When Amitav Ghosh, the distinguished novelist visited Chennai recently, one of the questions asked of him was whether the next Indian Nobel Laureate for literature will come from Indo-anglian writing or from regional literature. Ghosh replied that Regional writing in India has produced outstanding works, but these are hardly known to the world outside. He said that the Sahitya Akademis which were established to promote regional writing, need to play a more significant role in providing translations of major works in Indian language writing into English and other languages.
He cited the example of Latin American literature which has captured the world's attention through extensive translations.
In spite of winning a pan-India award like The Jnanpith, S.K. Pottekkat's genius is hardly known outside Kerala because of the limitation of language. In many ways, Pottekkat was a writer far ahead of his times.
In one of his early works Vishakanyaka , published in the 1940s, Pottekkat deals with the theme of land and migration, which are often seen as 21st century issues.
Globe-trotter
Unusual for a Malayalam writer of his times, Pottekkat travelled around the world on a shoe-string budget and saw people as much as places from close range and produced some of the finest travelogues in Malayalam literature.
He observed the poor Malayalee migrants struggling hard to make a living in foreign countries — a pavement hawker in Jakarta, a railway porter in Mombasa and a Malayalee nurse, keeping the flame of life alive in a hospital in strife-torn Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe).
He also wrote many stories drawing from his experiences in other countries.
His fiction had thus a universal flavour. Unlike his distinguished contemporaries like Takazhi, Keshav Dev and Basheer whose themes were generally based on social injustice and class struggle, Pottekkat looked at individual lives caught up in complex situations.
Pottekkat's stories were also marked by a delicious sense of humour, whereas the prevailing mood was one of anger and frustration against an unjust social order.
In his later works, with an intense sense of nostalgia, Pottekkat made his home town Kozhikode, the centre piece of his fiction and like Arundhati Roy's Aymenom , immortalised Kozhikode through two of his works — Oru Theruvinte Katha (the story of a street) and Oru Deshathinte Katha (the story of a locale). The latter won him the Jnanpith Award in 1980.
Dr. K. Parameswaran has now rendered some of Pottekkat's delightful stories into English in a volume titled Twelve Stories .
The collection contains such vintage. Pottekkat likes “The story of a timepiece” and “The Camel”.
“The story of a timepiece” is a hilarious tale of an eccentric Scottish national, McCarthy, who works as a manager of an estate in Wayanad in Kerala. McCarthy once caught a female employee smuggling out a timepiece, but instead of punishing her, he married her.
Later, after his wife dies unexpectedly, McCarthy returns to England, but makes an extraordinary effort to get the timepiece parceled to England to preserve it as a memento to his wife's memory.
Character profile
Pottekkat's remarkable skill in profiling his characters, is evident in “The Camel”. The hero of the story, an impoverished cart puller, is named after the animal because “the way he stretches his neck, sniffs from both sides and glances either ways!”, the story has found its way into several anthologies of Indian writing.
The pathos and poverty of the times are reflected in stories like “The silk dress” and “The old coat”.
“The statue”, “The gift”, “An African fable” are set in foreign locations and reflects the range of Pottekkat's fiction.
Dr. Parameswaran's translations capture the discipline of Pottekkat's craft and his compelling language. Anyone who goes through Twelve Stories , may want to read more of Pottekkat's fiction.
2013 marks the birth centenary of S.K. Pottekkat and that may be an occasion for the Kerala's Sahitya Akademi and the Pottekkat Trust to bring out a comprehensive volume of one of the most accomplished of Malayalam writers.
