When G Sankara Kurup, one of Malayalam’s great poets, became seriously ill in the late 1970s, the editor of a newspaper approached Professor M Krishnan Nair and asked him to write a feature on the poet “imagining that he is dead”. In other words, an obituary before the great poet passed. Krishnan Nair said no. But the editor kept calling for days on end. The great poet lived for more than a year after that, Krishnan Nair wrote in his very popular column, Sahitya Varaphalam, many years later. The column ran in different magazines for 36 years, after its first publication in 1969. The last one was published a week before Krishnan Nair, a literary critic credited with introducing world literature to Malayalis, died in 2006.
If he were alive, it would be his hundredth birthday on March 3. Readers and literature lovers across Kerala are celebrating the centenary of the state’s most known literary critic who is said to have read so much that his eyesight was affected. Krishnan Nair began writing Sahitya Varaphalam for a magazine called Malayalanadu in 1969, later moving to Kalakaumudi magazine. In its final years, Sahitya Varaphalam appeared in the Samakalika Malayalam magazine. Every week, the column would mostly contain a commentary on new literature from Kerala, but then introduce parallels from foreign literature to discredit the former.
“After reading Uroob’s (Malayalam) novel Ammini and then (English novelist) Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, I feel closer to Rebecca. Reading German dramatist Kaiser’s Coral after Pulimana Parameswaran Pillai’s Samathvavadi gives me happiness. There is no appreciation of art or literature without comparing one work with another,” Krishnan Nair wrote.
He could be harsh in his criticism of even great writers from Kerala. AB Jijimon, in his long piece on Manorama, remembers how Krishnan Nair criticised the works of Thakazhi and Kesavadev (two great Malayalam novelists) without harbouring any personal ill will towards them. The spat between the critic and poet D Vinayachandran had crossed all limits, when one ended up writing a complaint to the Chief Minister of the time, Jijimon writes.
“I could hardly agree with his taste and judgement when it came to Malayalam literature, but he was most often right about Western literature. I have often wondered about this contradiction. I think he was prone to thinking that Malayalam could never produce great literature,” renowned poet and critic K Satchidanandan tells TNM.
One reason for the column’s popularity was the humour. In one of his columns in 1983, he wrote, “Awards are given in our state every three years or five years for the best writing. It would be good if we stop that arrangement and give awards to someone who maintained complete silence and did not even touch a pen for five years. That would be very, very good.”
Even if it was by way of criticism, many writers thought it an achievement to be mentioned in Sahitya Varaphalam, says PK Shobhana, state librarian at the Thiruvananthapuram Public Library. “Krishnan Nair’s columns introduced me to many writers across the world and their works. The reading would be very in-depth and the analysis so careful, but it would still be very entertaining,” she adds.
His columns, Satchidanandan says, were somewhere between literary gossip and criticism. “But I should admit, like many others of my generation, that he introduced us to a lot of writers and works in foreign languages though his analysis was always superficial,” he adds.
A collection of Prof Krishnan Nair's columns can be found here.