Situated in the Ponnani taluk of Malabar, Kerala, the village of Kudallur remains, even in the twenty-first century, astonishingly untouched by time and the relentless march of modernization. A handful of small buildings on either side of the narrow main street, a river, a Shiva temple on a hill, a Bhagavathi temple. No gaudy jewellery or textile stores, so dear to Kerala hearts; no multi-storeyed or multicoloured structures that vociferously proclaim imported wealth; no bar-cum-restaurants with glittering lights. All of which makes it possible to believe that M.T. Vasudevan Nair (M.T. to everyone in Kerala and now, increasingly, to those who know him and his work all over India) can still find, when he visits this village to which he belongs, the landscape that safeguards the memories of his childhood. True, he laments that the river he loved, the gracious Bharathapuzha that was one of Kerala's richest and longest waterways, has dwindled to a narrow channel; that the kannanthali flowers that once bloomed in profusion on the hillside have disappeared; that many a colourful festival he watched enthusiastically as a child are celebrated no more; that the customs and rituals that were observed with such fervour in the forties and fifties do not live even in the awareness of the children now growing up in the village. But the Nila river, which is another name the Bharathapuzha is known by, still flows generously when the rains are plentiful, the ancient game of pagida is still being played in Kudallur and its vicinity, and there are still, among the players, those who remember the legendary Kondunni Nair whose presence is a guiding spirit in M. T's first novel, Naalukettu
Meanwhile, for readers of M.T.'s short stories and novels, Kudallur continues to evoke the landscape they are set in, and is peopled with the characters whose tales they tell. Do these characters seem real because they are drawn from M.T.'s life experiences or because his fiction has gifted them flesh and blood and tears that are untainted by the flaw of mortality? M.T. himself speaks of the debt he owes his village in the preface to the first edition of his short stories:
My small world of Kudallur draws me to it in an irresistible way. You can ask: do I insist that I will not go beyond its borders? I do not. I have often wandered out in search of other and different worlds. But again and again, I come back to Kudallur. Possibly, this is a limitation. But I love the Nila river I know more than the mighty oceans that hold unknown wonders in their depths.
Many of the characters in his short stories and novels once lived or still live in his village, and the stories he narrates range from his personal experiences to tales that he heard or pieced together, or was told as a child. He says repeatedly in articles and interviews that the material Kudallur offers him is inexhaustible, that there are still innumerable stories left to tell.
Born in 1933, M.T. was the youngest of four brothers. Even as a child, he was fascinated by words, by the way poets and writers of fiction used them. He read the poems his older brothers brought home, wandered over the hillside in the village reciting aloud those he had committed to memory, and devoured all the short stories and novels he could lay hands on. Then he started to experiment with words himself:
A magazine called Chitrakeralam was started from Madras by T. V. Parameswara lyer. Its standards were high: good paper, good printing, lots of pictures. The brother just older than me contributed poems to it, another brother sent pictures he had drawn. I did not let this opportunity go by. When the first
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