Angry readers shot off deprecating letters when Sethu’s Pandavapuram began to be serialised in the Mathrubhumi weekly soon after it had published, in instalments, the celebrated novel of Lalithambika Antharjanam, Agnisakshi .
For regular fiction readers fed on conventional narratives, the time-space arrangement of Pandavapuram was a little too aberrant and, therefore, off-putting. But, there were others who thought the time-space condensation as if in a dream, a nightmare rather, made it a masterpiece. Forty years hence, time has proved them right.
“Through its several readings in many languages, the novel has grown far beyond its author,” reckons an ecstatic Sethu.
“Suffice it to say that I’m flattered. I wrote it in 1976, but it was serialised in the weekly a year later, on the heels of Agnisakshi . Padmarajan’s Udakappola was being carried by Malayalanatu around the same time,” recalls Sethu, as the Turkish rendering of the work is getting ready.
It has already been translated into seven other languages and has had 20 editions in Malayalam.
“I’m not a critic to analyse a work, but I realised that it was not run of the mill. It was different. That was why I took it,” says writer M.T. Vasudevan Nair, who edited the weekly at that time.
A few years into its publication — it was released in book form in 1979 — the work acquired iconic status, what with the readers making their own frenzied journeys into the surreal place of ‘Pandavapuram’ in search of peace.
A consolation
“Pandavapuram is a consolation – only a consolation. Pandavapuram takes shape in those minds that are in need of consolation,” is how the writer has described the place that is at once real and a figment of a feverish mind’s imagination.
“It’s the mindscape of Devi, the central character who desperately seeks out the reason for her plight, that I sought to sketch. No one is prepared to show her a proper answer.
“It sends her off on a delirious, tortuous journey into a non-existent, imaginative past that would justify her unfair present. She finds relief in that imaginary space,” says Sethu. As it dawns on Devi in her interior monologues, everyone is in search of a logical past to justify their present, and creates their own Pandavapuram — where a sickeningly ripe yellow populace abounds with saffron-clad paramours!
It is, however, not just the story that has caught the fancy of the reading Malayalis. The novel’s space-time deployment — space is in a jumble, as time moves vertically and horizontally simultaneously — that has made it a gripping modern classic.
A literary masterpiece, the novel never really lost its currency.
