The man, the legend, the tash: Review of S. Hareesh’s ‘Moustache’

The novel is thought-provoking, if problematic. And it is slightly let down by an overly literal translation

I confess that I couldn’t quite finish S. Hareesh’s Moustache the first time I tried reading it in the original Malayalam. There was something a little off about the gender dynamics, and I don’t mean the ultimately innocuous throwaway comment about women going to temples, which whipped up such an outsized controversy that it instantly catapulted the book to fame.

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I mean the way in which the rape of Seetha, quite early in the novel, is couched in the language of power and given to us as the protagonist’s perspective.

I mean the way in which the author’s avatar — a writer who, in a parallel narrative decades in the future, is telling his son stories about Moustache — at one point launches into a little eyeroll-worthy, woe-is-me aside about the unvalued existence of men. It’s evocative of a certain type of —

moustache -twirling — Malayali masculinity that’s already fetishised far too much.

Mythic proportions

But this is all part and parcel of a story that revolves around the power relations embodied in the titular facial appendage. At a

time when we’ve been hearing about Dalit men being assaulted for having the temerity to ride a horse or wear a moustache, Hareesh tells the tale of a young Dalit man, Vavachan (aka Moustache), whose moustache assumes mythic proportions and becomes a character in its own right.

It makes its first appearance when Vavachan has a brief role as a policeman in a play, and it decides to stay with him. It/ he soon grows into a figure of power — and, for the upper-caste hierarchy, terror — as he becomes both hunted fugitive and living legend in the region of Kuttanad. Even his rape of Seetha plays, distastefully, into this caste conflict, as she is a woman of a higher caste who had earlier verbally abused Vavachan and his father. Increasingly fabulous local legends spring up in his footsteps, and at one point he tangles with the god of death.

It’s both as a story of caste and as the story of a land and its people that this book invites comparison with that other famed novel of Kuttanad — Kayar (Coir)by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai. In many respects, Moustache is what Coir is not; the two complement each other. Thakazhi is all social realism; Hareesh’s fabulism knows little restraint. Coir goes into the evolution of the region’s human society in great depth, backed up by forbidding legal and agrarian research; Moustache makes the land, the living creatures and the waterways of Kuttanad come alive.

Coir is at its core an upper-caste tale of Nairs and Syrian Christians; it does have lower-caste narratives, but they are a little dissatisfying. Moustache has well-developed Dalit characters in addition to the protagonist and narrates their struggles from their points of view, not through an upper-caste lens.

Jarring at places

The translation by Jayasree Kalathil is accurate but a tad turgid. In the translator’s note, she says that she hasn’t tried to imitate the lyrical rhythms of Hareesh’s writing; it might have been better had she done so. Some footnotes might also have been useful as there are a lot of untranslated Malayalam terms. The dialogue often lapses into a certain staid, formal English that’s at odds with the richly dialectal delivery you find in the Malayalam.

The literal translation of idioms is particularly jarring. For example, when the writer, accused of being a fascist, bursts out with, “His mother’s fascism!” — it’s an understood expression in Malayalam, but could have been rendered in a more idiomatic manner in English. And the very literal translation of Ponnuthamburan as ‘His Golden Majesty’ is a real howler; ponnu here is just a term of affection and loyalty towards the king, more ‘Dear’ than ‘Golden’.

In the Malayalam version of O.V. Vijayan’s classic, The Legends of Khasak , there’s a little exchange where a shopkeeper is asked for ice and replies that he doesn’t have any — but he does have water that’s even colder than ice! The humour of this comes through in a certain context, a certain dialect; Vijayan chose not to translate it literally when he rendered his novel into English.

rohan.m@thehindu.co.in

Moustache; S. Hareesh, trs Jayasree Kalathil, Harper Perennial India, ₹599