We begin our Zoom call by comparing Jayasree Kalathil’s cloudy London skies with my rainy evening in Kerala, as we wait for S. Hareesh to join us. Just as I am about to ask another casual ‘weather’ question, Hareesh joins and catches me off-guard—“From the name, I thought you were a Hindi-kaari (a Hindi speaker),” he says, sending all of us into splits of laughter and instantly lightening the mood. Within the next minute, Hareesh and I, both hailing from the same district, have discussed landmarks and neighbouring places, as most Malayalees do while meeting each other.
Hareesh, jointly with Jayasree Kalathil, won the JCB Prize for Literature 2020 for Moustache, a translation of his Malayalam novel Meesha. From his unassuming, affable manner, you wouldn’t guess that he has braved a publishing controversy in 2018, or won the richest literary prize in India this year or that movie adaptations of his short stories (Aedan, Jallikattu) have won awards. He is delighted with the recognition, especially since Meesha had a rocky start in 2018 when right wing Hindutva groups made a hullabaloo out of two characters discussing the sex appeal of temple-going women in the serialised novel. Things blew out of proportion—the serialisation in Mathrubhumi Weekly was brought to a halt, and the editor resigned soon after. Later, published copies of Meesha were burned. But it became a runaway bestseller in Kerala.
Moustache’s moustache
Hareesh is eager to talk about the people who crossed paths with him— a glutton who loved buffalo meat, his friend’s grandfather who had a pet crocodile that obeyed his commands, a man who sported a moustache after acting as a policeman in a play, and his own grandfather who survived the 1924 Kerala floods by growing banana plants on a hill.
These ordinary men get a new lease of fictional life in the complex world of feudal Kuttanad in Meesha. With varied textures — there is a chapter told through nadan patt (folk songs) — ample swearing and a prominent male gaze, Hareesh’s writing juxtaposes beauty with violence, bountiful nature with unpardonable ecological damage, and strong women with insecure, egoistic, cruel men. Here, girls are reborn as mushrooms, ancestral spirits guide the way, otters lead guerilla warfare and shapeshifters roam free.
The protagonist Vavachan is an oppressed caste Pulayan whose rebellious act of keeping a moustache irks dominant caste men. But his fame spreads faster. Women desire him, men describe his fights, and policemen fail to nab him. Vavachan transfigures into the mythical ‘Meesha/Moustache’, flaunting a magical, giant moustache where eagles nest and frogs lay eggs. He has read Kaalan’s (God of Death) ledger and can appear in two places at the same time.
While writing Meesha, Hareesh was inspired by the nadan patt Chengannuraadi. The folk song with nearly 10,000 lines was popularised orally by Mariamma chedathy, a sweeper in SB College, Chengannur. Similar to Vavachan, an oppressed caste man Aadi is both a hero and villain, and becomes a larger-than-life figure through songs. “I decided to follow this method of unravelling the story of Meesha through songs, and stories within stories. Surrealism being a base nature of our local stories, gave me a lot of freedom in writing.” Resplendent with characters, and talking animals that meet and part frequently (you might run into a character again after 80 pages), this spiralling, non-linear narrative worked well for Hareesh—“the non-linearity helps explore the possibilities of fiction.”
Storytelling and myth-making
Hareesh finds it ridiculous that some readers—under the influence of social realism—question the logic in pulp fiction such as yakshi katha and ghost stories. “I find those stories highly entertaining. I like superstitions in stories. My pleasure lies in hearing and telling stories”. The story remains the fundamental aspect of a novel for him—“Leave the characters to their own whims,” he requests. Kalathil expresses a differing opinion. She cannot translate if she disagrees with the politics of a story. However, the right politics is rendered useless if a good storytelling technique doesn’t strengthen it, she adds. They arrive at a consensus that “politics should be the totality of a novel.”
Meesha began a side-project when Hareesh lacked the courage to tackle a novel-in-mind about two people, Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar and Kariatt Yausep Malpan, who travelled from Kottayam to Rome, then back to Goa in the 1780s. They recorded their experience in Varthamanappustakam, the first travelogue in an Indian language. Writing by hand, he was unsuccessful in outsourcing the digitisation—“because my handwriting is so bad that it is indecipherable even to me”—and eventually typed out Meesha himself.
Contrary to Hareesh’s impromptu writing routine—“a concrete plan dampens the pleasure in writing”—Kalathil is highly systematic and begins her day at 4:00am. She became a part-time translator by sheer accident when she attempted translating N. Prabhakaran’s Oru Malayali Bhranthante Diary (now published in the collection The Diary of a Madman), to keep herself busy as she waited in various government offices in Kerala, to settle her dad’s affairs after his death.
Both Hareesh and Kalathil grew up on stories—“A quintessential feature of every child brought up in rural Kerala,” Kalathil asserts. Our stories, she says, are exchanged in unsystematic ways, not through books or the Western sit-me-down-bedtime stories, but through mundane activities—a neighbour bringing a snack passes on 10 stories; women de-seeding tamarind together exchange a “festival of stories.” She indulged in a fair share of stories through performing arts at the neighbouring temple—ottam thullal, chakyar koothu.
Hareesh notes that women standing on either side of walls and exchanging stories is a common sight in Kerala.
“Stories surround us,” he says. He prefers the company of ordinary people over intellectuals—“The idle banter of men hanging out at junctions or make-shift walls might be politically incorrect, gossip-filled or even anti-women, but the storytelling is marvellous.”
How ‘Moustache’ came to life
Initially, Kalathil was anxious about the polyphony of the narrative when approached for translation of Meesha. But she was attracted to “Hareesh’s unique, playful and irreverent style that defies expectations of a good narrative in fiction.” She struggled with the chapter narrated as folk songs because she kept reading her English versions in the Malayalam tune, until Hareesh suggested giving them a new life, as they are sung differently, and reinvented by different communities.
Being a birdwatcher and animal lover from a young age, Kalathil found the research for translating Meesha greatly enjoyable. She pored over her collection of books on birds by Induchoodan, Salim Ali, R. Vinod Kumar, snakes by Tony Phelps and Dileepkumar, and even scientific reports on Kuttanad’s below-sea-level farming system, and the mechanics of dredging up land from the lakes to make fields, in preparation. Hareesh, on the other hand, took long walks around Kuttanad to get a sense of place, and interacted with the older generation to get a sense of time, while writing Meesha. He struggled with finding the local names of plants and fishes that he knew by sight. A serendipitous twist led him to research reports done over 15 years at the Natural Science department at MG University. Translating fish-names was tricky, added Kalathil, as the same name points to different species in different parts of Kerala; finally, she mapped scientific names to local names.
“We think of Kerala as a small, geographical area with a uniform culture and language. But as a native speaker of upper-caste Malayalam from the hilly parts of Malabar, I had to negotiate—in Malayalam itself—several cultural and linguistic imaginaries to translate a book like Moustache,” she explains. “As a migrant writer living in the colonisers country, I am constantly faced with demands to explain myself, to italicise my otherness. It is a demand I have learned to resist.”
Thus Moustache came to life with no glossaries, a detailed introduction and a map.
Women in a masculine world
Kalathil has personally lived through distress caused by violence and abuse, and explored the representation of gender and caste in literature and cinema for her PhD. She found it difficult to write Seetha’s rape. But “this story can’t be told in sanitised terms,” she insists—“Moustache is a masculine world with atrocious people doing atrocious things. But it is never gratuitous. Hareesh’s entire project in Moustache, as I read it, is to unearth the toxicity of masculinity that flourishes within patriarchal systems of power and expose its impact on women, Dalits, and nature.”
Unlike in the novel, where Seetha’s rape is seen through the lens of assertion of male dominance rather than as a heinous act (it’s not even called a ‘rape’), Hareesh does not shy from calling a spade a spade when asked about his titular character—“Vavachan rapes a woman. He also lives through bad times; he is a man of contradictions.”
The women in Moustache, though never achieving a redemption or escape, protest in small ways against their patriarchal cages. Kuttathi, a sex worker, conveniently forgets to return a gold chain; Seetha, contrary to her love sung in songs, spits on Vavachan; Chella, Vavachan’s mother, is unperturbed by her husband’s cruelty and poverty. “We have a misconception that only the educated, urban woman reacts to male dominance,” says Hareesh. He was inspired by the ordinary women around him—nurses, salaried women and daily wage earners—who manage their household expenses, and live under the dominance of their often-unemployed husbands. “Our (Kerala’s) community owes a lot to women, especially nurses, who bettered living conditions for themselves, and their family members. Yet, men dominate.” He shares a passing joke that the statue of Jesus, situated at a prominent junction in Kottayam, should be replaced with that of a nurse, because of their immense contribution.
The presence of hunger
In addition to caste, gender politics, ecological damage and social reformation, the “season of hunger” is a constant undercurrent in Moustache. Vavachan himself is in search of the road to Malaya (a land supposedly without hunger).
“Until the 1980s, hunger was undoubtedly a big reality in Kerala, even in financially privileged households. Rice shortages were frequent. In Kottayam regions, palm trunks would be slashed, powdered and eaten as porridge. Two meals a day meant you were rich. Starvation was rampant, especially in feudal Kuttanad. Women would take their evening wages of paddy, and make kanji for the kids at night”. There is a ghost who asks for food, and a man who eats several rounds of sadya at funerals and weddings—sentiments which “erupted from a fear of shortage.” Jayashree points out that Moustache also shows the two sides—hunger and gluttony. Pothan Mappila’s love for buffalo meat becomes an act of gender exploitation when he deprives his wife and son of proper meals. “Even though fish and vegetation were in plenty, hunger was a stark reality,” she added.
Man and nature
Nature protects, nourishes and ravages humans in Moustache. “The floods saved me and my grandfather,” says Hareesh. “I would’ve been physically harmed had not the 2018 floods arrived, with which the controversy surrounding Meesha fizzled out. I was aware of the savarna politics in Kerala, but realised its depth then,” he recollects, “Now, the hushed whispers of communal hatred have grown louder. I struggle to talk to close friends and relatives about the Sabarimala issue because they get too emotional.”
Pachupillah, a character in Moustache, has traces of Hareesh’s grandfather. The hill cultivation of banana plants, which remain undestroyed in the 1924 floods, give them financial security. Pachupillah bribes his way into folk songs as Moustache’s best friend (something Vavachan, who hasn’t met Pachupillah, always wonders about) by sealing a deal with the songsters in exchange for rice and tobacco, and makes himself forcibly immortal, unlike other nadan patt heroes who grow organically into mythical proportions. Such invention and reinvention—and in Pachupillah’s case, a battle against fate—of characters occur frequently in Moustache, to pay tribute to Kerala’s oral storytelling tradition of skewed truths, overlapping stories of different characters and multiple endings.
The supernatural, men and fauna—weevils, spit-eating rasboras, guilty sardines, lily trotting jacunas and migrant birds—co-exist in the mangroves and winding waterscapes. The story grows into apocalyptic proportions when man turns against nature. Kalathil reveals that the chapter The Last Crocodile, was mentally taxing to translate—“The annihilation of crocodiles by Baker Saheb and the destruction of the natural world by the toxic masculine forces, is as important as the caste and gender issues that the novel explores”.
Hareesh becomes vocal at the mention of environmental impact. “Environmental destruction of nature is done on a day-to-day basis in Kuttanad, at a visible level— levelling paddy fields, making new roads, and reclaiming land from water bodies. Until the 1940s, crocodiles were plentiful in Kuttanad. I have mentioned only a few stories about Baker Saheb’s crocodile-hunts,” he says. He quotes Arundhati Roy about the size of Vembanad lake being less than 60% of what it was hundred years ago. The same colonial master, Baker Saheb, also finds a mention in Roy’s The God of Small Things.
Though Moustache mentions many historical events—cultural reformation by Sree Narayana Guru and Ayyankali, reclamation of land, Punnapra-Vayalar uprising—and figures—Luka Mathai, N. N. Pillah, Tipu Sultan—there is a lack of explicit dates, which Hareesh admits was intentional. “The majority of Vavachan’s story takes place in a span of 10 years (around 1939-1947) but I wanted to stretch time to show the growing nature of myth-making. I wanted it to transcend time.”
I ask about future projects as our time runs out. Kalathil is working on another book with Hareesh, and N. Prabhakaran’s Thiyoor Rekhakal, after which she plans to “leave men alone and translate women” (Sheela Tommy’s Valli is in discussion.). Hareesh evades with a one-liner, “I am writing a novel”. Kalathil teases him about how little he divulges and Hareesh answers with what he does best, another story. Once, writer Rajan Kakkanadan proclaimed he was going to write a novel. When his friends accused him of bluffing, he spent the night narrating the story over drinks. He never wrote that novel. “I already told the story, now why write it”—he said. “Similarly, my pleasure in writing wanes if I talk about it,” Hareesh answered laughing.
Over the next few days, I find myself recounting stories from our brief encounter—Raman-Ravanan contradictions, freedom activist Accamma Cherian’s courage, writer C. V. Raman Pillai’s memorable villain—in mundane conversations. My husband and I plot to catch hold of the magical neelakoduveli plant—another story that Hareesh shared—to cement our luck. As I pass on these stories we exchanged, I realise this is what Hareesh and Kalathil set out to do in the first place.