As he walked Ravi went over the events of that day again, the desire, the apathy and fulfilment, the invasive curiosity. Where was he, and what was he in this bewildering swirl of live and dead happenings?…
In the Gulf, hindi (an Indian) is often used to mean "stupid". There is no shortage of Arabic jokes featuring a dim-witted hindi. (I was discussing this with some colleagues recently, and one of them said, "I don’t think that way; I know Indians are clever. Now bangalis (Bangladeshis), they’re stupid.")
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The majority of Indians in the Gulf are from Kerala.
Kerala comes in first in India according to the Human Development Index. Transparency International ranks it as the least corrupt state in the country. And it has the highest rate of literacy in India.
The main language in Kerala is Malayalam, and it is spoken by around 36 million people.
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The day warmed, the palm winds were blowing. It was the hour of the teacher. Ravi smiled upon his twenty-two children, and they smiled back, the caliphs and queens, until smiles filled the seedling house. This was the hour of myth, Ravi knew. ‘Let’s tell a story,’ he said to the children. They were overjoyed.
Ravi asked, ‘What kind of story?’
The children began chirping all together, and a ten-year-old in the front row raised her hand to tell him something. Her silver anklets chimed when she moved her feet under the desk, and her wide gaze was hemmed by exuberant lashed darkened with surma.
‘Yes?’ Ravi said.
‘Saar, Saar...’ she said, then grew shy. ‘A story without dying, Saar!’
Ravi laughed, ‘What’s your name, child?’
‘Kunhamina.’
Ravi listened to the ballad of Khasak in her, its heroic periods, its torrential winds and its banyan breezes. There was no death but only silver anklets and her eyes sparkling through the surma. Ravi looked deep into those eyes; the story would have no dying, only the slow and mysterious transit. He began in the style of the ancient fabulist.
‘Once upon a time...’
I’ve never been to Kerala. I don’t speak Malayalam. I don’t remember if I’ve read any translated Malayalam literature before (though I’ve certainly read literature from Kerala written in English).
Recently I decided to read The Legends of Khasak, by O V Vijayan – a book that has been waiting patiently on my bookshelf for years. Its publication in 1969 apparently brought about a sea-change in Malayalam literature, divided it into pre-Khasak and post-Khasak eras, released it from the shackles of tradition and marked the arrival of modernity – "the most influential work in Malayalam in the last 50 years".
Fortunately, I read all of those assessments only after finishing the novel, else I would have approached it with difficult-to-meet expectations (which happened with My Name Is Red).
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This novel literally revolutionised 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 manipulation of time and space together created a new readership with a novel sensibility and transformed the Malayali imagination forever.…
The Legends of Khasak is about a young man, Ravi, who goes to teach in a remote village. The stories of various people in the village are explored; the whole narrative has a mythical quality.
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The history of Khasak was the great oral legend; that, and a shared indigence held Khasak together.…
Ravi was originally supposed to be an urban revolutionary come to "conscientise" the village, a pilgrim-revolutionary; however Vijayan’s faith in Communist politics was shattered because of the events in Hungary in 1956, and he developed a more mystical-minded protagonist, a spiritual wanderer who would "learn from the stupor of Khasak".
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Looking back, I thank Providence, because I missed writing the "revolutionary" novel by a hair’s breadth. Had I written it, I would have merely made one more boring entry in Marxism’s futile, repetitive bibliography.…
It’s a slim book, yet it took me a long time to read. At times the imagery is dense, and I also kept referring back to remind myself how people and events were connected to each other. But perhaps it is a book you can’t rush. I was enveloped by the vivid, dream-like atmosphere conjured in it.
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 particularly 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.…
O V Vijayan started work on the original novel in 1956, and it was finally published in book form in 1969. The English translation, done by Vijayan himself, was published in 1994.
As I read the novel I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was looking at a reflection; something beautiful, maybe profound was there but I could only see light and shape, not detail. Vijayan wrote of the translation:
It has been difficult translating this book. It is full of dense images of nature, old folk customs, evocations of caste differences, the rich play of dialects, all of which are difficult to render into English. So much has been lost, there was no way it could have been salvaged. 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.It has been claimed that the translation differs substantially from the original in its sensibility, and that some readers view it as an independent novel. Vijayan experienced an "epistemological break" in the years between writing the original and doing the translation, moving from a position of scepticism and philosophical doubt to one of certainty, and the translation apparently mirrors that.
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They say that the Malayalam language has never been the same again. I cannot vouch for that, but certainly the book taught me this – no language, however physically confined, however historically deprived, is left without springheads of regeneration. There is as much narrative potential in Malayalam as in the imperial languages. Khasak has given that assurance to successor generations.
O V Vijayan worked in Delhi for 35 years, then moved to Hyderabad. He found it difficult to live in Kerala because he would get mobbed.
I have some problems of privacy in Kerala. People come up to me constantly – it's sort of a celebrity status that is hard for me to deal with. But it's a humbling experience too. I find 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 how much they enjoy my work. It is gratifying that people in all walks of life are reading my books....
I know a Malayali author living in Bahrain whose books are read in numbers that an author writing in Arabic can only dream of. Benny Daniel (who writes as Benyamin) recently won the prestigious Kerala Sahitya Akademi award for his latest novel Aadujeevitham (Life as a Goat).
The novel revolves around the true-life story of an Indian man named Mohammed Najeeb who spends several years in the deserts of Saudi Arabia as a goatherd with no contact with another human being. "Najeeb was promised a job in Saudi Arabia by an acquaintance. He was taken to the middle of a desert and left there to look after hundreds of goats. He didn’t meet another human being there, except a man who used to occasionally drop by to deliver food for the goats. He didn’t know how to get out or contact the outside world. His only companions were the animals and his life and character were so influenced by them. He was finally rescued by a friend and was able to return home."Literary events at the Keraleeya Samajam in Bahrain have been known to attract audiences in the thousands.
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In one of those moments of preposterous coincidence that life throws at us, on the same day that I decided to read a Malayalam novel, I was asked to meet a publisher from Kerala interested in translating Bahraini novels into Malayalam. And the great thing is that the books will be translated directly from Arabic.
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I am aware of at least one Malayalam novel translated into Arabic, via the English translation. The novel Oru Sankeerthanam Pole (Like A Psalm) by Perumbadavam Sreedharan, based on the life of Dostoevsky, has sold over 100,000 copies in Malayalam. In Arabic it is called (مثل ترنيمة), translated by Mohammed Eid Ibrahim, and was published this year by the Kalima Foundation in Abu Dhabi.
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Quotes by O V Vijayan, unless otherwise indicated, taken from the author's note or afterword of The Legends of Khasak.
All photos by Rajesh Kakkanatt, reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.
