Nilanjana S Roy: The chronicler of Khasak

SPEAKING VOLUMES

My idea of heaven is a vast, beckoning continent divided into separate segments: here is Shangri-La, over to the left you'd have Macondo, somewhere in between would be Faulkner's Yokhnapatawpha County, and so on. If we get to choose our afterlives, this is where I'd spend mine.

An entire swathe of this imaginary continent would be taken up by a place called Khasak. Like all the best countries of the mind, Khasak not only exists, but has been growing and changing for each reader ever since 1967, when a cartoonist and teacher called O V Vijayan set down its legends.

Vijayan passed on last week after a long, hard bout of illness, deeply mourned by all those who knew him and those who knew his books: the funeral drew thousands.

He had fewer laurels than he deserved. The Sahitya Akademi award to him was made for Infinity of Grace, not for the monumental Legends of Khasak, and it is a disgrace that he was never awarded the Jnanpith.

Few writers, after all, can claim to have changed the course of the history of writing in a language with their very first book.

Khasakinte Itihasam was serialised in the late sixties, and by the time the fourth or fifth installment came out, readers had begun to grasp that something was being born in their midst.

Vijayan said once that the book grew out of an image and a landscape; he wrote it, he said, with the sound of the winds whistling through Palakkad in his head.

He was often compared to writers like Manuel Puig and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and it is interesting to read The Legends of Khasak in the light of a comment by Garcia Marquez.

He was speaking of returning to his village after an absence; like Vijayan, distance brought a kind of clarity.

"I felt that I wasn't really looking at the village," said Garcia Marquez, "but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the houses, the people, and the memories".

The Legends of Khasak begins with Ravi, the outsider who comes to Khasak in order to be the first teacher the small place has ever had.

There are echoes of Vijayan's experiences in Ravi's life, but Khasak was much more than a semi-autobiographical first novel. Through Ravi's eyes, Vijayan presented a shifting view of a small town in flux, where each inhabitant has a story to tell.

There is Appu-Killi, the local idiot affectionately known as the Parrot, whose decision to convert to Islam has repercussions that are rapidly sorted out: "The Parrot was to be allowed the freedom of both religions. For certain days of the week he could be Muslim. For the rest he could be a Hindu. If necessary, Hindu, Muslim and Parrot all at the same time."

Ghosts and spirits co-exist with district administration officials, smallpox epidemics and outbreaks of lice infestations are treated with equal seriousness; religious dilemmas and personal dramas make up the ebb and flow of life in Khasak.

He could write about infinity and the most domestic of trials in the same breath. Vijayan packed so much into the relatively slender space of this first novel that, over three decades later, we are still discovering new epiphanies in Khasak.

He made a comment once about his work as a cartoonist that could also serve as a writer's explanation: "An indescribable sadness permeates the reality that I am supposed to describe, but nonetheless the prevailing superstition about my profession requires that I make people laugh."

Readers took to Khasak; the establishment took a while longer, not quite sure what to make of it""one critic tells me that The Legends of Khasak was dubbed "ultramodern" because the term "postmodern" had yet to make its way into the lexicon of discourse in Malayalam.

There are apocryphal stories about readers who badgered puzzled men at railway station counters, demanding a ticket to Khasak. It was useless to tell these souls that Khasak did not exist, or to fob them off with stories about Khasak being based on Palakkad; Khasak, to the faithful, was even more real than Palakkad.

It was in the next few years, just before the Emergency cast its shadow across India, that Vijayan wrote some of his strongest, most scathing work.

He was by then a disillusioned man: his faith in communism as an ideal had been shaken, his faith in humanity was steadily eroding. He didn't believe in civilisation any more, or in revolution: these concepts and ideals had failed too many, too often.

Dharmapuranam, translated as The Saga of Dharmapuri, emerged from this period, a time when modern India appeared to have betrayed its idea of itself.

It opens with a meditation on the Presidential bowels, with the ministers and the subjects of Dharmapuri engrossed in contemplation of the products thereof.

They discuss the Presidential s***; they reflect on the meaning of its form; and finally, the more assiduous of the courtiers eat s***. And that was for openers; The Saga of Dharmapuri is a satire so biting that Jonathan Swift would have been proud to have been its author.

Dharmapuri was to begin serialisation in early 1975""in June, the Emergency was imposed, and the book "went into hiding", to use Vijayan's phrase.

He rewrote some parts, intensifying the satire here, toning it down there, and it was eventually serialised again in 1977. But it was only published in 1985 in book form; as with Khasak, Vijayan was writing well ahead of his time.

There were other books, including gems like Generations and brilliant short stories.

Most writers would be content to write one immortal work, but Vijayan had begun his career with two. And of his short stories, the one that resonates most in our times is a piece called The Wart.

Like The Foetus, it was inspired by Sanjay Gandhi's excesses, but it is an allegory that applies to the powerful anywhere, in any age. The Wart is about a man who discovers a wart on his face one day; the wart grows until finally it encompasses the man.

It is the perfect image, from a man who could translate awe, terror, compassion and human frailty into great writing. Towards the end of his life, friends reported that his hands shook almost too much from illness to allow him to take up the pen and write or draw.

But by then, he had said more of importance than most writers will say in a lifetime.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com