Kerala: Mad about books

M. Mukundan writes in the first page of his novel Adityan Radha and Others: “Chapter four ends thus: Amidst the women who sit around the milk-bathed Sivalingam my mother might be grieving for me.” Five pages on he writes, “The fourth sentence in the second paragraph of Chapter eight runs like this: Not a wrinkle was to be seen in the woollen jacket or silk tie he wore, when after many years he stood with bowed head before his mother’s dead body.”

Written in 1993, the book bears more resemblance to Camus’s The Stranger than it does to 2008 Booker winner Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. Whatever else it may be, Adiga’s novel is not about re-drawing the contours of literature.

M Mukundan on the other hand is experimental. And if his writing is unlike anything written in English in India today, one good reason for that is it is in Malayalam - and written in the context of a literature that is slippery and shape-shifting in its embrace of the experimental.

Freedom

In Kerala, somewhere in the space and time that might be the end of Chapter four or the fourth sentence in the second paragraph of Chapter eight, there exists this other literature, and other writers who are free to be deviants. And the trick of this freedom is being in possession of a readership that is not the Booker panel of judges, nor even the reader of the New Yorker.

Outside the big cities, a very small minority of Indians - only seven to eight million - read in English. India has an overall rate of 65% literacy - measured in people’s own mother tongues. But where India drops into the Indian Ocean, in the state of Kerala, home of Malayalam literature, literacy is close to 100%. Not surprisingly, the population of Kerala - some 31 million - reads books.

Malayalam writers are in the enviable position of writing for Adiga’s rickshaw puller and not just about him.

Grassroots readers

Paul Zacharia, one of the best-known contemporary writers in Malayalam, says: “In the Indian picture, Kerala’s book readers are a record. They are the product both of the literacy movement and the earlier library movement spearheaded by a one-man army called PN Paniker [the founding father of the literacy movement in Kerala]. A whole world of grassroots readers keep emerging from the villages.”

Sixth on the list of seven objectives of Kerala’s communist-led state government’s literacy mission is “provision of facilities for library and reading rooms for creating an environment conducive for literacy efforts and a learning society”.

The grassroots level activism that brought about the literacy movement continues in the form of publishers like KSSP (Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad), which was formed in 1962 to publish scientific literature in Malayalam.

Today KSSP continues its practice of door-to-door sales and Kala Jathas (literacy rallies). According to KK Krishna Kumar, its former president, KSSP publishes around 60-100 titles and sells books worth Rs 10-15m ($200,000-$300,000) every year.

In a recent report in The Hindu, Ravi DC, CEO of DC Books, Kerala’s leading publishing house, said the sale of Malayalam books has been growing by at least 30% a year. At the sixth international book fair, which DC Books organised in Kerala in November 2008, sales had doubled in a year. And, he added, “the demand for books in rural areas is on the increase”. The marketing strategy was now based on the concept that “books should go to people instead of people coming to book houses”.

Well read in every sense

According to Paul Zacharia, the Malayalam reader is well read in every sense, including in world literature. DC Books’ website offers the reader translations of Carlos Fuentes’ Aura and his The Death of Artemio Cruz. There is Alex Haley’s Malcolm X and Amoz Oz’s Fima.

Che Guevara, Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens are all available, as are Junichiro Tanizaki and George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, JM Coetzee and JMG Le Cl‚zio - all of them in Malayalam. (Paul Coelho for some reason is available only in English.) And among the million books on display at the week-long DC book fair, the bestsellers included not only examples of contemporary Malayalam literature, like V Vijayan’s Khasakkinte Ithihasam and MT Vasudevan Nair’s Randamoozham, but also popular English titles such as Adiga’s The White Tiger.

Writers in Kerala locate themselves in the great confluence of world literature. They are powerfully influenced by both Malayalam and world literature. Zacharia, for instance, says of himself: “I have been bilingual in my formative reading”. But he adds that once they write, “authors are almost entirely focused on the Malayali audience and not on the world”. In the author’s note prefacing his book The Reflections of a Hen in Her Last Hour, Zacharia thanks these readers “who keep a stern eye on writers’ performance and put the fear of God into them”.

Literature

When the greats in Malayalam literature sell, they really do sell - edition after edition. Nalukettu by MT Vasudevan Nair, written in 1958 and selling some 400,000 copies over the years, was re-launched in a special edition in 2008 for its 50th anniversary. (The English translation is available from Oxford University Press.) The novel tells the story of Appunni, who is born into the matrilineal Nair caste, exiled from his home as a child and thereafter aims to regain his lost home or nalukettu (the traditional Kerala house).

But the most recent trend in Malayalam literature is the personal narrative. The wildly popular Autobiography of a Sex Worker by Nalini Jamila was the first of many such bestsellers. The book caused controversy as established writers rejected its literary worth, and feminists and others on the left rejected Jameela’s argument that prostitution offers freedom from a husband’s demands and restrictions. Jameela, a grandmother in her 50s who is still active in sex work, rewrote the autobiography in part as a response to the criticism.

Courtesy: Le Monde Diplomatique