Sahitya Akademi

Interrogating Man's Destiny

Author(s): M.T. Vasudevan Nair and K. Satchidanandan
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 39, No. 2 (172), ACCENT ON ORIYA SHORT STORY (March -
April 1996), pp. 8-12
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23336060
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 IN FOCUS

M.T. Vasudevan Nair, the eminent fiction-writer in

Malayalam has won this year's Jnanpith Award. In this
issue we publish a brief write-up on his oeuvre and in
the next, the translation of one of his more recent long
shortstories, Vanaprastham.

Interrogating Man's Destiny

6íT A THY does one write? Because sometimes one feels

VV like saying something. Because some questions
disturb us. At times these may be questions addressed to
ourselves. Or to the community around us. Or to our time.
Or the whole of mankind. At times to Nature, and to God."

This seemingly general statement on the primal

springs of literature M.T. Vasudevan Nair makes in
Kathikante Kala (The Story-teller's Art) can very well apply
to M.T.'s own writing that spans four fertile decades. His
fiction has been a continuous interrogation of himself, his
community and man's destiny in a contradictory world.
Only the questions have grown with time until they have
attained metaphysical dimensions as in some of his recent
narratives.
M.T. made his debut in Malayalam fiction at a time
when the genre was dominated by the progressive writers
whose concerns were chiefly confined to the objective world
with its macabre mechanics of class and caste oppression.
Basheer with his deep insights into personal worlds was
perhaps an exception. M.T. took off partly from him and
partly from his elder contemporaries like Uroob, Kovilan
and S.K. Pottekkat. These writers, along with a few of
M.T.'s coevals like T. Padmanabhan and Kamala Das
brought about a decisive turn in Malayalam fiction t
now began to foreground the subjective. Men, women a
children in these tales were caught in the solitary mome
of their encounter with the self which was seldom at home

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in a hostile world. They belonged, in M.T.'s case especially, to a lower
middleclass increasingly being marginalised by the new forces of the
society and destined to confront a crumbling world whose lullabies had
once shaped their dreams. The sources of their solitariness were not
always the same however: at times they carried within them a nostalgia
for the old village that almost grew into an obsession in front of the
urban infernos to which poverty had banished them and whose demonic
values were making increasing inroads even into their idyllic rural
worlds; at times they were prisoners of a self-consuming narcissism; at
times tormented by the ugliness of their own bodies that the mirror
threw back at them (the mirror becomes a metaphor of self-reflection
and even of self-pity in these stories): or compelled to suppress their
instinctive libidinal drives in a world of patriarchal taboos. They were
often motivated by an impotent rage against an exploitative system or
yearning for revenge the very realisation of which also revealed its
futility. Or they were defeated in love or parented by lovelessness. The
introduction of these themes alone would not have been much, had not
M.T. also moulded a highly lyrical and nuanced narrative idiom
that could capture every hue of those twilit zones of consciousness
he has been striving to register. He did not know then that he was
foreshadowing another generation of story-tellers in
Malayalam—brought to the readers by M.T. himself through the
pages of his Mathrubhumi weekly by a marvellous coincidence-—who
would take his stances to their logical extremes, celebrate the
abnormal, idolise the irrational, locate his angst in the irretrievable
loss of man's identity, universalise the peripheral beings he had
discovered in his village, standardise his themes and moods as the
obligatory premises of a modern fictional discourse and turn their
art into an apotheosis of solitude.
Many of M.T.'s themes and attitudes can well be traced back
to the circumstances of his early life. Born in a declining
lower-middleclass agricultural family in the remote village of
Kudallur in the Palghat district of Kerala in 1933, he had experi
enced the anxieties of underdevelopment in his traumatised child
hood in which he had to trudge miles along the rough rural lanes
to borrow a book after his heart. Things improved a little during
his high-school days in Kumaranallur where the poet Akkitham
would lend books to the voracious young reader. Meanwhile he
had also secretly started writing poetry, that he was to give up as a
genre later even while retaining its images and resonances in his
fictional prose. Victoria College in Palghat that he joined after an
idle year at home imposed by scarcity gave him greater oppor

K. SATCHIDANANDAN 9

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tunities to read and write. While in his final year as an under
graduate he won a short story competition held by Mathruhbumi as
part of a World Short Story Contest that brought him instant rec
ognition. This story 'Valarthu Mrigangal' (Domestic Beasts, 1953)
had all the essential features that were later to define his whole
oeuvre. His first collection of short stories Raktam Puranda Mantari
kal (The Blood-Stained Sand) appeared when he was still a stu
dent. By the time he joined Mathrubhumi after a brief spell of
teaching, he had already won the attention of Kerala's vigilant and
discriminating readership. By now M.T. had witnessed hell in the
form of famine, cyclone and epidemics that haunted his sleeply vil
lage on the banks of Nila, the home of one whole fraternity of
Kerala's writers. A lot of this experience went into the construction
of his first novel Nalukettu (The Ancestral House, 1959) that
depicts the matriarchl social order of Kerala's Nair community in
its final gasp for life. Its articulation of humiliation, rage and
revenge was so close to the experience of the rural middle class
•youth that it immediately became popular and went on to win the
Kerala Sahitya Akademi award.
Asuravithu (The Dragon-Seed, 1962) his next important novel
takes off from where Nalukettu ends: if Appunni, the protagonist
of the former novel longs in his rage to raze the ancestral house to
ground, Govindankutty the anti-hero of the latter subverts a whole
order by renouncing his father, family and community one after
another. His conversion to Islam does not liberate him; he feels
lonely even while carried by the Moplahs in a procession. He
asserts his identity and revises history, only to find that his identity
is still elusive and his revision disenchanting. He discovers all his
life to have been a useless passion. At another level, however, the
novel reveals that glimmer of humaneness that is sparked on even
in the apparently cruel and rude by certain moments of crisis, in
this case, the cholera that assails the community. As in his stories
like 'AkathalangaP (Inner Courtyards) 'Kuttiedathi' and 'Iruttinte
Atmavu' (The Soul of Darkness), here too M.T. uncovers that sec
ret and sacred well of kindness that lies deep within the hearts
even of the vengeful, the insane and the abandoned.
M.T.'s exploration of (wo)man's essential solitude attains new
dimensions in his short lyrical novel—a monologic narrative that is
almost an unbroken stream of consciousness—Manju (The Snow,
1964) set in the snowy Nainital whose chill seems to have driven
Vimala, the main character into a sombre elegiac mood- of self-re
flection. Kalam (Time, 1969), that won Sahitya Akademi award in

10 INDIAN LITERATURE : 172

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1970 is an imaginative and unsentimental exploration of the
dialectic of 'being' and 'having'. Success, in a world dominated by
Evil, inevitably means a fall from the ideal as the rise of Sethu
reveals in the novel that is ultimately a study in self-love.
Rantamoozham (The Second Turn, 1984), M.T.'s latest novel, is,
at least on the surface, a departure from his usual manner as here
the theme comes not from his village society but from
Mahabharata. But the structure of feelings here is no different
from his earlier works as the characters lose their supernatural
aura and their mythical content to become totally human. M.T.
d.eals more with the gaps, the fissures and the silences of the epic
than its expressed feelings, thoughts and actions. He plays on the
ambivalent potential of the text, reading it along its margins and
bringing to the surface its unconscious. Bhima's experience here is
one of neglect that leads to seething indignation as is of many of
M.T.'s characters in his earlier narratives. Hidumbi and Ghatot
kacha also share this pain of being marginalised. Bhima's days
muscular adventure are followed by nights of solitary contem
tion when he is troubled by profound existential questions. Iro
bad faith, indifference, self-contempt and rage enliven the pa
of Rantamoozham packed with M.T.'s inimitable lyrical intensity
has been accused of having reduced mythical heroes into ear.th
beings; but the very purpose of the book seems to be demythi
tion through an ironic reversal—something he also tried suc
fully with folklore in two of his popular films.
M.T.'s short stories (he has eighteen volumes of them) h
recently gained greater maturity and have begun to show a th
tic, stylistic and attitudinal shift. 'Vanaprastham', for exam
employs a frugal and austere style markedly different from t
densely colourful narratives of his earlier periods in keeping w
its theme that suggests the possibility of a love that transcends
flesh and purifies the soul. This is very untypical of this auth
since confict more than harmony has been his consistent fasci
tion. 'Sherlock' with its urban setting too employs a fresh narra
mode empty of any reference to greenery implying frustration
sterility. 'Kadugannava: Oru Yatrakkurippu' (Kadugannava:
Travel Note) deals with its protagonist's encounter with evil, em
ness and death in a village dense with the memories of his fat
even while its subtexts create a parody of history. One can well
cover a gradual but perceptible shift in the author's preoccupati
from the social to the moral and the spiritual. His new novel—s
an ambition—set in Varanasi may more fully reveal the implica

K. SATCHIDANANDAN 11

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of this metaphysical quest.
M.T. is more than a fiction-writer. He has written plays like
the award-winning Gopura Natayil (At the Temple Gate) and sev
eral sensitive film-scripts like those of Nirmalyam, (Offal), Perum
thachan (The Master-Carpenter), Oru Vatakkan Veeragatha (A North
ern Ballad) and Vaisali all of which fight stereotypical characters
and situations and are full of civilizational visual details that could
charm cultural anthropologists. His best stories have the visual
quality of films as he goes on changing his angles while his best
films have all the poetic felicity of his stories. His two travelogues
and several, articles on writers, books and the art of writing alike
bear the stamp of his style.
M.T. is very much a cult-figure in Kerala today and has been
likened to the poet Changampuzha in the fascination he exercises
on young minds and on the Malayalees in exile. His fiction has
been labelled transitional, modern and post-Modern in its various
stages; but like all good art it transcends these categories. He turns
the tales of his village into those of everywhere. As the historian of
everyday, he looks at experience from different perspectives and
goes on revising his texts and his ways of looking at reality. M.T.'s
art goes straight into the boiling lava of emotions that lies inside
the placid surfaces of frozen systems of the family, society and
ethics. He is fascinated more by the micropolitics of power and
resistance in intimate human relations than by the macropolitics of
the state and the society. More than one of his well-wishers in a
recent symposium expressed the belief that M.T. was yet to write
his masterpiece. It seems proper that the rare honour of the Jnan
pith award has come to him exactly at this point of his career
when he is ripe enough for the task and his art is face to face with
a critical turn. □

K. Satchidonandan

12 INDIAN LITERATURE 172

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