Bard of Malabar: The chronicler of our times

A quarter century of Kerala’s social and cultural history spilled over into his pages. His quill marked one of the most trenchant of instruments that recorded the heart throbs of Malabar’s experience of modernity and fired the imaginations of Malayalies for many many decades.  Novelist, science writer, journalist, social and cultural critic, film maker, C. Radhakrishnan is probably a worthy recipient of this year's Ezhuthachan Award instituted in memory of the progenitor of Malayalam language and literature. As one of the writers of the twentieth century, who with marked responsibility charted the passage of Malayalam language and literature into the twenty-first century, his literary oeuvre has shown a certain resilience that helps it stand the test of time.

His language is earthy, its music is colloquial and fresh, his prose is robust and organic, resonating with the myriad fragrances of this land, its vibrant cultural history. He records with precision and economy the trials and travails of some of the most crucial decades of social transformation in Kerala history. His novels like Ellam Maykkunna Kadal and Puzha Muthal Puzha Vare tell the tale of a land that slowly shifts pace into another era of new kinship ties, modern registers of individual and familial patterns, and new forms of labour and capital. The fading away of a matrilineal society, the agony and ecstasy of yielding to new ways of living, the angst of the self caught in acute social upheavals, are all gently captured by this writer, without once losing their irresistible paradoxes, the irony and pathos of the infinite tragedies and comedies that weave the magic of life. His novels are preludes to the angst of a lost generation, narrated in a clear and intense voice, resonating with an intimate tangibility that is at once poignant and evocative.

However, with the passing of age and the exigencies of changing times he reinvented his literary muse to talk about ecological concerns, the need for a scientific spirit, and the necessity to bring in a critical rigour into the most creative of endeavours. He updated his literary idiom for the usage of a new generation, for newer and more pressing times.  Spandamapinikale Nandi, Munpe Parakkunna Pakshikal among numerous other works intertwine private and public destinies, shaping a sense of our political unconscious. Even while revealing the current crisis within secular democracy, his fiction also weaves alongside it the utter vulnerability of the universal human condition. Every observation of C. Radhakrishnan’s has gone into the Malayali's social and literary imagination with the intensity and freshness of a new wave. He has honed Malayalam’s literary style, pushed the limits of its realism, enriched its dialogues, reveled in its vernacular idiom, and alerted his readers to the politicality of literature.

(The writer is Director, Centre for Cultural Studies University of Kerala)