A river runs through it: The world of MT Vasudevan Nair

In over seven decades, MT has published nine novels (one written jointly with friend and writer, NP Muhammad), 19 collections of short stories, over 50 film scripts, directed six films, three travelogues, a play, and numerous collections of essays and memoirs. He won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award at the age of 25 for his second novel, Naalukettu (1959), and a decade later, Kaalam, his fifth novel, fetched him the Kendra Sahitya Academi prize.

MT started writing in the 1950s, at a time literature influenced by the national movement and socialist ideals was slowly making way for stories that explored the inner lives of the individual.

His rendering of the Mahabharata from the perspective of Bhima, Randamoozham (1984), mopped up whatever awards he had not won until then. He won the National Award for screenplay four times and the Kerala State film award 11 times. Nirmalyam (1973), his directorial debut based on from his own story, Pallivalum Kalchilambum, won two National Awards — best film and best actor(PJ Anthony). In the midst of a great phase of creativity, as editor, Mathrubhumi Weekly, the premier literary magazine in Malayalam, he nurtured modernist writing in Malayalam fiction, publishing writers such as OV Vijayan, Kakkanadan, Sethu, MP Narayana Pillai, Punathil Kunjabdulla, M Mukundan, Paul Zacharia and Sarah Joseph, among others.

There are few artists in any language who have enjoyed commercial and critical success as MT. His stature in Malayalam owes a lot to his artistic integrity and the dignified independence he has maintained while being a celebrity cultural figure. His commitment is to his work, not to any party, faith, community or ideology — he has campaigned with the civil society for the preservation of rivers, against nuclear plants and written against authoritarianism. He has been a proud spokesperson for his land and language without ever being provincial or chauvinistic in his arguments. While rooted in his land (desham) and language (bhasha), he invokes a universal humanism. He is the writer most Malayalis idolise in their teens and early youth, the first writer who introduced them to the magic of literature, the writer who articulated the angst, anger and alienation of their youth. They seek out other writers as they grow old, but MT stays on in the recesses of memory as the first love of their youth.

MT Vasudevan Nair won the National Award for screenplay four times and the Kerala State film award 11 times. (Credit: T Mohandas)

MT started writing in the 1950s, at a time literature influenced by the national movement and socialist ideals was slowly making way for stories that explored the inner lives of the individual. Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Ponkunnam Varkey, Kesavadev, Karur Neelakanta Pillai, SK Pottekkatt, ‘Uroob’ PC Kuttikrishnan and Lalithambika Antharjanam were at their peak. The transition from progressive realism to a more personalised literature started with them. But it was the generation that followed — MT, T Padmanabhan and Madhavikutty (Kamala Suraiyya), among others — which exemplified this new writing.

James Joyce and American modernists influenced their work. In an interview to M N Karasseri (1996), MT names J D Salinger and Carson McCullers among the writers who influenced him. In his introduction to an English translation of MT’s stories, poet-critic Ayyappa Paniker traces the emergence of the MT generation thus: “Individual human beings with their private agonies emerged replacing the social stereotypes of erstwhile fiction committed to grand ideologies and slogan shouting. The whisper of the soul became audible, which had earlier been swallowed or stifled by public oration and street-side chorus… Slogans were replaced by sobs, with a gentle touch of the romantic without excessive sentimentality, the new and young writers wound their way into the sensitive minds of the new generation readers.” MT’s fiction is most representative of this new writing that held centre stage for nearly two decades, until the modernists, many of them influenced by European existentialists, appeared and changed reader preferences. Sample this extract, the opening segment of the short story, Iruttinte Athmavu (The Soul of Darkness): “He felt very frightened as he crept out of the room. At the door, he peered into the hall. Achuthan Nair was fast asleep. He waited for a minute, hesitating. It was so funny to see the lump in Achuthan Nair’s throat moving up and down when he snored. The areca nuts he had tucked into his waist were about to roll off. When he looked at those huge, hairy arms and the fat, disgusting fingers, his first reaction was of anger. Wasn’t that hand that, yesterday, at dusk… was it yesterday? Or several days ago.

In over seven decades, MT has published nine novels, 19 collections of short stories, over 50 film scripts, directed six films, three travelogues, a play, and numerous collections of essays and memoirs.

“Velayudhan stroked his neck. It still hurts. One day, he had to chop that hand off, without anyone seeing him do it. He had to keep a hatchet ready. Then, while Achuthan Nair was asleep with that rough, hairy hand resting on the floor, one day he would creep up stealthily and chop it off at one stroke.” — translated by Gita Krishnankutty.

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The short story is MT’s preferred medium. The discipline the genre demanded and its potential to attain the perfection of the lyric interested him, perhaps. He quotes American writer Struthers Burt approvingly — “A good novel may be badly written; but a good short story never!” — in Kathikante Kala (The Art of the Short Story Writer). “Short story,” he writes, “is a wail or a cry from the heart. The cry could be due to pain, sorrow, or anger; the wail or cry could arise even from happiness.” Kathikante Kala and Kathikante Panippura (The Workshop of the Short Story Writer) are primers for aspiring writers. It also reveals a practitioner, who has studied the short story, its art and form, with great attention.

His early short fiction — Valarthumrugangal, Pallivalum Kalchilambum, Kuttiyedathi, Iruttinte Athmavu, Oppol and Olavum Theeravum, among others — were sobs of the soul, well-crafted stories that eschewed moralising, rooted in a milieu familiar to him, especially his own village. The emotions and sentiments these tales carried were universal, such as loneliness, loss of hope, love, betrayal and revenge. His longer fiction, especially novels such as Naalukettu, Asuravithu (The Demon Seed, 1962), Manju (Mist, 1964) and Kaalam, reveal a storyteller with an eye for detail of the local geography, the flora and fauna, the rhythms of seasons, the ebb and flow of a river, nuances of personal and social relations, even the economic history of the region. These are works of a master craftsman at work, chiselling away the excess fat from language, carefully constructing the fictional edifice and the emotional tempo with dialogue, in local dialect, capturing the caste and communal diversity within it.

MT won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award at the age of 25 for his second novel, Naalukettu (1959), and a decade later, Kaalam, his fifth novel, fetched him the Kendra Sahitya Academi prize.(Illustration by Vishnu Ram; Credit: ieMalayalam)

His later fiction is structurally more complex and layered (Karutha Chandran, Vaarikkuzhi, Swargam Thurakkunna Samayam, Vilppana, Hora, Sherlock, Kochu Kochu Bhookambangal), but, ironically, it is the earlier works rooted in his village that are seen as representative of his oeuvre.

“The village that is familiar to me is the background of most of my fiction. Its river is my lifeblood,” MT once wrote. Kudallur, a village by the Bharathapuzha or Nila, is where MT was born. In his own words, “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.” The Valluvanad region of which Kudallur is a part, has a distinct culture nurtured by the Nila. The river, which originates in the Western Ghats and meets the Arabian Sea at the ancient port town of Ponnani, is the life force of the region. The Nila in Kudallur flows through a wide, fertile valley bound on both sides by small hills. People cultivated paddy and vegetables along the river and its flood plains and grew coconut and areca nut on the hill slopes. The river also served as a highway for boatmen who ferried goods to Ponnani. MT picked up his stories from the riverside, conversation of elders in the families, angadi (bazaar) gossip and sobs forgotten like ripples in the river. He turned many of these stories also into film scripts, which qualify as top-class literature. Was cinema’s gain literature’s loss? MT was quick to respond. “I am first and foremost a writer, text is my priority. I have been a journalist; similarly, worked in films. Not that cinema is inferior to literature in any way, but it is books that define me,” he said.

MT’s ancestral house in Kudallur (Credit: Amrith Lal)

MT has not stayed in Kudallur for any long stretch of time since he completed school. He graduated from Palakkad, a town an hour by road to the east, and settled in Kozhikode, the largest city in northern Kerala, where he found work as a journalist in 1956.

But it is to the village, to the river Nila that he returns for renewal. Most of his long fiction are grounded in Kudallur. The river runs through them, reflecting the mood of his characters, a space and force that they take refuge in times of emotional crises. After leaving the village, he bought a plot and built a house by the river to watch the Nila. MT once wrote: “I prefer the dear Nila I know well to the great oceans that carry unknown surprises in their womb”. The river, now vandalised by the sand mafia, is a pale shadow of MT’s childhood. Boats disappeared long ago. So did the kadavu (jetty) where people met and stories were born. Sand banks with patches of overgrown weeds scar its bed even in Karkidakam, when it is supposed to be in spate. As MT wrote in Kaalam, “The river, his river, dreaming of floods even as it grew dry, lay behind him like a lifeless body drained of blood and movement.”

MT Raveendran, a cousin who lives next door to MT and the author of MTyum Kudallurum (MT and Kudallur), said “Mad” Velayudhan of Iruttinte Athmavu, Kuttiyedathi in Kuttiyedathi, Govindankutty and Kunharakkar of Asuravithu and Saidalikutty of Naalukettu were real people, who MT turned into characters often without even changing their names. Many were relatives. He directed us to 96-year-old Yusuf, who appears as a character in Naalukettu. It was at Yusuf’s Ramla Stores, Appunni, the protagonist of Naalukettu, gets to meet Saidalikutty, who had murdered his father. Yusuf, talking with great pride about MT, recalled how “young Vasu” would come to his shop to buy groceries. Like visitors searching for William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County on the Mississippi and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo, admirers travel to MT’s Kudallur. Blessed are those writers who can invoke a land in their fiction and be identified with it for ever!

MT’s cousin Raveendran outside Ashwathi, the house the writer built in Kudallur. (Credit: Amrith Lal)

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So is it a place, a landscape that shapes the story? I asked MT, while seated at his office flat in Kozhikode, on a rain-less evening. “Characters, their predicaments — that’s what inspires me. The crossroads they find themselves in — they trouble us. Landscape may influence these,” he says. Works like Randamoozham and popular film scripts such as Perumthachan (1992) and Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha (1999) take off from gaps in the stories already well-known and offer a radical and revisionist but convincing version of the old narrative. They speak about people, who have been misunderstood or cast aside by fellow beings. This affection for the underdog and the ignored is a powerful strand in his writing. In novels like Kaalam and Vilapayatra and much of his short fiction of the 1960s and thereafter, self-pity is the defining character of his protagonists. This was not the case with Appunni in Naalukettu or Govindankutty in Asuravithu, who refused to accept defeat. In Naalukettu, Appunni is willing to forget the past. He accepts help from his father’s murderer and builds a life for himself. The book ends with Appunni telling his mother: “Don’t worry, Amma. This naalukettu needs to be demolished. A small house that lets in light and wind is sufficient.” It was a severe indictment of the old Nair feudal household, that suppressed its inhabitants, male and female, and wallowed in the imagined pride of a bygone past. Similarly, Asuravithu ends with Govindankutty, leaving behind his village with the conviction, “dear ones, I begin the journey to return another day”. This optimism is muted in Manju, which many have compared to a prose poem, set in Nainital. Life is still like the placid lake. Vimala is resigned to her state of loneliness, but refuses to quit on life. As she continues the wait for her lover, she assures herself, “varum, varathirikkilla” (he will come, surely he will). Randamoozham and Varanasi reveal a writer who has come to terms with this world and looks at life with a philosophical detachment. Randamoozham has been MT’s most ambitious novel, involving research and gestation of many years. He writes: “Weak family relationships and human beings who become entangled in them: these are themes that have always been available to me in my own village. The only difference is that I am dealing here with a family story set in a more ancient era.” The epic of the Kuru clan could have been the story of a Nair tharavad (homestead) in Kudallur!

Yusuf of Ramla Stores (Credit: Amrith Lal)

He once wrote: “The unexpected tenderness shown by a man whom everyone considered the apotheosis of cruelty stuns me into disbelief. The dark doings of a man who had always been projected as the symbol of goodness leaves me gaping… I have told myself that it is not enough to analyse human frailty with clinical detachment. I must understand with empathy.” This is a key statement to understand a character like Govindankutty, the protagonist of Asuravithu or Sethu of Kaalam.

Arguably the most powerful character in MT’s fiction, Govindankutty is a great study in human condition. Born at a time of great social transition, his rebellion against his own family and community — he converts to Islam as a mark of revolt — and later, his rejection of religion itself, and restoration of his pride and dignity after becoming a selfless being who risks death to bury victims of smallpox, Govindankutty’s story is of a man refusing to be defeated even at the risk of being destroyed. Asuravithu, as much as it is about the crumbling of the feudal Nair tharavad, also contains the micro-history of a region, its complex social, gender and economic relations and the commonsensical approach of negotiation and accommodation of the society in dealing with religious differences.

The warmth in Hindu-Muslim relations in MT’s fiction is remarkable. In fact, this is a common thread in MT’s writing — an unsaid, organic secular sensibility that rejects bigotry while being deeply immersed in both the ritualistic and spiritual worlds of faith. This is the micro-politics in MT’s fiction — and films — that needs to be restated in our times when the past is presented in terms of violence and conflict involving different faiths.

The roots of this secular sensibility, perhaps, lies in a family legend that MT has written about. Many generations ago, a woman in his family used to visit Kodikkunnathu Kavu (shrine), across the river, offer milk and return with the naivedyam (prasad) for her children. One monsoon night, the boatman could not cross the flooded river. The woman was distraught that her children would go hungry. Late at night, a woman appeared at the door with naivedyam and asked the mother to feed her children. She then disappeared into the machu (the room where the family deity is housed) in the house. The family believes it was Kodikkunnathu bhagwati that appeared that night.

The river Nila in front of his house (Credit: Amrith Lal)

Generations later, one monsoon night, when the flooded Nila waded into the homes on its banks, a Muslim family with a pregnant woman sought refuge in MT’s home. His mother, ignoring caste taboos, invited them in and the woman gave birth to a girl next to the machu. He has recounted this story in Asuravithu.

The descendants of Kunharakkar live in the neighbourhood, says Shobha, a relative of MT who takes care of his ancestral home. She cheerfully showed us around the house, remodelled since though with the machu intact. She told us about the steady stream of students and admirers who arrive to see “MT’s tharavad”.

What has happened to the warm relations between different communities?

MT wondered if it had turned for the worse. “I don’t know why. Is it because of any reason other than politics? We need to find out.” He talked about his childhood when faiths coexisted without friction. “I can recall their faces, people who built close relations discounting their religious differences.” He recalled the works of Edasseri Govindan Nair — who he describes as “my poet” — that contains the essence of shared spaces and mutual respect. “We are duty bound to realise that we need to be governed by a large sense of humanity.”

It’s been over six decades since Naalukettu and Asuravithu and much of MT’s short fiction were published. Looking back, it is easy to make the case that the same humanistic values that MT saw in Edasseri run through his fiction as well. In the coming decades, his works are likely to be valued for meticulously documenting the inner lives and outer worlds of the inhabitants of a bygone agrarian society, the ecological wisdom of a people who lived in awareness about their debt to land and river.

In an interview to The Indian Express two decades ago, he had told us about a novel he wanted to write, about a man who lived in Kudallur. I asked him if it was still on his mind. His voice turned grave. “Yes, I am still working on it. COVID had caused some disruption. But I will complete it,” he said, with great enthusiasm. MT once wrote about a boy who stood atop Thannikkkunnu, the hill behind his house, and wanted to shout to the world: “I am here, in this remote village, dying to be a writer.”

That boy is very much around.