons for not being
able to come, reached me last. I was really surprised why you could not
come. The last letter I wrote may need an explanation. I wrote it on the
spur of the moment, during a journey, without revealing its context. Many
years before, I had experienced a frightening presence in a French comic
newspaper called Le Canard enchaine: a cartoonist who drew exactly like
me. Even his handwriting inside the ‘legend’ of the cartoon was exactly like
that of mine. Anandi’s thoughts and responses surprised me, though their
similarity to mine was not to the same extent. You think like me, react like
me.
You asked me whether I had a writer’s weaknesses. Back in Kerala my
image is that of a perfect bourgeoisie decadent intellectual. (The Communists
are mainly responsible for this). I came across a caricature of mine in the
Deshabhimani where I am shown to be floating on the ganja smoke. Nobody
will believe that: I rarely smoke and drink only when I am at a formal
reception. (That I don’t see any merit in ‘not drinking’ is another matter).
The same is true of the other ‘weaknesses’. There have been many crises in
my family life. Many view me as a strange being as I don’t try to conceal
such things. Many people seem to believe that my stories are based on per-
sonal experiences: this is a superstition peculiar to Malayalees. I have lived
intensely, defying rules. But I feel my life has been purer than that of any
average human being. I do have some major weaknesses: the frenzied friend-
ship I cultivate with those who share my ways of thinking. I don’t distinguish
between male and female in this companionship. These are my intense ‘love
affairs’. All these loves end in great disappointments. This is because there
are high expectations here, as in ordinary love affairs. Here the rules and defi-
nitions of rational thought replaces the abstractions of emotionality. I had
this kind of ‘an affair’ with a young man who is now a well-known critic. He
had turned me into an abstraction, with high expectations of my virtues. An
intense relationship. I could foresee the tragedy, much in advance.
These are my fears. When Anandi wrote that you were coming to meet me,
I felt the same fear. I wanted to convey this to Anandi. Since I was travelling,
I could not write in detail. Then there are those inadequacies that are inher-
ent in man-woman relationships. I am not afraid of them now. First, Anandi
is only an idea to me, as of now. An image of sympathy. I have not seen you
in photograph or in reality. Anandi could be the pseudonym of a male ‘sah-
rudaya’ (one who appreciates art and literature). Secondly, I am concerned
with some very serious issues, these days. These concerns do not allow me to
 Letters by O.V. Vijayan to Anandi Ramachandran 283

think too much of my inadequacies. So we can keep those anxieties aside. Let
me convey my fears once again. Please don’t have high expectations about
me. Which means, don’t idealise me. (Not because I have the arrogance to
believe so. Only because of the calamities it will bring upon our relationship.)
We will meet in June. I am not keeping well. I am psychosomatic. There
are also some afflictions which are not ‘psycho’-related, but ‘somaras’-related.
Spondilitis, kidney stone, etc. Journalism has become a mental torture from
being a profession. My friends consider this as madness. Since I resigned
from my job to observe my ‘individual satyagraha’ against the Emergency,
I had to use up all my bank balance to survive. That experience helped me
write three stories: ‘Oil’, ‘The Examination’, and ‘The Wart’. This liberated
me from the romantic world of Khasak forever. All this in detail, on another
occasion. Anandi has succeeded in making me write a long letter like this!
Let me conclude. Delhi is getting dressed up, once again. This time it is for
the Non-aligned Meet. What a farce.
Lovingly,
Vijayan.
26-2-83.

In the letter of June 1983, he had apologized for delaying the reply. He had
mentioned Theresa and Usha in the letter.
Vijayan got to know Theresa through the wife of a journalist-friend,
Premalatha Goyal. What began as friendship, ended in marriage.
Vijayan said I could stay with him in Chanakyapuri. Or if I wanted pri-
vacy, he could arrange a room at India International Centre. I did not stay
with Vijayan in Delhi.

Dear Anandi,
Letters. Apologies. I was slow in replying. I was preoccupied with many
things. My trip to the U.S. is yet to be finalised. Psychosomaticism (Vijayan
writes ‘psychosomarasam’ coining a new word in Malayalam) has brought
about much instability. What Anandi said was correct: I am a victim of several
conflicts. I have come to accept them. That gives me a sense of being at peace.
As a friend, Anandi can accept me. You can trust me. I have nothing to
gain from anyone. Just that I am afraid of high expectations about me.
Even if I go to the U.S. I will return by the middle of July. In that case,
we can meet each other during your visit to India this year. I leave it to your
convenience. I had mentioned that you could stay with me. The house is
fairly large, by Delhi standards. But it lacks modern amenities, due to my
disinterest in them. Chanakyapuri in Delhi is quite an open place with trees
and birds. Hence your stay here will be enjoyable. My wife and son are with
me. (My wife is older than me). She is a Reader in one of the colleges here.
She has a Ph.d in philosophy. In her mind and actions she is rational and
argumentative. I am a deformed guy with no knowledge of logical thought.
284 O.V. Vijayan

(My son, Madhu, is on my side. He is eighteen). Both of them are now at

Hyderabad for their summer vacation.
Then, my sister, Usha is staying with me. (O.V. Usha, the poet). She works
as Associate Editor at Vikas Publishing house.
We have a happy-faced cook, Mary from Chengannoor. (Mary and family
stay at the Annexe beside my house). So Anandi’s arrival will not add to our
burden.
If you prefer privacy (‘non-interference’ is the word Vijayan used), you
are welcome to stay at a convenient hotel. My application for membership at
India International Centre is still pending. Otherwise you could have stayed
there. The atmosphere of seminars and lawns would have been more enjoy-
able than hotels.
Let me be brief. I will send you the details of my trip.
With love,
Vijayan,
16-6-83.

In July 1983, I went straight to Delhi from Dubai. I had told Vijayan not to
come to the airport. My close friend, Asha Nair was the Principal of Delhi
Cambridge Public School. Her husband, L.K.S. Nair (whom I called ‘elder
brother’) was the M.D. of Mahanagar Telephone company. They insisted
that I should stay with them, when they heard that I was coming to Delhi.
Hence I stayed with them.
I went to meet Vijayan the very next day. The driver of my ‘elder brother’
dropped me at Vijayan’s place, in Chanakyapuri.
Vijayan was staying in the second floor of an apartment which did not
appear very new. The living room was spacious. The bedrooms had good
ventilation.
The heat of the Delhi summer in July was unbearable to me. Since Vijayan’s
house was surrounded by neem trees, I did not feel the place was too hot.
Theresa and Usha were not there, on that day. Madhu had already left for the
U.S. He had chosen to pursue Bachelor of Finance after the twelfth standard.
Vijayan did not like that choice very much.
Vijayan opened the door. He was dressed in white kurta and dhoti. His
long hair touched the shoulder. Overflowing beard and moustache. He was
extremely thin. This was our first face-to-face meeting. The grey cat was with
him. Vijayan mentioned the cat in his letters.
Vijayan sat on a sofa, at the edge. I sat in the opposite sofa. Though I
was vocal in my letters, I was silent now. The breeze came through the neem
trees. The atmosphere was calm and quiet. Vijayan sat looking at me, like a
sage.
Who will speak first? This was the first line of a poem Usha had written.
That line reflected my mental condition.
 Letters by O.V. Vijayan to Anandi Ramachandran 285

Vijayan began speaking: of his health, of the cat who can sense his emo-
tions. We did not speak about literature or contemporary political issues. We
were trying to know each other.
I was wearing a white chiffon saree with small flowers. (Normally I don’t
remember such things. Maybe I remembered it since Vijayn commented on
that.)

Vijayan asked me, ‘Don’t you like cotton sarees? Bengal cotton?’
‘I have no problem with it’.
‘It will suit Anandi well’.

Since Vijayan said it, I bought many Bengal cotton sarees in those days. Later,
I took care to wear Bengal cotton sarees whenever I went to meet Vijayan.
We had lunch together. I returned in the evening.
It was only to meet Vijayan that I went to Delhi. The unbearable heat
there and my eagerness to meet my children forced me to come back home
the very next day.

Source
Anandi Ramachandran. 2011. Vijayan’s Letters: The Letters written by O.V. Vijayan
to Anandi Ramachandran. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Figure 10 Vijayan and wife Theresa. Credit: K.R. Vinayan


Bio-Chronology
O.V. Vijayan: His Life and Times

November 13, 1924:

Vijayan’s maternal grandfather figures in the following historical event that
happened on this day. It is mentioned in Vijayan’s last novel, Thalamurakal
(Generations).
Members belonging to the Ezhava community of Palghat, Kerala, led by
leaders such as Thachamuchikkal Chami (O.V. Vijayan’s maternal grand-
father), Damodaran, and Padmanabhan led a march to Kalpathy tem-
ple demanding access to the public roads around the temple. Chami was
badly injured when the leaders of the march were assaulted by the local
Brahmins. Subsequently, he became a Christian and took the name ‘Thomas’.
Chamiyarappan, a prominent character in Vijayan’s novel, Thalamurakal, is
modelled on Chami.

1925:
The British Government promulgated an order, allowing people of all castes
to enter into the roads around Kalpathy temple.
A non-violent agitation for access to public roads near Vaikkom temple
in the kingdom of Travancore was conducted from March 30, 1924, to 23
November, 1925. It was supported by Narayana Guru, Mahatma Gandhi,
and Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy. Gandhi visited Vaikkom in March 1925.

2 July, 1930:
O.V. Vijayan was born at the Thachamoochikkal house, at Vilayanchathannur,
near Koduvayur in Palghat district, Kerala. His father, Ottupulakkal
Velukkutty was a Subedar Major in the Malabar Special Police, and his
mother, Kamalakshiyamma.

April 10, 1936:

Premchand, the eminent Hindi writer, presided over the meeting of the All
India Progressive Writers’ Association held in Lucknow. K. Damodaran
and a few other writers from Kerala attended the Lucknow conference. The
Progressive movement had a great impact on Malayalam literature.


288 Bio-Chronology

June 12, 1937:

The followers of Progressive Literary Movement in Kerala, formed an asso-
ciation called ‘Jeeval Sahitya Sanghatana’ which held a meeting at Kozhikode
(Calicut).

1937:
Vijayan’s father is transferred to the M.S.P. camp at Arikode, near Calicut.
The serene atmosphere of this camp on the hill deeply affected Vijayan’s
sensibility. He commenced studies in the Muslim school in the valley, but
Vijayan, fragile of health, hardly attended the classes.

1940:
Vijayan joined Raja’s High School at Kottakkal. He studied here till the
Intermediate Class.

January 1948:
Cracks began appearing in the Progressive Literary Association as the
Communist party wanted writers to toe the party line. Among those who
insisted that commitment to art and its aesthetic form should take prec-
edence over a writer’s political ideology were leading Malayalam writ-
ers like Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Keshav Dev, M.P. Paul, and Joseph
Mundasseri.

1950:
O.V. Vijayan publishes his first short story, ‘Parajithan’ (The Loser) in a
Malayalam journal called ‘Kalanidhi’, from Thiruvananthapuram. Vijayan
joined Victoria College, Palghat, for his undergraduate course, with
Economics as his main subject.

1952:
Vijayan publishes a story, ‘Plum Cake’ in English in the college magazine of
Victoria College.

1953:
Vijayan attempts to write a story in English titled, ‘Father Gonsalves’, but
abandons it. He rewrote it in Malayalam under the title, ‘Parayoo, Father
Gonsalves’ (Tell me, Father Gonsalves”). It was published in a periodical
called ‘Jayakeralam’ from Madras (Chennai).

1954:
He secured his M.A. Degree in English Literature from Presidency College,
Madras (now Chennai).

1955:
Vijayan joined a college in Madurai but soon left the job.
  Bio-Chronology 289

Satyajit Ray’s film, Pather Panchali, which launched the parallel film
movement in India, was released.

1956:
He joined as a lecturer in English at Malabar Christian College, Kozhikode
(Calicut). He made friends with several writers of Calicut such as R.
Ramachandran, Uroob, Thikkodian, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, K.T.
Muhammed, N.P. Muhammed, and M.V. Devan. The Christian manage-
ment of the college found Vijayan’s association with the Communist Party
unacceptable. His service was terminated at the end of the year.
He publishes his first collection of short stories titled, ‘Moonnu Yudhangal’
(Three Battles).
During this time of unemployment, he joined his sister, Shanta, in the vil-
lage of Thasarak where she was working in a one-teacher school. The village
with its rustic characters and their age-old customs and beliefs, and their oral
traditions rich in legends and myths made a deep impression on the mind of
Vijayan. The germ of a novel which was to become The Legends of Khasak
took shape during this time in Vijayan’s imagination.

November 1, 1956:
Kerala became a separate state of Malayalam-speaking people. The linguistic
reorganization of India redefined the nature of the Indian nation.

1956–58:
Vijayan joined a college in Tanjore (Thanjavur) as a lecturer in English. His
ties with the Communist Party became stronger. His cartoons begin to appear
in Shankar’s Weekly during this time.
The Soviet invasion of Hungary and the subsequent execution of President
Imre Nagy (1896–1958) in 1958 deeply impacted Vijayan. Though he contin-
ued to believe in communist ideology, he was less sure of its moral foundations.

1958:
After Vijayan lost his job at Tanjore, there was a brief interval when he
returned to Kozhikode to join a periodical called, Prapancham, which was to
be launched by the Communist Party of India. Meanwhile, Shankar, the edi-
tor of Shankar’s Weekly, invited him to New Delhi to join the Weekly. Soon
he left for Delhi, carrying the draft of his first novel.
He publishes a short story, ‘Appu-Kili’ in Mathrubhumi Weekly, which
was to become a chapter in the novel, Khasakkinte Ithihasam. In fact, this
happened by mistake. He had given the chapter of the novel to the editor of
the Weekly for his comments, and it was sent to the press inadvertently.
290 Bio-Chronology

1958–62:
Vijayan becomes a staff writer and cartoonist at Shankar’s Weekly.
Vijayan had a circle of friends who were either journalists or writers from
Kerala. Among them were M. Mukundan, Paul Zacharia, M.P. Narayana
Pillai, P. Govinda Pillai, Kakkanadan, Anand, V.K. Madhavan Kutty and
T.N. Gopakumar. On every Friday, the writers met at the Kairali Club at
Connaught Place where their works would be presented for detailed discus-
sion. Vijayan actively participated in these literary discussions. Many of his
stories were first presented in this literary circle before they were published.

1962:
On October 19/20, the Chinese army invaded India in the North-East and
conquered large tracts of Indian land as there was hardly any Indian resist-
ance. This was the greatest setback Nehru suffered in his political career.

1963:
Vijayan left Shankar’s Weekly to join the Patriot, as a staff cartoonist. His
cartoons caught the attention of readers and became popular.
The Communist Party of India went through an ideological crisis which
led to a split in the Party. The editor of The Patriot Edathatta Narayanan
suspected Vijayan of having allegiance to Maoist thoughts. Soon, his posi-
tion within the paper, which was pro-Russia, became untenable and he left
the newspaper. Vijayan’s cartoons, political articles, and some of his short
stories refer to these political events.

1964:
Vijayan sets up a studio at Connaught Place. He soon emerges as a leading
international cartoonist and political commentator. His cartoons begin to
appear in international newspapers such as The New York Times, The Far
Eastern Economic Review, The Hindu, The Statesman, and The International
Herald Tribune.
Jawaharlal Nehru died on the morning of May 27, 1964. An era ends in
modern Indian history with his passing away.
1965:
Vijayan marries Dr. Theresa Gabriel who taught Philosophy in a Delhi
college.
Around September 1, Pakistan army launched a major offensive against
India. After much damage to both sides, the two countries agreed to a cease-
fire at the intervention of the U.N. on September 22.

1965–67:
Vijayan works on his manuscript of Khasakkinte Ithihasam.
  Bio-Chronology 291

Apart from cartoons, he also publishes political columns in leading English

and Malayalam newspapers, such as The Times of India, The Illustrated
Weekly of India, The New Indian Express, Kalakaumudi, and Malayalanadu.
The Tashkent agreement between India and Pakistan was signed on
January 10, 1966, and Lal Bahadur Shastri died the same night. Mrs Indira
Gandhi was sworn in as the next Prime Minister.

November 6, 1966:
A huge procession, which comprised of many saffron-clad sadhus, was taken
out in Delhi demanding a ban on cow slaughter. It turned violent and ended
in rioting and massive loss to property. This was an early indication of the
Hindu right-wing asserting its divisive agenda in India.

1968:
From the issue dated January 1, 1968, Mathrubhumi Weekly, a leading lit-
erary periodical in Malayalam, begins to serialize the novel, Khasakkinte
Ithihasam. Initial responses were mute, but in the course of the next few
years, this novel became the harbinger of modernism in Malayalam fiction.

1969:
Khasakkinte Ithihasam appears as a book in Malayalam and was noticed as
a major modernist work which brought about a paradigm shift in modern
Malayalam novel.

1970:
Khasakkinte Ithihasam wins the Odakkuzhal Award for the best work in
Malayalam for the period, 1967–70.
During the period, 1967–70, political turmoil spreads in many parts of
India. The Naxalite revolt by a fringe group of the Communist Party of India
which believed in armed revolution led to several attacks on landlords and
the ruling class. The campuses in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala
witnessed violent agitations. The echoes of these uprisings can be heard in
Vijayan’s short stories and cartoons. Ramachandra Guha notes: ‘To the his-
torian, the late 1960s are reminiscent of the late 1940s, likewise a time of
crisis and conflict, of resentment along lines of class, religion, ethnicity and
region, of a centre that seemed barely to hold’ (433).

1971–75:
Vijayan works on his second novel, Dharmapuranam (The Saga of
Dharmapuri). It had a prophetic ring about it, as it anticipated the declara-
tion of the Emergency by Indira Gandhi in June 1975.
The rise of the J.P. movement raises challenges before the centrist Congress
party.
292 Bio-Chronology

1971:
Indira Gandhi won a massive victory at the parliamentary elections (352 out
of 512 seats) held in January. Through her populist policies, she succeeded in
vanquishing the old guard in the Congress party.
In East Pakistan, political unrest has been brewing for some time due to a
feeling of neglect of their people and the domination of West Pakistani rul-
ing class. The imposition of Urdu created resentment in the Bangla-speaking
people of East Pakistan. The brutal repression unleashed by the Pakistani
army on the rebels who sought a separate state, resulted in riots and sectarian
fights, precipitating a massive confrontation. By the summer of 1971, the ref-
ugees fleeing from East Pakistan into India began swelling. A full-fledged war
raged for about a month, before India decisively defeated the Pakistani army
and liberated Bangladesh with the help of Muktibahini, guerrilla fighters of
Bangladesh patriots who were trained by the Indian army. On September
15, 1971, the Pakistani army surrendered to the Indian army. Mrs Gandhi
announced in Parliament the same day that ‘Dacca is now a free capital of
a free country’. With this decisive victory, Mrs Gandhi’s popularity scaled
unprecedented heights.
The Bangladesh war figures prominently in Vijayan’s novel, Gurusagaram
(Infinity of Grace) published in 1987.

1974:
A movement against corruption of the Gujarat government was launched by
the students under the banner of ‘Nava Nirman Movement’ in January 1974.
The chief minister, Chimanbhai Patel, had to resign as a result of the move-
ment. This inspired a similar movement in Bihar. Jayaprakash Narayan, a
Gandhian of great moral authority, joined the movement against corruption
transforming it into a massive popular movement against the Government.
J.P. (as Jayaprakash Narayan was fondly called) exhorted his followers to
strive for ‘total revolution’. J.P. announced a march on Parliament on March
6, 1975. The subsequent months witnessed pitched battles between the oppo-
sition and the government with protest marches, strikes, and lock-downs
in every part of the country. All this culminated in the declaration of the
Emergency by Mrs Gandhi on the night of June 25, 1975. An estimated
36,000 people which included prominent politicians of all opposition par-
ties, writers, intellectuals, and even journalists were detained under MISA
(Maintenance of Internal Security Act), without trial. In the next two years,
India was a totalitarian state with the administration wielding absolute pow-
ers, with censorship of all media in full force, with no possibility of any dis-
senting voice being heard.
Vijayan stops writing and drawing cartoons during the Emergency. He
leaves Delhi for Secunderabad and later moves to Kerala. For a time, he lived
in fear that he would be arrested. One night, he had taken shelter in the house
of N.E. Balaram, in Thiruvananthapuram, a prominent Communist leader,
hoping that he would help him in case the police came for him. Balaram
  Bio-Chronology 293

telephoned the DGP and made sure that Vijayan’s name did not figure in the
list of people to be put under arrest.

June 1975:
Dharmapuranam (The Saga of Dharmapuri) was to be serialized in
Malayalanadu Weekly from July 1975, but it had to be abandoned as the
Emergency was declared on June 25, 1975. The government imposed strin-
gent censorship measures that prevented publication of any material that
could be interpreted as ‘anti-national’. The novel, in fact, had a chapter
called ‘The Emergency’ though it was written much before it was declared.

1977:
Dharmapuranam (The Saga of Dharmapuri) was serialized in Malayalanadu
after the Emergency was lifted in 1977 and general elections declared. However,
no publisher came forward to publish the novel as it was accused of obscenity.

On January 18, 1977:

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced fresh elections to the Parliament.
She faced a humiliating defeat in the post-Emergency general elections. Mrs
Gandhi lost her Rae Bareilly seat to her earlier opponent, Raj Narain. The
Janata Party won 298 seats while the tally of the Congress was 153. Morarji
Desai was chosen as the new Prime Minister.

1978:
O.V. Vijayante Kathakal (The Collected Stories of O.V. Vijayan), containing
his early stories such as ‘The Beginning of a Battle’ and ‘The End of a Battle’,
is published.

1979:
Oru Neenda Rathriyude Ormakkayi (In Memory of a Long Night), a collec-
tion of three stories that use allegory to critique the nightmarish excesses of
the Emergency, namely, ‘The Wart’, ‘The Test’ and ‘Oil’, is published.
He begins a column in the literary weekly, Malayalanadu, under the title,
Indraprastam.

1980:
Indira Gandhi returned to power in the general elections conducted in 1980,
with 353 seats. Sanjay Gandhi, who was responsible for many of the excesses
of the Emergency, was killed in an accident, on 23 June, 1980.
In the early 1980s, there was social unrest on many fronts. The textile strike
in Bombay which began on January 18, 1982, lasted almost two years. The
tribals in central India demanded new states of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
This period saw a renewal of Naga militancy and an aggressive campaign
294 Bio-Chronology

by the All India Assam Students Union against the infiltrators, mostly from
Bangladesh, who had settled in the state. The agitation took an ugly turn in
February 1983 when ‘hundreds of Bengali Muslims were slaughtered by a
mob of Assamese Hindus and tribals’ (Guha, 557).
The Punjab crisis became a major challenge for the government, with
a Sikh preacher called Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale who advocated a sepa-
rate Sikh state, acquiring a mass following. On June 5, 1984, the Operation
Bluestar was launched by the Indian army to flush out Bhindranwale and
his followers from the Akal Takht of the Golden Temple of Amritsar. The
armed confrontation resulted in the death of about 500 terrorists and about
80 soldiers, as per government sources.
On the morning of October 31, 1984, Indira Gandhi was shot dead by
two of her security guards at point-blank range. In the aftermath of her
death, there were riots in Delhi which continued for days in which more than
a thousand Sikhs were brutally killed by mobs. It was one of the worst epi-
sodes of communal violence in Indian history after the Partition riots.
O.V. Vijayan’s novel, Pravachakante Vazhi (1992, The Prophet’s Way)
deals with this period with acute sensitivity to the sentiments of ordinary
Sikhs and the suffering they underwent.

1985:
Ashanti, a collection of six stories featuring erotic scenes and scatological
imagery, is published. It has been criticized for its obscenity and open defi-
ance of the idea of decorum.
Dharmapuranam, the novel which had appeared in a literary weekly in
1977, appears in book form. Vijayan had revised it after publishing it serially
in Malayalanadu.
Balabodhini, comprising 17 stories, mostly satires on current politics,
appears as a book.
In the general elections held after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the
Congress party won 401 seats, in Parliament. Rajiv Gandhi swept the polls
and became the Prime Minister.

1987:
Vijayan’s third novel, Gurusagaram, is published. It marks a spiritual turn
in his career as a novelist. Vijayan had been frequenting an ashram near
Thiruvananthapuram, established by Karunakaraguru.
Ghoshayatrayil Thaniye (Alone in the Festive Procession) and Oru
Sindoorappottinte Orma (In Memory of a Vermilion Mark), two collections
of his essays, are published.
A collection of Vijayan’s satirical pieces, Ente Charitranweshana
Pareekshakal (My Experiments with History) comes out.
During the late 1980s, the Hindu–Muslim divide widened, as issues such
as the Shah Bano case verdict and the Babri Masjid–Ayodhya temple dispute
  Bio-Chronology 295

captured the attention of a large number of people, led by the Hindu right-
wing politicians. In 1986, the government enacted a ‘Muslim Women’s Bill’
in Parliament, which overturned the Supreme court verdict ordering the pay-
ment of maintenance to Shah Bano. On February 1, 1986, the District Judge
of Ayodhya ordered that the Babri Masjid be opened to permit worship at
a small Hindu shrine. This greatly encouraged the militant elements among
the pro-Hindu right wing to orchestrate a Hindu revivalist movement.
The telecast of the serial based on the Hindu epic, the Ramayan, from
January 1987, which had over three million viewers on national television,
in retrospect, seems to have helped a consolidation of the Hindu sentiments
in favour of the Ayodhya movement.

1988:
Kataltheerath (After the Hanging, 1989), a collection of 14 stories comes
out. This volume contains some of his best stories such as the ‘Kataltheerath’
which was translated as ‘After the Hanging’, ‘Krishnapparunth’ (The Sacred
Eagle) and ‘Irupathiyonnam Noottandu’ (Twenty-First Century).
A revised edition of Dharmapuranam appears in Malayalam.
Three collections of Vijayan’s essays come out: Sandehiyude Samvadam
(The Sceptic’s Dialogues), Vargasamaram, Swatwam (Class Struggle,
Identity), and Kurippukal (Notes).
The Saga of Dharmapuri, a self-translation of O.V. Vijayan’s novel,
Dharmapuranam appears in English, from Penguin books.

1989:
Kattu Paranja Katha (The Story Told by the Wind), a collection of stories.
Itihasathinte Ithihasam (The History of the Legends), a book of reminis-
cences recounting the story of his composition of Khasakkinte Ithihasam
(The Legends of Khasak) comes out.
After the Hanging and Other Stories, a volume of Vijayan’s stories trans-
lated by himself comes out from Penguin.

1990:
Madhuramgayathi (Sweet is the Music), is published. The novel is notable for
its strong ecological vision.
Vijayan wins the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award as well as the Sahitya
Akademi Award for his novel, Gurusagaram.
Environmental issues gain prominence in Malayalam in the 1990s after
the movement to save the Silent Valley.
In response to V.P. Singh’s decision to implement the Mandal commission
report, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which advocated the Hindu majoritarian
ideology, announced a rath yatra (a march of people) from the ancient tem-
ple of Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya under the leadership of L.K. Advani.
The march sparked off communal violence in many cities of northern and
western India.
296 Bio-Chronology

1991–92:
Vijayan wins the Vayalar Award for his novel, Gurusagaram, in 1991, and
the very first Muttathu Varkey Award for his literary contributions in 1992.
While campaigning for the general elections, Rajiv Gandhi was assassi-
nated by a suicide bomber of the LTTE at Chennai.
In the general elections, the Congress party won 244 seats and was able to
form government under the leadership of P.V. Narasimharao. On December
6, 1992, a large number of ‘kar sevaks’ (volunteers) assembled from many
parts of India defied the police and demolished the Babri Masjid to liberate
the ‘birth-place’ of Ram, beginning a new chapter in the post-Independence
India of aggressive ‘Hindutva’. The demolition of the domes of the Babri
Masjid led to widespread rioting in many cities of India. Riots broke out in
town after town, in an orgy of violence that lasted two months and claimed
more than 2,000 lives in Bombay alone.

1993:
Poothaprabandhavum Mattu Kathakalum (Poothaprabandham and other
stories), a collection of stories which contains the very first story he pub-
lished, ‘Parayoo, Father Gonsalves’ (Tell us, Father Gonsalves) comes out.

1994:
The Legends of Khasak, self-translation of Vijayan’s Khasakkinte Ithihasam,
appears from Penguin.

1995:
Haindavanum Athihaindavanum (The Hindu and the Fundamentalist
Hindu), a volume of his essays dealing with issues of ‘Hindutva’ (Hindu
Extremism), is published.
The Infinity of Grace, a translation of Vijayan’s Gurusagaram, done by
Ramesh Menon and O.V. Vijayan, appears from Penguin.

1996:
Kure Kathabeejangal (Germs of Some Stories) published. It contains short
stories of his late period.

1997:
Thalamurakal (Generations), his last novel comes out. He explores the his-
tory of an Ezhava feudal family and its struggles against the stigma of caste in
the novel. In this autobiographical novel, his maternal grandfather, Chami,
becomes the central character under the name of Chamiyarappan.

1998:
O.V. Vijayan: Selected Fiction, translated by O.V. Vijayan, an omnibus of
his translations appears from Penguin.
  Bio-Chronology 297

1999:
Samudrathilekku Vazhi Thetti Vanna Paralmeen (The Small Fish that Strayed
into the Sea), an autobiographical work, is published.
Ithiri Nerampoke, Ithiri Darshanam (A Little Fun, a Little Insight), a book
of cartoons done during the period of Emergency in Malayalam, is published
in book form.
Vijayan wins the M.P. Paul Award and the Samastha Kerala Sahitya
Parishat Award for his literary works.
In the month of May, Pakistan and India fought a bitter war in Kargil
which lasted till July.

2000:
O.V. Vijayante Kathakal (The Collected Stories of O.V. Vijayan) is published.

2001:
Andhanum Akalangal Kanunnavanum (The Blind and the Far-Sighted), a
collection of essays, is published.
Vijayan is conferred the Ezhuthachan Puraskaram, the highest award given
to writers by the Government of Kerala. Vijayan is made a Distinguished
Member of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi.

2002:
In the massive communal violence that spread across Gujarat, in the wake
of the burning of the Godhra train, ‘more than 2,000 Muslims were killed,
and at least 50 times that number rendered homeless, living in refugee camps’
(Guha, 657).

2003:
The government of India awarded Vijayan the Padmabhushan, one of the
highest civilian honours for service rendered to the nation.
Ente Priyappetta Kathakal (My Favourite Stories), is published.
A Cartoonist Remembers appears from Rupa, New Delhi.

2004:
Vijayan is awarded the Mathrubhumi literary prize, by the well-known media
institution, Mathrubhumi Printing and Publishing Company. He is awarded
the Sanjayan Puraskaram by Tapasya.
Vijayan’s novel, The Legends of Khasak appears in French translation, as
Les legendes de Khasak. The government of Andhra Pradesh gives him an
award for his life-time achievements.
298 Bio-Chronology

2005:
On March 30, O.V. Vijayan passed away in Secunderabad while undergoing
treatment at the Care hospital. His body was taken to Kerala, by a special
flight and cremated with full state honours at Thiruvilwamala, in central
Kerala.
Vijayan’s novel, The Legends of Khasak appears in German translation as
Die Legenden von Khasak.
O.V. Vijayante Lekhanangal (O.V. Vijayan’s Articles), a collected
volume of his articles, including his journalistic prose pieces, appears in
Malayalam.
Tragic Idiom: O.V. Vijayan’s Cartoons and Notes on India. Edited
by S.Ramanathaiyer and N Hudson-Rodd, appears from D.C. Books,
Kottayam.

2007:
Arakshithavastha (Insecurity), a collection of five stories published.

2011:
Vijayante Kathukal (Letters of O.V. Vijayan) is published.

References
Guha, Ramachandra, 2011. India after Gandhi: The history of the world’s largest
democracy. Picador.
Bibliography

Works by O.V. Vijayan in Malayalam

Vijayan, O.V. 1969. Khasakkinte Ithihasam (The Legends of Khasak). Kottayam:
D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1978. Vijayante Kathakal (Vijayan’s Stories). Kottayam: Sahitya
Pravarthaka Sahakarana Samgham.
Vijayan, O.V. 1979. Oru Neenda Rathriyude Ormakkayi (Stories on the Emergency).
Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1985. Asanti. Kottayam: Current Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1985. Dharmapuranam (The Saga of Dharmapuri). Kottayam: D.C.
Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1987. Gurusagaram (The Infinity of Grace). Kottayam: Current Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1987. Ghoshayatrayil Thaniye (Alone in the Festive Crowd). Kottayam:
Current Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1987. Oru Sindoorappottinte Orma (Memory of a Vermilion Mark).
Kottayam: Current Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1988. Sandehiyude Samvadam (The Dialogue of a Sceptic). Kottayam:
Current Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1988. Vargasamaram, Swathwam (Class Struggle and the Self).
Kottayam: Current Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1988. Kurippukal (Jottings). Kottayam: Current Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1988. Kadaltheerathu (On the Sea-shore/ After the Hanging).
Kottayam: Current Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1989. Kattu Paranja Katha (The Story Told by the Wind). Kottayam:
Current Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1989. Ente Charithranweshana Pareekshakal (My Experiments with
History). Kottayam: Current Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1989. Ithihasathinte Ithihasam (The Legend of Legends). Kottayam:
D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1990. Madhuram Gayathi (Sweet Is the Music). Kottayam: Current
Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1993. Pravachakante Vazhi (The Way of the Prophet). Kottayam: D.C.
Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1993. Poothaprabandhavum Mattu Kathakalum (The Ballad of the
Spirit and Other Stories). Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1995. Kure Kathabeejangal (Some Outlines for Stories). Kottayam:
D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1997. Thalamurakal (Generations). Kottayam: D.C. Books.


300 Bibliography

Vijayan, O.V. 1998. Haindavanum Athihaindavanum (The Hindu and the Extreme
Hindu). Kottayam: Current Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1999. Ithiri Nerampokku, Ithiri Darshanam (A Little Amusement, A
Little Philosophy). Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1999. Samudrathilekku Vazhi Thetti Vanna Paralmeen (The Small
River Fish That Has Strayed into the Sea). Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2000. O.V. Vijayante Kathakal (The Complete Stories of O.V.
Vijayan). Complied by Asha Menon with an Introduction. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2001. Andhanum Akalangal Kanunnvanum (The Blind and the Far-
Sighted). Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2003. Ente Priyappetta Kathakal (My Favourite Stories). Kottayam:
D.C. Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2005. O.V. Vijayante Lekhanangal. Compiled by P.K. Rajasekharan.
Kottayam: D.C. Books.

O. V.Vijayan’s Works in English and in English Translation.

Vijayan. O.V. 1988. The Saga of Dharmapuri. Trans. O.V. Vijayan. New Delhi:
Penguin Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1989. After the Hanging and Other Stories. Trans. O.V. Vijayan. New
Delhi: Penguin Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1994. The Legends of Khasak. Trans. O.V. Vijayan. New Delhi:
Penguin Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1995. The Infinity of Grace. Trans. Ramesh Menon and O.V. Vijayan.
New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 1998. Selected Fiction. Trans. O.V. Vijayan. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Vijayan, O.V. 2003. A Cartoonist Remembers. New Delhi: Rupa.
Vijayan, O.V. 2006. Tragic Idiom: O.V. Vijayan’s Cartoons and Notes on India. Ed.
By S.Ramanathaiyer and N. Hudson-Rodd. Kottayam: D.C. Books.

Vijayan’s Works Translated into French

Vijayan, O.V. 2001. Les Rochers, translated by Valerie Bla ignac, Revue Europe,
April, 132–138.
Vijayan, O.V. 2002. L’Aeroport, translated by Dominique Vitalyos, Revuew Europe,
November–December, 236–241.
Vijayan, O.V. 2004. Less Legendes de Khasak, translated by Vitalyos, Dominque,
Fayard.

Vijayan’s Works in Hindi

Vijayan O.V. 1997. “Samudra That Par” Translation of “Kadal Theerath” in Katha.
New Delhi: Katha Publications.

Films Based on O.V. Vijayan’s Works

Rajeevnath, T. 1988. Director, Kadal Theerath. Written by O.V. Vijayan and
Rajeevnath. Camera by Santhosh Sivan. Produced by Rasika Films.

Critical Works on O.V. Vijayan, including articles:

Appan, K.P. 2007. “Nirandanathinte Chiri” (Laughter of Detachment) in Marunna
Malayala Novel (The Changing Malayalam Novel). Kottayam: D.C. Books.
 Bibliography  301

Gopinarayanan. 2006. O.V. Vijayan: Oru Jeevitham. Thrissur: Sahitya Akademi.

Karthikeyan, K.G. and M. Krishnan Namboothiri. 1994. Ed. Khasak Padhanangal
(Studies in Khasak). Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Kurian, Sheeba M. 2005. Vijayante Cherukathakal (The Short Stories of O.V.
Vijayan). Kozhikode: Olive.
Madhavan, N.S. 1998. “A Hundred Visions and Revisions”. Biblio,
September–October.
Mankara, Vinod. 2011. “Kireedam Vecha Sarpangal”: A Conversation with O.V.
Vijayan in Jayakrishnan, Ed. Ithihasangalude Khasak. Trivandrum: Kerala Bhasha
Institute.
Mathew, Tony. 1994. Editor. Khasak Padhanangal (Studies in Khasak). Kozhikode:
Bodhi Publications.
Menon, Asha. 2003. “Khalsayude vilapam” in Khalsayude Jalasmrithi. Kottayam:
D.C. Books.
Nair, M. Krishnan. 2011. “Vijayan’s Master-piece” in Jayakrishnan, Ed.
Ithihasangalude Khasak. Trivandrum: Kerala Bhasha Institute, 15–20.
Narendra Prasad, R. 2003. “Vijayante Thalamurakal,” in Unni Pokunnu.
Chengannur: Rainbow Publications.
Puthumana, Kalidas, 2011. Dramatic version of The Legends of Khasak in Malayalam
in Jayakrishnan, Ed. Ithihasangalude Khasak. Trivandrum: Kerala Bhasha
Institute, 666–703.
Rajakrishnan, V. 1991. “The Quest and After”, Indian Literature, November-
December, 74–81.
Rajakrishnan, V. 1994. Rogathinte Pookkal (Flowers of Morbidity) in Khasak
Patanangal. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Rajakrishnan, V. 2011. “Aarum Kootanayatha Moovanthikalude Thazhvarayil” in
Jayakrishnan, Ed. Ithihasangalude Khasak. Trivandrum: Kerala Bhasha Institute.
Rajasekharan, P.K. 1998. Pithrughatikaram: O.V. Vijayante Kalayum Darshanavum
(The Paternal Clock: The Art and Vision of O.V. Vijayan). Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Rajasekharan, P.K. Ed. O.V. Vijayan: Ormapustakam (O.V. Vijayan: A
Commemorative Volume) Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Ramakrishnan, E.V. 1992. Aksharavum Aadhunikathayum (Orality, Modernity and
Print Culture). Thrissur: Aathira Publications.
Ramakrishnan, E.V. 2011 (Paperback 2017). Locating Indian Literature: Texts,
Traditions, Translations. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.
Ramakrishnan, E.V. 2018. “Celebrating 50th Year of O.V. Vijayan’s The Legends of
Khasak”. The Hindu, 10 November, 1918.
Ramakrishnan, E.V 2017. Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity.
Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.
Raveendran, P.P. 1999. “Gurusagaram: Aryavarththinte Prathyaya Sasthram” in
Edapadukal: Sahityam, Sidhantham, Rashtreeyam. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
Raveendran, P.P. 1999. “Translation and Sensibility: The Khasak Landscape in
English and Malayalam”. Indian Literature 191: 177–186.
Raveendran P.P. 2009. O.V.Vijayan (In the series ‘Makers of Indian Literature’).
New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
Sankaran, K.P. 2011. “Khasakkinte Ithihasam Malayala Novelil: Moulikathwathite
Puthiya Vithanam” in Jayakrishnan, Ed. Ithihasangalude Khasak. Trivandrum:
Kerala Bhasha Institute, 51–63.
Sanu, M.K. 2011. “Atheetha Lokangal Khasakkil” in Jayakrishnan, Ed.
Ithihasangalude Khasak. Trivandrum: Kerala Bhasha Institute, 32–50.
Satchidanandan, K. 1994. “Mrithiyude Oosharachayakal” (Desert Shadows of
Death) in Khasak Studies. Kottayam: D.C. Books.
302 Bibliography

Singh, Ravindra Pratap. 2015. “Reading Taboos of as Allegory in O.V. Vijayan’s The
Saga of Dharmapuri”. Journal of Applied Cultural Studies. 1(1): 2015. http://jacs​
.amu​.edu​.pl​/uploads​/10.​%Singh ​%201​.pdf.
Sreejan, V.C. 2011. “Adrishya Rekhakal” in Ithihasangalude Khasak (Khasak of
Legends). State Language Institute of Kerala.
Thaliath, Maria Rajan. 2011. “Grotesque Realism in O.V. Vijayan’s The Saga of
Dharmapuri”. Tatva Journal of Philosophy 9(1), 29–41. https://doi​.org​/10​.12726​
/tip​.17​.3.
Usha, O.V. 2011. “Khasak: Oru Sakshimozhi” in Jayakrishnan, Ed. Ithihasangalude
Khasak. Trivandrum: Kerala Bhasha Institute, 718–724.
Vinod, V.B. 2009. “The Location of History in a Spiritual Eco-System: Looking at
Madhuram Gayathi by O.V. Vijayan”. Indian Literature 53(2): 180–185.
A Selection of Vijayan’s Cartoons

Cartoon 1: A comment on the state of the nation. (Page 37, The Tragic Idiom, from
the section “The State of the Nation”)


304 A Selection of Vijayan’s Cartoons

Cartoon 2: Erosion of idealism in public life. (Page 49, The Tragic Idiom, from the
section “The State of the Nation”)

Cartoon 3: Gandhian ideals do not guide the ruling class. (Page 63, The Tragic
Idiom, from the section “The Foreign Encounters”)
 A Selection of Vijayan’s Cartoons 305

Cartoon 4: Transparency has disappeared from public life. (Page 89, The Tragic
Idiom, from the section “The Foreign Encounters”)
306 A Selection of Vijayan’s Cartoons

Cartoon 5: The judiciary fails to be a watchdog of civil rights. (Page 120, The Tragic
Idiom, from the section “The Democracy Wall”)
 A Selection of Vijayan’s Cartoons 307

Cartoon 6: Stalinism finds supporters among Indian communists. (Page 198, The
Tragic Idiom, from the section “The State of the States”)
308 A Selection of Vijayan’s Cartoons

Cartoon 7: There is ‘heavy water’ but no drinking water. (Page 233, The Tragic
Idiom, from the section “Nuclear”)
Notes on Contributors

Mangat, Ajay P. (b. 1972) is an Assistant Editor at ‘Malayala Manorama’

daily. He is a novelist, translator, and critic. His novel, Soosannayude
Granthappura received critical attention. He has translated Gail Omvedt,
Elif Shafat, and many others into Malayalam. He has written an intellec-
tual biography of Noam Chomsky. His recent publications are Deham,
Velichamanyonyam and Moonnu Kallukal.
Kakkattil, Akbar (1954–2016) was a short story writer and novelist in
Malayalam. He served as a teacher of Malayalam in the Secondary Schools
of the state. His short stories based on his school life have been very popu-
lar. He was actively involved in cultural organizations like Kerala Sahitya
Akademi and National Book Trust. Among his well-known books are
Mruthyu Yogam and School Diary.
Anand (b. 1936) whose real name is Satchidanandan is an acclaimed
Malayalam novelist whose Alkkoottam (The Crowd) was a pioneering
work of modernist fiction. He was an engineer by profession and was
associated with Central Water Commission, New Delhi. Among his major
works are Marubhoomikal Undakunnathu (How the Deserts Originate),
Govardhante Yatrakal (Govardhan’s Journeys), Apaharikkappetta
Daivangal (The Stolen Gods), and Vibhajanangal (Partitions). He has
received the Sahitya Akademi Award and Ezhuthachan Puraskaram.
Ramachandran, Anandi (b. 1941) has been an educationist and is now the
Director of Asiatic companies based in Dubai. Her association with O.V.
Vijayan which began in 1982 out of appreciation of his works and ideas,
matured into a close friendship. Vijayan’s letters written in response to her
letters and her observations in the book, Vijayan’s Letters, show her criti-
cal sensibility as well as deep understanding of Vijayan the writer.
Menon, Asha (b. 1947) is a literary critic, essayist, and writer of travelogues
in Malayalam. His real name is K.Sreekumar. He worked in a bank in
Kerala. In his later years, he turned to travelogues and metaphysical sub-
jects. Among his well-known works are Kaliyugaranyakangal, Herbarium,
and Himalaya Prathyakshangal.


310 Notes on Contributors

Petty, Bruce (1929–2023) was one of Australia’s foremost political cartoon-

ists whose cartoons appeared in Melbourne’s The Age. He was also a
satirist, sculptor, and maker of animation films. A film, Leisure, directed
by him, won an Academy award. In his formative period, he had spent
the years between 1954 and 1961 in London which transformed him into
a cartoonist. He has published several books, including Betty’s Australia,
Betty’s Money Book, and Betty’s Parallel Worlds.
Panikkar, Chitra is a Senior Professor of English at Bangalore University. Her
areas of specializations are Literary Theory, Translation Studies, Indian
Literature, and Joyce Studies. She has translated parts of Ulysses into
Malayalam.
Selbourne, David (b. 1937), a British thinker and social commentator, had
deep interest in the political developments in India. He visited India dur-
ing the infamous Emergency and published essays in The Guardian that
alerted the world to the excesses of the Emergency. Apart from An Eye to
India, he has also edited a volume of essays on Jayaprakash Narayan titled,
In Theory and Practice: Essays on the Politics of Jayaprakash Narayan.
Sivaraman, Deepan is an Indian theatre director, scenographer and aca-
demic. He is an Associate Professor of Performance Studies at Ambedkar
University, New Delhi. He has won many honours such as Charles
Wallace India Trust Award and Kerala Sangeeta Natak Akademi Award.
His stage production of O.V. Vijayan’s novel, The Legends of Khasak, at
Thrikkaripur in north Kerala won wide acclaim and it was staged in sev-
eral cities across India. Among the plays he has directed are Kamala, Ubu
Roi, and The Cabinet of Dr Kaligari.
Unny, E.P. is the Chief Political Cartoonist at the Indian Express, New
Delhi. Earlier he had worked with the Hindu and the Economic Times.
His books are Spices and Soul: A Doodler’s Journey through Kerala,
Santa and the Scribes: The Making of Fort Kochi, and R.K. Laxman:
Back with a Punch. He participated in the exhibitions held at the Asian
Cartoonists Conference (1996) and the International Cartoon Festival in
Carquefou, France (2006).
Ushakumari, G. is a literary critic in Malayalam. She is a Professor of
Malayalam at the government college, Pullut. She specializes in gender
studies. Her published works include: Udal Oru Neythu: Samskarathinte
Sthreevayana, Kathayum Kamanayum, Cinema: Varthamanathinte
Charithram, and Shareerathinte Samoohika Bhavanakal.
Arunlal, K. currently works as an Assistant Professor of English at Government
College, Mokeri. He is a translator and essayist in Malayalam. He has
translated Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Ranajit Guha, and Bertrand Russel
into Malayalam. He has authored and edited three books, excluding the
translations.
 Notes on Contributors 311

Ramachandran, K. (b. 1947) has been a social activist who was involved
in several campaigns connected with environmental and health issues in
Kerala. He has been an essayist and frequent contributor to periodicals
in Malayalam and also English dailies like The Hindu and the Indian
Express. His books include Visammathathinte Kaathal, Indian Paristiti
Varthamanam, and translations of books by Ivan Illich and Andre Gorz
into Malayalam.
Satchidanandan, K. (b.1946) is a prominent poet and critic of Malayalam.
He has 32 volumes of poetry in Malayalam, 10 in English, 7 in Hindi, and
32 collections in other languages including Arabic, Irish, French, German,
Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese besides all major Indian languages.
He has won Sahitya Akademi Award, Dante Medal from Italy, besides
winning all the honours given for literature in Kerala. He has edited several
books in English on Indian literature. The Missing Rib, I am a Language,
and Questions from the Dead are some of his recent collections of poetry
in English.
Das, Kamala (1934–2009) was a celebrated bilingual writer who wrote
fiction in Malayalam and poetry in English. She was an iconoclast who
broke new ground in the treatment of gender and sexuality in her writ-
ings including her widely-acclaimed autobiography, My Story. Her best-
known works in English are Summer in Calcutta, The Descendants, The
Old Playhouse and Other Poems, and the novel, The Alphabet of Lust.
Her works in Malayalam run into two volumes of about a thousand pages.
Appan, K.P. (1936–2008) was a Professor of Malayalam at the S.N. College,
Kollam, Kerala. He was known for his critical interpretations of modernist
Malayalam works. As a major critical voice, his readings of contemporary
Malayalam writings were path-breaking. Apart from the Sahitya Akademi
Award winning Madhuram Jeevitam, his major works are Kalahavum
Viswasavum, Samayapravahavum Sahityakalayum, and Uttaradhunikata:
Charitravum Vamshavaliyum.
Dinesh, K.T. is a writer and translator. He worked as a Research Officer in
English in the State Council of Research and Training after serving as a
teacher of English. He has translated the award-winning poetry volume of
R. Ramachandran for Sahitya Akademi. He writes regularly on education,
literature, and cinema in leading journals of Malayalam.
Mukundan, M. (b. 1942), a reputed Malayalam novelist, was born in the
former French colony of Mahe (Mayyazhi) which became independent
in 1954. He retired from the French embassy, New Delhi, as the Head
of its Cultural Department. He is the author of more than 30 novels in
Malayalam, including On the Banks of Mayyazhi River, a modern classic
in Malayalam. He won J.C.B. Literary Award for 2021, and the Crossword
Award twice, in 1999 and 2006. He has won the Sahitya Akademi Award,
312 Notes on Contributors

Vayalar Award and the Ezhuthachan Award. The French Government

honoured him with the title Chevalier of Arts and Letters.
Mohan, Manila C. is an experienced journalist and eco-activist known for
her political stance against totalitarian interests. She has been with the
Kairali TV, Mathrubhumi Weekly, and Dool News before taking up the
position of the Editor in Chief of True Copy Think.
Dhanesh, Mankulam is an Assistant Professor of English and Cultural
Studies at CHRIST (deemed-to-be University), Bangalore. His doctoral
dissertation was a comparative study of the novels and philosophies of
O.V. Vijayan and Milan Kundera. His areas of specialization include liter-
ary and cultural studies, critical social theory, and pedagogy.
Usha, O.V. is a poet and novelist in Malayalam. She has written lyrics
for films. She has published four volumes of poems and a novel titled,
Shahidnama. As a younger sister of O.V. Vijayan, she had close associa-
tion with him. She retired as the Director of Publications from Mahatma
Gandhi University, Kottayam.
Pillai, P. Govinda (1926–2012) was a leading Marxist theorist, thinker, and
literary critic in Malayalam. He spent many years in Delhi as a jour-
nalist and editor. He was involved in nationalist freedom struggle, and
later, became a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). He was
the Chairman of Kerala Press Academy and Kerala Film Development
Corporation. Among his well-known works are Marx and the Capital,
Historiography – New Dimensions, E.M.S and Malayalam Literature,
and Frederick Engels.
Pavithran, P. is a well-known critic in Malayalam. He has been a Professor
of Malayalam at Sree Sankara Sanskrit University. His study of the poetry
of Kumaran Asan is a prominent critical work. Among his other impor-
tant works are Pranaya Rashtreeyam–Asan Kavita Padhanangal, Marx-
Gandhi-Ambedkar, and Bhoopatam Talathirikkumbol.
Shyma, P. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Payyanur
College in Kerala. Her doctoral dissertation was on the backward caste
representation in Malayalam cinema. She writes on cinema, transla-
tion, caste, and modernity, with a focus on culture and modernity. As
a bilingual translator, she has translated texts dealing with narratives of
decolonization.
Venugopal, P.N. is a well-known translator who has translated essays and
short stories from Malayalam into English. His recent work is a transla-
tion of E. Santhoshkumar’s short stories titled, A Fistful of Mustard Seeds
(Niyogi Books, 2019).
 Notes on Contributors 313

Rajasekharan, P.K. (b.1966) is a well-known literary critic in Malayalam. He

retired from the editorial section of Mathrubhumi daily. His study of O.V.
Vijayan’s works, Pithrughatikaram, won Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award.
Andhanaaya Daivam received Kerala Sahitya Akademi’s Vilasini award.
His recent books are Vakkinte Moonnam Kara, Narakabhoopatangal,
and Bookstalgia.
Raveendran, P.P. is a bilingual literary critic and translator. He was for-
merly a Professor and Dean of the School of Letters at Mahatma Gandhi
University, Kottayam. He is a co-editor of the two-volume Oxford India
Anthology of Modern Malayalam Literature (2017). He has translated
the poetry of Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan and Attoor Ravivarma
into English. The monographs on O.V. Vijayan and Kamala Das, Texts
Histories Geographies: Reading Indian Literature (2009) and Under the
Bhasha Gaze: Modernity and Indian Literature (2023) are some of his
recent works in English.
Sreenivasan, Rajeev taught innovation at several IIMs and was a technology
strategist in Silicon Valley. He has been a columnist for 30 years, writing
on culture, economics, and foreign affairs.
Prasannarajan, S. is an editor, essayist, and columnist based in Delhi. He has
written extensively on political thoughts and trends, ideas, and literature.
He is currently the editor of Open magazine.
Thomas, Sanju is an Assistant Professor at the School of Letters at
Ambedkar University, New Delhi. Her areas of interest are Indian litera-
ture, Translation Studies, Malayalam fiction and cinema, and Women’s
Writing. She has translated the memoirs of Ajitha into English (Kerala’s
Naxalbari, 2008) and edited an anthology of short stories by women writ-
ers from Malayalam into English (Myriad Memoirs, 2003).
Mathew, Thomas (b.1940), an established literary critic and essayist in
Malayalam, was a Professor of Malayalam in several government colleges,
besides being the Director of the State Language Institute. He has received
the Sahitya Akademi award and the Vayalar Award for literary criti-
cism. His well-known works are Dantagopurathilekku Veendum, Marar:
Lavanyanubhavathinte Yuktishilpaam, and Ashaante Seethayanam.
Rajakrishnan, V. is a literary critic and film director. He retired as a Professor
of English from Kerala University. His readings of modernist fiction were
received well in Malayalam. He has directed a film and written a book
on Indian cinema, titled Kazchayude Ashanti which won awards at the
national and state levels. Among his books are Rogathinte Pookkal,
Cherukathayude Chchandass, Nagnayaminikal, and Maruthira Kathu
Ninnappol.
314 Notes on Contributors

Sreejan, V.C. is an established critic in Malayalam. He has taught English

in several government colleges in the state. He has published widely on
a variety of topics related to modern Malayalam literature in the last
50 years of his writing. His prominent books are Vaakkum Vaakkum,
Aadhunikotharam: Vishakalanavum Vimarshanavum, Novel Vaayanakal,
Ormayil Malabar, and Niroopanavum Niroopakarum.
Index

A Aranda, Lucia 204

Aadha Gaon, Reza 5 Aravindan, G 265
‘aadhunikata’ (modernism) 3 artists 85, 215, 245–246
Aag ka Dariya, Hyder 205 Asaduddin, M. 205
Abraham, Abu 231, 240 Asaf Ali, Aruna 235
absurdity 87, 114, 120, 127, 142, Asan, Kumaran 153
177, 256; Sisyphean 119; of tainted Ashanti 294
knowledge 113 ‘ashram’ 88, 95, 114, 120, 122, 133,
Adorno, T.W. 157 207, 294
Advani, L.K., rath yatra by 295 Assamese Hindus, assault on Bengali
aesthetics 5, 72, 151, 162, 258, Muslims 294; see also Gujarat
268–269 pogrom; Hindu–Muslim divide
‘Airport’, Vijayan 146, 260, 264 Asturias, Miguel 7
Akal Takht 294 ‘Atiyantaravastha’ 128
Alexandria Quartet, Durrell 87, 97 ‘At the Sign of the Goat’,
Ali, Haidar 269 Selbourne 124
alienation 12–13, 102, 155, 175, 184, Augustine, Saint 272, 274
187, 207, 214, 270 Aurangazeb 236–237
Al Kapp 97 Autumn of the Patriarch, Márquez 258
Allana, Amal 219 awards: Ezhuthachan Puraskaram
allegory 127–128, 181, 264, 293 297; Kerala Sahitya Akademi
All India Assam Students Union 294 295; Mathrubhumi literary prize
All India Progressive Writers’ 297; M.P. Paul 297; Muttathu
Association 287 Varkey 296; Odakkuzhal 291;
Ambedkar, B.R. 153 Padmabhushan 297; Sahitya
Ambedkarism 152, 160 Akademi 262, 295; Samastha Kerala
Anand, Mulk Raj 151, 153, 290 Sahitya Parishat 297; Sanjayan
Ananthamurthy, U.R. 5, 9–10, 13, 267; Puraskaram 297; Vayalar 296
on naked worship 10 Azhikode, Sukumar 237
ancestor worship 212
Andhanum Akalangal Kanunnavanum B
(The Blind and the Far-Sighted) 297 Babri Masjid–Ayodhya temple dispute
anti-colonial movements 143, 155 178, 245, 294–296
anti-feudal movement 155 Balabodhini 294
anti-imperialism 125, 226 Balakrishna Pillai, Kesari 3, 109–110
apartheid 225–226 Balyakalasakhi, Basheer 62
Appan, K.P. 85, 131, 146 Balzac, H. 3
‘Appukkili’, Vijayan 289 Bandyopadhyay, Swaraj 97
Arakshithavastha (Insecurity), Banerjee, Manik 245
Vijayan 298 Bangarwadi, Magdulkar 69, 71–72, 97


316 Index

Bangladesh 10, 60–61, 65, 122, 133, cartoonist 1, 5, 13–14, 223–228, 230–
135, 292 232, 235, 240, 255, 260, 262, 266;
‘The Banyan Tree’, Vijayan 168 Indian 13, 224–225; international
Barba, Eugenio 219 290; Western 13, 225, 228–229
Barbakov 124 cartoons 1–2, 119, 122–123, 128,
Barrett, William 87 144–145, 147, 165–166, 223–228,
Basheer, Vaikom Muhammad 3–4, 231–232, 238–243, 245, 260,
62–63, 121, 153, 248, 260 289–292; news 231; political 228,
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre 95–96, 114 260, 262; social 225
Baudrillard, J. 174 casteism 12–13, 139, 181–186, 267
Beckett, Samuel 89, 191, 195, 203 castes 12, 119, 140–141, 146, 182–183,
‘The Beginning of a Battle’ 185, 229, 267, 287, 296; Dalits 2,
153–154, 293 146, 174, 213; Ezhavas 2, 73, 181,
beliefs 2, 4, 8, 289; see also customs; 267, 287, 296; Iyers (Brahmins) 74,
traditions 185; marginalized 152; Nairs 73,
Bentinck, W. 224 185
Bernier, Francois 236 The Catcher in The Rye 263
Bhagvad Gita 9, 114, 152 ‘Cattle’ 165
Bhakti: poetry 114, 270; traditions censorship 227, 241, 292
11–12 Chacko, P.T. 236
Bhartṛhari 86 Chakravartty, Renu 248
Bhasi, Thoppil 236 Chami, Thachamuchikkal (grandfather)
Bhaskara Panikkar, P.T. 69–70 2, 181, 287, 296
Bhindranwale, Jarnail Singh 294 Chaudhuri, Amit 10
black humour 14, 88, 120, 137, 140, chauvinism 65
215, 225, 242, 246, 273 ‘Chavittuvandi’ (Pedal-Machine) 154, 162
The Blessing of the Wild-Fowl, Vijayan Chekhov, Anton 3, 219
51, 146 ‘Chemmeen’ (The Shrimp), Vijayan 167
Blindness, Saramago 178, 180 ‘Chengannur Vandi’ (‘The Chengannur
Borges, Jorge Luis 109 Train’) 162, 260
Borodin, A. 80 Chiang Kai-shek 80
Bose, Jagdish Chandra 157 China, invasion of 290
Bose, Nandalal 237 Chitre, Dilip 204
bourgeoisie 64–65 Chowdhry, Neelam Mansingh 219
Brahminism 160, 167; see also Chullikkad, Balachandran 251
casteism city 4, 245, 260; see also urban
Brezhnev, Leonid 232 civilization 101–102, 138, 157, 198,
Brook, Peter 219 274; modern 154, 160
Brothers Karamazov 95 civil society 176, 180, 186
Buddha 106, 156–157 class 60, 156, 273; Marxism and
Buddhism 153, 160 156; struggle 4, 154, 295; see also
bureaucracy 64–65, 127, 154, 167 working class
Coetzee, J.M. 245
collective: amnesia 13, 213; crime
C 62; see also violence; memories 6,
Camus, Albert 196, 243 213–214
Candide, Voltaire 124 colonialism 7, 157
capitalism 9, 80, 153, 157, 165, communal: identities 61; violence
256–257; industrial 2 294–295, 297
capitalist 155, 160, 257; communalism 151, 173–175
modernization 153 communism 5, 9, 70, 78–80, 129, 152,
capital punishment 144 172–173, 215, 249, 256–257
caricatures 186, 231, 235, 240 Communist Party of India 2, 9, 77–79,
cartooning 123, 228, 230, 239 153, 235–236, 256, 289–291
 Index   317

communists 62, 64, 70, 120, 165, 230, Dilipkumar 249

235–237, 243, 250, 282; movement ‘Discovering Bharat: Dialectics of
2, 236, 248; revolution 134 Hindutva’, Vijayan 8
companionship 163, 183, 282 dissenting 3, 5, 8, 11, 13, 236, 292;
compassion 9, 13, 89, 99, 106, 114, execution for 80
119, 145, 173–174, 183, 186 ‘diversity in unity’ 245
conflicts 79–80, 85–86, 99, 101, 106, divisiveness 64
112, 130, 165, 173, 245, 283 Doctrine of Lapse 65
Congress 64, 236, 293 Don Quixote 274
Connor, Steven 200 Dostoyevsky 122
consumerism 127, 134, 257 drama 212–213, 219, 229
creative: artist 1, 97; imagination 143; dreams 9, 86, 97, 147, 172, 242, 265,
independence 167; indiscretion 86; 273–274
irreverence 227; life 1; reflection 2; Dubček, Alexander 134, 258
translation 205; writing 270 Durrell, Lawrence 87–88, 97
creativity 13, 87, 171, 203, 242, 245
critical insider 1, 13 E
Cruikshank, George 228 East Pakistan see Bangladesh;
Cuba 80 under war
cultural: heritage 269; memory 13 eco-feminist 168, 205
customs 6, 160, 185, 193, 289; see also eco-fiction 181, 273
traditions Eisner, Will 232
cynicism 224 Emergency 121, 123, 125–129, 132,
Czechoslovakia, invasion of 134, 172, 178, 180, 232, 237–241, 244, 259,
258, 265 263–264, 281, 283, 291–293; as ‘The
Wart’ 144
D emotions 59, 80, 86–88, 96–97, 139,
Damodaran, K. 62, 79, 287 159, 173, 256, 268, 270, 285
Dange, S.A. 235 empathy 8–9, 13, 79, 145, 164, 180,
Dara Shikoh 236–237 183, 260
Darwin, theory of evolution 156 enlightenment modernity 10, 157–158
‘death’ 95–96, 197 ‘Enna’ (Oil), Vijayan 145, 154, 259,
decolonization 143, 192 264, 282–283, 293
Delhi (Indraprasta) 11, 59, 71–72, 230– Ente Charitranweshana Pareekshakal
231, 235–237, 239, 241–242, 245, (My Experiments with History),
248–249, 251, 266, 280, 283–285, Vijayan 294
289, 291–292; sadhus for ban on Ente Priyappetta Kathakal (My
cow slaughter 291 Favourite Stories), Vijayan 297
democracy 7–8, 11, 13, 59, 129, 132, equality 7, 143, 181, 227
145, 166, 177–178, 225–226 equity 228
Derrida, J. 174 Erikson, Eric H. 102
Deshabhimani 235, 237, 282 eroticism 96, 114, 120, 128, 130–131,
despair 99, 166, 196, 242 134, 137, 146, 169
Dev, Keshav 3, 237, 288 essays 1–2, 9–10, 13–14, 109, 111, 151,
Devan, M.V. 289 167, 191, 197, 294, 296
Dharmapuranam (trans. as The Saga of ethnic: conflicts 174; divisions 60;
Dharmapuri), Vijayan 1, 4–9, 105– identity 61; knowledge 159
107, 121–122, 126–132, 151–152, evolution 8, 91, 105, 142, 145, 156,
155–157, 164–165, 176–181, 186, 158–159, 210, 259, 268
244, 257–258, 273, 291, 293–295 ‘The Examination’, Vijayan 259, 264,
dialogues 73, 76, 166, 199, 207, 209, 282–283
212, 219, 268 expiation 120, 136–137, 139, 141
dictatorship 7, 79, 176–177, 179, 225 exploitation 3, 111, 157
318 Index

‘Ezhuthukaarum Vaayanakkarum’ Gandhi, Sanjay 264; death of 293

(Writers and Readers), Vijayan 109 Gandhism 121, 144, 152–154, 157,
160, 292
F gendered society 163
fanaticism 134, 245–246 gender issues 174
fantasies 81, 142, 184, 282 genres 85, 122, 157
‘Father Gonsalves’ see ‘Parayoo, Ghosh, Ajaya 235
Father Gonsalves’ (‘Tell me, Father Ghosh, Amitav 245
Gonsalves’) Ghosh, Aurobindo 97
fathers 99–100, 102–107, 275; as Ghoshayatrayil Thaniye (Alone in the
cultural symbol 99 Festive Procession), Vijayan 294
father–son binary 99 Gitanjali, Tagore 204
The Feast of the Goat, Llosa 7 God 62, 70, 72–73, 79, 96–97, 99–100,
‘Feces’, Vijayan 146 103–107, 119–120, 166, 168, 173,
federalism 64 272, 274
Feiffer, Jules 223, 228 ‘Going Back’, Vijayan 146
feminism 162; new materialist 168 Golden Temple, occupation of 11, 294
feminists 162, 164, 167 Goldman, Lucien 106
festivals 59, 195, 250 Gopakumar, T.N. 290
feudal lords 100, 154 Gopalakrishnan, Adoor 265
fiction 3–4, 11, 13, 178, 186, 230, 244, Gopalan, A.K. 76–77
255, 265–266, 268, 270 Gopisamvad, Bandyopadhyay 97
filmmakers 229–230 Gorbachev, Mikhail 230; Glasnost of
‘Flowers of Illness’, Rajakrishnan in 197 129, 256
‘The Foetus’, Vijayan 168, 259, 264 Govindan, M. 109, 237, 239, 268
folklore 6, 143 Govindan Nair, Edassery 153, 245
‘The Forgotten Book’, Vijayan 62–63 Govinda Pillai, P. 290
formalism 70–71 Goyal, Premalatha 283
Foucault, Michel 174 Great Decolonization 129
France, Anatole 3 Great Midsummer Revolution 129
Francis, Saint 246 Grotowski, Jerzy 219
Frankenstein 159 Guha, Ramachandra 291
Fraser, G.S. 87 guilt 70, 89–91, 95, 99–100, 114, 120,
freedom of individual 143 168–169, 182, 184, 196, 272; see
freedom struggle 62, 64, 257 also sin
Freud, S. 95 Gujarat pogrom 245, 297; see also
Friedman, Alan 203 Hindu-Muslim divide
Fromm, Erich 90 Gujral, Satish 237
Gulag, Solzhenitsyn 239
guru 152
G Gurusagaram (later trnsl. as ‘The
Gabriel, Theresa see Theresa (wife) Infinity of Grace’), Vijayan 1, 7–12,
Gadar Party 263 39, 100–101, 107, 122, 132–133,
Gandhi, Indira 60, 125, 129, 135, 181, 206, 244–245, 257–258, 273,
144, 231–232, 240, 244, 291; 292, 294–296
assassination of 11, 241, 294;
parliamentary victory of 293;
popularity of 292; at Rae H
Bareilly 293 Habemasians 172
Gandhi, Mahatma 64, 113–114, 119, Haindavanum Athihaindavanum (The
143–144, 152–154, 156, 160; Hind Hindu and the Fundamentalist
Swaraj 153; visit to Vaikom 287 Hindu), Vijayan 296
Gandhi, Rajiv 186, 294; assassination Haksar, Anamika 219
of 296 ‘hamartia’ 159
 Index   319

Hardy, Thomas 86 ‘In Memory of the Vermilion Mark’,

Harrison, George 240 Vijayan 2
Havelock, Eric 108, 274 intellectuals 175, 243, 245, 269, 292
Hegel 157 invasion 2, 60, 135
Heideggerian 198 ‘Iringalakuda’ 256
‘Hemingwayan’ mode of irony 10, 89, 110, 142, 166–167, 229
masculinity 160 ‘Irupathiyonnam Noottandu’ (Twenty-
Hesse, Hermann 91, 97, 133 First Century), Vijayan 295
The Hidden God, Goldman 106 isolation 94, 155, 163, 193, 280
Hinduism 81, 121, 169 Ithiri Nerampoke, Ithiri Darshanam (A
Hindu–Muslim divide 294 Little Fun, a Little Insight), Vijayan
‘Hindutva’ 8, 10, 151, 166, 296 see under Kalakaumudi
Hiroshima 264 Itihasathinte Ithihasam (The History of
Hitler 114, 172, 179 the Legends), Vijayan 5, 103, 295
Holocaust 11–12, 139, 157 It is cold in here, Marquez 212
Hong Kong 137 ‘It’s Dusk at Khasak’, Madhavan in 193
Horkheimer, Max 157
‘House of Ponmudi’ 266 J
human: condition 177, 179–180; destiny Janatha Party 241
181, 199; dignity 7; psyche 147, 158; Jarry, Alfred 212
race 138, 147, 228 ‘Jeeval Sahitya Sanghatana’ 288
human beings 3, 111, 130, 172–174, Jews 12, 138–139; see also holocaust
258; universality of condition of 151 Joshi, Puran Chand 79
humanism 168, 171–172 journalism 270, 281, 283
‘humorous cartoon’ 223; see also J.P. movement 291
cartooning
humour 63, 71–72, 128, 194, 223–227,
241, 259 K
Hungary, Soviet invasion of 2, 5, 9, 72, Kabir, Humayun 269
230, 265, 289 Kafka, Franz 3, 97, 122, 144, 196, 244
Hyder, Qurratulain 205 Kairali Club, Connaught Place 290
Kakkanadan 93, 164–165, 236, 290
Kalakaumudi, ‘Ithiri Neramboku; Ithiri
I Darsanam’ (‘A Little Fun, A Little
Ibsen, Henrik 3, 212, 218–219 Insight’) in 123, 232, 240, 291, 297
illusions 14, 87, 180, 225 Kali 88
imageries 110, 113, 121, 187, 243–244 Kalidasa 96
images 89–92, 97, 106–107, 110, 144, Kalpathi/Kalpathy, and public road
146, 200, 228, 230, 232, 282 issue 287; temple in Palghat, march
imagination 2, 4, 121, 131, 139, 143, to 2
147, 179, 186, 266, 272 Kamala, Vijay Tendulkar 212
Imperialism 80, 126, 129–130, 177; Kamalakshiyamma (mother) 2, 287
high-tech 134 Kamasutra 169
Indian army 11, 59–60, 65, 135, 292; at Kapur, Anuradha 219
Golden Temple 294 karma 88, 90, 105, 107
Indian Constitution 239 Karunakara Guru 191, 245, 265, 294
Indian Muslim 65 Kashmir issue 61, 65, 174, 273
Indianness 124, 153 Kataltheerath (‘After the Hanging’),
Indo-Anglian poetry 204 Vijayan 45, 122, 142, 145, 295
Indo–Pak conflict 133 Kathakali 212, 219, 260
industrial revolution 256–257 Kathopanishad 95
Infinity of Grace 1, 7–11, 100, 107, 122, Kattu Paranja Katha (The Story Told by
132–133, 173, 257–258, 262–265, the Wind), Vijayan 295
292, 296; see also Gurusagaram Kazantsakis 122, 133
320 Index

Kelappan, K. 237 laughter of detachment 87–88, 92

Kenopanishad 85 Laxman, R.K. 231
Kerala, becoming separate state 289 Le Canard enchaine 282
Kerala Sahitya Akademi, as The Legends of the Khasak 1, 5–6, 8–9,
Distinguished Member of 297 71–72, 83–84, 86–87, 89–92, 99–
Khaliyar 69–70, 120 100, 108–109, 114–115, 119–120,
Khan, Abdul Gaffar (‘Frontier 154–155, 191–194, 196, 203–206,
Gandhi’) 144 257–258, 295–297; as Die Legenden
Khasakkinte Ithihasam (The Legends von Khasak (German) 298; as short
of Khasak) 1–3, 5–6, 71–72, 86–87, story in Mathrubhoomi 262; transl.
91–92, 99–101, 103–109, 114–115, by Vijayan 243
119–120, 122, 132, 154–155, Lenin, Vladimir 78, 186
180–181, 191–194, 196, 203–206, Lévi-Strauss 110–111
243–244, 257–258, 289–291, 295– liberation 5, 95, 154, 168, 173, 179,
298; as first novel 243; Odakkuzhal 185, 258
Award for 291; self translation of life, philosophy of 86, 92
204–205; stage adaptation of 212 ‘The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler’,
Khomeini 179 Vijayan 146
K.M.K Art Society 215 Link Weekly 235
knowledge 140, 167; forms of 130; listeners 76–77, 108, 112, 269
institutionalized 114 literacy 108–111, 113, 115, 165
Knowledge Before Printing and After, ‘The Little Ones’, Vijayan 143, 264–265
Wood 109 Llosa, Vargas 7
Kolatkar, Arun 204 Low, David 223–224, 226, 228
Koothu 212 Lyotard, J-F. 154, 174
Kootiyattam 212, 219
Kosla, Nemade 5 M
K.P.G 237 Madhavan Kutty, V.K. 290
Krishnagatha 73 Madhavan, N.S. 122, 146, 193, 196
Krishna Menon, V.K. 235 Madhu (son) 280–281, 284
‘Krishnapparunth’ (The Sacred Eagle), Madhuram Gayati (Sweet Is the Music),
Vijayan 154, 295 Vijayan 1, 100, 122, 151–152,
Krushchev, Nikita 235 155, 157–159, 181, 187, 206,
Kumaramangalam, Mohan 79 257–258, 295
Kundera, Milan 110, 245 Magdulkar, Vyankatesh 97
Kure Kathabeejangal (Germs of Some Magic Lantern, Havel 274
Stories), Vijayan 296 Mahabharata 64
Kurippukal (Notes), Vijayan 295 Malabar Christian College in
Kozhikode, as lecturer in 69, 235,
L 249
Lacan 167, 174 Malayalam: ‘Ezhuthu’ in 109; fiction
language 74, 88, 163, 260, 269; 4, 6, 120, 123, 133, 191, 205, 291;
Bhojpuri 269; Braj bhasha 269; literature 1, 3, 62, 87, 91, 191,
dialects 5, 13, 73–74, 112, 185, 193, 204–205, 287; Palghat dialects 162;
269; evolution of 268; Hindi 5, 269; writing in 74, 251; see also langauges
Kavara dialect 112, 165; Maithili Mandal commission report 295
269; metrical 108; poetic 268; manipravalam 73, 269
pollution of 270; Urdu 268, 292; uses Manju (Snow), M.T. Vasudevan
of 85 Nair 97
Larry, Maugham 97 Mann, Thomas 85
‘The Last Tin-coating’, Vijayan 166 ‘manushyan’ (‘human being’) 3
laughter 3, 6, 63, 72, 74, 87–90, 92, 95, man–woman relations 162
119, 142, 179 Mao Zedong (Mao-tse-Tung) 80, 235
 Index   321

‘Mapping the Khasak Landscape’, Muhammed, K.T. 289

Raveendran 205 Muhammed, N.P. 289
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 119, 212, Mukherjee, Sujit 203
258, 265 Mukundan, M. 164–165, 236, 290
martyrdom 81, 257 Mundasseri, Joseph 269, 288
Maru, Komagata 263, 273 Mundasseri, Thomas 237
Marxian: critics 151; dream 273; Muslim Women’s Bill 295
ideology 153; vocabularies of social mysteries 2, 237
change 80 mystics/mystical 8, 88, 125, 132,
Marxism 9, 78–81, 152–153, 156, 197, 199–200, 208, 265
246, 256, 264, 266, 273
Marxist Party 76, 256 N
Marx, Karl 9, 70, 72, 78–80, 119, 153, Naga militancy 293
160, 244, 273 Nagy, Imre, murder of 2, 5, 72, 230,
masculinity 160, 165, 167, 183; see also 265, 289
patriarchy Nair, L.K.S. 284
mastery 2, 146–147 Nair, S.K. 263
materialism 197; new 168 Nambiar, Kunchan 63
Mathrubhumi Weekly 289; Khasakkinte Namboothiripad, E.M.S. 76–80, 232,
Ithihasam serlialised in 291 235–237
Maugham, Somerset 93, 97 Narasimharao, P.V. 296
Mauppasant 3 Narayana Guru, Shri 2, 153, 183,
Mazumdar, Charu 232 187, 287
‘Meditation on Words’ 73–75 Narayanan, Edathatta 235, 290
‘The Memories of a Long Night’ 259 Narayana Pillai, M.P. 290
‘Memory of a Vermillion Mark’ 76 Narayan, Coomar (Narain) 226
Menon, Asha 89 Narayan, Jayaprakash (JP) 132, 292
Menon, T.K.N. 236 Narayan, R.K. 124
metaphors 86, 89, 144, 156 narrative art 86, 88, 216
metaphysics/metaphysical 8–9, 14, 90, narratives 1, 99, 105, 107, 111, 113,
95, 114, 120, 122, 132, 145–146, 160, 217; male-centred 165
180–181, 205–206 nationalism 110, 113, 162, 180, 226;
middle-class 2, 154 European 152
militarism 65 national movement 64
minorities 10–11, 13, 59, 61, 174, 269 nationhood 64–65
mirages 87, 96 nation-state 7, 11, 145, 151, 153, 155,
modernism 3–4, 152, 155, 205, 291 157, 160, 162, 177, 186
modernity 4–6, 9–10, 13, 109–110, 112, Naxalism 134, 291
114, 143–144, 147, 152, 157, 159– Nayar, Kuldip 240
160, 165, 167, 169, 185–186; capitalist Nazism 138–139, 183, 186, 239
155; colonial 142, 151, 153–154, 169; Nehru, Jawahar Lal 154, 160, 235, 269;
conquest of villages 154; European death of 290
155; invasion of 154; nationalist 153; Nemade, Bhalchandra 5
subaltern 153; third-world 155 Ngugi wa Thiong’o 13
modernization 152–154, 157 Nietzsche, F. 85, 90, 178
Mohan, Manila C; Conversation with, nihilism 237
Deepan Sivaraman 212–219 1984 riots 263, 273
Moonnu Yuddhangal (Three Battles), Ningalenne Communistakki,
Vijayan 122, 289 Bhasi 236
moral bankruptcy 62 ‘Nokkukuthi’, Govindan 268
Moscow 230, 232 non-violence 152
‘Mrthiyude Oosharacchaayakal’ (Hot novelists 87–90, 92, 106–107, 132,
Glades of Death), Satchidanandan 134–137, 159–160, 171, 181, 229,
in 197 236, 245
322 Index

novels 1–2, 5–8, 10–11, 14, 119, 122, passion 62, 78, 88, 103, 229, 242
131–132, 204–206, 237, 242, 245, The Paternal Clock 99
257–258 Pather Panchali, Ray 236, 289
nuclear war 144, 147, 158 patriarchy 12, 105–106, 139,
nudes 10, 227 181–183, 244
Patriot, The 235, 290
O patriotism 130
October Revolution 79 Paul, M.P. 288
‘old age’ 104 Pavithran, P. 151, 167–168
On the Sea-shore’, Vijayan 166, 260 ‘The Pedal Machine’ 142
Operation Blue Star 11, 273, 294 Peer Gynt (Henrik Ibsen) 212, 218
opportunism 64 Phoney patriotism 65
oral 6, 10, 108–110, 114, 143, 289 ‘photographic gaze’ 110
orality 4, 6, 109, 111–113, 115 Pillai, Shankar 235
Orozco, Jose Clemnte 237 plagiarism 97, 120
Oru Neenda Rathriyude Ormakkayi pleasures 96, 139, 162, 168;
(In Memory of a Long Night), sensuous 88
Vijayan 293 Plekhanov, G. 79
Oru Sindoorappottinte Orma (In ‘Plum Cake’ 288
Memory of a Vermilion Mark), poetry 3, 109, 203–204, 229, 244, 268
Vijayan 294 politics 8, 121, 123, 143–144, 154–155,
‘Oru yudhathinte avasanam’ (‘The End 166, 171–172, 174, 176, 179, 215,
of a Battle’), Vijayan 4, 293 235, 255–257, 259; function of 255;
Orwellian 131, 273 war for 257
Ottupulakkal (family/residence) 2, 268, polyphony 110–112, 160, 164, 175
275, 287 Poothaprabandhavum Mattu
O.V. Vijayan: Selected Fiction, self Kathakalum (Poothaprabandham
translation of 296 and other stories), Vijayan 296
O.V. Vijayan’s Politics 171 ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ poem, Browning 96
O.V. Vijayante Kathakal (The Collected Posnan, strike at 2, 72
Stories of O.V. Vijayan) 293, 297 post-colonial/ postcolonial 1, 6, 10–11,
O.V. Vijayante Lekhanangal (O.V. 128, 132, 147, 229
Vijayan’s Articles) 298 post-modern/ postmodern 174, 205, 218
Pottekkat, S.K. 3
poverty 144–145, 223, 228
P power centralization 4, 11, 60, 64–65
Padmanabhan 287 Prague Spring 134, 256
Pakistan 65, 144, 291, 297 Prapancham 289
Palakkad/ Palghat: dialects of 2; Ezhavas Prasad, Narendra 163
of 73, 287; Kalpathi temple 2; Pravachakante Vazhi (The Prophet’s
peasants’ revolt against 2; theyyams Way/The Way of the Prophet),
in 265; writing about 266 Vijayan 1, 7, 9–12, 101, 107, 122,
Paniker, Ayyappa 204 181, 206, 263, 294
Paniker, K.C.S. 237 Premalekhanam, Basheer 62
Panikkar, Chitra 111, 191 Premchand 153, 287
Pappukkutty, Kedamangalam 237 The President, Asturias 7
‘Parajithan’ (The Loser), Vijayan 288 production and distribution 257; see
‘Parakal’ (The Rocks), Vijayan 147, also consumerism
158, 256 Progressive Literary Association 288
‘Parayoo, Father Gonsalves’ (Tell me, progressive literary movement 4, 153,
Father Gonsalves”), Vijayan 74, 153, 244, 287–288
288, 296 progressive writers 153–154, 169
parody 142, 209 progressivism 154, 156, 206, 259
Partition 8, 11, 133, 294; violence of 4 prose and verse 268
 Index   323

Proust, Marcel 3 Rivera, Diego 237

psychopathology 181–182 robotic humans 158
Psychosomaticism/ romanticism 70, 244
‘psychosomarasam’ 283 ‘Rosario Ferré, Aranda on 204
Punjab crisis 294 Roy, Arundhati 229
Puri, Rajinder 231 Roy, Sabitri 245
Putin, Vladimir 232 Rushdie, Salman 229

Q S
Quartet, Alexandria, Durrell 87 ‘The Sacred Eagle’ 144
sadism 96
R ‘sahrudaya’ 269, 282
race 12–13, 119, 159, 273 Samskara, Ananthamurthy 5
Rajakrishnan, V. 89, 122, 132, 197 Samudrathilekku Vazhi Thetti Vanna
Ramachandran, Anandi: letter to Paralmeen (The Small Fish that
Vijayan 280–285; on Vijayan 279 Strayed into the Sea), Vijayan 297
Ramachandran, C.P. 236 Sandehiyude Samvadam (The Sceptic’s
Ramachandran, R. 289 Dialogues), Vijayan 295
Raman Pillai, C.V. 121 Sanjayan 63
Ramaswamy, E.V. (Periyar) 153, 287 Sanskrit 140, 182, 185, 269
Ramayan, serial 295 Sanskritization 146, 185
Ramayana 74, 146, 247 Saramago, Jose 119, 177, 180
Ramkinkar 237 Sartre, Jean-Paul 196
Ranadive 62 Satchidanandan 119, 197, 204
Rao, Maya Krishna 219 satire 126, 142, 167, 229, 294
rath yatra 295 satyagraha 152, 226
Raveendran, P.P. 193, 205–206 savarna–avarna divide 213, 268
Ray, Satyajit 230, 236, 289 save the Silent Valley movement 295
The Razor’s Edge, Maugham 93 scatology 7, 121, 128, 130–131
readers 1, 62, 121–122, 128–130, Scavenger’s Son, Thakazhi Sivasankara
162, 199–200, 207, 209, 231–232, Pillai 4
242–243, 258, 260; English 209; scenography/scenographic 213, 217–219
international 209; Malayalam 4, 6–7, scepticism 10, 78–79
162, 165, 209, 244–245, 263; Schechner, Richard 219
urban 176 School of Drama 212–213
realism 4, 7, 9, 243, 265; grotesque 7, Schopenhauer 90–91, 95
9, 142 Science and Technology 256, 259, 269
rebellions 106, 109, 113, 226–227, 256 secularism 8, 162, 180
reformist movements 2, 215 Selbourne, David 121
resistance 7, 85, 100, 121, 132, 144, self-criticism 2, 6, 10
152–153, 155, 184, 200, 290; self-dissolution 176–177
feminine mode of 160; of peasants self-liberation 165
152; politics of 155; see also self-reflection 9–10, 13
dissenting self-translation 1, 14, 142, 191–195,
‘The Return’, Vijayan 144, 154 198, 200, 203–205, 210, 295–296
Revolutions 12, 70–72, 76, 78–81, 119, Sen, Mohit 236
134, 156, 185, 235, 257 Sengupta, Mahasweta 200
Reza, Rahi Masoom 5 sexual: acts 165, 218; anarchy 121;
righteousness 78, 80, 139 experiences 89, 167; guilt 89–90; sin
Rilke, Rainer Maria 96, 114 89–90; unions 114, 167–168
‘Rite of Rhetoric’ 229 sexuality 114, 146, 162, 164, 166,
rituals 2, 6, 10, 108, 138, 142–143, 168–169, 178
146, 183, 185, 213; see also beliefs; Shabdangal, (Voices) Basheer 4, 62, 248
customs Shah Bano 295
324 Index

Shah Jahan 236–237 Stalinist Russia 172, 239

Shankar, R. 237 Stalin, Joseph 80, 172, 179, 265
Shankar’s Weekly 231, 235, 243, The Statesman 232, 239, 243, 290; ‘City
289–290 Notebook’ of 240
Shanta, O.V. (sister) 69–70, state terrorism 157
247–248, 289 Stendhal 3
Sharma, Punnasseri Neelakanta 109 stoicism 86
Shastri, Lal Bahadur, death of 291 storytelling 143, 274
Sher-Gil, Amrita 237 Strindberg, August 3
short stories 1–2, 14, 119, 122, 125, subjugation 146–147
142–143, 147, 167, 262–265, 289– superstitions 87, 226, 282
291, 296; see also under separate supremacy 139, 185
names surplus value 80, 156
Siddhartha, Hesse 97 surreal 120, 142
Sikkim 65 Swift 121
Simhala: nationalism 59; polarization ‘Syed Sheikh Hussain Mastan’ (djin)
59–60 69–70
sin 81, 88–91, 99–100, 105, 120, 138, symbols 80, 86, 88–93, 100, 105, 112,
169, 182, 184, 186, 272, 274–275; 256, 259
and curse 139–141; realization of 95
Singh, Khushwant 121 T
Singh, Maharaja Hari 61 Tagore, Abanidranath 237
Singh, V.P. 295 Tagore, Rabindranath 200, 203, 237
Siqueiros, David Alfaro 237 Tamil nation 60
Sivaraman, Deepan; Conversation with, Tashkent agreement 291
Manila C. Mohan 212–219 teaching 76, 101–102, 122, 174,
Sivasankara Pillai, Thakazhi 3–4, 167, 248, 260
245, 270, 288 Tendulkar, Vijay 212
slavery 143, 225–226 terror 65, 78, 91, 137, 145, 166, 181,
smallpox epidemic 88, 90, 115 187; of Auschwitz 186, 225; of
social: amnesia 215; bonds 143, 183; Buchenwald 225; organized 134
commitment 4, 151, 154–155, 163, Thachamuchikkal house 287
237; formation 105, 169; hedonism Thackeray, Bal 232
257; imagination 111–112, 114; Thalamurakal (Generations), Vijayan
realism 6, 153, 162–163, 244; 2, 8, 12, 122, 136, 138–139, 141,
realities 153, 223–224; unrest 293 181–183, 185–187, 262–263,
Socialism 80, 172 266–267, 287, 296
social justice 7, 9, 143, 147, 181, 257 Thanjavur 69, 76, 289
Soviet Union 59, 78, 129, 172, 174, Thasarak 118, 193, 196, 214, 243, 248,
230–231; into Afghanistan 232 289; memorial at 230
‘The Spider’, Vijayan 168 theatre 3, 8, 12, 100, 212–214, 216,
Spiegelman, Art 232 218–219, 229
spiritual humanism 135, 173–174 Theresa (wife) 262, 283–284, 290
spiritualism 197 Theyyam 212–214, 216, 219, 265
spirituality 88, 106–107, 166, 168, 172, Thikkodian 289
238, 241, 243–245, 273; holistic 172 third world 152, 155–157, 169, 177, 257
‘Spring Thunder’ 143 Thiruvankulam, Prince 114
Spy-phobia 226 Thurber, James 228
Sreedhara Menon, Vyloppilli 109, 153 Tiananmen Square incident 238
Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana time 91–92
Yogam (SNDP) 153 totalitarianism 4, 7, 181, 292
Sri Lanka 11, 59, 61, 65; civil war traditions 81; see also beliefs; customs
59–61; Tamils 59–60, 65 Tragic Idiom, Vijayan 228–229, 298
 Index   325

transcendence 86, 132, 142–143, education 288–289; Kakkattil with

146–147, 264–265 255–261; on language with Usha
transfer of power 64, 79, 185 (sister) 268; Madhavikkutty (Kamala
transgressions 90, 140, 142–143, Das) on 251–252; marrying Theresa
146, 168 290; political cartoonist 243; political
translation, process of 203, 206 columns 119, 122, 291; political
‘Translation and Sensibility’ 193 commentator 1, 5, 122, 132, 290;
translator 192–193, 209–210 Prasannarajan with 272; Srinivasan
traumas 119, 133, 145, 181, 187, 239 with 262–267; Usha on 247–250;
tribes 61, 134, 174, 258 writing in English 13, 74, 268, 270
Triste Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss 110 ‘Vijayan’s Journeys’, Pavithran 167
Tulsi 269 Vijayan’s Women 162, 169
Twain, Mark 119 Vijayante Kathukal (Letters of O.V.
Two Measures of Rice, Sivasankara Vijayan) 298
Pillai 270 Vinayan, K.R. 230
‘Two Wars: Two Finger Prints’ 59 Vinayaraj, Y.T. 168
violence 4, 6–7, 9, 122, 127, 131, 139,
U 144, 146, 157, 182–184; of Western
Ubu Roi (Alfred Jarry) 212 enlightenment modernity 157; see
‘Understanding Divisiveness’, also Gujarat pogrom; Partition; state
Vijayan 64 terrorism
untouchable castes 2, 181, 184 Virilio, Paul 174
Upanishads 101, 113, 132 Viswanathan 235
urban 154, 208, 216, 237, 243 V.K.N. 63, 204, 237
urbanization 154 Voices, Basheer 62
Uroob 245, 289 Voltaire 121
Usha, O.V. (sister) 251, 268–270,
283–284 W
war 4, 7, 59–61, 127, 135, 138, 177,
V 225–226, 232, 238, 256–258, 263;
Vaikkom temple, public roads issue 287 of Bangladesh liberation 60–61, 65,
Vajpayee, Atal Behari 232 122, 133, 135, 292; Burma 273;
Vargasamaram, Swatwam (Class Kargil 297; Pakistan 135, 144, 290,
Struggle, Identity) 295 297; as ‘the Sorrow’ 7; in
Varkey, Muttathu 114 Sri Lanka 59–60; on Ukraine 231; in
Varkey, Ponkunnam 153 Vietnam 80
Varma, Ravi 237 Warsaw Ghetto 12
Vasudevan Nair, M.T. 96–97, 155, ‘The Wart’, Vijayan 144–145, 168, 259,
245, 289 264, 282–283, 293
Vasudevan Nair, P.K. 236 Watt, Beckett 89
Vedic wisdom 105–106, 132 The Way of the Prophet, Vijayan
Velukkutti, Ottupulakkal (father) 99–100, 122, 273
152, 287 Weisz, Victor (Vicky) 223, 228
Verma, Nirmal 9–10 western education 110, 156, 185
Veyattummal, Chandran 216 westernization 154
Vietnam 9, 80 White Confederacy 126–127, 129
Vijayalakshmi 251 womb 165; of mother 90–91
Vijayan, Ottupulakkal Velukkutti/O.V. women 164, 167; identity 168–169;
Vijayan 186, 275; to Anandi liberation 168–169; materialistic
Ramachandran 279–285; birth of conditions of 168; perceptions of
245, 287; childhood 2; columnist 1, 162; theatre 219; ‘wearing a
8, 171, 186; death of 242–243, 298; blouse’ 167
326 Index

Wood, Ananda 109 229; Mann on 85; as self-translators

working class 79–80, 153–154, 257 204; Western 225
writers 10, 85–86, 122, 151, 154–155,
164, 191–192, 237, 243, 245–246, Z
270–271, 288–290, 292; editorial Zacharia, Paul 8, 123, 246, 290