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April 2005   KERALA CALLING8

N.A. Karim

In and out of hospital with differentailments and with a long affliction of Parkinsons disease O.V. Vijayan thecreator of the Legend of Khassack,

thinker and cartoonist passed away in aHyderabad hospital at the early hours of  Wednesday, 30th March 2005. He hadbeen living in Secunderabad for quitesome time now. Author of thirty booksincluding the Legend of Khazassack,Dharmapuranam, Gurusagaram and Tha/amuraka/ and winner of Kerala andKendra Sahitya Akademi Awards andseveral other prestigious ones including theEzhuthachan Puraskaram instituted by theGovernment of Kerala, O.V Vijayan hadgrown into something of a cult figure.Therefore the void that is created by hisdeath in the literary and cultural life of Kerala is not easy to fill.

The novel on the imaginary but now immortal village of Khassak whichchanged the literary sensibility of Malayalam story readers in a radical way is now celebrated as a contemporary classicof Malayalam fiction. But this early success with his first novel which turned out tobe his magnum opus made a victim of hisown celebrity the weight of which satheavily on him throughout his literary career. It is indeed a fact that he could notrepeat this early creative achievement inany of his later works let alone the questionof transcending the imaginative andphilosophical heights he climbed in the

Legend of Khassak.

 What made O.V. Vijayan differentfrom other modem Malayalam writers wasthat in all his creations there was an intensebut subtle spiritual yearning of man forthe satisfaction of which he explores allsecular non- traditional means. The writer

The central character of his Legend,

Ravi, did not get the mental succour fromthe ashram of Bodhananda of which hebecame an inmate after his mother’s deathand after having sexual relationship withhis stepmother. Perhaps his emotionaldiscontent

T he l i t e ra r y legendO.V. Vijayan wrote, drew, spoke and lived in his own un ique original way

himself was afflicted with a divinediscontent. He sought remedy for this atfirst in literary and cultural life, and latersought refuge in the most traditionalIndian spiritual way. He used to visit andmake extended stay in the ashram of Karunakara Guru at Pothencode in Kerala.Did his deeply intellectual mind find any solace there? .We are not sure.

 was evidently too superficial that he was not driven to make a determined andsustained quest for its real remedy. Sex ~asperhaps a deeper urge in Ravi that it getsthe better of supposedly existential agony and falls for the pleasure that women likeMymoona provided with the result thathe becomes incapable of responding to thelove of Padma who loved him sincerely.

Poet ry in Car toon -  Fat igeued by t heir ow n karmas, great m any l iv ing b i l l ions, move around the wor ld

The first cartoon sketched by O.V. Vijayan, published in Mathrubhumi weekly in 1960.

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KERALA CALLING   April 2005 9

The question that she asks in her lastencounter with him is significant. “Whatis it that you are trying to run away from?”He was not running away from mundanelife in any way. The vague and evasiveanswer is illustrative of his mental make -up.

In a very broad sense Vijayan belongedto the mainstream of modem Malayalamnovel the foundation’s of which was laidby the unrelenting realist O. ChanduMenon and the inveterate visionary C. V.Raman Pillai. We find a combination of both in a modem idiom in Vijayan stories

in a general way, is significant. Vijayan’sthemes, particularly in his firstspectacularly successful work, have been

often termed the ex-pression of existentialangst.

In Kerala of the sixties of the lastcentury there were no sudden socio-

economic or cultural upheavals to givebirth to such philosophical concerns orsearch as in the west though our academics

and intellectuals in metropolitan cities were aware of the deepening spiritual crisisin the life of highly industrialized

capitalistic societies particularly of the west. The problem of alienation had notset in closely-knit traditional rural andagrarian societies.

In the case of Vijayan’s Legend the

protagonist of the novel comes from aGod- forsaken village in a remote area of predominantly agriculture based Palakkad

district. It is true Vijayan has succeededin giving a magical appeal to the villageby suggestively linking it with an undated

legendary past.. The time of clock andcalendar is dynamited

from within. Even the sounds that areproduced when east wind plays in the

fronds of palms are given a highly evocative

mystical quality. It is this touch of timelessness that gives the story of Ravi

and Khassak the irresistible appeal. They become archetypal, as it were.

Here is a wayward young man caughtin a slightly unusual personal situation and

unsure of himself and his future. The lifeand behaviour of Ravi everywhere he wentis depicted in such a vaguely romantic way 

that it captivated the imagination of a new generation of kindred souls who found in

him a mind y earning for new experiencesblasting all traditional social or moralnorms. This magic of the atmosphere andcharacterization is the result of the lyricalquality of Vijayan’s narrative prose and thehighly suggestive nuances of the words heuses.

O.Y. Vijayan could not repeat this with the some perfection and effect in hislater stories though flashes of it were in allhis writings that gave a peculiar Vijayanhallmark. He gave a spiritual philosophicaland universal orientation even for acontemporary political situation as in isDharmapuranam. A major later work,Thalamurakal, written in thephilosophical vein did not evoke the samehuman interest that the story of Ravi did with his bohemian spiritual vagabondage.

The peculiar halo around Ravi’s head isnot there in the case of other latercharacters even when Vijayan tried to castthem in almost the same philosophicalmould.

The success of Vijayan’s creations is inhis ability to combine a sublime sense of tragedy with a subtle streak of comedy. C. Y. wrote his historical novels imbued witha sense of unmitigated tragedy and wrotelight plays to giv e ex-pression to comedy.Vijayan combined both in a remarkably 

original manner, as he was a writer withmultiple perspectives of life including thetragic and the comic, the sublime andludicrous, the silly and the serious. According to ancient Greeks a great geniusis capable of creating both tragedies andcomedies with the same skill andperfection. In that sense O.V. Vijayan wasa real literary genius. His death is anirreparable loss to serious literature inMalayalam.

including the story on Khassak. But wefind a striking departure from the novelsof writers of immediate past like KesavaDev and Thakazhi in the sense. Viyayan’sconcerns are different from the writers of the Malayalam renaissance era. The shiftfrom the social and historical to thepersonal and philosophical apart from thecommon fictional tradition they all share

We are dust par t i c les out t o meet our in tervenient dest in ies one by one.

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