A literary colossus, Thakazhi helped Malayalam literature break colonial mould

What made Thakazhi a celebrity of world literature was his monumental work Chemmeen’, which departs from his earlier works and tells a romantic love story set against the backdrop of a fishing village.

He was able to fuse the universal and the local and also romance andmyth in Chemmeen, touchingly depicting the interplay of man and nature. Chemmeen was translated into 19 world languages and adapted as film in 15 countries.Chemmeen won for Thakazhi the Kendra Sahitya Academy Award in 1958. Its film adaptation by Ramu Kariat won the national award in 1964.

Despite the roaring success and popularity of Chemmeen, many regard Kayar’ (coir) as Thakazhi’s magnum opus. This voluminous work is about the life and times of three generations of people in his native Kuttanad and the changes that came about in the agrarian relations. It showed the transformation of the society from a purely feudal and caste-dominated one to a modern.

Thakazhi began to write stories at an early age and his first story was published while he was still a schoolboy. His inborn talent was nurtured by two mentors. The first of these was his high school headmaster Kainikkara Kumara Pillai (1900-1988) who introduced him to writers like Tagore. The second was the savant A Balakrishna Pillai (1889-1960) whoexposed him to modern European literature and thought. Thus he came under the influence of writers like Maupassant and thinkers like Marx and Freud.

In his mature stories he normally centred his work on a social or psychological problem. Kalyaani’s story deals with the unfortunate woman who turns to prostitution just to escape from hunger. In Mathen’s story, the focus is on the betrayal of the poor by the rich. Mathen, the poor servant, is cruelly cheated out of his hard-earned money by his rich employer to whom he had entrusted the safekeeping of the earnings of a life-time.

Kochouseph is the moving story of a fishmonger’s life of privation and misery. The chaste woman shows how a seemingly contented woman with a loving husband and four children finds real fulfilment only in the company of a secret lover. In all these stories, we find Thakazhi a master craftsman.

Unconventional in approach and unsentimental in tone, these stories which portray characters and incidents from ordinary life revealThakazhi’s technique of developing his theme in a simple style and with a rare economy of words.

Noted critic Dr V Rajakrishnan says: “Thakazhi is normally remembered as a writer who looked analytically at the continuously changing Kerala society since the turbulent decade of 1930s. At the same time, without denying him his place as a social chronicler, one could find in him a poet who could look at the minutest aspects of human life.”

Nevertheless, Thakazhi may be more known by the posterity for his Chemmeen in which he had been able to shape a deep and touching romantic love story against the backdrop of the vastness of the sea, he said.

Rajakrishnan noted that it was significant that Thakazhi, who bore the influence of French naturalists and Russian realists, had employed the narrative method of epics’ in his Coir which told a typical Kerala story.Meanwhile, President K R Narayanan has expressed grief over the sad demise of Thakazhi.

Pillai was a pioneer of the progressive literary movementwhich enabled Malayalam literature to break out of the colonial mould’, Narayanan said in his message.

Pillai’s novels and short stories pulsated the real life rhythm of Kerala, the President said, adding the litterateur would “continue to live with us through his brilliant universal appeal.”

Conveying his heartfelt condolences to the members of the bereaved family, he said Pillai’s novel Chemmeen’ made a profound impact on Indian literary field.