O.V VIJAYAN (ഊട്ടുപുലാക്കല്‍ വേലുക്കുട്ടി വിജയന്‍)

O.V VIJAYAN

 (ഊട്ടുപുലാക്കല്‍ വേലുക്കുട്ടി വിജയന്‍)

Ootupulackal Velukkuty Vijayan ഊട്ടുപുലാക്കല്‍ വേലുക്കുട്ടി വിജയന്‍was an Author and Cartoonist, who was an important figure in modern Modern language  literature. Best known for his first novel Khasakkinte Ithihasam (1969), Vijayan has six novels, nine short-story collections, and nine collections of essays, memoirs and reflections.
O. V. Vijayan was born in Palatkad  on July 2, 1930. His father O. Velukkutty was an officer in Malabar Special Police of the erstwhile Madras Province in British India As a child, Vijayan was largely homeschooled. Formal schooling began at the age of twelve, when he joined Raja’s High School,Kottakkal in Malabar  , directly in to sixth grade. The informal education arranged by his father during his absentee years was sufficient to keep him at par with his peers. The following year, Velukkutty was transferred and Vijayan joined the school atKoduvayur in Palakkad  . He graduated from Victoria College in Palakkad and obtained a masters degree in English literature from  Presidency College.Vijayan wrote his first short story, "Tell Father Gonsalves", in 1953. He went on to write five novels and translated a significant portion of his own work into English. His first and most famous novel,  Khaskkinte Itihasam (The Legends of Khasak, 1969) tells the story of a teacher named Ravi dispatched to a newly created school in remote Khasak. He brought about a sea-change in  Malayalam literature with this novel: so much so that it can be divided into pre-Khasak and post-Khasak eras, named after Vijayan's pioneering first novel. The former era was romantic and formal; the latter is modernist, post-modernist and post-post-modernist, with tremendous experimentation in style and content In a way, Vijayan released Malayalam fiction writing from the shackles of tradition He wrote many other short stories, essays and satire. He was also an editorial cartoonist and political observer and his works appeared in various news publications including The Statesman  and the Far Easter Economic Review He also worked for  The Hindu .
O. V. Vijayan was almost certainly India's foremost fabulist in the recent pastAn extraordinary writer with enormous range, he wrote everything from a semi-fictional history of his feudal-landlord family, 'Generations' to the scatological 'The Saga of Dharmapuri'. His works have often been compared with those of William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia  Marquez  While Khasak continues to be his best-known work as an angry young man, his later works, Gurusagaram (The Eternity of Grace), Pravachakante Vazhi (The Path of the Prophet) and Thalamurakal (Generations) bespeak a mature transcendentalist.While he lived outside Kerala for most of his adult life, spending time in  Delhi and in  Hyderabad (where his wife Teresa was from), he never forgot his beloved Palakkad, where the 'wind whistles through the passes and the clattering black palms'. He created a magical  Malabar in his works, one where the mundane and the inspired lived side-by-side. His Vijayan-land, a state of mind, is portrayed vividly in his work.
Vijayan was unlucky not to win India's principal literary prize, the  Jnanpith, possibly because he did not endear himself to the political powers-that-be through his trenchant cartoons (Shankar's Weekly, The Far Eastern Economic Review, The Hindu, The Statesman). However, in 2003, he was awarded the Padma Bhusan  , India's third highest civilian award.Vijayan struggled with Parinson’s Disease for 20 years and finally succumbed to organ failure in a  Hyderabad hospital at age 75. His wife Dr. Teresa Vijayan died a year after his death. Their son Madhu Vijayan lives in Los Angeles, CA.The first novel of Vijayan appeared in 1969 and took twelve years' writing and rewriting to reach its final form. It set off a great literary revolution and cleaved the history of Malayalam fiction into pre-Khasak and post-Khasak. It was serialised first and appeared in book form later. The novel is about Ravi, a teacher in an informal education centre in Khasak, and his existential crises. The central character is a great visionary in astrophysics who completed his post graduate programme in Physics from a famous college at Thambaram. The novel ends when Ravi begins his journey to some other realms of existence. The existential puzzle of man as to why he should exist is thoroughly explored in this novel. It was a kind of stepping stone for the writer himself to that world and marked the arrival of a truly visionary writer.The third novel differs in language, vision and characterization from the earlier works. It is on the immanence of Guru in the life of the'kmijn,...anifested in everybody. The seeker partakes of the grace of the Guru as he happens for him unawares and unconditional. The central character is a journalist from Kerala, working in Delhi, going on an assignment to report the Indo-Pak war of 1971. He undergoes an excruciating experience both spiritually and physically to learn how to annihilate all forms of ego. Gurusagaram fetched him the Vayalar Award  , the central  Sahithya Akedemy  Award and the  Kerala Sahity Award in 1991.
This novel emphasizes the vision that intuition is perennial and it is one and the same always. This oneness of the revelation makes the ways of all prophets the same. This great education in spirituality is got in those barbarous days of Delhi when the Sikhs were maniacally hunted after and mercilessly butchered following the murder of  Indiara Gandhi.Vijayan’s latest novel Thalamurakal is autobiographical to a great extent. It is historical to a still greater extent. Beyond autobiography and history, the novel is a journey down the collective experiences of a family in search of an awareness about oneself and his clan. This search is of great importance when the collective experiences of the subculture are very bitter and the individual sense of the clan identity is much superior. The novel is a narration of four generations in Ponmudi family in Palakkad, Kerala.
He has written many volumes of Short Stories, the first volume of which was published in 1957 - Three Wars. He has also written many essays, and also published one book of cartoons- Ithiri neramboke, Ithiri Darshanam (A Little Pastime, A little Vision) - 1990.O. V. Vijayan's best known collection in English is After the Hanging and Other Stories which contains several jewel-like masterpieces, in particular the title story about a poor, semi-literate peasant going to the jail to receive the body of his son who has been hanged; The Wart and The Foetus about the trauma of the fascist Emergency; the transcendental The Airport, The Little Ones, and several others.An incisive writer in English as well, Vijayan translated most of his own works from Malayalam to English. Selected works have been published by  Penguin India.
Short stories :-Short Stories of Vijayan (1978) ,Oru Neenda Rathriyude Ormakkayi (1979) ,Asanthi (1985) ,Balabodhini (1985) ,Kadaltheerathu (1988) ,Kattu Paranja Katha (1989) ,Poothaprabandham and Other Stories (1993) ,Kure Kathabeejangal (1995) ,O. V. Vijayante Kathakal (2000) ,Arakshithavastha (2007 ;-Collection of Essays ,Khoshayathrayil Thaniye (1987) ,Oru Sindoora Pottinte Orma (1987) ,Sandehiyude Samvadam (1988) ,Vargasamaram Swathwam (1988) ,Kurippukal (1988) ,Ithihasathinte Ithihasam (1989) ,Haindavanum Athihaindavanum (1998) ,Andhanum Akalangal Kaanunnavanum (2001) Satire ,Ente Charithranewshana Pareekshakal (1987)

O.V. Vijayan wrote fiction in Malayalam, but drew cartoons mostly in English. I asked him once if he was ever tempted to write in English like some Marathi writers. Usually tentative, Vijayan was firm in his reply: "For me, fiction can only be written in Malayalam, however underexposed the language is." This was at his house on Delhi's Satya Marg. Vijayan was sitting with Pooh on his lap. The Siamese cat, the only pet he is known to have kept, was looking more philosophical than her master. But secretly I felt that a tamed zebra would have been a more suitable companion for him. Ink on paper, whether to draw or write, Vijayan at his best choreographed mesmerising moments in black and white.When did Vijayan first break into the Malayalee mind? My guess is it was with a cartoon and not one of his stories. In 1966 (he hadn't come out with a novel yet), India was experiencing a food shortage, and the historically cereal-deficient Kerala suffered most. Malayalees, overly dependent on ration shops for their daily diet, were numbed when they heard the government had reduced the fortnightly ration to six ounces of rice per adult. Meanwhile, in faraway Soviet Union and the US, they were competing to launch artificial satellites. A couple of days later, readers in Kerala woke up to a cartoon by Vijayan in Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi: a man perched on a satellite in outer space, peeping through a telescope at the earth, tells his friend: "On that planet, there exists a form of life that lives on six ounces of rice."

It was one of the earliest intimations of Vijayan's genius. He wasn't entirely unknown even then, being part of a group of very gifted Malayalam writers, all of whom happened to be living in Delhi in the sixties. Together, they fashioned what was later reckoned to be the Golden Age of Malayalam fiction. They used to meet at the Kerala Club in Connaught Place to read aloud from their work and listen to some probing criticism. In 1968, Mathrubhumi Weekly began serialising Vijayan's first novel, Khasakinte Itihaasam. The novel challenged the reading habits of the day and it wasn't until the fourth or fifth instalment before its strangeness gave way to awe, and readers realised that they were witnessing a classic in the making. Around the same time, a not-so-successful Colombian novelist, with four novels to his name, was trying his luck for the fifth time. The Legends of Khasak impacted Malayalam fiction in the same way <="" i=""> did Spanish literature, and later the world at large. Vijayan had set a benchmark for Malayalam writers. Khasak was a novel of its time, zeitgeisty, yet imbued with writing qualities that transcend decades. It's an imagined village in north Kerala where the protagonist, Ravi, arrives to start a school. During his brief stay, Ravi experiences all the intense passions of life: sex, politics, religion. The novel wove a magical web around readers. A story goes that a young collegiate, with dishevelled hair and angst-ridden eyes, once went to a railway station asking fora ticket to Khasak. Nothing could persuade him that there was no such place—he insisted he belonged to that place. Khasak had become the imagined homeland for many in Kerala.

In his second novel, Dharmapuranam, Vijayan broke the Khasak mould, and went on to write an allegorical—and at times scatological—tale of a decadent despot. In all, he wrote six novels, nine collections of stories, a book of cartoons, and a few collections of essays. He was unique in his inclusive outlook. His power to fuse, his ability to build bridges over vast chasms—like a village ration shop and the Soviet cosmodrome—and his gift of divining patterns in apparent chaos were the signatures he left on Malayalam literature.In writing, these qualities showed in an amazing ability to invent portmanteau words and syntactical brilliance. Vijayan was also one of the first Malayalam writers with an international outlook. Auschwitz, typhoons in Hong Kong, the assassination of Soviet dissidents like Hungarian Imre Nagi were as much subject matter as life in little towns like Irinjalakuda or Chengannur. In another avatar and in another language, Vijayan drew cartoons. In English. He started his career as a teacher of English in a college in Calicut, but later, in 1958, the late Shankar invited him to join his weekly as a columnist. Though he left Shankar's Weekly to join dailies like The Patriot and The Hindu, Vijayan kept in touch with Shankar's till it closed down during the Emergency. Vijayan didn't draw cartoons in English in the same period. But the iconic cartoon on the Emergency in Malayalam is by Vijayan. It showed a train running with compartments which looked like police lock-ups. The caption: "Oh, here comes the train that runs on time."

Prof. John Kurakar