The Kochi Novel

(Published in Fountain Ink, December 2014)

(There is a long standing debate on the necessity, or otherwise, of authenticity when writing on cities and history in literature, and Kochi figures in this debate in its limited portrayal in both  books and film.)

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“In a time when people everywhere tend to speak alike and live alike, I consider it my good fortune to be able to record, through my writing, a unique way of living and speaking that is being lost. And yet, the purpose of the art form that is the novella is not the documentation of a society, or a description of its life and its customs and rituals. To do that, a historian or an essayist would more than suffice. In fact, they would be more qualified to do it than a writer of fiction. These are but mere ingredients in the writer’s effort to create a fresh flavor in fiction, a completely original artistic experience. If it does not create the experience of delight that is art, then all page-stuffing that goes by the name of novel writing is but in vain.”—Johny Miranda (From the author’s note to Requiem for the Living)

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Of the great many concerns confronting an author of fiction whose work is premised on a place like Kochi, a cultural milieu shaped by labyrinthine historical narratives, aspects of authenticity are quite likely to be the sternest. It is in a way a case of the very factors that in the first place attract the author to the work turning out to be its most intriguing impediments: your imagination is stimulated by the milieu; now how will your language interpret and translate this stimulus?

The path of rigourous and exhaustive research is the most popular one embarked on in this pursuit, especially in contemporary Indian fiction where, in addition to the perennial sway it has from ancient times held over purveyors of literary imagination, a complex matrix of sociopolitical factors—of which the interests of market is not the least significant—has made history a fashionable and oft frequented fictional location. Common sense dictates that the more information you have about the place where your work is set—its people; its geography; its customs and traditions; its fashion and culinary culture— the more authentic your work is likely to be, and, as an obvious consequence, more powerful.

Not everyone, however, is in agreement.

There is a school of thought—classical and conservative, but which in the contemporary world of Malayalam literature is not, and does not quite care to be, vociferous enough to be heard above the din and sloganeering hubbub of a sensibility that associates itself less with the formal components of art and more with its visible political content—which argues that authenticity in literature is in essence an effect that can come only from within, as a consequence of the work’s inner, invisible structure woven by myriad intricate strands of which political content happens to be just one; and as such, even the most well researched work is bound to be a sham if the perspective of the research is framed by an outsider’s eye for the exotic. Those who stand by this argument believe that fictional authenticity has to, and can only, be understood as an abstract, aesthetic ideal, and not as a consequence of precisely assorted and maneuvered sets of researched data. Johny Miranda and P F Mathews, authors of two of the finest, albeit little known even in Malayalam, Kochi novels, are firm advocates of this notion. What matters, they say, is not whether this or that nugget of information is historically precise, but whether it is aesthetically valid. To impart knowledge is none of fiction’s business; what it strives for is to lead the reader to dimensions that can exist only in the plane of imagination, of dreams.

Both Miranda and Mathews, who hail from the Latin Catholic community of Kochi’s cluster of tiny backwater islands, affirm that the decision to base their novels 0n Kochi and on the life of Latin Catholics was not borne out of a conscious urge to write a Kochi novel that focused on community assertion. The urge, instead, was to write a novel that conformed to universal ideals of aesthetics based on what was closest to them and what they knew best, and what for them were not reams of exotic content but merely lived experiences of day-to-day existence. Kochi, thus, was not the focal point of imagination, but a mere medium for these writers who locate themselves unequivocally on the side of art in that ancient, but still unresolved and therefore not any less significant, debate about what art is for: for its own sake or for the sake of life? In fact, it is within the framework of this debate that they prefer to place the discourse on authenticity in fiction, instead of reducing it to a squabble between the ‘insiders’ and the ‘outsiders’. Given the unabashed propensity with which contemporary Malayalam—its print media, social media and academic discourses—straightjackets works of art and literature on grounds of ideology and identity, this is indeed a significant point of view.    

   

Johny Miranda, whose novella Jeevichirikkunnavarkku Vendiyulla Oppees, first published in 2004 by Mathrubhoomi Books, and which has till now remained obscure in Malayalam, says that when he set out to write his book, his only aim was to “write a good novella—by this I mean a book that would satisfy the literary reader-someone who is honestly and sincerely looking for an aesthetic experience as opposed to one who reads for exotic content, or to learn about history, or for sociological reasons.” The novella has now been translated into English by Sajai Jose as Requiem for the Living, published by Oxford University Press. Malayalam, however, still remains blind to this remarkable work which was hailed by Paul Zacharia, one of the greatest Malayalam writers, as “a gem of Bhasha literature” that “depicts an overpowering world of make-belief, a medley of religion, ritual, custom and superstition that solidifies into the life system of the islanders—a phantasmagoria of real and imagined pasts in which the ornamental inheritances of the Portuguese days and the harsh realities of a marginalized people are intermingled.”  

Miranda’s unwavering commitment to the ‘good novel’ and to its ‘literary reader’ is matched in its intensity by the contempt with which he regards the ‘easily pleasing novel’ that caters to the ‘lazy reader’. Presently employed as a lineman with the Kerala State Electricity Board, he is particularly scornful of the “well-researched-but-lifeless-novel” which, according to him, is an exploitative genre and a market driven project that aims at nothing more than to take commercial advantage of  the reader’s curiosity, a treachery that he believes will be exposed ruthlessly by the forces of time.

“This is the information age, and there are plenty of works that you come across, especially in Malayalam, where you know the writer has chosen a certain topic and has then proceeded to write a fictional work on it. Or he or she has obtained exotic or unusual information from sources like the internet. Still others do ‘fieldwork’—ie, meet people, especially old people, tap into their memories and then use it in their writing. Such ‘research based’ works often reveal their true selves later because often the ingredients lie separate and half baked in the final dish”, says Miranda who believes that literature is not even obliged to be on the side of the human.

And yet, despite it not being his objective, the novella has turned out to be one of the most powerful narratives of community assertion in Malayalam literature. No work of fiction has illustrated the ethos of the Kochi-Creole world and the life of the Anglo Indian Latin Catholics with such disturbing grace and panache as Requiem for the Living has. In her introduction to the English translation of the book, J Devika, eminent scholar and critic, attributes this to the fact that “Requiem for the Living does not seek to be a substitute for anthropological description. Nor is it a simplistic attempt to claim and assert a community identity—and indeed this is what marks it as a unique literary effort. It faces upfront the reality of the impossibility of asserting miscegenated identities in a culture so obsessed with purity of birth.” Miranda, too, avers that Requiem for the Living was not meant to be a comprehensive record of his community’s life and culture, and makes it a point to emphasise that the novel’s worldview is not a flawless articulation of the community’s worldview.

While both Miranda and Mathews do not argue with the notion that a written text can be read in whichever way the reader wants to, they feel that the mainstream readership is shortchanging both themselves and writers who are committed to ideals of artistic intuition by reducing everything to inflexible—and very easily navigable on account of its familiarity by way of mindless repetition—discursive trajectories of political correctness. According to them, it certainly does not help that from early works written with the proclaimed goal of community reform to the works of progressive writers movement—Purogamana Kala Sahithya Prasthanam—inspired by proletariat Communist idealism in the first two decades after independence to the works of identity assertion that gained and continue to have prominence from the nineties, Malayalam has a long history of literature that catered readily to the demands of reductionist political readings masquerading as literary criticism.

The emergence of identity studies, initially in the early part of twentieth century as a political movement within various subaltern communities and then later in the nineties as a post colonial academic project which mainstream magazines appropriated into a journalistic genre that some publishers now catalogue as life writing, is of pivotal significance in this context. Given the way it confronted, and to an extent successfully toppled, the domineering Savarna hegemony of mainstream imagination, any rebuttal, especially in no uncertain terms, of its theoretical framework stands the risk of being exposed as elitist and snobbish. However, both Miranda and Mathews hold the view that in the last decade or so, identity studies has become yet another oppressive norm, a prisoner of its own devices, sabotaging its very premise by means of crippling the agency of writers who are coerced into boxes their creative selves instinctively loathe getting into; a classic case of critique against one hegemonic order turning out to be another hegemonic order.

“Any writing”, Miranda says, “that attempts to tell a story by restricting itself to a frame—for instance, these days you have women’s writing, Dalit writing, suchlike, for e.g.—is according to me a failure from the very beginning. I’m proud that Jeevichirikkunnavarkku Vendiyulla Oppees does not fall into any such category. To my mind, literature is not something that should be restricted to a certain framework. When you sit down to write, it’s not the kind of reader who form the majority of your audience that you keep in mind, but the readers who stand on the highest plane in terms of sensibility.”

P F Mathews, author of the novel Chavunilam (Dead Land), a hypnotic account of the life in a nameless Kochi backwater island populated mostly by Latin Catholics, wonders why only writers from subaltern cultural locations are expected by mainstream academic discourses to carry the burden of being “voices of their community”. Citing his own experience, he says that subaltern writers find themselves right in the middle of a two-pronged battle where on the one side they have to face up to dominant upper caste voices—both Hindu and Syrian Christian—to be even heard, and on the other resist the academic patronage of those who are insistent on deploying their works as mere political artillery in an ideological war.

First published in 1996, Chavunilam, a novel that with a chilling tenderness portrays the human condition as a carnival of death—almost each of the twenty five chapters in the novel has vivid descriptions of deaths and ghosts—was hardly even acknowledged as a published work until 2010 when, after Mathews won the national award for the best screenplay for the film Kuttisrank, it was published again. Even after that, it has remained largely obscure, while many of the few who did read it chose, much to Mathews’ consternation, to focus on aspects of identity and cultural landscape than on its aesthetic topography. “It is a very difficult”, he says, “for a writer like me to make his presence felt in a literary culture that has always been dominated by Savarna voices. And to make matters a lot worse, when I am read, the focus is usually not on what I set out to achieve. It is a terrible dilemma. Does anyone ask MT Vasudevan Nair how he feels to be the voice of Nair community? Why do people choose to focus on aesthetics when they discuss MT and burden writers like me and Miranda with the responsibility of being some sort of cultural ambassadors for our community?”

Mathews believes that one major reason for such inclinations to reduce everything to the realm of crude moralistic binaries—whether a certain work is offending or not, whether it is politically correct or not—is the influence wielded by weeklies and monthly magazines which to all intents and purposes determine the tone and tenor of the literary culture in Malayalam. The emphasis journalism places on contemporary reality as the supreme form of reality, and the myopic view with which it frames a populist and easily readable mode of communication as the most politically correct form of literary expression, according to him, is a trap which has consumed both readers and writers. The advent of social media platforms where the “shallow spontaneity of reactions” is the unforgiving norm, he believes, has only exacerbated this situation.  

“The intellectual Malayalee”, he says “takes great pride in thrashing ‘painkili’ literature (a popular term for literature of the masses). But the way I see it, what is published as political and academic discourses in these mainstream magazines is also one kind of ‘painkili literature’. They are both cunningly designed to attract readership, especially those readers who are on the lookout for easy equations to instantly theorize everything they encounter in life, and therefore betray the very politics they claim to be standing for. Most of what they publish as literature is not literature and most of what they publish as critical theory is not critical theory.”

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Despite its much celebrated historical grandeur; despite being the only metropolitan city in Kerala; and despite the popularity of a very thriving literary tradition of ‘writing the land/desham’ (nation), Kochi has not featured that often in Malayalam literature. While the near absence of literature that depicts the coastal life in the region has been ascribed to several reasons—the dominance of Savarna voices in both mainstream Malayalam literature and the left liberal ideology that provides its theoretical structure; the distinctness of its cultural life (a consequence of its miscegenated identity) that is at odds with the upper caste Hindu elitism which defines Kerala’s mainstream cultural life; the economic backwardness of the region; the lack of sufficient historical documentation of its culture—it is quite surprising, given the predisposition Kerala has towards celebrations of both its ancient cosmopolitanism and a self constructed, almost delusional, image of a sociologically conscious contemporary society, that neither the colonial past of Kochi—a city that was colonized by three different forces in a span of three decades and from where India’s colonial past had begun—nor its present status as a thriving metro especially notorious for its high crime rate has been explored much in fiction.

Parishkara Vijayam (Victory of Reform), written by Variyath Chori Peter, and published in 1906 by Kochi Union Press, is the first Malayalam novel to portray the life of Latin Catholics in Kochi. As the title would suggest, it was written with the specific intention of achieving community reforms. Written in the tongue of the region, the novel provides a vivid portrait of the life at the time. However, it did not inspire a successor for a long period until Ponjikkara Rafi, towards the middle of the last century, came up with Swargadoothan (Heaven’s Messenger), a brilliant stream of consciousness novel that also presaged the destiny of obscurity which was to befall Miranda and Mathews on their literary journeys. It remains out of print in Malayalam, and is seldom mentioned in academic discourses as well, while many second rate novels of the same era are still talked about for their ‘revolutionary merit’. Rafi’s other novels—Paapikal (The Sinners), Oro Pro Nobis (Pray for Us), Kanayile Kalyanam (Marriage at Cana)—also are based on the region, though his later novels focus more on cultural documentation—thus, ironically, making them excellent research material for modern day writers—than on the one of a kind experimental streak that distinguishes Swargadoothan.

Both the Progressive Writers Movement post independence and the high modernity movement inspired by European existentialism in the seventies did not feature significant Kochi based works. The notable exception in this regard is the short stories of Victor Lenous, arguably the most stylish writer of urban male angst and loneliness in Malayalam. In a career spanning twenty years from 1972 to 1992, Victor wrote only twelve short stories, almost all of them based on the city of Ernakulam, while most of his contemporaries had preferred Delhi as the city for their rootless heroes lost to the debauchery of existential pathos. Victor was least interested in exploring the historical dimensions of Kochi, focusing instead on weaving into the beguilingly laced fabric of his stories, with a distinctly minimalist sophistication, the urban ethos of modern Ernakulam, which at the time was still evolving into the globalised metro it was to later become. His sleek stories also present the first, and perhaps still the finest, instance in Malayalam of investigating the aesthetic possibilities of crime and underworld. Though they have gone to achieve cult status—especially since his death in 1992—the stories remain largely obscure in the domain of mainstream literature.   

  

The most famous Kochi novel in Malayalam, inarguably, is N S Madhavan’s masterly crafted Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal, translated and published by Penguin Books as Litanies of Dutch Battery, which tells the story of an imaginary island named Lanthan Bathery through the voice of its intriguing narrator, Edwina Theresa Irene Maria Anne Margarita Jessica, whose tone is at once intensely autobiographical and objectively political. Unlike Miranda’s and Mathews’ novels, Litanies of Dutch Battery is kaleidoscopic in its narrative structure and covers a far broader historical, political and demographic spectrum. If in Jeevichirikkunnavarkku Vendiyulla Oppees and in Chavunilam, the geographical isolation of the island is reflected in the way its characters disengage themselves from both the world around them and the opulence of historical narratives that define their existence in mainstream consciousness, Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal rigorously chronicles the ways in which the island and the history of the world around it reach out to each other, thus accomplishing the narrative of isolation by means of describing its very obliteration at the altar of politics. In that sense, the mien of the novel is post colonial and historical as opposed to the magical realist version of an old school existentialism—a Dostoevskian twist to Gabriel Garcia Marquez—explored by the other two. This is hardly surprising either, coming as it does from a writer like Madhavan, a pioneer in Malayalam at developing a form and structure that with intricate precision map the archetypal emotional crises of his characters on to the contemporary political crises of the world around them. 

Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal, which has been both critically lauded and commercially successful, has had its share of critics too. J Devika, for instance, argues that Madhavan, in his attempt to reclaim the multicultural legacy of Kochi, employs Parankis (the Malayalam term for Kochi-Creole people, literary meaning Portuguese) as “one of the elements in constructing its exotic allure”. P F Mathews, too, believes that the novel stands guilty of exoticising history, which incidentally, according to him, is one of the main reasons for the universal acceptance it has garnered. “There is no doubt that Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal is one of the most meticulously researched and brilliantly crafted novels in Malayalam. Its sentences are sparkling, and the imagery is eye-catchy. But that does not hide the fact that it approaches history from the perspective of a dominant other. That, I suppose, is why he is so insistent on providing so much historical data for the sake of authenticity.” Mathews is also critical of the voice of its narrator Jessica, in particular of the way Madhavan chooses to cast her in the same Biblical mould as Jesus. “All of that seems a little too contrived”, he says.

Kochi and its colonial history have found expressions in English too, most famously in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh where, in a manner so typical of him, Rushdie has chronicled the history of a Rushdian Kochi, a city invented upon the edifice of a colonial historical imagination with the dreamy astuteness of a post colonial Victorian sensibility that defines his oeuvre. George Thundiparambil’s Maya, which features Kappiri Muthappan—the mythical, cigar smoking African slave who, according to legend, was buried by the Portuegese  under large trees along with their treasures when the Dutch had claimed Fort Kochi—as the hero is another recent work that excavates the city’s past for its inspiration. (Kappiri is derived from the Arab word Kafir, used by Arab travelers to describe the people of Africa.)   

  

With the emergence of Kochi, especially Fort Kochi, as a prime destination in the international tourist map, a glut of travel guides and coffee table books have of late started coming out. In sync with its projected image of a tourist site that provides a sumptuous feast of colonial vestiges, these are usually bland reproductions of popular historical narratives that faithfully glorify the city’s imperial legacy.      

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Interestingly, while its literature has not had much to do with Kochi, Malayalam’s cinema has, since the advent of millennium, turned the city into both its cultural and industrial headquarters. This, at the level of logistics, is a direct consequence of the industry shifting its financial base from Chennai, where it had been headquartered from the time of its inception, to Kochi following the emergence of modern studio facilities in the city. Soon, the city—again, especially Fort Kochi—also became the favored location for many filmmakers.  In fact, a whole new genre of Kochi films emerged which located the city as Malayalam’s own underworld; a Chotta Mumbai, as the title of a blockbuster movie says.

But despite the fact that according to official figures, Kochi has, for the best part of last ten years, found a permanent spot right at the top of the list of cities with the highest crime rate, this cinematic underworld is a blatant misrepresentation, a slipshod caricature inspired more by the commercially appealing visual possibilities of its setting than by any meaningful interpretations of an existing social condition. With its crisscrossing networks of narrow alleys; its massive godowns; its graffiti laden walls; its harbor; and its colonial architecture; Fort Kochi and the adjascent Mattancheri are tailor made locations for run of the mill action thrillers. A lot of these are also blatant rip-offs of foreign language movies, especially Korean ones, prompting Anvar Abdullah, an eminent film critic, to ask if Kochi is the capital of Korea. The only noteworthy exception in this genre is Rajiv Ravi’s Annayum Rasoolum (Anna and Rasool), a Shakespearian romance in the Vishal Bharadwaj mould, in which Kochi is as much a character as a location.   

Along with its visual peculiarities, the idiosyncrasies of Kochi’s vernacular too are a commercial factor that Malayalam cinema, in particular the much celebrated (and much maligned as well) ‘new generation Malayalam cinema’, has exploited. Here too, the emphasis has been on parody than on a faithful cinematic reproduction of a distinct accent. If literature had sought to exoticise the history of Kochi, cinema’s endeavor has been to exoticise its present, populating it with Godfatheresque dons and dope crazed ‘freaks’. Needless to say, the actual dynamics of crime and its tangled operational networks are paid scant regard. Had that not been the case, more crime/action/underworld thrillers would most certainly have had the globalised and haphazardly crowded urban milieu of Ernakulam as its background rather than the dazzling locales of Fort Kochi. Ironically, cinema itself has now birthed a local underworld of a different kind, one that controls such production processes like renting buildings, providing local ‘extra’ artists, etc.

In literature, V M Devadas’ Pannivetta (The Bohr Hunt), published in 2010 by DC books, is the only contemporary novel of note to explore the aspects of Kochi as a hub of crime and its complex post-globalisation sociopolitical ethos. The plot of Pannivetta revolves around the life of a set of local gangsters who have been hired to be part of a Russian roulette in connection with the setting up of a corporate industrial township named Info City. Grushe, a Russian born Jew who had migrated to USA following the collapse of USSR, is the woman who has been assigned to conduct the roulette. The novel is narrated as a set of profiles of the gangsters Grushe meets after she arrives at Kochi.

Devadas, who hails from Thrissur, Ernakulam’s neighbouring district, says that he was drawn to the idea of a Kochi novel primarily on account of the possibilities the city offered to investigate the multifarious dimensions of globalisation as both a political and personal experience. Rather than on the documentation of the city’s colonial past, the novel’s focus is on documenting the history of crime and violence of Kerala society from 1970-2010; and to explore the interconnected networks of state and its machinery, various business mafia and conventional political and economic ideologies. Kochi, in Pannivetta, is deployed as a metaphor for the novel’s philosophical pursuit, a modern city that has both geographic and economic hideout-islands in its margins. “In that sense”, he says “the objective of choosing Kochi as a background was not to write a Kochi novel per se, but to use the place as an ideal location where people from different parts of Kerala, and India, can meet. That is why, I have not focused on one particular community: you have, in addition to characters from Kochi, Tamil immigrants, people from the north east, Jews, foreigners etc.  Also, there was a conscious effort to include the various geographical dimensions of Kochi, and not to stereotype Kochi as Fort Kochi or a backwater island.”

However, Pannivetta too, has been criticized for the ways in which it seeks to transform Kochi into a populist fantasy. P F Mathews, for instance, says that the novel is “an escapist narrative that does not address the harshness of either the historical or contemporary realities it seeks to portray”; an illustration of “how things can go wrong when you approach a place like Kochi with an outsider’s preconceived notions.” To this criticism which implicates him of exoticising the contemporary, Devadas responds by arguing that following the advent and categorical consolidation of a globalised world political order, the conventional notions that went into the construction of land/desham (nation)—language, traditions, customs, regionalism—have collapsed, and consequentially, those that used to distinguish an insider from an outsider as well. For a globalised citizen, he says, the idea of one’s own Desham is that of a fluid and hybrid entity composed of heterogeneous elements, and whose boundaries are by nature protean. “That is one reason why I chose to base my novel around a conspicuously fictitious element like Russian roulette. It was a narrative tool to establish the plane of my novel as the plane of hyper real. And yet, its historical contexts remain very real.” 

Interestingly, though they differ on what constitutes authenticity in literature, they are in agreement on the topic of literature that panders to fixed norms of political correctness. “In the context of Kerala society, identity politics is a double edged political problem. Even while it is evident that many vested interests, including academicians and religious and political organizations, exploit its theoretical framework, one can never entirely abandon it. I believe that the questions raised by identity studies are very significant and cannot be addressed with just a class based analysis; the flipside however is when it is used for the creation of idols, and as a quick-fix panacea for deep-seated problems. The prevailing trend of synthetically creating characters to appease such politically correct norms is a practice I condemn as a writer.”

According to Devadas, if one were to extrapolate this stance on political correctness to the realm of insiders and outsiders, one will have to question the ‘authenticity of the authenticity’ claimed by ‘pure insiders’. For validation, one needn’t look beyond the fact that discussions of insider novels from Kochi do not feature works by women or by Muslims who are a prominent presence in the city. “In any case, in literature, what the traditional insider and the traditional outsider execute, at its core, is the same process: that of translating into language a personal or personalized experience. How, then, can one personal experience be privileged over the other?”

Indeed, for those who do not care much for the finality of an absolute answer, such questions, ancient and unsettled, yet offering multiple, and equally vindicated paths for its resolution, are what matter most. How does one understand authenticity in literature? Does that authenticity matter one bit in the understanding of literature? Is the age of the pure blooded insider done and dusted? Have exploitative forces of market legitimized an outsider’s exotic gaze? Is it possible for a writer to possess a gaze that is not exotic? How does one understand the dynamics of ethics in the realm of creativity? Is ethics in fiction a question of style or of meaning? How does one understand the politics of reading? What is the politics of a manner of reading that tries to politicize everything that is being read? Should a reader insist on ethical judgments of the text? Why shouldn’t a reader insist on ethical judgements of the text? Should a reader search for answers? Does reading matter at all?

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