Oh my! Khasak
O V Vijayan once said
“Destiny had been readying me for Khasak” when asked about his literary venture
‘Khasakinte Ithihasam’, for me it took half a decade after its original
publication (1969) to finally dust Khasak off the shelf and give it a try, the
language was challenging and the impatient reader inside me had to finally bend
my knees and stretch a lot of my time to Ravi, Khasak and Vijayan. It did not
disappoint me.
Recently M K Sanu, prominent literary critic set on fire a
controversy regarding Khasak, according to him Khasak has no literary value,
Ravi the protagonist is not a ‘role model’ and the story has ‘no moral’ to
inspire upcoming generation and hence Vayalar award given for Khasak should be
withdrawn. Yes, he has all the rights to disagree to a class of people who
admire Khasak, to challenge an intelligentsia that baptised Khasak a benchmark
that divided Malayalam literature into Pre-Khasak and Post-Khasak eras, to call
Ravi ‘immoral’ and a ‘sinner’ and to not appreciate Vijayan’s lyrical prose on
the wind moaning palm folds of Palakkad.
I read Khasak in its original soulful Malayalam,Vijayan himself translated Khasak into English (Legends of Khasak, 1994) but by
then Vijayan got mutated into a more spiritual-Vijayan and I bet the anglicized
Khasak is a lot different than the first print. It’s the story of Ravi, a
college dropout on a protracted journey in search of a self, escape from an
illicit relationship with his step mother, irrelevant father and his college
sweetheart Padma and he reaches the rural hamlet of Khasak near Palakkad and starts a single-teacher school. In
fact he was running away from his yesteryears that in a way troubled him, he
wanted to liberate himself to be precise and he was an existentialist to some
magnitude.
19th century European literature, particularly
after the Second World War saw diverse Sisyphus’ coming more often into the
literary scene, they all questioned the very being and the relevance of self.
One of the chief arguments questioning Khasak's authenticity is this ‘imported
existentialism’ from the West. I agree that Indians had no exceptional happenings
in its history that made him question the idea of self or of existence
(Post-colonial and Partition writings do deal with the theme in a subtle way
though) but that cannot limit the imaginations of a writer who was updated
about the world and a reader and dreamer like Vijayan’s horizons had no limits.
Apparently it’s the same period Latin American writer Gabriel Marquez’s ‘One
hundred years of Solitude’ (1967) shook the literary world, interestingly both
Vijayan and Marquez played with ‘magic realism’ and ‘dead pan style’ of storytelling
in their respective works. It’s natural for contemporaries to adopt certain
style and theme I assume, but each person is unique just because of the element
of ‘I’ and of his environment and experiences. Vijayan, a communist then
confessed that Imre Nagy, a Hungarian communist politician imprinted an
image of him so powerfully inside Vijayan that he planned of creating Ravi as a
“pilgrim revolutionary” but his death terminated it all. Had he been alive
then, Ravi’s destiny would have been something entirely different.
Ravi is immoral!? He’s a sinner!? Well, perceptions differ.
According to popular Indian sensibility Ravi essentially fulfils the need to fit both.
For a section of readers he gets ‘the realisation’ ( of being a sinner) that he’s
haunted by his father’s thoughts, the jasmine bloomed windows of his bedroom
and of course his step mother and Padma that he finally let a snake bite him
for an ultimate moksha. For another section he’s more like Camus’ Meursault
(The Stranger, 1942), he’s not a criminal or sinner, he’s just different.
People often expect others to follow certain patterns in life and when some
deviant ones try to take a different leap they get blacklisted. Meursault is a
victim of such societal expectations so is Ravi. M Mukundan’s Ramesh in “Haridwaril
Manikal Muzhangunnu” and Kamala Das in her “My Story” faces the same ruthless
judiciary. All good stories need not be a ‘moral story’ and all heroes not necessarily be a ‘role model’( morals differ from person to person by the way), we need tolerance
towards what might not appeal to our sanities, we need a neutral stand while
reading and take a journey with the writer and the world he’s trying to show
us. By the finish of the novel Maimuna asks Ravi “ Mashini poya varoole?”, its not just Maimuna but the readers and
Khasak itself asking Ravi. You still think he’s a sinner? Khasak ends where it started-Kumankavu, we
never know maybe Ravi started a new journey from there to some other land of
existence. Personally I like to think positive. Hope is a good thing. ( Hello! Andy Dufresene said the same)
Khasak is a real fable, something far beyond a mere rural
narrative, interestingly three years of Sociology made me think he’s a ‘rural
urban continuum’ ( think of the cultural encounters! Didn’t get it? Never
mind). Recently I went on a Malabar expedition on train, passing Palakkad felt
like “Oh myy! Khasak” I thought of all possible things Vijayan presented before
me from Appukili and his dragonflies to the dawn Padma arrives on train (that’s
my favourite scene! A woman brave and beautiful with thick glasses coming in search of her love, that was unusual a scene in Malayalam literature at that
time).Khasak has a lot more than stimulating characters with multi-dimensional
dialogues, it has legends and myths, secularism and communism, caste and education,
Vijayan and his lyrical prose, black humour and questions.
PS: What do you think? Inbox me. Sorry for not keeping a comment box, personal reasons. Happy reading.