Jorge Luis Borges’s contention that folklore is the most refined form of storytelling finds a resounding echo in the fictional world of Malayalam writer S. Hareesh, many of whose short stories illustrate this. It is also the defining tenet of his novel, Meesha (translated into English as Moustache , which was awarded the JCB Prize for Literature recently ), a subversive epic set in Kuttanad of pre-independence Kerala.
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Kerala’s Macondo
“In writing, it is perfectly acceptable to picture the Bengal tiger as three-legged or as speaking Sanskrit,” the narrator of Meesha insists, quoting Borges, underlining the distinction between fiction and bare fact. The narrative is shaped like a medieval ballad where fact and fantasy are inseparably entwined. Teeming with larger-than-life characters, shape-shifters and anthropomorphic creatures, the ballad form lends credence to the novel’s phantasmagorical occurrences unfolding in central Travancore’s feudal society at a time when caste and gender reigned supreme there in ways inconceivable now.
Hareesh drew inspiration from Chengannooradi , a ballad of over 7,000 lines about a local hero, popularised by Mariamma chedathy , a sweeper at St. Berchmans College in Changanassery. In it he found the idea of the unlikely lowborn protagonist, Vavachan, a legend-fugitive who comes to possess the imagination of the high-bred and the lowborn alike. The novel’s setting is a character in itself, preventing Vavachan from escaping to Malaysia and where, as in a Russian folktale, he takes cover from a hailstorm under a large mushroom, which is really a dead sibling reborn.
Hareesh says that as a young reader he relished the edgy excitement of yakshi fables, the compelling narration of the Arabian Nights and the Kathasaritsagara, besides local lores. All these went well with the servings of contemporary Latin American writing in Malayalam translation that were readily available in his formative years in the 1980s. He devoured Borges, Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Juan Rulfo, with Mario Vargas Llosa his favourite.
Their influence was so sweeping that he featured them all — “creators of labyrinths that trap people” — along with some of their famous characters like Fermina Daza in a story about a carpenter’s phantom in his debut collection. But he remained loyal to his very own Macondo — Kuttanad — which transforms into a multidimensional character in Meesha . A village clerk by profession, Hareesh never left his native Neendoor, part of Upper Kuttanad in Kottayam district, always keeping an ear to its fecund ground.
Sense of transience
“It’s a fantastic place. For instance, St. Mary of the Manarcad Church and the devi of a nearby temple are believed to be siblings who visit each other furtively at night,” says Hareesh. He speaks of how he once heard someone being called ‘ ilu’ . “I had no clue what it meant, but was later told that it referred to the pointless Malayalam letter pronounced ilu that is seldom used, to suggest that the fellow was good for nothing!” It’s this linguistic and practical resourcefulness that is the source of the sardonic, irreverent, ribald and sexist humour of Hareesh’s characters.
But underneath the profanity and vileness run a strain of pathos and an acute sense of transience. A character whose bookish father had an unseemly death when a wall of books crashed on him eventually reconciles with what his father was after, and begins to battle Ulysses, “ like a soldier in the face of certain defeat”.
How caste manifests itself in daily life is a recurring theme. Subterranean tension arising from conflicting caste identities marks the story of a Nair-Ezhava love marriage spun around the image of the social reformer, Sree Narayana Guru, who is almost always identified with the powerful Ezhava community, considered a notch below the Nairs in the pecking order.
Caste and gender violence in Meesha are visceral, and add to a subversive plot that’s punctuated by elaborate descriptions of the process of defecation and ablutions. Hareesh isn’t judgemental about his characters, who act out of free will and therefore embody the male toxicity, gender violence, caste prejudices and feral greed for power in society. This lack of political correctness invited the wrath of the Sangh Parivar and caste outfits like the Nair Service Society, stopping Meesha from being serialised in the Mathrubhumi weekly.
Happy with the success of Moustache , Hareesh says his translator, Jayasree Kalathil, co-wrote and reinvented the work in English. “At no point was I apprehensive about the translation, as Kalathil has the mind of a writer. Having deciphered certain not-so-apparent links in the work, she was its best reader,” he says.
anandan.s@thehindu.co.in
