Sociology Through Literature

A Study of Kaaroor's Stories

S. Devadas Pillai

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000020656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This book presents a comprehensive study of nearly 100 of Kaaroor's short stories. Kaaroor Neelakanta Pillai is one among the Big Six of the 'new wave' in Malayalam literature which began in the mid-1940s. The Big Six and their immediate followers wrote about the common man, peasants, pavement-dwellers, fishermen, rickshaw-pullers, underpaid school teachers — their lives, aspirations and vulnerabilities. By treating Kaaroor's stories as case studies, the book takes a sociological approach to understanding the representation of a wide array of themes: romantic overtones, erotic pursuits, marital episodes, issues of family, lives of children, behavioural patterns, shades of greed, the idea of spirituality and politics in Malayalam literature.

With its annotated transcreation and detailed commentary, this book brings Kaaroor's works to the general reader, and will be useful to scholars and researchers of South Asian literature, English literature, linguistics, cultural studies, besides those interested in Malayalam literature and the Malayali/Indian diaspora across the world.

1
Introductory notes on the ‘Big Six’

Kaaroor Neelakanta Pillai was one of the Big Six front-runners in the ‘progressive’ literary movement in Kerala. The Six are: Thakazhi, Dev, Varkey, SK Pottekkat, Basheer, and Kaaroor who gave a place to till-then neglected Chatthu, Pappu, Koaran, Suhra, Maria, Tiruma, and Chiruta, along with Menons and Pillais.

Brief notes on the Big Six follow:

The mid-1930s saw new trends in the Indian literary scene. In 1936, a Progressive Writers’ Association was set up in Lucknow, headed by the Hindi author Premchand. Soon, some young Malayali writers set up an ‘organization for humanist literature’ in 1937. In 1944, the same group formed a Progressive Literary Group.¹ Thus by the middle of the 1940s the division between ‘old’ and ‘new’ progressive writers became almost clear.

The ‘old’ here refers to novels and short stories based on British sources familiar to the literati during the colonial times. Universities had full courses in English literature leading to BA and MA degrees. When someone said ‘Menon is a Literature MA’ it meant English literature, nothing else, and it carried much weight. Some professors who taught English courses were even known with prefixes like ‘Shakespeare Sankaran Nair’ indicating his grip on the Bard of Avon.

The first Malayalam novel Kundalatha (1887) by Appu Nedungadi is an adaptation² of Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline, which was very certainly one of the three Shakespearean plays prescribed for the four-year BA degree course then. [I had it in my BA course, along with poetic pieces from Milton, Browning and Wordsworth. – sdp.]

In 1889 came O. Chandu Menon’s novel Indulekha, based on a British novel, Henrietta Temple (1837) by Lord Beaconsfield. Menon was planning to translate Henrietta but later thought of an adaptation for a novel on a Nayar family.³

Menon’s next work, Sarada (1892), again, on a Nayar family, has events that slip away from realism, considering its period, but made good leisure-time reading. Both Nedungadi and Chandu Menon looked upon the British nuclear (patriarchal) family as models and that gave them a very critical view of the mother-based Nayar family. The impact of colonial British culture on ‘English-educated’ Indians was so strong that they could not see any virtue in the Nayar matriarchal culture.

Chandu Menon, who began as a low-profile desk worker, rose to the position of a legal officer presumably through his contacts with William Logan whom he helped in preparing the Malabar Manual. Logan probably guided him to Henrietta Temple.

The popularity of both these novels brought out many pot-boilers, barring one or two like Paternal Uncle’s Daughter (1931), by Bhavatratan Nambootiripad focusing on some issues of his own Nambootiri society.

The works cited earlier came from the Malabar region, then part of the Madras Presidency ruled directly by the British and not Travancore and Cochin states under Maharajahs.

In Travancore, the first landmark was a historical novel on a royal personage Marthanda Varma (1892) by CV Raman Pillai, followed by some other titles of the same genre paying tribute to the ruling royal lineage. CV’s models included the novel Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott.

In Cochin state, a popular novel of the time was Rama Varma Appan Thampuran’s Bhaskara Menon (1904), inspired by the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Wallace.

The first Malayalam short story (c.1881) is generally credited to Vengayil Kunjiraman Nayanar (1861–1914), of Malabar, followed by five or six others, including Oduvil Kunjikrishna Menon, whose story ‘Kalyani-kutty’ (the name of the heroine) was a noted piece.

Then came Murkoth Kumaran’s story ‘Sister-in-law’s Ornaments’⁴ in which a woman’s greed for gold ornaments badly hits the fortunes of a joint family. Here greed as a theme gets a place, perhaps for the first time. Murkoth was from Malabar. Some other stories depicted certain customary ceremonies of the Nayars which, due to show of affluence, slowly pauperized many families. All these ‘short’ stories were like novelettes depicting romantic tales laced with escapist stuff for leisurely reading.

In Travancore, EV Krishna Pillai (1894–1938), a lawyer, made a mark in short stories and farces which carried his brand of humour, wit, and satire. Malayalam fiction prose then basically meant ‘EV’ and ‘CV’ for the ‘educated’ reader. Some of EV’s stories with titles like ‘The Arrest of Kaimal,’ ‘Arrogant Policeman,’ and ‘Bribe for the Superintendent’ were certainly daring efforts in the Maharajah’s regime with ruthless Diwans who became de facto rulers.

But leisure-time reading calls for variety and that did exist. For instance, in the 1950s when the Big Six and others were cutting a path for realism, C. Madhavan Pillai’s romantic-escapist novels with his easy-flowing style became quite popular. Many other authors too, some of them ‘forgettables,’ entered the scene.

In late 1920s journalist and litterateur ‘Kesari’ Balakrishna Pillai (1889–1960) began to create a landmark with his three consecutive weeklies in Trivandrum, which carried fiery criticism of the Diwan’s misrule. He had to quit the first weekly Samadarsi (1922–26) under pressure from its owners who feared strong official backlash.

The Diwan then amended rules in such a manner that eventually Balakrishna Pillai had to close down his own second venture Prabodhakan (1930) and also the third one Kesari (1930–35). His office was raided, and his small, manually operated printing press confiscated.

Along with his dissenting political notes, in both the weeklies, he published notes on French writers who gave birth to realism – a point that remains undisputed. British author Walter Allen says:⁵

• ‘In France this was the period after the Revolution and Napoleon. Glory had departed, and the descent was the descent into vulgarity, into everything that could be epitomized in the word bourgeois. Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert were great Romantics, who instead of turning away from the world in disgust, turned towards it in disgust and fought it with its own weapons. In them, realism as an aesthetic creed was born.’

Besides translations of Maupassant’s stories, Balakrishna Pillai serialized two novels of the French master – A Life and Good Friend – in Prabodhakan and Kesari. He also introduced authors like Stendhal, Prosper Merimee, and Luigi Pirandello to Malayali readers. It is said he was the first to write on Bertrand Russell in Malayalam. And when he translated (1936) Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, it became a landmark in the Malayalam literary scene.⁶

In his Kesari days, Balakrishna Pillai met a small group of budding writers and thinkers once a week in his office and encouraged them to talk, write, and discuss literature. He advised them to read on advances in behavioural sciences, sexology, and related topics.

Writer Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai (1912–1999) then doing a lawyer’s course in Trivandrum, attended Kesari’s weekly sessions regularly. What Thakazhi wrote then was often shockingly bold even to some members of the ‘Kesari group’. When copies of his short novel Reward for Sacrifice (1934) were given to members of the group, one of them in a subsequent session tore it into pieces and flung it on young Thakazhi, calling it utterly obscene. Realism in Malayalam literature was born with this event in Kesari’s office.⁷ Thakazhi is certainly the first Malayalam realist, Maupassant his model, and ‘Kesari’ Balakrishna Pillai his guru. EV Krishna Pillai too was in close touch with ‘Kesari.’

When his press and weeklies were confiscated, Balakrishna Pillai became almost a pauper and finally left the city – ‘inheriting’ the prefix ‘Kesari’ to his name – and settled down in his wife’s maternal home in North Paravur, Ernakulam District, where her mother and brother were living.

He never wrote a word on political affairs thereafter, and focused on literature, encouraging young writers to be bold and realistic. He wrote lengthy forewords and book reviews, which were all learned essays opening the doors to world literature brimming with realism and naturalism.

But his income from occasional writings was very limited and his health was sinking while the small forsaken by-lane, near Peruvaram temple, in North Paravur town, leading to his house began to receive literary luminaries and many aspiring writers. [Paravur is my hometown, and I am blessed to have been ‘coached’ by him for about ten years. He is my first guru. – sdp.]

Today Kesari is called a visionary and is revered as the grandfather-figure of ‘modern’ Malayalam literature, with roads, lanes, and public halls named after him, a statue in Trivandrum, and a PhD thesis on him. His house in North Paravur is now being turned into a museum. This is stated here to show that in India stalwarts and pioneers have often to pass away in near-penury but are celebrated post-demise.

Prolific Thakazhi continued to write bold stories on marital tangles and the suppressed erotic life of men and women. His noted pieces on other topics include ‘The Flood’ (noted for its technique, on a dog trapped in the attic during the flood) and ‘Tahsildar’s Father’ (on the neglect of the aged). Later he turned to Pulaya farmers of his region (Two Measures, 1948) and those at the social periphery (The Beggars, Scavenger’s Son, 1947). His Prawns (1956; ‘Chemmeen,’) on a Hindu-Muslim love-theme centered on fisher folk of his region has had many European versions. At the local level, ‘Chemmeen’ became an immortal Malayalam film (with Salil Chaudhuri’s fine music).

Thakazhi’s eminence peaked with Kayar (Coir, 1978), with a Jnanpith crown, which tries to document some aspects of the social history of Travancore till the 1950s. Its basic material was drawn from many old legal documents that Thakazhi went through as a lawyer for decades on behalf of clients who filed suits on landed property matters.

P. Kesavadev (1905–1983), who dropped his last name ‘Pillai’ due to the influence of Arya Samaj, was actively involved in problems of the working class, and had a hot streak of protest in him running through most of his works. He chose the title Protest for his auto-biography – which has flashes of social history of the Nayars. Dev was jailed for his political protest during the Maharajah’s regime.

Along with some of his short stories, his short novel From the Gutter (1942) gave him a pedestal. It features a rickshaw puller who adopts a baby abandoned in a gutter and brings her up well. In Actress (1951), the indignities a girl had to face when she joined a professional drama unit is the theme while in Neighbours (1963), the focus is on the steep fall of a once well-off Nayar joint family and the rise of other groups like the Ezhavas. This work shows Dev’s sharper sense of social history acquired in his senior years.

Though swayed by Marxism at the start, he became its fiery opponent when the ‘Calcutta Thesis’ (1948), presented by Bombay’s BT Ranadive, advocated violence to overthrow the presiding social system. The Communist Party of India (CPI) gradually split on this issue and the CPM (Marxist) was born which toed the extremist line.

In many parts of Kerala, extremists took to political violence and murders. The rich were intimidated, looted, and even knifed in some regions. In Edapally, near Kochi city, a police station was set on fire. The police then became very brutal, and custodial deaths were often heard of.

Dev who had earlier written on Marx and Lenin in his Fire and Flame, with Karl Marx as the Fire and Lenin as the Flame, was disgusted with Stalin’s rule, which he said was a variety of Nambootiri Brahmin feudalism. He protested with stories like ‘Don’t kill, Brother! Don’t kill.’ His caustic sarcasm bubbles up in the play Rains There, Umbrellas Here (1956) in which Comrade Sankaran, now Sankara-novich, says:

‘Comrades, when it rains in Russia, the working class

in other parts of the world have to open their umbrellas.

It is a historical necessity!’

In the same play, Thomas becomes Thoma-sky, Narayani is Narayani-yovna, and Madhavan is Madhava-sky. Brilliant lampooning indeed, which continued in his short political plays like ‘I’ll Become a Communist Just Now’ – a strong threat flung by someone in a serious dispute with someone else. This implied that when you become a Communist, you can be violent and do anything illegal and unlawful. Dev’s anti-Communist stand became valid when the violent Naxalite movement took shape in the mid-1960s.

The early stories of Ponkunnam Varkey (1910–2004) are on the hill-side farmer, certain failings of the Catholic clergy (which include financial greed), and political protest.

In ‘That Banana Massacre,’ when a certain virulent epidemic hit banana farms in the hills, the Diwan sent squads to eradicate them all, and farmers became paupers almost overnight. Pesticides and farmer relief measures were out of question then. And as the squad was heroically doing its job, a farmer woman yelled:

‘My father too has some disease, why don’t you cut him also?’

Another very touching piece is ‘The Lonely Plough’ narrating the bond between farmer Ouseph and his dear bull named Kannan whom he had to sell to meet his daughter’s marriage expenses.

His stories on sexual abe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introductory notes on the ‘Big Six’
• 2 Romantic overtones
• 3 Erotic pursuits
• 4 Marital episodes
• 5 On small children and teenagers
• 6 Families: sinking, troubled
• 7 ‘Sir’ stories
• 8 Sirs: the other side
• 9 Dictates of fate
• 10 Behavioural patterns
• 11 Some social issues
• 12 Political themes
• 13 Shades of greed
• 14 Profiles of the poor
• 15 Some uncommon people
• 16 Social dropouts
• 17 Spiritual themes
• 18 Some more episodes
• 19 Tuskers and mahouts
• 20 Kaaroor’s ‘Zoo’
• 21 Sociology through literature: some endnotes
• References
• Index