Malayalam-language writer MT Vasudevan Nair died on December 25 at the age of 91. He was also an acclaimed film director and screenwriter.
Born in 1933 in Kerala’s Palakkad district, Nair began writing from a young age. He studied chemistry in college and went on to teach maths to school students. Later, he joined the Mathrubhumi weekly magazine and went on to publish several novels and collections of short stories, memoirs and travelogues.
Nair’s novel Naalukettu about the decline of a joint family, won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 1958. Years later, he adapted the novel into a television film. Randamoozham (1984) is a retelling of the Hindu epic Mahabharata from the point of view of the character Bhima. Among Nair’s best-known screenplays is Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha set in 16th-century Kerala. He directed seven films and wrote the screenplay for more than 50 films. He won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay four times, which is the most by anyone in the category.
He was awarded the Jnanpith Award in 1995 and the Padma Bhushan in 2005.
Here are some of MT Vasudevan Nair’s essential writings in translation:
The Demon Seed and Other Writings
The Demon Seed is arguably one of Nair’s best novels. Published in Malayalam in 1962, it is an uncompromising look at the crumbling matrilineal order, and the breakdown of the joint family system.
The novel tells the story of Govindankutty, a young unemployed Nair boy. When his wealthy brother-in-law takes him on as the manager of his property, and a marriage is arranged for him, Govindankutty dares to dream for the first time in his life. He brings his bride home, eager to start life afresh, but discovers to his horror that she is already pregnant by another man – his urbane lawyer-cousin Krishnettan. Shattered by the knowledge that his family had connived to betray him, Govindankutty goes berserk. Finally, estranged from home and village, he converts to Islam in the ultimate gesture of defiance.
The collection also brings together six of Nair’s best stories, including “Vanaprastham”, “The Jackal's Wedding”, “Sherlock, “The Era of Ramanan”, an essay on the impact of the first modern verse romance in Malayalam, and a piece on contemporary cinema.
Bhima: Lone Warrior, translated by Gita Krishnakutty
This is the story of Bhima, the second son, always second in line. Nair’s Bhima is a revelation – lonely, eager to succeed, treated with a mixture of affection and contempt by his Pandava brothers, and with scorn and hatred by his Kaurava cousins. Bhima battles incessantly with failure and disappointment. He is adept at disguising his feelings but has an overwhelmingly intuitive understanding of everyone who crosses his path.
A warrior without equal, he takes on the mighty Bakasura and Jarasandha, and ultimately Duryodhana, thus bringing the Great War to a close. However, all of Bhima’s moments of triumph remain unrecognised and unrewarded. If his mother saw glory only in the skills of Arjuna and the wisdom of Yudhishtira, his beloved Draupadi cared only for the beauteous Arjuna.
Bear With Me, Amma: Memoirs of MT Vasudevan Nair, translated by Gita Krishnakutty
MT, as he is popularly known, is one of the most illustrious writers and film-makers from modern Kerala. His life’s work has won him the Jnanpith Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the National Film Award and the Padma Bhushan, among others. MT grew up in the village of Kudallur in Kerala and his writings constantly evoke the landscape of the years he spent there. Many of the characters in his stories are based on people who lived in this region and the stories themselves often retell incidents that happened there.
Naalukettu: The House Around the Courtyard, Gita Krishnakutty
Naalukettu (1958) is the story of a young boy, Appunni, set in a joint family of the Nair caste in the author’s native village, Kudallur. Growing up without a father and away from the prestige and protection of the matrilineal home to which he belongs, Appunni spends his childhood in extreme social misery. Fascinated by accounts of the grand “naalukettu tharavad” of which he should have been a part, Appunni visits the house only to be rejected by the head of the household. With vengeance boiling in his heart and the pain of disappointed love a lingering ache, Appunni claws his way up in life to finally buy the symbol of his youthful aspiration and anguish: the naalukettu tharavad of his ancestors.
But victory – both financial and emotional – turns to ashes. Enemies are not worth conquering; his father’s murderer turns out to be the only sympathetic adult in his lonely teenage, and Appunni eventually returns the favour. Naalukettu sensitively captures the traumas and psychological graph of Appunni, caught as he is in the throes of a transitional period in Malabar, a phase marked by the gradual disintegration of the feudal structures of the matrilineal joint family system and the rise of the Nair’s sense of personal identity.
The Writings of MT Vasudevan Nair
This collection contains three of Nair’s previously published works Mist and The Soul of Darkness, Kaalam, and Kuttiedathi and Other Stories.
Mist and The Soul of Darkness are Nair’s highly-acclaimed novellas, Manhu and Irutinde Atmavu. Mist, set in a hill-station resort, the author narrates the story of Vimala, a schoolteacher who continues to wait for her beloved Sudhir, with whom she once shared a passionate affair filled with promises. In The Soul of Darkness, Velayudhan is a young man regarded by his family as not normal and is thus treated abominably, tortured and beaten. Though his cousin Ammakutty really cares for him, she is helpless and cannot do much to save him. In both stories, Nair voices through mists of memories and emotions, some lost hopes and evocative experiences.
Set against the backdrop of a crumbling matrilineal tarawad system of the Nairs in Kerala with its manifold conflicts and problems, Kaalam is the story of Sethumadhavan Nair who starts out as an ambitious and confident adolescent but in his journey towards adulthood, where material and social Success go hand in hand, he is faced with an overwhelming sense of disillusionment.
Kuttiedathi and Other Stories, translated by V Abdulla
Written over a broad span of time from 1962 to 2000, the stories encompass the ordinary middle class lives and sufferings of people in northern Kerala.
