Interview with M.T. Vasudevan Nair

MT Vasudevan Nair, the legendary Malayalam author and scriptwriter, one of Kerala’s four Jnanapith awardees, turned 80 on July 15 this year. There were no celebrations at “Sitara”, the writer’s home in Kozhikode – because MT, as Malayalis fondly refer to him, never celebrates his birthday. In interviews on the day, MT said that for him this birthday was the same as all the rest; he was thankful “to destiny, to nature, to god, to whomever” for allowing him this span of time. But all over Kerala, the public as well the media went to town celebrating this milestone in the life of the writer it often describes as “ Keralathinte priyapetta ezhuthukkaran” (Kerala’s dear writer) and “ Malayalathinde sukrutham,” (Malayalam’s good fortune).

In Kerala, MT’s writing has enjoyed sustained popularity; his books are continually getting reprinted. He is also read outside the state, with translations of his work available in several Indian languages and English. The latest of these is the HarperCollins edition of what is frequently referred to as his masterpiece – Randaamoozham, now in its 36th Malayalam edition: Bhima Lone Warrior.

MT’s writing has also had a great run with awards and recognitions, having won most of the major state and national awards, including this country’s most prestigious literary awards including the Jnanpith and several Sahitya Akademi awards. He has also won the President’s Gold Medal, in 1973, for Nirmalyam – the first film he wrote, directed and produced and numerous national Best Screenplay and Best Film awards.

MT’s first literary prize came to him at 17, while he was a student at Victoria College, Palakkad - his short story Valarthumrigangal (Pet Animals) won first prize in the World Short Story Competition conducted by The New York Herald Tribune. His first published story came two years before that. The story which appeared in a Malayalam magazine explores the feelings of a boy too poor to have crackers of his own, as he stands listening to the sounds of crackers coming from the houses of the rich celebrating the new year festival of Vishu: overwhelming sense of loss, the painful realization that this is the way things are and the way they’re likely to stay.

Some version of these feelings haunt all of MT’s literary and film heroes, and it is these themes that we see in the latest of his works to appear in English – Bhima, Lone Warrior  – the HarperCollins edition of Randaamoozham, translated by Gita Krishnankutty. This is the second time Randaamoozham is coming out in English, there was an earlier Macmillan edition called Second Turn (1997.) Randaamoozham is MT’s telling of the Mahabharata from the point of view of Bhima, the second of the five Pandava brothers, but with a difference “...the real Bhima is not the Bhima presented to the young minds that devour children’s literature and illustrated classics. Bhima not only has a huge body, but also a great mind.” MT too was familiar only with the Bhima who was the butt of jokes for his oversized body and inadequate brain. It was only when he read a complete Mahabharata that he began to see these aspects and realized that Bhima –always bending to the authority of an older brother, who will one day be King and yielding place to a younger brother, already a hero – was aware of the secret motivations of his relatives and resigned to the knowledge that he would always be second-in-line, not just to the throne, but to affection, fame, glory, everything.  Over the years, readers have said how easily they became invested in MT’s version of Bhima’s life.

It is Bhima, Lone Warrior that occasioned this interview, and which transformed much of my feelings not only about this book and MT’s writing, but also about the writer himself. I had read the book in its first Malayalam edition in 1984. I was 21, a much more egotistic, far less imaginative reader, reading and living with a world-view that annotated everything to its convenience. I was committed to the notion of the Mahabharata as a story where the divine plays a crucial role. So when I met MT’s very human tale of the Pandavas, in which Bhima is a man as are his brothers, his mother, his wife and even Krishna – they all seemed diminished. I hated the characters of Randaamoozham then, because they were all just human beings with petty human desires and flaws. So, I never went back to it. I had read a couple of MT’s other works and, perhaps, because I had already decided that MT was a man who wrote the magic out of life, I found the almost documentary-like precision of his writing unappealing – it seemed too similar to real life to warrant being a story.

So when I agreed to do this interview, I did not expect much – I prepared thoroughly but I also felt a little fatalistic. Not only was MT one of the most interviewed and written about people in Kerala, at eighty, probably having said all he wanted to, I was also certain he was not a writer I cared for, nor a man I would enjoy meeting. But in the three weeks between then and the interview, many things changed – beginning with my conviction that I could never like this writer‘s work. It started when I began reading Bhima, Lone Warrior. Remember, I was picking it up after a gap of nearly 30 years, in the meantime, not only had I been busy with real life –grown older, got married, had children, learnt to make a living – but I had also become intimate with the chimerical routines of the imagination. I knew that while we teach ourselves to live life as it comes, the unschooled imagination makes its own versions of that life inside us, so that we are always aware of the many potential variations to the choices and events of our lives. And what I realized in the weeks that I spent reading, first Bhima, then one after one, MT’s other novels, stories  and screenplays, was that it is these elusive other versions of the  visible, obvious aspects of human events and emotions that  MT has pursued all his writing life.

Look, for instance at how he created Bhima. Familiar with abridged versions, when he started reading the Mahabharata of Vyasa in Kunjikuttan Thampuran’s Malayalam and Kisari Mohan Ganguli’s English, he saw what he had “missed” and realized that there were occasions in the story that “disturbed and provoked” him, occasions about which Vyasa remains silent. “So I started thinking of what might have happened.” For example, he points out, after the war of Kurukshetra, the enemy is routed, the Kauravas are dead and Yudhishtra the man slotted to be king, tells Bhima that according to kshatriya dharma, whoever defeats the enemy is the one fit to rule and that since it was Bhima who had killed their enemies, it was only right that he should be crowned. “But the next day, what we see is the coronation of Yudhishtra. So, something must have happened. What happened? What could have happened? ” The characters and plot turns of Bhima, Lone Warrior are written to answer that and other questions like it. This is the MT method: dog the silence till it holds still and the writer can read the many story versions lying coiled there. 

These versions may not please everyone; some readers complain about how MT’s Krishna is not the god they have loved, but a human prince on the lookout for ways to regain his kingdom’s lost glory; some complain that MT turns on its head a popular Malayalam ballad about warrior-cousins, Aromal and Chandu, so that the villain becomes a tragic hero in the film Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha. Is MT conscious while writing that readers may have objections?  “Objections! What objections, it is a writer’s freedom” he says, adding that it is popular depictions of these tales that have become fixed in readers’ and viewers’ imaginations; when readers object to his Krishna, they are objecting to how different he is from the benign Ramanand Sagar version, just as the objections to his characterization of the dramatis personae of Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha are based on the popular 1960s/70s film series produced by Udaya Studios. He stresses that what he is seeing is all there in the sources; for anyone wanting a one-to-one argument, he says he has named all his sources. “It is there in Vyasa. I have not taken liberties with Vyasa – you can’t take liberties with Vyasa- I have only read his silences… he left it for the coming generations to write about, so I have only extended some things, but the base is there.”

MT spends a great deal of time preparing for a book, but on no other book has he spent as much time as on Randaamoozham and that is why, though “all books are favourites, I have a special fondness for this one – I worked seven years on it.”

For MT, it is the preparation that makes writing, even when it is difficult, a pleasure; there is external preparation – reading, researching, making notes – but internal preparation, immersion into the story is necessary for the writer to bridge the gap between “…you and what is not there,” and to find a way “to approach the silence.”  

MT has always been mindful of the silences; he knows they will challenge him to question: what is it people are not saying? What might they have said if they did speak? What is in the silence that surrounds the seen and the heard? MT has said that life in his mother’s village, Kudallur, where he grew up, was a constant inspiration to make him look closer and listen harder. He estimates, a good 60 percent of his fiction is based on life in that village, and even now, he insists, there is more material there. His mother’s presence is clear in his fiction; he writes, in Bear With Me, Mother  “She is very much there in most of the memories and appears directly in some of the stories in this collection. And her presence can be perceived in the background of the rest.”

MT is the son of MT Ammalu Amma and T. Narayanan Nair and since the Nairs followed a matrilineal system, he lived with his mother in her family house.  Through MT’s childhood, his father was working in Ceylon as a plantation manager, and is a model for the men in his fiction who work in faraway places, sending money and coming home occasionally. The anxieties and hardships of the women, the feelings of the children about their fathers, the general atmosphere and tempo of the life MT portrays in many of his stories, is often drawn from his family. He writes of how in the family, there was “…an accusation against me that I constantly wrote stories about the people in my family.”  Many of his famous stories like Kuttiedathy, Ninte Ormakku, Iruttinde Aatmavu are based on people he knew or heard being talked about at home. 

After high school, MT began to write more seriously, his brother, had had some work published and the two of them would sneak off to write in the attic and only his elder sister-in-law knew what they was up to. After school, MT went to Palakkad to study Chemistry at Victoria College. In the essay “An Examination in Victoria College,” he describes the big town and all that life in a big town meant for a poor boy. The reader will smile, when on page 107, MT writes “I used to get bored, listening to the boys repeat dialogues and comic exchanges from films.”  Did those dialogues serve as examples of what he himself would avoid when he began to script for films? Was MT’s mind subconsciously already working on what makes a screenplay good? Did he learn from those sessions to make his own characters life-like?

When Shobhana Parameshwaran Nair, the renowned Malayalam film producer persuaded MT to write the screenplay for the 1965 film Murapennu, little did anyone guess that the reluctant scriptwriter would go on to writing over 40 films and become a favourite with audiences. It is said that MT revolutionized the Malayalam screenplay, that his work was instrumental in giving the screenplay importance and the status of a literary creation. The majority of films penned by MT were popular films, with heroes and heroines and plot lines that viewers could easily relate to and invest in. With MT’s films as with his fiction, for the reader (or viewer), there is always a feeling of the rightness of characterization and plotting – it is as if we were in the story and knew it could not be otherwise. 

In the interview, MT talked about how much importance he gave to the need to feel this rightness – “I have a personal yardstick; I must be satisfied, otherwise I will reject it; maybe I will take it up after sometime, and even then, sometimes I read and say ‘no, no, not yet time’.” MT is exactly the kind of writer that I try to persuade my students in the creative writing classes I teach, to model themselves on – a writer who respects his material, wrestling with it as with a worthy opponent who could become an ally; preparing himself painstakingly for the writing, but also humbling himself to it, willing to let it go, if it doesn’t feel right.

Preparing to write Randaamoozham, initially, he had no idea whose point of view he would take, but soon, it became clear that “Bhima was ideal for me, his loves, his frustrations, his sorrows, all these were ideal for me. It is Bhima, who occupies a particular position, like in football, the center – half, the middle man, he meets the challenges; he defends.”  The Bhima of Bhima, Lone Warrior is a classical MT hero: misunderstood, acutely conscious of what people around him do to get what they want, painfully aware of his own losses. It’s MT’s persistence and patience in waiting till he finds the right shades of character, the right moments, the right structure that make him the great writer he is. This greatness comes in part from his readiness for the capricious blessings of chance.

MT also seeks the blessings of the Goddess at the Kollur Mookambika temple; he said that this year, he managed to travel there by train, with friends, after a gap of four years. I wanted to know what is the role of the Devi in the writer’s life. And in one of the most compelling moments of our interview, MT did not answer with words, but only pointed to his ear and eye. I remembered a line from a song that described the Goddess as “ sakala loka sakshi/witness to all the worlds.” As if She were his eyes and ears. 

I also remembered the discussions that had sprung up around the question of faith in MT’s 1973 film Nirmalyam. The breathtaking climax scene shows the velichappadu, the temple oracle, whose whole life was spent in devotion to the Goddess, smiting his forehead with his ritual sword, spitting the flowing blood into her face and then breaking the sword. In the scene before this, the oracle has just understood that his wife has been sleeping with someone else and the frenzy of the climax scene seems to follow from his wife’s statement that it was not the Devi who put the food into their starving mouths. The film critic TG Vaidyanathan, in his review of the film wrote that he read this scene as the velichapadu’s loss of faith but that in a letter to him, MT himself had written that the oracle was  ‘an archetypal character and cannot lose complete faith…”  Vaidyanathan also wrote of Nirmalyam’s “boldness” and “its departure from social placebos.”

Forty years later, MT still rejects social placebos – he will not make his Krishna tele-serial sweet, nor his Kunti selflessly innocent and he will not let villains remain villainous simply for convenience. “Planting his feet firmly on the precipitous path, Bhimasena walked towards the forest that lay like a fallen black cloud below him. White-winged birds came down from the clouds at that moment in perfect formation and flew into the valley as if to show him the way.” He is devoted to the human, to tracking down the human aspects of the characters and stories of myths, legends and of the great Mahabharata. It is this devotion that lies in MT’s decision to make his Bhima re-turn to earthly life, rather than continue to walk, as he does in popular versions, to the heaven that waits.