C. Anoop’s 3 Kalangal is a man writing about a male world and in the process seeing images, people and situations that have a masculine slant of perception. Invoking a male canon of writing from O.V. Vijayan to Paul Zacharia, the world of the stories is perpetuated by characters from a male literary tradition in Malayalam who are nevertheless facing challenges from new critical perspectives and readings. Thus in a tale that speaks about the deconstruction of love, explicitly titled ‘Pranayathinte Apanirmanam’, the female student of a conventional male academic challenges Adoor’s reading of Zacharia’s Bhaskara Pattelarum Ente Jeevithavum by saying that the real hero of the novel is the marginalised female character.
In the process she rattles the conventional mindset of the professor but finally plays into the stereotypical image of a ‘feminist’ in Kerala whom no man desires as wife.
There are 29 stories in this collection. Many of them put together convey a sense of the journey of the artist as a boy and then a young man. Thus it reveals numerous initiation ceremonies that reveal the crucial transformations in a writer’s understanding of his cultural codes and his quest for ways of representing bodies and desires.
For example the first story titled ‘Vaisheekam’ has two young students going in search of the favours of a sex worker. The epiphanic climax is the realisation on looking into the mirror that the face there does not correspond with the face that looked back prior to the foray into the bylanes of desire.
From emotional to psychological and sexual initiations as also literary ones, the numerous boys and men in Anoop’s fictional world become conditioned to work like men, feel like men and react like men. No wonder that the locales are largely all exclusive masculine domains like bars and brothels where the female presence is either minimal or commoditised.
Many of these stories are olfactory in nature, which make them a refreshing experience to savour. Fragrances, smells which are linked to memories, bodies and emotions have a curious effect on the reading process as many of these stories reveal.
An analysis of the olfactory landscapes of these stories, the way in which Anoop’s characters are drowned in their sense of smell provide important aspects of the Malayali’s gender stereotypes.
These are cinematic stories, primarily visual, and often haunted by a discourse of male eros. However, while adopting traditional machismo styles the writer also seems to recognise its limitations and parodies it, thus breaking away from the self deceptions it creates in a changed social milieu.
Thus, as the stories progress they become less masculine, less concerned with modernist preoccupations with the virile male self with its accompanying fears of emasculation, in the process becoming more fluid in their engagements with identity.
A story like ‘Murukkaan Kaalam’ is punctuated by a son’s existential dilemmas and how he draws succour from his mother’s robust sense of the feminine. ‘Napoleonte Poocha’ is a psychoanalytic reading of the fragile constructs around masculinity.
These stories reveal a complex and complicated terrain of gender and sexuality in Kerala today. From the popular imaginations around the expectations of a virile male persona to a contemporary crisis in masculinity, they chart the agonies and ecstasies of being men in our modern society. They also reveal an anxiety of authorship, probably stemming from a new self-consciousness on the part of our writers.
3 Kalangal
C. Anoop
Chinta Publishers
Rs. 180
