Bringing a big black volume of ‘Malayalam Popular Encyclopedia’, Vattakarikkakam Krishnan Nair lays it on a table, next to a really thin book. He takes the thin book and shows the cover: Mathew M Kuzhiveli by Vattakarikkakam Krishnan Nair. He is about to talk about the first bunch of Malayalam encyclopedias that got printed in the 1960s. But he has to begin the story with Mathew, the man who was instrumental in making it happen. Everything he has to say about the bigger book is in the smaller one that he wrote, he says. And he is the only one who could tell the tale. No one else from the editorial team of those first volumes of the Malayalam encyclopedia is alive today.
“He (Mathew) was an educational expert, a teacher and president of the publications department of the Kerala University. He is the one who thought of giving a scientific foundation to children’s growth. So he began Balan Publications to bring out graded books – books for children belonging to different age groups. This led him to the thought of preparing an encyclopedia,” Krishnan Nair says, sitting at his home in Thiruvananthapuram.
Krishnan Nair is in his 80s now. He was a fresh graduate when he joined Mathew’s team. “I got introduced to him by my university professor, PC Devassy, who is also a writer. That was in May 1960. By 1961, he had finished the work of the first two volumes,” says Krishnan Nair.
Till then, it was mostly creative literature in Malayalam, as non-fiction was very little, Krishnan Nair says.
Mathew went to study the encyclopedia work in the then Madras and came back to submit a project proposal to the Kerala University. “But for some reason, they did not accept it and he decided to implement it on his own. There were many scholars to help him. In 1956, they began the work of the first volume. They decided to make it a popular encyclopedia that would be more useful to a layman, than the reference type encyclopedia.”
Unlike general encyclopedias that give an overview of a range of topics and are used for reference purpose, the popular encyclopedia has been written in the form of essays covering different topics. Krishnan Nair shows this reporter one such essay on ‘Vishwam’ (Universe), a self-contained one, with all the information on our universe available in those days. “We referred different encyclopedias – Britannica, Americana, Chambers, Hammerton and so on – to prepare the notes, understand the content and then write in essay form in Malayalam. There was a large group of writers to do the writing.”
Many years have passed but there are still copies in universities and schools. “Of course, the articles need to be updated. But it is these encyclopedias that finally paved the way for the government to produce reference-type encyclopedias later,” he says.
Mathew wanted 14 volumes, but in the first go, they decided to print eight volumes, which could later be divided and brought out as 14. It, however, never happened. Krishnan Nair was involved in the work from 1960 to 1974, the year that Mathew passed away.
“When he passed away, the work on the encyclopedias, too, came to an end. His Balan Publications and the Kerala Press associated with it also stopped functioning,” he recounts.
Krishnan Nair hopes that Mathew’s dream of bringing out the 14 categories with updated information and a 15th volume for the index would still somehow happen.