MT Vasudevan Nair
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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”.
