BOOK REVIEW
Name of the Book: Vishakanyaka
Novelist: S.K.Pottekatt
Language: Malayalam
Name of the Publication: DC Books
Place of the Publication: Kottayam
Price: Rs.130
Pages: 170
ISBN No: 8126409916
Published
in 1948 and written against the back drop of a historical event that has taken
place in the district of Wayanad, ‘the Wildwest of Kerala’, Vishakanyaka penned by the renowned Malayali
writer S.K.Pottekatt is the heroic saga of Travancore Christians who fought against
the chilly winter, malaria and wild animals and who transformed the woody hills
of Malabar into agricultural orchards. They had sacrificed themselves at the
altar of green revolution even before the modern governments entered the scene.
The novel can be looked at not as an individual story but a piece of social
history in which the mankind do not bow their head before nature. People
hailing from the region of Travancore had migrated to the north east regions
where environment is purely hostile for their very sustenance. The hard soil of
the land gives us the impression that no ploughing was done and it remained
barren ever since the creation of earth. The migration continued till the
late-Sixties of the 20th Century. As the title suggests, Vishakanyaka is the mythical maiden who saps the energy of the man
who falls for her and it is an apt description of the land where countless men
and women fell ill or died fighting the vagaries of nature. The narration of
the meeting between the settlers and the soil serves as the crux of this
creative output.
The
first batch of Travancore settlers had to face the fatal attack of malaria. As
the land was unploughed, it is designated as ‘maiden.’ The novelist confesses:
“Knowingly or unknowingly, I felt a love for the Travancore brothers, who paved
the first steps for a united Kerala. I think that they deserve admiration
because of their astonishing industriousness and the courage, self-sufficiency
and confidence for commencing a new life in an unfamiliar region, without
availing any kind of governmental support or sympathy. I was urged to write
this novel more by compassion and consideration I felt for their sufferings and
sacrifices than reverence.”(Vishakanyaka: 7)
Pottekatt’s
Vishakanyaka is a novel devoid of a particular hero. The heroine is the wild
land/toxic damsel of Wayanadu, who with her magical power enchanted young
farmers and sucked their blood [like a vampire or female Dracula]. Such an
enthusiastic novel that describes the conflict between man and nature cannot be
seen in any Indian language. The novel is a saga of mankind who are hesitant to
surrender in front of the atrocities of nature. If a generation fails to
achieve the goals, the next ones come forward with greater courage to continue
the fight. The farmer-settlers, as a whole, are installed as the hero. ‘The
elder-brothers from Travancore,’ while retaining their individual ethology, are
envisaged as a single faction. The wild nature of Wayanadu waits for them with
its seductive and perfidious pits. After tempting the hardworking as well as
the idyllic alike, the maiden soil ridicules them. The novel is the narration
of the meeting between the settlers and the soil. The bewitching but toxic land
as the heroine obliterated with fatal diseases kills them at the end with her
venomous embraces. The farmer settlers with their spectacular expectations and
hopes finally travel to the ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler
returns’. The novel depicts the conflict between man and nature. The very
notion of giving a voice to nature can be said to be postmodern. Ecocritical
readings bring out the voices of Nature, or the non-human environment at its
best.
Pottekatt’s
characters, as he mentions in a note to another novel, “were people in blood
and flesh”. It is not an individual’s story; but a piece of social history in
reality. Anthony loses the ascetic, pure and innocent paradise. Here is a
character, Anthony, who does not rise to the status of a hero; but he can be
called the novelist’s representative/spokesman or the central consciousness. As
the symbol of cruel nature, here is Madhavi and as the representation of the
farmer-batch, the young man Anthony, who is defiled by her in the end of the
novel. When Anthony, abandoning everything and returns to his native region,
new batches of farmers, it is stated, come to the wild land of Wayanadu. To
him, Madhavi becomes a venomous damsel, a serpentine/poisonous maiden, or a ‘la
belle dame sans merci’ of the renowned sensuous poet John Keats. He equates the
lusty maiden soil of Wayanadu with Madhavi. Knowingly or unknowingly, this
becomes the surface-structural message of the novel/ novelist. But, the
sincerity and adeptness in the descriptive/poetic/nature-lyrist power expose
the deep-structural sub-text/texture diametrically opposite and the portrayal
of Anthony turns out to be ironic.
The
novel is composed in such a way that it disentangles the intertwining histories
of colonialism, capital and local agency and thereby to capture the
circumstances that spawned the migration of ‘forward looking’, mostly marginal,
peasants of erstwhile princely state of Travancore into its eastern hills and
to the erstwhile British Malabar. It renders the message that development via
collaborative effort is not at all a hard nut to crack provided the people are
committed to their goals. Sacrifice is needed for any kind of development. The
mode of development envisioned by him via the novel can be imitated for the
betterment of our lives. Swami Vivekananda was of the firm conviction that any
development can be brought out only through the people. Man has immense
potentialities. Normally these energies are scattered and dissipated. If they
can be converged and focused, a great power can be created. If sunlight is
focused through lens, it can get rays. People took this message of swami to
heart and tried to put it into practical terms. This provided the motive power
for the progress of India in the achievement of independence and development in
economic, political, social and other fields. . His clarion call “Uttisthata Jagrata Prapya Varannibodhata Kshurasanna Dhara Nishita
Dustayadurgama Pathah tat kavayo Vadanti”– arise, awake and rest
not till the goal is reached. This had an electrifying effect on multitudes
across the globe. The very novel Vishakanyaka
can be evaluated as the practical exortation of the philosophy of this towering
figure. Hence no age and custom can stale the infinite variety made immortal by
this novelist. Though it might sound dry and lengthy at some instances, the way
he endeavoured to depict his eponymous hero have often succeeded in dragging
back the readers’ attention and making them interested in the further
description and thereby finish the novel in a single sitting. However Pottekatt
has succeeded in taking his readers in the voyage to Wayanad and Vishakanyaka being considered as a
classic in Malayalam is an open testimony to this.
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