The Demeanor of Nature in O. V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak

Abstract

The Legends of Khasak is one of the famous and artistic works of renowned writer Ottupulackal Velukkuty Vijayan, commonly known as O. V. Vijayan, was a novelist and cartoonist, who was one of the most important figures in modern Malayalam literature. He is best known for his first novel Khasakkinte Ithihasam (1969), he was the author of six novels, nine short-story collections, and nine collections of essays, memoirs and reflections. The plot is set in the backwaters of Kerala, in the half of the twentieth century. Critics in Malayalam have been unanimous in their praise of Vijayan's uses of language. Never before, or after, has any writer, they aver, experimented the poetic dimensions of prose with such telling effect. In Khasakkinte Ithihasaam, Vijayan is able to present Khasak as a mythical place of primordial Purity by making use of a strange mixture of Tamil and Malayalam. While Raviand Madhavan Nair speaks pristine Malayalam, the natives use a crude mixture of Malayalam and Tamil. This is reinforced with powerful images and metaphors. Ravi is the protagonist of this novel and he comes to the village of Khasak in Palakkad region as a single school teacher. Ravi is a great visionary in astrophysics who finished his post graduation in Physics from a very famous college at Tambaram. Palakkad District Board has established a single teacher school in the village Khasak for the local children as an effort to give them basic education. Ravi is from a different place and he is to be the first teacher in that village. Khasak is both wondrous and a magical place. Ravi is not only a dominant central figure in this novel. The Legends of Khasak, Vijayan's first novel, appeared in 1969 and it took twelve years' writing and rewriting to reach its final form. It leads to a great literary revolution and cleaved the history of Malayalam fiction into Pre-Khasak and Post-Khasak eras. The novel ends when protagonist begins his journey to some other realms of existence. It was a kind of stepping stone for the writer Vijayan to that world and marked the alight of a truly visionary writer in Malayalam Literature.