‘On the Banks of the Mayyazhi’ by M Mukundan’s Malayalam and Gita Krishnankutty’s English translation
Mohan Gulrajani
‘On the Banks of the Mayyazhi’: In this novel, the river cradles folklore, revolution, and history
In M Mukundan’s Malayalam and Gita Krishnankutty’s English translation, the language of the novel performs the very folklore it narrates.
Author M Mukundan.
Some books flow like a river: meandering, vast, birthing several distributaries through its course, of which some fade and some persevere. M Mukundan’s On the Banks of the Mayyazhi – translated from Malayalam by Gita Krishnankutty – is a weaving together of many distributaries. It is a novel populated by vignettes of the ordinary lives of Malayali natives, the Indo-French and the French, against the backdrop of waning colonial power in the small French-colonised river town of Mahe, or Mayyazhi, as the locals call it. The novel is set in the late 1940s, in a strange period in Mahe’s history when the rest of India was free, yet Mahe remained under French rule. The reader leaves with the question, how many un-freedoms do we wilfully obscure to sustain the illusion of a completely liberated nation? In presenting the coarsely textured lives of Mahe, Mukundan animates these unfreedoms with empathy.
What makes Mukundan’s novel enduringly important is its refusal to neatly declare who the “people of Mayyazhi” are. This is not simply a tale of revolution, but the coming together of the many diverse life-worlds that interact in a colonised small town. In this richly textured amalgamation of life-worlds, suave Sayivs (Sahibs) speak effortless Malayalam, dark-skinned natives clad in mundus drink alongside the part-French, and both the Virgin Mary and the deity Gulikan receive simultaneous veneration. It is a world unbothered by certainties of identity, moving instead at the tidal rhythm of a town where histories overlap, and belonging is never singular.
Between life-worlds
Despite its vignette form and sporadic style of narration, a loose plotline ties the novel together – that of Dasan, the most brilliant student Mayyazhi has ever seen, who audaciously refuses a scholarship to France, with consequences that make up the latter half of the book. In the first half, Dasan’s grandmother, Kurambi Amma, introduces the reader to the many inhabitants of Mayyazhi. As Kurambi Amma inhales pinch after pinch of snuff, she spins tales of their lives and deaths. Told with the charm and playfulness that only a grandmother skilled in the art of storytelling could command, the tales present the town as fantastical, with deities lurking in every corner. In Kurambi Amma’s stories, distinct categories of native and foreign collapse – she weeps as she relates the story of Joan of Arc and shudders as she narrates the tale of Kunhimanikkam and her serpent-lover. Kurambi Amma’s history of Mayyazhi isn’t one that can be found in the records of the town, but presents the truer portrait of its aspirations, dreams and fantasies.
Mukundan presents the life of the Sayivs with unflinching empathy – this might be a world of lavish suits and fair French brides, but it remains susceptible to ordinary unhappinesses. Through the many domestic tragedies that befall the French (Albert Sayiv grows up to be a vagrant, and Gaston Sayiv does not leave his room for 25 years after his wife leaves him), they emerge as more than just “rulers”, deserving of readings that go beyond “coloniser”. They are inhabitants of the town, moulded by the language, religion and customs of the natives. The lives of the natives and the French are intertwined in ways that trouble definitions of the subject and the coloniser.
Revolution on the margins
Mahe, ruled by the French, was only freed in 1954. In this “languorous town”, as the blurb mentions, a portrait of Marx incites the question “Is [he] a sanyasi?”. The latter sections of the novel trace the faint, tentative beginnings of nationalist awakening, beginning with Dasan’s refusal to accept a scholarship from the French government. As with everything in Mayyazhi, change arrives obliquely, through the unease of a people unaccustomed to a political rhetoric of freedom. Mukundan resists the temptation to romanticise this stir of rebellion; the novel acknowledges that in places like Mayyazhi – peripheral to the grand theatres of nationalist struggle – resistance is messy, halting, and often compromised. Dasan slowly emerges as a tragic revolutionary, stunted by external occurrences and internal mystiques that only an attentive reading of the book will reveal. In Mukundan’s version of nationalist struggle, the lived realities of anti-colonial resistance bear little resemblance to the triumphant, orderly accounts preserved in official history. On the Banks of the Mayyazhi complicates linear narratives of liberation, suggesting that freedom often arrives unevenly.
Gita Krishnankutty’s translation is marked
by a quiet fidelity that honours the texture of Mukundan’s original without
lapsing into exoticism or explanatory excess. Krishnankutty preserves the
novel’s languorous pace, its deliberateness and its oral style of narration.
She ensures the linguistic and cultural specificities of Mayyazhi are conveyed
unmediated, trusting her readers to settle in slowly in an unfamiliar world.
Her translation preserves the novel’s atmospheric density, shifting registers
from languid to urgent according to the movement of the narrative from old
Mayyazhi to a revolutionary one. In Krishnankutty’s hands, the novel speaks in
an empathetic voice that is distinctly local and strikingly universal.
On The Banks of the Mayyazhi, M Mukundan, translated from the Malayalam by Gita Krishnankutty, HarperCollins India.
We welcome your comments at let...@scroll.in.
Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)
Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi
601 - B, Hamilton Court, DLF City Phase - IV,
Gurugram, 122009, Haryana
Mo. +919818253979