O. V. Vijayan

O.V. Vijayan (1930–2005) was an acclaimed Malayalam novelist, short story writer, cartoonist, translator, columnist, political analyst, and public intellectual. In a literary career spanning almost half a century, he published six novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eight volumes of non-fictional prose, three volumes of reminiscences, three volumes of cartoons, and four self-translations. This book offers a comprehensive understanding of O.V. Vijayan’s work by analysing his fictional and non-fictional works, cartoons, and columns, and situates him in the context of Malayalam literary culture and Indian literature at large.

The volume discusses themes such as the politics of everyday life; culture, religion, and the changing nature of Indian society; struggles of a writer and thinker; the idea of socially responsive radical modernism; ecology and subculture; and the politics of self-translation. These readings explore Vijayan’s legacy as an iconic figure of modernism in Malayalam fiction who reinvented its language; as an unrelenting critic of the modern nationstate and its excesses; as a post-colonial thinker; and as a visionary who transcended the binaries of the mundane and the magical, the political and the spiritual, and the premodern and the postmodern.

Part of the Writer in Context series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of Indian literature, Malayalam literature, English literature, comparative literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, global south studies, and translation studies.

E.V. Ramakrishnan is bilingual critic, poet, and translator who writes in English and his first language, Malayalam. He is a former Professor Emeritus and Professor and Dean of Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. He has been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for his critical study of Malayalam novel, Malayala Novelinte Deshakaalangal (2023) by the National Academy of Letters, New Delhi. He is a recipient of Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, Odakkuzhal Award and fellowships from the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, K.K. Birla Foundation and the Shastri Indo-Canadian Foundation of the Government of Canada. He has delivered lectures in many International conferences held in the Universities in Georgia (U.S.A), Paris at Sorbonne, Vienna, Beijing, Macau, Amman, Kuala Lampur etc. His prominent critical works in English are: Making It New: Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi Poetry (1995), Locating Indian Literature: Texts. Traditions, Translations (2011), Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity (2017) and Mikhail Bakhtin: A Critical Introduction (2023). Among the scholarly volumes he has edited/co-edited are Interdisciplinary Alter-Natives in Comparative Literature (2013), Bakhtinian Explorations of Indian Culture: Pluralism, Dogma and Dialogue through History (2018), Literary Criticism in India: Texts, Trends and Trajectories (2021) and A Cultural Poetics of Bhasha Literatures: In Theory and Practice (2024). He has published eleven books of critical studies in Malayalam which include Aksharavum Aadhunikatayum (1992, 2001, 2021), Anubhavangale Aarkkanu Peti? (2007, 2022) and Achati Muthal Aagolatha Vare (2022). He is the author of four volumes of poetry in English, the most recent being, Tips for Living in an Expanding Universe (2018).

K.C. Muraleedharan is Associate Professor of English retired from Payyanur College, Kannur University, Kerala. He is an academic and translator whose articles and translations have appeared in various journals like Malayalam Literary Survey of Kerala Sahitya Akademi, Granthalokam, Countercurrents.org, and Modern Literature. He has translated from Malayalam into English the manuscript of Pattom A. Thanu Pillai’s biography published in 2012. He has edited/co-edited seven anthologies for undergraduates of various Indian universities, prescribed in and outside Kerala, a few of them published by Cambridge. He has served as the Chairperson of the Board of Studies and a member of the Academic Council of Kannur University. He has been associated with the SCERT, Kerala as an expert resource for textbook production since 2009.