It may have taken quite some time to happen but Malayalam literature is finally seeing a lot of its poets busy penning prose, with varying degrees of success.
Not that another glass ceiling just got smashed : World literatures have produced towering figures who juggled genres — poetry, play, novel, criticism and the like — with consummate ease.
“I would not be asked this question, if I were writing in any other language,” says poet-lyricist Rafeeq Ahamed, whose debut novel, Azhukkillam , is now being serialised in the Mathrubhumi Weekly .
“From Victor Hugo in France to our own Bengali (Tagore, for one) and Tamil (Chandrashekar Kambar) writers have been questioned for switching genres. Certain themes are best-expressed through certain media. In Malayalam, too, we have had poets Changampuzha Krishna Pillai and most recently, D. Vinayachandran writing novels. It’s a different question if they succeeded in their effort,” maintains Rafeeq, peeved at the hint of a ‘commercial’ angle in the query.
Fresh from the success of his maiden fictional offering, Nilam Poothu Malarnna Naal , poet, academic and researcher Manoj Kuroor says it was not by design that he became a fiction-writer, tracing the seeds of narration back to his own fictional poems such as Coma and Sudoku.
Politics of culture
Engendered in the Sangam period is a certain politics of culture which has rarely been investigated but which made for fictionalised representation, he reasons why he chose ‘poetic fiction’ for the subject. T.P. Rajeevan, perhaps the first contemporary poet to successfully cross over to fiction with Paleri Manikyam: Oru Pathirakolapathakathinte Katha and KTN Kottoor: Ezhuthum Jeevithavum , argues that each genre has its possibilities and limitations. “Poetry over centuries evolved mainly into a personal medium and lyrical in character. To express the totality of a period without losing its political, historical, and social characteristics is only possible in novel. It gives enough space and freedom for the writer to have a free play of expression. An image in a poem could morph into a character or an incident in a novel. In that sense, a novel is an epic poem written in prose,” he says.
Seasoned, award-winning novelist Subhash Chandran, however, says the novel is the ultimate form of creative expression, a notch above cinema.
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