Let books be lessons for life

Some years ago, when I had visited Kottayam on invitation by my publishers in Malayalam, I was asked if there was someone I would like to meet among the deacons of Malayalam literature. My mind ran over my wish list of literary lions.

MT Vasudevan Nair was staying in the same guest house as I, and not just did I speak to him, I even had the opportunity to watch him eat breakfast. That by itself was a rarity for me. Literary lions are always seen in the glow of a spotlight. Larger than life, they loom over the horizon and your mind with an absoluteness that is inviolable. It is as if there is a board: SEE BUT DO NOT TOUCH.

We are a race of touchy-feely people. We can’t help touching things. As an artist friend of mine once explained to me, hence the need to encase art behind glass or keep it cordoned off. So it is very humanising and endearing to see a man, a literary lion, eat his fried egg and chew on his toast.

Balachandran Chullikad was the other literary figure I wanted to meet. He had been a student icon, his poetry brimming rebellion and subversion and he almost made poetry fashionable. But he was to be part of the programme. So that left only OV Vijayan who was based in Kottayam those days.

OV Vijayan was ailing and had taken ill. Did I mind visiting him at hospital?
Not really, I said thinking of how I had stood before the Pieta for hours. It was behind a sheet of glass but the power of what it was emanated with a power no glass could hold back.

It didn’t matter if there would be no conversation; it would be enough just to be in his presence, I knew. Somewhere in those eyes would be traces of that vision that conjured Khasak. At the hospital, someone told me of the day they brought in OV Vijayan. Of going to the doctor and saying, “I have brought OV Vijayan in! He is very ill.” And the doctor who responded, “Who is OV Vijayan?”

Years after it was published, Khasakinde Ithihasam (The legend of Khasak) is still the biggest seller for DC Books and there is hardly anyone who doesn’t recognise his name. And yet... The doctor wasn’t just being sarcastic. He truly didn’t know who OV Vijayan or what his genius represented. The gentleman with me wasn’t annoyed as he narrated the incident. He was just dismayed. “If it had been even a two bit actor from the cinema world, would he have been so dismissive? The doctor would have dropped everything and rushed to be at his side.”

Makes you think about the place of literature in the common man’s life. Increasingly, we see the distancing of literature from life.

Take poetry. Does anyone read poetry at all except for students of literature? Instead what we consider poetry is lyrics of film songs and music videos. Rhyming ditties that draw from the epidermis of emotion rather than any serious soul searching.

Each time I have heard that publishing poetry is a dead end, I have always bristled indignation and disapproval. That is a publishing myth, I have claimed again and again. People will read poetry if only publishers have the vision to publish it. In the last decade, the number of poetry titles that have emerged from our publishing houses are few. So much so, it seems as if vanity publishing houses are built on the deep yearning of poets seeking to see their work in print. There are takers for cook books and motivational books, quiz books and misery memoirs but when it comes to poetry, there appears a curious silence. A humming and summing and a ponderous proclamation:  perhaps next year we may….

For no publisher would rush forth to embrace a peril called poetry? For a while I even thought that publishers were to blame for the disappearance of poetry in our lives. Not anymore. I am beginning to think poetry is truly and decidedly dead because we have no place for it in our lives.  It is this I think of as I sat with a handful of people at a poetry reading. There would have been more attendees at a Tupperware party.

Not so with what is considered the bulwark of Indian writing in English––the novel. Ever since the novel appeared on the horizon of this realm, it is the literary novel that has reigned. And the more complex and inaccessible it was, the literary establishment found reasons to hail and stamp it is as literary masterpieces.

No wonder then, one is constantly running into apologetic readers who tell you: I’ve always had a block about Indian writing in English! It just seems so lofty. So ponderous!
Literary India would toff their noses at these readers and dismiss them as philistines, habitual devourers of pirated pulp from the pavement and incapable of deciphering sub texts. However the truth is that there is a message in their disdain for Indian writing in English.

For when truly light novels (and priced in an appropriate light fashion) appear, even the only now-and-then reading India rushes to pick it up. This is a world they recognise, conjured in a manner that doesn’t necessitate delving into a dictionary at the end of every sentence.

These novels serve a purpose––to entertain––and that they do in the best possible way. However, to treat them as anything other than commercial literature is perilous. For like a Jilly Cooper or a Sidney Sheldon or an Ian Rankin, these airy novels might hold attention, but their work is hardly representative of the times we truly live in. Or, the human condition.

But what of the novel that is to survive the passing of time?
The ones that will make us think and help us look at the world with a different perspective. It is here our writing seems incapable of hitting that note that a Fannie Flagg, Anne Tyler or John Updike, a David Lodge, Linda Grant, Rose Tremain or John Le Carre seem to strike making literary fiction truly a joy to read.

Accessible without losing any of the gravitas that will make us go back to it not just as literature but as lessons in living itself.