He was an impressionable sixteen when he met Mahatma Gandhi; the encounter had such an impact on him that he ran away to join Congress workers in Calicut. Six years later, in 1930, he was arrested for playing an active role in the salt march at Calicut, tortured and imprisoned for a year. In one of his best-known stories, Walls, his narrator writes: "One must make some small sacrifice for the sake of Literature. In the cause of the country's freedom, I have been beaten up several times. With great tenderness, I have been pushed to the ground by rifle butts in my chest and dragged through the streets. And several times I have landed in jail. But this time? This time, a prison sentence for Literature itself!... When I thought about it, I felt some pride." |
Basheer spent the next decade in virtual exile from Kerala, for his anti-British writings and activities. By all accounts, he enjoyed his time as a wanderer. He spent much of this time in disguise, in order to escape the notice of British spies; he was quite successful at posing in turns as a wandering mendicant and an astrologer, and seems to have enjoyed being a magician's assistant, running a tea shop and assisting an herbalist at different times. He worked as a khalasi and traveled up to Jeddah, then returned by land across modern-day Pakistan. This was followed by a period where he distributed an early spiritual curiosity equally between Islam, Hinduism and Christianity. He joined a band of Sufis, learned meditation among the sanyasis.
In the 1940s, he was arrested by the British and imprisoned once more. Released, he became first a writer of potboilers "" pieces and novellas dashed off in the hope that he would earn some money "" and then a respected writer. He started Basheer's Book Stall in a spirit of entrepreneurship. Then, in the 1950s, he had what other people politely called a nervous breakdown, and what he, with typical bluntness, referred to as the time when he went mad. He spent several years as a patient in an institution; then recovered, married, continued to write.
That brief biography does him no justice, though it might give the reader who hasn't yet been lucky enough to find Basheer some sense of the man's appetite for life, and his frailties. The volume of work he left behind at his death in 1994 was considerable, and he would have been the first to admit it was uneven. He wrote some of his work for money, some for entertainment, and one at least while he was emerging from madness (Pathumma's Goat).
Though he was a contemporary of Thakkazhi's, among other great writers, Basheer's work had something in common with the Latin writers "" he would have been at home with Julio Cortazar and Mario Vargas Llosa. He shared with them not so much the fascination with surrealism as an ability to imagine the bizarre within an utterly normal context.
In one of his short stories, a Muslim dog romances a Hindu bitch, is mauled by other Hindu dogs and takes to "anti-Hindu gestures", biting humans-but only of the Hindu faith. Few stories have mocked the obsession with faith and identity with such brevity. In 'Me Grandad 'ad an Elephant', Kunjupathumma grows up inside a community so obsessed with the past it has no time for the present. And one of the most striking sentences in 'Walls' (which was made into a film by Adoor Gopalakrishnan) is the one where, finally released, the prisoner hesitates: "Outside is an even bigger jail."
Few writers charted the sacred and the profane with such equal relish, and such equal understanding. But of all the stories told about Basheer in jail, Basheer in love, Basheer starving in his writing days, Basheer in the grip of madness, Basheer the wandering seeker, this one stays with me. In his early years as a writer, his rough, deliberately street Malayalam was often re-translated by editors into the more polished phrases of "literary" Malayalam. Basheer raged against this: "Your silly stupid grammar!" he wrote. He was interested in the way people spoke, not in the way they were supposed to speak; in the way their lives really were, not in the way they were supposed to be.
