His passing marks not just the loss of a literary giant but that of a cultural touchstone.
Dec 27, 2024 10:28 IST First published on: Dec 27, 2024 at 07:10 IST
For nearly seven decades, M T Vasudevan Nair has been a lot like first love for Malayalis. Unavoidable and unforgettable. Rooted in the landscape of Kerala — both geographical and cultural — his novels and stories and the movies he wrote and directed have drawn them into a world of familiar passions and universal complexities. From the lush, rain-soaked hills of the Western Ghats to the sunlit shores of the backwaters, from the stultifying humidity of summer to the petrichor after monsoon rains, his novels, stories and films brought to vivid life a region that is both traditional and modern, conservative and progressive. He wrote about the tensions between these dualities, revealing how Kerala’s history, with its complications of caste, class, and politics, shapes the lives of its people. Whether it was the struggles of a young man, torn between familial loyalty and his own desire for freedom in Naalukettu (1958) — considered the gold standard of modern Malayalam literature — or the haunting reversal of tropes in the film Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha (1989), he rejected simplistic binaries of heroism and victimhood. He lent his characters depth and dignity as they negotiated generational trauma and loss and searched for an identity or voice of their own.
A part of this has to do with the time and the milieu M T began writing in. In a newly-independent nation, growing up in a literary family, he was guided by the works of contemporary greats such as Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai and Ponkunnam Varkey. Their socialist ideals shaped his consciousness but they also lent themselves to a gentler, more inward glance in his work, where myth and history coalesced with individual experience. The result was richly rewarding. At 25, he had won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award for Naalukettu. In 1970, he won the Sahitya Akademi prize for his fifth novel, Kaalam. He won the National Award for screenplay four times and the Kerala State film award 11 times. And these were only a few of a lifetime’s accolades.
One of the trappings of celebrityhood is that it disconnects the star from the ground, isolates him from the reader/audience. M T was especially careful to avoid falling into the trap. At heart, he remained the boy from Kudallur, shaped by the earthiness of the land and the generosity of the river Nila. As an editor at the Mathrubhumi Weekly, the leading Malayalam literary magazine, he nurtured writers such as Sethu, M Mukundan, Paul Zacharia and Sarah Joseph, each stalwarts in their own right. His passing marks not just the loss of a literary giant but that of a cultural touchstone.
Why should you buy our Subscription?
You want to be the smartest in the room.
You want access to our award-winning journalism.
You don’t want to be misled and misinformed.
Choose your subscription package
