E. V. Ramakrishnan – författare

O.V. Vijayan (1930–2005) was an acclaimed Malayalam novelist, short story writer, cartoonist, translator, columnist, political analyst, and public intellectual. In a literary career spanning almost half a century, he published six novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eight volumes of non-fictional prose, three volumes of reminiscences, three volumes of cartoons, and four self-translations. This book offers a comprehensive understanding of O.V. Vijayan’s work by analysing his fictional and non-fictional works, cartoons, and columns, and situates him in the context of Malayalam literary culture and Indian literature at large.

The volume discusses themes such as the politics of everyday life; culture, religion, and the changing nature of Indian society; struggles of a writer and thinker; the idea of socially responsive radical modernism; ecology and subculture; and the politics of self-translation. These readings explore Vijayan’s legacy as an iconic figure of modernism in Malayalam fiction who reinvented its language; as an unrelenting critic of the modern nationstate and its excesses; as a post-colonial thinker; and as a visionary who transcended the binaries of the mundane and the magical, the political and the spiritual, and the premodern and the postmodern.

Part of the Writer in Context series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of Indian literature, Malayalam literature, English literature, comparative literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, global south studies, and translation studies.

O.V. Vijayan (1930–2005) was an acclaimed Malayalam novelist, short story writer, cartoonist, translator, columnist, political analyst, and public intellectual. In a literary career spanning almost half a century, he published six novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eight volumes of non-fictional prose, three volumes of reminiscences, three volumes of cartoons, and four self-translations. This book offers a comprehensive understanding of O.V. Vijayan’s work by analysing his fictional and non-fictional works, cartoons, and columns, and situates him in the context of Malayalam literary culture and Indian literature at large.

The volume discusses themes such as the politics of everyday life; culture, religion, and the changing nature of Indian society; struggles of a writer and thinker; the idea of socially responsive radical modernism; ecology and subculture; and the politics of self-translation. These readings explore Vijayan’s legacy as an iconic figure of modernism in Malayalam fiction who reinvented its language; as an unrelenting critic of the modern nationstate and its excesses; as a post-colonial thinker; and as a visionary who transcended the binaries of the mundane and the magical, the political and the spiritual, and the premodern and the postmodern.

Part of the Writer in Context series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of Indian literature, Malayalam literature, English literature, comparative literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, global south studies, and translation studies.

This volume, an important contribution to dialogic and Bakhtin studies, shows the natural fit between Bakhtin’s ideas and the pluralistic culture of India to a global academic audience. It is premised on the fact that long before principles of dialogism took shape in the Western world, these ideas, though not labelled as such, were an integral part of intellectual histories in India. Bakhtin’s ideas and intellectual traditions of India stand under the same banner of plurality, open-endedness and diversity of languages and social speech types and, therefore, the affinity between the thinker and the culture seems natural. Rather than being a mechanical import of Bakhtin’s ideas, it is an occasion to reclaim, reactivate and reenergize inherent dialogicality in the Indian cultural, historical and philosophical histories. 

Bakhtin is not an incidental figure, for he offers precise analytical tools to make sense of the incredibly complex differences at every level in the cultural life of India. Indian heterodoxy lends well to a Bakhtinian reading and analysis and the papers herein attest to this. The papers range from how ideas from Indo-European philology reached Bakhtin through a circuitous route, to responses to Bakhtin’s thought on the carnival from the philosophical perspectives of Abhinavagupta, to a Bakhtinian reading of literary texts from India. The volume also includes an essay on ‘translation as dialogue’ – an issue central to multilingual cultures – and on inherent dialogicality in the long intellectual traditions in India.