MT Vasudevan Nair
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
An overview
Udbhav Seth, Dec 26, 2024: The Indian Express
Madath Thekkepat Vasudevan Nair, or more familiarly MT, the legendary author, editor and screenplay writer, breathed his last in Kozhikode, where he had spent the better part of his 91 years. MT arrived on the literary scene when the socially inclined fiction of pre-Independence India was waning to make way for a more personal and psychological angst. His stories about aristocratic joint families giving way to nuclear ones, nature being consumed by industry, male angst at a time of sudden social change, and women’s defiance of the establishment made him a towering icon not just in Kerala but in the larger cultural landscape of India.
He was only 25 when he won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi for Naalukettu (1959), the story of an angry young man who wants to tear down his ancestral house because of how the family treated his rebellious mother. A decade later, MT won the Kendra Sahitya Akademi prize for ‘Kaalam’ (1969), a story about a man who feels all achievement is futile and is looking for a reason to keep on living, bumbling from woman to job to family in search of a purpose.
But before that, he’d worked towards a degree in chemistry and worked as a mathematics teacher in a school, a vocation that had drawn him for the ample holidays it afforded. A brief stint as a government block development office later, he found his home in literature and cinema — his childhood favourites. His brothers were prolific writers, and MT began his literary stint by editing Mathrubhumi Weekly in 1957. It would be under his leadership that the magazine would go on to launch the careers of literary giants such as OV Vijayan, Sethu, M Mukundan, Paul Zacharia and Sarah Joseph.
“I knew him for six decades, first as a reader and then as a mentor. In 1967, I had been on a visit to some drought-stricken areas in Bihar. For Malayalis, used to lush vegetation and water all around, it was a terrifying experience. I was 24 then and very shaken by the suffering I saw. I wrote something but wasn’t sure if it was a story or an essay. I did not know MT then, but he loomed large in our literary landscape. I sent it off to Mathrubhumi, never expecting to hear back. To my surprise, not only did he get back and help get that story published, he was also instrumental in pushing me to write my first novel,” said Sethu, 82.
He added: “He was the most outstanding literary editor in any Indian language. From Kakkanadan to Padmarajan, he was instrumental in bringing out around 10 important writers during the 1960s. He was my guru in every sense of the word”.
When MT began writing, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Ponkunnam Varkey, Kesavadev, Karur Neelakanta Pillai, SK Pottekkatt, ‘Uroob’ PC Kuttikrishnan and Lalithambika Antharjanam were the reigning stars of Malayalam literature. MT’s writing would mark a rupture with the old order. Zacharia, 79, said: “He turned the table on Malayalam literature with Naalukettu (1958), drawing from the (aristocratic) Nair community he belonged to and which was being driven to the ground due to many economic concerns and frictions. He also wrote Randamoozham (1984) which told the story of Mahabharata from Bhima’s perspective.”
It tells the story of the Pandava brother, stripped of mythology, grounded in realism. “He is the man who brought modernity to Malayalam fiction and, while there were other writers contributing to it, he made it come alive. The popularity that Malalayam-to-English translations are enjoying today is partly due to his major influence,” said Zacharia.
Karthika VK, publisher, Westland Books, who has worked on many of MT’s translations with V Abdulla and later, Gita Krishnankutty (who worked on Randamoozham), said, “His stories… have all been hugely impactful and have influenced the way most Malayalis think about home, family, history, mythologies old and new… There’s so much I’ve long admired about him: his empathy for human frailty, his dry sense of humour, his deep emotional connect with the Malayali mindscape, his no-nonsense insistence on the primacy of free speech and integrity in politics, and also his affection and loyalty to long-time collaborators.”
Though he left his hometown of Kudallur after school, it remained the fount of his work’s intimacy with nature. He once wrote: “I was born into a penurious middle-class agricultural family in a sleepy little village… The villagers believed that if one could read Ezhuthachan’s Adhyatma Ramayanam fluently, without faltering, then one’s education was complete. If you lead the cattle to the nearby river without their being allowed to take a bite from the lush paddy fields on either side of the bunds, grown-ups deemed you fit for farm work”.
Apart from nine novels and 19 short fiction collections, Nair left a mark in screenwriting too, authoring more than 50 screenplays and directing six films. “He brought a modern sensibility to (the form)… Though a Modernist, he stuck to a traditional mode of storytelling because he was comfortable with it,” said Zacharia. MT’s most recent screenwork includes Manorathangal, a 2024 anthology of his stories which he adapted for the screen, featuring some of the biggest names in Malayalam cinema like Mahesh Narayanan, Fahadh Faasil, Priyadarshan and Mohanlal.
“He was my mentor, friend and drinking companion for over 60 years,” said Zacharia. “He was a good man, an easygoing man, concerned and caring for his friends, even though he could appear aloof to people he didn’t know very well.” Karthika said, “MT is undoubtedly one of the greatest writers, ever… There really cannot and will not be (another) like him.”
His legacy
Anil Nair, Dec 28, 2024: The Times of India
The past is proverbially another country, far from dead, often not even past. It was wi th this sense of time and place that MT Vasudevan Nair, the doyen of Malayalam literature who passed away on Wednesday, wrote. However, when the legacy of a writer who had the rare privilege of becoming a legend in his own lifetime is debated, the main criticism against MT (as he was endearingly called by generations of Keralites) could be that his particular fictional pasts were too provincial.
In the mid-20th century and later, when writers everywhere, no matter their cultural milieu or personal ideologies, obsessed over the Gulag and Guernica, the equivalents of today’ s Gaza, MT tuned his lyrical lyre to the ebb and flow of the Nila. His short stories and novels captured the terminal decline of Kerala’s feudal system, especially the fracturing of the extended matrilinear Nair family, and Nila, once a roaring river that had dwindled to a rheumy brook, was its apt metaphor. To be fair, ‘nature’ to MT was not some pastoral illusion — many bad things can happen in a river though worst things can happen to it and he realised, like many other great writers did, that “the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.”
Similarly, his dark and brooding novels, a radical departure from the drab social realism prevalent then, invested his characters with rich inner lives. Appunni in ‘Naalukettu’ (The House with a Courtyard) and Govindankutty in ‘Asuravithu’ (Demon Seed) wrestled with their inner demons as much as they resisted the changing world outside. The tormented Appunni makes peace with his own father’s murderer to shed delusions of past grandeur and agrees to demolish the naalukettu (traditional home). As he says at the book’s very end, “Don’t worry amma…A small house that lets in light and wind will do”. On his part, Govindankutty converts to Islam to later renounce religion itself and find salvation in burying smallpox victims. The way the trauma and catharsis of these characters is evoked makes them memorable.
All the same, MT approached the zeitgeist obliquely, some would say, reluctantly. Communism and its discontents were the elephant in the room that MT, as his many critics point out, refused to see. A comparison with his contemporary OV Vijayan is instructive. Like MT, Vijayan too always resisted pandering to the ‘western gaze’ and considered bhasha (vernacular) and desham (the village) as his fictional birthright. But in Vijayan’s novels, the big issues of the day always loomed in the background. In ‘Khasakkinte Ithihasam’ (The Legen ds of Khasak), the main protagonist Ravi, a “rationalist and liberation’s germ carrier” goes to an interior village to ‘convert’ the folk to his cause. As it turns out, in a pattern of disowning and recovery, the village gets the better of Ravi. As Vijayan was to later reminisce, “I thank providence for having missed writing the ‘revolutionary novel’ by a hair’s breath… Ravi [the putative pilgrim-revolutionary] re-entered his enchanted childhood. He was no longer the teacher; in atonement he would learn. He would learn from the stupor of Khasak”.
Appunni and Govindankutty may be more dramatic and tragic characters but unlike Ravi they are not subject to, or stirred by, deeper undercurrents. They become provincial on that account alone, MT’s Caliban to Vijayan’s far more modernist Hamlet.
Much later in his career, MT wrote ‘Randamoozham’ (Second Turn), a brilliant reworking of the Mahabharata but, in the light of his entire oeuvre, it reveals another, very different, blind spot and begs the question why he chose Bhima and not Draupadi. Women were always the weak link in MT ’s fiction, Manju (Mist) being his only novel that had a female as leading protagonist, and even there one who pines for lost love.
Of course, MT made up for the self-effacing women of his novels with their much bolder counterparts in his cinema, women who would sometimes knowingly debase themselves in search of transgression. These women took no prisoners and dared live their lives on their own terms.
Thus, for someone who always professed the primacy of the written word, MT may, paradoxically, be remembered for his contribution to cinema. Among his many cinematic creations, one image will always stand out. In a climactic scene from the movie ‘Nirmalyam’, a temple oracle realises after a lifetime of piety that devotion is just a daytime disguise, smites himself with a scimitar, and waist-length hair flecked with blood, spits on the deity, then collapses and dies. ‘Nirmalyam’, scripted and directed by MT, went on to win the National Award in 1974 and launched the already renowned writer into a parallel career in the movies.
The movies he scripted and directed were like the Agfa ‘box’, a medium with magical properties that allows suspension of disbelief and captures not just memories but things to come. In contrast, his prose was more like knocking on open doors; worse, doors that led nowhere. Perhaps, to rally one last time to MT’s defence, it could be said that he wrote fiction, to paraphrase the redoubtable Zadie Smith, “not from any belief in its power to influence the world but as a simple act of faith, as something that must be done, to misquote Tertullian, because it is absurd”.
