An Unwritten National Autobiography

As connoisseurs of literature, especially Malayalam literature, across the world mourn the passing of MT Vasudevan Nair, The AIDEM presents excerpts from the early chapters of the maestro’s authorised biography in English written by Venkitesh Ramakrishnan, Managing Editor of The AIDEM. The draft of the biography titled “An Unwritten National Autobiography”, is pending final clearance with a group of Book Editors. The biographer has subtitled the introductory chapter as follows: 

On MT Vasudevan Nair’s ‘Unwritten National Autobiography’, which can be read through his body of work as a whole as well as through his pregnant, and at times diplomatic, silences.

Virginia Woolf summed up the plight of a biographer when she observed “a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand.” This observation was made way back in 1940 while the celebrated modernist author was working on the biography of artist Roger Fry, her only attempt at chronicling a life story. Given Woolf’s body of work, there can be little doubt that the element of poetic license has played some role in the assertion about a biographer’s subject having a thousand selves. But, any biographer who goes about his or her work with “due diligence“ would vouchsafe that this is a distinct possibility and not just a figment of some wild imagination.

The manner in which myriad facets of a persona unravels is a real, tangible experience in any effort to put together an earnest, substantive biography. Woolf’s assertion acquires new meanings and dimensions if you are trying to chronicle the life of someone like Madath Thekkepat Vasudevan Nair or MT Vasudevan Nair or just MT, as phonated by countless admirers and followers of this legend of Malayalam literature. Of course, you tend to agree with Woolf, but overwhelmingly so, because every one of the countless selves in MT manifests not just conspicuously but also captivatingly and commandingly. So much so, the narrator is time and again under spells of discombobulation. I have gone through these awe-struck spells intermittently over the last 16 years, the period through which I have carried on this attempt to record the manifold facets of MT Vasudevan Nair’s life and times.

Severally, and in what could be termed as an order of priority, MT Vasudevan Nair’s persona – or at least the ones that are apparent to the world – could be described as follows. He is primarily a writer, overwhelmingly a writer of fiction, a master of the forms of the novel and the short-story. His praxis rendered a new sensibility in both these genres to the robust modern Malayalam literature, having its roots in the small South Indian State of Kerala, known internationally for its unique, unparalleled social development and demographic transition as well as for the significant resonances to global ideas and influences, especially in politics, literature and cinema. The new sensibility that MT brought to the Malayalam novel and the short story spanned form and content as well as the inexplicable beauty and rhythm of the language as reflected in literature. Along with fiction, forays into non-fiction commentary on contemporary and historical aspects of the world is also part of MT’s oeuvre. This too is marked by an inimitable style of writing that captures the innate and subtle nuances of a given situation or personalities involved therein, in a language and in a manner without parallel. In short, MT’s occupation with the written word has added tremendous value to the prose in the Malayalam language. 

MT does ‘vidyarabham’ for a child 

Then, MT is a much awarded film-maker, who once again pioneered and strengthened one particular stream of Neo-realist cinema in India. He is also the most illustrious literary Editor that the journalism in Kerala has seen in its history. At least two generations of new writers owe their place in the limelight to this truly perceptive Editor, whose journalistic initiatives not merely promoted Malayalam literature’s forays into modernism but literally galvanized it. In the process, during his period, the magazine that he anchored became a lustrous reflector and facilitator of Kerala modernity and its multihued influences. Yet another manifest attribute of MT is as an institution builder, particularly of cultural institutions that have proactively sought – with varying degrees of success – to rebuild the essence of the social and cultural trends often described as the Kerala Renaissance.

The most important among the series of institution- building endeavours that has marked his life is the revival and restructuring of the Thunchath Ezhuthachan memorial, at Tirur in north Kerala. The memorial is named after Thunchath Ezhuthachan, the “father of Malayalam language”. who not only evolved the 51 character alphabet system for Malayalam equivalent to Sanskrit, but also made contributions to refine its style and imparted an “individuality” of its own and helped make it a “fully fledged” independent language. Thunchath Ezhuthachan memorial was an institution originally set up in 1964. It came under the leadership of MT in 1993 and since then the institution has become a symbol of the vibrancy and diversity of Kerala’s cultural pursuits and engagements. Along with all this, MT has also been a direct participant in important social movements in Kerala. However, these participations have been decided after much contemplation and were advanced very, very selectively. 

The MT Phenomenon and Kerala’s Development Paradigms 

The collective effect of these diverse streams can only be termed as the MT phenomenon, which has held sway over several successive generations of literary connoisseurs, cultural aesthetes and social observers in the 20th and 21st centuries. In chronological terms, this is an effect that has been conspicuous right through the nearly seven decades that Kerala has existed as a State in the sovereign republic of India. More importantly, this effect has had significant reverberations in all aspects of the social and cultural life of Kerala. The depth and expanse of the phenomenon is such that if MT had chosen to write his autobiography it would have qualified to be read as the ‘social, cultural and socio-economic national autobiography’ of Kerala. A “national autobiography” that would capture all the strengths of this distinctive region in engaging with the concept of modernity as well as the pitfalls it has suffered periodically in the course of this multi-dimensional engagement.

These divergent streams in Kerala’s development experience, especially their social, economic and cultural manifestations, are encapsulated, along with their ingrained nuances, in MT Vasudevan Nair’s large body of work, as also in some of the dimensions of his individual life. It is in this background that MT’s work and his life qualify to be termed as “the unwritten national autobiography” of Kerala.

Kerala’s uniqueness as a geographical region and socio-cultural entity has been recorded and acknowledged at diverse levels globally, even leading to the creation of the buzz phrase the ‘Kerala Model of development‘. Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen propagated what he termed as the “Kerala experience in development“ and highlighted some of the processes through which a small State, with a not-so-robust economy and low per capita income achieved indicators of social development comparable to those of many developed countries. The social development indicators of international standards reflect in low infant mortality, low population growth, high levels of literacy and life expectancy, better managed land reforms resulting in relatively more effective land distribution to the landless as compared to the other States of India. A concrete consequence of the impact of all these indicators is in the enhanced political participation and activism among ordinary people emphasizing a largely decentralized and democratized political structure. 

But, as in the case of the many “developing nations” that have shaken off colonial political control and sought to engage with “freedom, progress and modernity” ‘,Kerala’s development experience too is not unidimensional. The discontents of Kerala modernity have manifested in variegated forms and themes including the globally discussed “modernity versus coloniality” debate. This has come up in Kerala repeatedly over several decades with the emphasis that the very ideas that have dominated Kerala’s precepts on modernity and even the idea of the Kerala Renaissance are dictated by the hegemonic ideas from Europe, which have cemented a model of global power and hierarchical structure concentrating all forms of control, including subjectivity, culture and production of knowledge. These debates have underscored the importance of accepting multiple modernities, especially those that assimilate traditional modes of knowledge production. However, the question whether this emphasis by itself has produced salutary effects in the larger, mainstream Kerala society does not evoke uniformly positive replies.

The manifestations of this dichotomy in everyday life are manifold. For instance, the influence of modernity in Kerala has led to greater conceptual awareness about environmental issues among people, but almost every river including the Nila – that flows through MT’s native village and has been marked by MT himself as the muse for his creativity – is practically “dead or dying” having been divested of its natural being by the rapacious ‘sand mafia’ promoted by the powerful builders’ lobby. An important component of the people’s struggles in the early stages of the engagement with modernity were to attain a respectable standard of living through materialistic advancements. In the early years of freedom from colonialism, these efforts were marked also by a secular engagement that brought together very many communities and sub-communities in joint efforts for this materialistic gain. However, as the communities progressively attained a better “standard of living”, the secular engagement with modernity gave way to insular and sectarian assertions of identity. Thus, the pursuit of materialistic gains and decent living as visualized in the context of modernity were themselves becoming instruments to challenge, and at times, even overthrow the spirit of progressiveness. These divergent streams in Kerala’s development experience, especially their social, economic and cultural manifestations, are encapsulated, along with their ingrained nuances, in MT Vasudevan Nair’s large body of work, as also in some of the dimensions of his individual life. It is in this background that MT’s work and his life qualify to be termed as “the unwritten national autobiography” of Kerala. 

What is a National Autobiography? 

When and how does an autobiography become a ‘national autobiography’? There are no definitive or straightforward answers to this evidently intricate question. Yet, there is little doubt that musings on the concept of ‘national autobiography‘, breached new frontiers in the summer of 2008 when Philip Holden’s “Autobiography and Decolonization” was published (by the University of Wisconsin Press). In this seminal work Holden analyses the autobiographies of seven legendary leaders of the Third World – Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography, Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound, Marcus Garvey’s fragmentary Autobiography, Lee Kuan Yew’s The Singapore Story and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah – and postulates how the narration of their individual lives from their own perspective turns out to be a narrative of the social, socio-economic and political trajectory of the country and its people. 

At its core, Holden emphasizes, these autobiographies are bound together by a wider, global thematic range despite being set in six different countries – Gandhi’s and Nehru’s autobiographies are set in India, with such varied history and culture that the country has been marked as one encompassing many nations by a number of historians, sociologists and anthropologists. The sub-title – “Modernity, Masculinity and the Nation-State” – of Holden’s study underscores his perception on the larger sweep of these famous autobiographies. Holden goes on to argue that these autobiographies are not merely a record of the course of decolonisation of their respective nations but also a predication of the new lives and systems the country and its citizens could follow. 

The factors that determine these analyses are indeed complex, nuanced and varied. However, among the broad central themes running through these ‘national autobiographies’, one primary commonality is in that all the narrators and narratives represent multidimensional struggles marked by efforts to overcome the world of inequality, where in they are placed, and move towards relatively better and liberated social and economic conditions. This in itself has numerous and even antithetical dimensions, especially at the level of individual lives, but even more complex is the struggle to combat with the “modernity” that the colonial regime has advanced in bits and parts. 

This is so because “modernity” has been used as an instrument or facilitator of control and oppression on the one side, but at the same time very many aspects of this “modernity’’ need to be accepted and accommodated as these constitute an important element in the framework for growth, which in turn is central to the “rebuilding of the decolonized nation”. This is a process where the narrators of the ‘national autobiographies‘ are seeking new futures, and while doing so engage with and critique the present from two opposing directions. Holden highlights the pathways of these multitudinous exertions in the lives of these leaders and perceives them as a marker of the turbulent emergence of new nationalisms seeking to become the genuine heirs of a true modernity. At some levels, these efforts are closely linked to the evolvement of the ’Enlightenment Principle‘, again with all its pluses and minuses. Indeed, the record of the challenges that these lives faced at the level of real-politik and societal pressures add to the diversity and complexity of the narrations and reaffirm their standing as ‘national autobiographies.’ 

However, there are fundamental differences between the authors of ‘national autobiographies’ that Holden made the subjects of his prodigious study and MT Vasudevan Nair. Holden’s ‘subjects’ were all political leaders who played an important role in the anti-colonial struggle in their respective nations. Their autobiographies dealt majorly with politics, along with other stirrings in society such as culture, values, social mores and literature. At no point in time in his life was MT Vasudevan Nair an active politician. In each of these areas MT’s work rarely dwells directly with political issues or happenings. On top of it all, MT Vasudevan Nair has not written his autobiography. 

MT had made it repeatedly clear that he would not write an autobiography. Indeed, it is a measured abstinence, pregnant with meanings. Especially so because as a writer MT has drawn so much from his personal life, native village and the experiences with lay people. In short, from his immediate surroundings rather than from bookish erudition. What I have deduced from the 16 year long perusal of MT’s work and life is that his refusal to embark on a “comprehensive autobiography” is also part of the perceptive socio-cultural positions taken by him through his literature, cinema and other interventions. Thus, this “silence” or “steadfast refusal” also constitutes a component of Kerala’s own unique “national autobiography” etched through his life. 

The primary commonality of a social atmosphere of economic hardships and inequality that Holden underscored in the ”national autobiography” narratives that he chose to study holds good for MT Vasudevan Nair’s life too, even at an individual level. MT was born “into a penurious middle-class agricultural family in a sleepy little village” in north-central Kerala in 1933, about 14 years before India attained independence from the British colonial regime. In MT’s own words, the life in his village in those days was such that “the nearest bus stop was six miles away and the nearest high school lay at a distance of seven miles”. “The villagers believed that if one could read Ezhuthachan’s Adhyatma Ramayanam (the Malayalam version of the Indian epic Ramayana written by Thunchaththu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan in the early 17th century) fluently, without faltering, then one’s education was complete. If you could lead cattle to the nearby river without their being allowed to take a bite from the lush paddy fields on either side of the bund, grown-ups deemed you were fit for farm work.”

The Autobiography Question that Every Journalist Wished to Ask 

As stated earlier, it is my case that MT Vasudevan Nair’s “omission” in writing a comprehensive autobiography is yet another nuanced statement underscoring his standing as one of the foremost representatives of the “Enlightenment Principle“ in the context of the limited engagement with modernity that Kerala has had. Again, as I repeat now for emphasis, a large quantum of MT’s work in fiction consists of autobiographical elements and he has from time to time written vignettes of his life pertaining to select aspects and periods. Still, the demand for an autobiography from the master raconteur of Malayalam literature was something that almost every single ardent reader of MT Vasudevan Nair mirrored over several decades. By a conservative estimate, the “autobiography question” is something that has chased MT,for at least three and half decades. This “Big Question” had first risen to a crescendo around the period he reached “shashtipoorthi” (the auspicious 60th year as per the Hindu calendar) in 1993. “When would you write your autobiography?” “Why don’t you write your autobiography?” It continued with varying degrees of intensity in the following years too. Legions of journalists, littérateurs, film enthusiasts and general fans and followers repeated these words or variations thereof seeking to know how and when MT would unravel his autobiography.

An overwhelming majority of the questions on this topic had evoked short and at times even monosyllabic replies. MT is known to be “fiercely protective of the machinery of his wits deploying the armaments of silence and solitude”, but even so the diplomacy quotient in these responses was conspicuous. The longest among these almost terse responses was the one given to Srijit Perumthachan, wherein the doyen iterated that he had “not felt the need for an autobiography and in any case it is difficult for fiction writers to work on an autobiography since many elements of their life-story gets reflected in their fiction.” 

In spite of such definitive negations about attempting an autobiography, I know of no journalist with some exposure to Malayalam literature, who has forsook or let pass by a chance to ask MT the “autobiography question”. The question came up from very many journalists and literary enthusiasts even during the Covid period. The maestro’s response remained the same; “A lot many writings of mine have reflections of my autobiography”. While a majority of these autobiographical depictions were in MT’s short stories and novels, the closest he came to “direct autobiographical writings” was in the series of memoirs he wrote for the annual Onam (the important Kerala festival celebrated across communities irrespective of religious and caste based divisions) edition of Malayala Manorama over four years. The memoirs were titled Kashu, (Money) Kanji (Rice Gruel), Kuppayam, (Dress) and Kallu (literal meaning is Toddy, but the word is also used in Malayalam to describe any alcoholic drink). Indeed, these riveting accounts did bring out many unknown facets of MT’s life, but there were very many aspects that were still not covered. 

Long before these memoirs were published, I too had got an “opportunity” to join the sundry multitude that raised the autobiography question to MT. That was way back in in the early months of 2001, and this book is essentially the result of that conversation and the many follow ups it had in the years and decades following it at different levels; with MT himself and many of his friends and peers and of course the constant exchanges that one had with MT’s world of words, in the written, spoken and audio-visual formats.

***

The response that came my way that afternoon should rate, arguably, as the longest or at least as one of the longest from MT on this topic. In its spoken form it was not a reply in the strict sense but a collection of four counter questions.

“Have you come across Pablo Neruda’s ‘Memoirs’, his autobiography? Do you know how transparent and brutally forthcoming he is in describing his own life and the life of others around him? Do you think that it is possible to narrate one’s life as transparently and as honestly in the Kerala and Indian milieu? Is there any purpose at all in writing an autobiography if one cannot capture at least a semblance of one’s concept and commitment to self-truth and transparency?” Brief, but palpable pauses filled the spaces between each question. As he posed them, his voice carried no hint of the emotional quotient that seemed inherently pregnant in those words. Instead, a fleeting half-smile flitted across the corner of his mouth.

I had indeed “come across” Neruda’s “Memoirs” by then and immediately surmised that MT’s reference must have been to Neruda’s celebrated flair and affinity for wine and women (he had three wives as well as numerous lovers and flings). I sought to raise a discussion of sorts recalling Neruda’s fling with one of his domestic helps – a ‘manual scavenger’ who used to clean the toilets at his residence – while he was a Chilean diplomat in Sri Lanka in 1929. But MT cut me short rather curtly and said that “transparency and commitment to self-truth” was not merely about opening up about wine and women. “There are other dimensions to human descent that go beyond these so-called vices and some of us would have had many such experiences. My point is that there are times in our social environment where silence is the next best thing to honesty.” MT brought the ‘discussion’ to a close with this “value addition” and slipped back into one of his characteristic silences. 

If one were to encapsulate the experience of that afternoon it would have to be with phrases similar to those that have been often used to describe many short stories of the master ; lyrical, poignant, powerful. MT had made his point quietly and forcefully, without recourse to hysterics or dramatics, employing a few words and the articulate, deep silences. In the final analysis, it came across as yet another nuanced statement from the master preceptor-narrator drawing attention to the limited engagement with modernity that permeates the Kerala society ; a statement from the most influential chronicler of the human dynamics of this society underlining once again the limitations in comprehensively assimilating and internalizing modernity’s stated values in their true essence.