Thakazhi's KAYAR: Stories, Narrative and History
in a Malayalam modern epic

 

My current work in Kerala (South India) is both ethnographic and linguistic. I have been engaged in the study of a saga (both a novel and a modern epic), composed between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s in Malayalam by the most celebrated Malayalam writer, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai (1912-1999), consciously modelled on the Mahabharata, which retells in 1,000 densely printed pages the social, political and cultural history of Kuttanad, a district of North Travancore famous both for its polders reclaimed from the backwaters for rice cultivation and for its being the birthplace of communism in South India. The voices of hundreds of characters over four generations, in this novel, bring back to life an axial period (1885-1971) during which feudalism, matriliny and bonded labor gave place to conjugal life, everyone’s access to a piece of land, decolonization and the industrial revolution of the 1960s. The fact that the master narrative of this axial period was told in Malayalam by a Nayar or Nair (the land-owning caste) who turned communist, and a writer who made a living as a modern lawyer (perfectly at ease with English) but who had been trained in classical Kathakali (music-dance-drama) and other genres of verbal art, is indeed part of the story. That’s why linguistic anthropology, here, is a key to ethnohistory and anthropology at large.

 

Stories, narrative, and “stories in the story”

I am purposely using the words stories (hundreds of short-stories interwoven into the flow of collective history), narrative (one master narrative, the advent of Independence and communism), and epic (a literary genre called upakhyaana in Sanskrit, weaving many subplots or “stories in the story,” which is consciously modelled by Thakazhi on the Mahaabhaarata).

Kayar is coir in English: the fibers of the coconut. The title image is that of hundreds of life histories interwoven into the thread of History.

 

Deixis shift, or Metalepsis

One literary technique resorted to by Thakazhi to graft fiction onto historical facts is to introduce deictic shifts into the master narrative. Let me give an example of this narrative process which revolves around a ‘Historical Event’ in the Kingdom of Travancore, late October 1939. The real historical chronology is given below, but, for fiction's sake, students agitation and the clashes with the police that happened in October 1939 have been mixed up with the assassination attempt of July 25, 1947, as explained below:

1929  The Great Depression and the Revenue Settlement of 1929 made the life of the farmers, tenant cultivators and agricultural laborers miserable. Emigration to Malaysia (Kayar, chapters 98 &ff.).

1934  First general strike of coir factory workers in Alleppey.
Socialists (communists) win control of the Kerala Provincial Congress Committee.

1st October 1936   C. P. Ramaswamy Aiyer is appointed Dewan (prime minister) of Travancore

12 November 1936  The Temple Entry Proclamation allows temple entry to all Hindu communities.

January 1937   Gandhi visits his followers in Travancore.

late August 1938   Neyyattinkara Firing: The police opens fire on a March (jatha) of 20,000 people led by Akkamma Cheriyan (1909-1982). Students agitation, schools and colleges are closed.

1939   Second World War begins.

late October 1939   Sir C.P. Shashtiabdapoorthy (60st birthday) Celebrations.

Schools and colleges have been closed. Communist students chop the nose of C.P.’s statue erected at a central crossroads in Trivandrum. This event is recounted in Kayar, ch. 102, where the two most salient characters, Viswanathan and Manikanthan, represent respectively N. Sreekantan Nair and Thakazhi himself. In the diegesis (la diégèse) of Kayar, ie., in the space-time of the story, the main culprit, Viswanathan, Manikanthan’s close friend from childhood, scorns Manikanthan for not joining the attack: “You coward!” (a real fact in their life history but which took place when they were students in Trivandrum in the early thirties).

From a historical point of view, the late October 1939 attack simply prefigures the 25 July 1947 assassination attempt. From a literary point of view, Thakazhi, exploiting the repetition pattern linking the two events which in itself has an epic dimension,[1] creates a typical example of deixis shift or metalepsis (métalepse),[2] ie., of transgression of the boundaries between the space-time of the story (fiction), the space-time of history (two different historical events in 1939 and 1947), and the space-time of the writer (his memories of his college life and socialist student activities in the early thirties).  

(Census, 1941 : Travancore pop. 6.1 millions. 40% Lower-caste Hindus, 32% Christians, 21% Higher-caste Hindus, 7%  Muslims)

1942   Quit India Movement. In Kuttanad, food shortages, strikes in the paddy-fields, and foundation of the Karshaka Thozhilali Sangham (a farm workers’ association).

October 1946  The Punnapra and Vayalar communist uprising.

25 July 1947  Assassination attempt on C. P. Ramaswamy Aiyar, the Dewan of Travancore, who consequently resigns his position. One of the culprits, N. Sreekantan Nair (who takes refuge in Bombay to escape police capture), was Thakazhi’s close friend from childhood and, at the end of a distinguished political career (in communist governments from 1957 onward), will eventually be the English translator of Kayar.

15 August 1947  Independance of India.

30 January 1948  Assassination of Gandhi.

 

[1] See Attipat K. Ramanujan [1929-1993], Repetition in the Mahâbhârata [1968], repr. in [A. K. Ramanujan,] The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan, New Delhi, Oxford UP, 1999.

[2] See any textbook in narratology, and in French: Gérard Genette, Métalepse. De la figure à la fiction, Paris, Seuil, 2004.