The Quiet Revolutionary

IT was in the '30s and '40s that a group of young writers, describing themselves courageously as 'progressive', began writing fiction in Malayalam, jettisoning the aristocratic and Sanskritised modes of feudal Kerala and directly choosing the life of the common people as their theme. They were influenced by 19th century humanist writers like Maupass-ant, Zola, Gorky, Chekhov and Hugo and by the rising winds of socialist and communist thought. A. Balakrishna Pillai, humanist, scholar-recluse, talent-finder and voracious surfer of world literature, guided them in the manners of modernism. The leading figures of the movement—purogamana sahityam or progressive literature—were Thakazhi, Kesava Dev, Basheer, Karoor, Ponkunnam Varkey, all in their idealistic youth. Modernism had arrived in Malayalam literature as a thing of the left, not of the centre or the right. But that was long ago, as we shall see.

This brotherhood of the founding fathers of modernist and progressive Malayalam fiction was remarkable for its fecundity, robustness, unabashed revolutionary loudness, no-holds-barred narrative offensives and unflinching humanism. Today, Thaka-zhi Sivasankara Pillai quietly passes into history as one of Kerala's most venerated figures, having carried the name of his obscure village Thakazhi and that of his moth-ertongue into the far corners of the world. He leaves behind just one, still battling, brother-in-arms: Ponkunnam Varkey (88). They treated each other with the contemptuous dismissiveness that only longstanding friends have, but in the death of one and the survival style of the other a link remains, speaking volumes about the integrity and life-long commitment of these modernisers.

Old, weak, upper caste and disillusioned with the left's intellectual and social failure, Thakazhi was an easy target for Hin-dutva in its recent strut-attempts in Kerala. But despite the younger, fashionable writers and intellectuals jumping on to the Hindutva rath, he was to the end an entity that some today consider unfashionable and un-Indian; an avowed secularist. Varkey, at an age when he should be consulting with priests about heaven, is an unrepentant rebel, questioning official Christianity with the same harsh vigour of five decades ago when his books were banned in Christian homes.

It is a measure of the ingrained humanistic commitment and 'old-fashioned' liberalism of Thakazhi that when men and women, big and little, of Kerala's cultural scene crawled for the fundamentalist handshake, he could look the obscenity in the eye and say no. Over the last four decades, the progressive movement entered 'ultra-modern' and 'post-modern' phases with many instances of originality and ingenuity. In its assertive process, it dismissed Thakazhi and his group as old-fashioned and unartistic. But when fascism and fundamentalism arose, many with their literary wares on glittering display in the awards-window adopted strategic silence, careful neutrality or shadowy collaboration. Some signed up with alacrity. Thakazhi, having witnessed enough misery in the last 50 years to make him blind with anger, burdened with his long-ago brand of humanism, stood fast. Kerala's cultural predicament in the face of religious fascism proves that modernist literary manners do not guarantee a modernist mind. Thakazhi proved that in today's India it takes far more than being a great writer to be civilised, humane and democratic.

Thakazhi takes leave of a society that he and his pioneering group could never have imagined would be called, even as copy-hype, 'God's Own Country', even by the communists today. Thakazhi the story-teller took god and religion in his stride, and did not, as some of our fearful, fawning and selfconscious post-modernists do, carry them like an expensive French perfume. Just as Thakazhi & Co did not pay literary attention to god except as a social apparition, god apparently paid no creative attention to the society of Malayalis about whom and for whom they were writing. It was a society that had begun to attain trappings of modernity like education, but remained a paragon of complacent conser-vativism. It perpetuated, as Thakazhi movingly documented in Thottiyude Makan (Son of the Scavenger), generations of fellow beings in the trade of carrying excreta.

Randidangazhi (Two Measures of Rice) was the first Malayalam literary work to narrate the feudal exploitation of farm labour, in this case in the paddy-lands of Kuttanad, where Thakazhi was a small-time farmer. His most celebrated work, Chemmeen, read in over 24 languages, is the tragic story of forbidden love between an upper-caste Muslim and a fisherwoman, set amidst the grime, tears and laughter of fisherfolk colonies. The goddess of the sea shows no mercy: she swallows the woman's husband, and then the lovers themselves in a famous climax.

Thakazhi started life as a lawyer and then devoted himself to full-time writing, supported by farming, a profession that bound him happily to the soil. He and his compatriots led rumbustious artistic lives, penniless and footloose, drinking and fornicating on credit, chaotic and sometimes violent, but never losing sight of the sense of social justice that drove them. They were a far cry from the please-be-gentle-with-me-I'm-a-nice-and-uninterfering-writer types of today. He survived the media hype, the wealth, the idolisation.He was humble but outspoken, gregarious and accessible to all till the end.

It is difficult to encapsulate what endeared Thakazhi to three generations of fad-crazy Malayalis. One can only say that his simplicity of language and narrative, transparent affil-iation to the human cause, sympathetic understanding of relationships, personal and social, panoramic view of history and primary commitment to the reader—all contributed to make him a hero in a congenitally cynical society.

A great man has passed from the society of Malayalam-speaking people and they are the less for that. It was not a literary accident that he was a beloved household name. He was as much a compassionate and great human being as he was a compassionate and great writer. And that mattered.