At the Kerala Literature Festival, correspondent Priyanka Tanwar has a conversation with noted Malayalam writer M Mukundan about the promotion of regional translated literature, innovations in book cover design and his relationship with publisher Ravi Deecee from DC Books.
Edited excerpts:
Indian Printer & Publisher (IPP) – Your novel Delhi: A Soliloquy won the JCB Prize for Literature. What role do literary prizes play in promoting translated works?
M Mukundan – I write in Malayalam, which is very colloquial, and so generally difficult to render in some other language. However, in this case, the Malayalam I used is rather cosmopolitan because the story takes place in Delhi where Malayalis from all parts of Kerala live. They speak a different kind of Malayalam. So, translating it was not difficult.
Usually, I am concerned about how my work will be rendered in another language. I am happy as they did it quite well.
IPP – Malayalam translations are steadily gaining prominence in India. Your thoughts.
M Mukundan – It is a good trend. Publishers are now interested in provincial or regional literature. Earlier it was difficult to get a translation published. That is changing because publishers, or the readers, realize there is good, intense writing in regional languages. That is how the first JCB award was won by a Malayali writer, Benyamin, for Jasmine Days. People started having a fresh look at Malayalam literature and realized something unique there. Surprisingly, in the third year, another Malayali, S Hareesh, won the JCB award for his book Moustache. Readers understood that Malayalam language fiction is strong.
Fiction in regional languages is an emerging trend all over the world. Earlier, English, French, Spanish, dominated. That is changing. Writers from relatively small languages are coming to the forefront. Some of the Booker Prize or Nobel Prize authors exemplify this.
Earlier, there was a kind of colonialism in culture too. For example, in the Soviet Union, there were so many small states, small religions, and people talking in different languages. They had different life experiences. All these were suppressed by the Christian languages. That is a kind of colonialism. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Christian language dominance collapsed, and the smaller languages and cultures started coming up.
I think this is a good time for smaller cultures, countries, and literature.
IPP – Tell us about your latest book.
M Mukundan – My latest book called You is published by Westler. I wrote it in the second person. Usually you write as he, she or I, but here it is you.
IPP – How satisfied were you with the work of Fathima EV and Nandakumar K in the translation of Delhi: A Soliloquy?
M Mukundan – They did a good work. They were in constant touch to clarify doubts. Nandakumar is exposed to life in Delhi because he lived there. Fathima doesn’t know much about Delhi but is a good translator. We have to acknowledge the role of Karthika VK, editor of Westland Books. As a result, it came out very well. Otherwise, we shouldn’t have won the JCB award.
IPP – Tell us about your relationship with DC Books as a writer.
M Mukundan – They have published most of my books. They changed Kerala’s publishing culture. For example, when I started writing long ago, only about 1,000 or a maximum 2,000 copies of a novel would be printed. It took 2-3 years for the next edition, for a new print. But now the first edition itself would be about 10,000 copies. That’s phenomenal. That’s all because of DC Books.
Ravi Deecee invests in new writers while most other publishers hesitate as there is a risk. Maybe Deecee knows how to feel the pulse of the time, and knows what readers want. So, new novels and new writers are being discovered.
IPP – How does the history of a city or place influence your writing? How do you examine the past?
M Mukundan – In the beginning, I wasn’t influenced by anybody. If I am influenced by anybody, it’s myself, because I had a difficult childhood. I had health issues when I was small. I couldn’t go to school for some time. I was confined to a room. When I looked out through the window, I saw other children playing, screaming, and enjoying. I don’t remember what was the disease was. Those days, we never asked the doctors about the illness.
Those days of solitude haunted me. It made my worldview dark. I became a pessimist. That is what inspired me to write. Writing is an escape from the sadness and solitude. Writing can also be very therapeutic. I tried to find solace in writing. For me, it was another world. I am the master. I can create that world the way I want. In the real world, I can’t do anything. But the world I create, I am the master. I can do it the way I want. That’s how I started writing.
IPP – How has Malayalam writing evolved?
M Mukundan – Malayalam writing is going great. Most of the successful writers now have lived outside Kerala, including Benyamin, Sheela Tomy and myself. It helped us enlarge our worldview.
We are here in a kind of prison. You are confined to your own culture, your own religion. But once you go out, all of a sudden you find that your world has widened. Most writers who have enriched contemporary Malayalam fiction have lived abroad. Malayalis have a nomadic culture. They don’t want to stay at one place. They want to face the world and discover new things. All these things helped us to enrich Malayalam writing.
IPP – DC Books did an innovative cover design exercise for your Malayalam novel, On the Banks of the Mayyazhi (Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil). 1,000 blank copies were printed and hand-painted by different artists. How were you involved with the exercise? How do these innovations in cover designs help in promoting the book?
M Mukundan – This was for the 25th anniversary edition. There were 1,000 different covers. It’s not entirely different but each one was unique in some way or another. Govind Deecee told me everybody got two copies of the book so that they could show that they were individually hand-painted covers.
Earlier he (Ravi Deecee) experimented with the cover of one of my novels about former chief minister, EMS Namboodiripad—Kesavan’s Lamentations (Kesavante Vilapangal). When the novel was serialized, there was an illustrator to do all this. When a magazine publishes an installment, what we call serializing. Then usually take the services of an illustrator to draw pictures. It is an added attraction. It becomes a limited edition piece. When DC Books reprinted the book, they used an embossed figure in metal. There were just 1,000 copies, and readers queued up to buy it. These ideas lure readers.
In other states, the big, glamorous authors, don’t sell like in Kerala. That’s why writers are safe here. In other states, writers are not really safe. In Karnataka, Gauri Lankesh was shot dead. In Kerala, these things can never happen because the readers protect the writers.
IPP – Which Malayalam books translated into English would you recommend to our readers?
M Mukundan – Contemporary fiction, such as that of Benyamin, is well translated. There previously translated books into English were not so good. When the translation is bad, readers can’t appreciate it. But I think in the last 20-25 years, good translations coming out.
My novel On the Banks of the Mayyazhi (Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil), translated into English by Geeta Krishnankutty is a wonderful work.
Among the contemporaries, I can name MT Vasudevan Nair. I also recently read Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand. She’s a wonderful writer.
