Two-volume legend

By: N P Ashley

Malayalis, it is said, have a knack for trolls and memes. From a shared filmic folklore, quick, funny, sarcastic images get churned out and shared instantaneously. One author who often features in this social media banter is Vaikom Muhammad Basheer.

Be it Ettukali Mammonju—a prototype for politicians who take credit for everything (he would famously say, “It is me,” whenever any unmarried woman in the village got pregnant!), or Aakashawintayi (‘sky toffee), the name an interreligious couple, Sarasamma and Kesavan Nair, gave their child by picking lots, or Bhargavi Nilayam, now a synonym for haunted houses after the 1964 film—among literary figures, Basheer’s presence in popular culture is perhaps the most telling.

Basheer didn’t write very much. His 40-year-long literary career can be fitted into two volumes. His writing became mythical not because of its simplicity, accessibility, or brevity—but because he was overwriting; writing on top of already existing materials; he was a palimpsest. He wrote against writing itself and that freedom has a certain deep and lasting appeal.

He altered the content of Malayalam fiction by introducing Muslim social life and using writing as a tool for community reform. He crossed cultural boundaries, closed gaps—yet always remained an outsider: to literature, to society, even to his own community.

Banned, targeted and arrested—Basheer’s early public life makes it difficult to say if they are creative writing pieces from a freedom fighter and political activist (against the Travancore diwan Sir C P Ramaswamy Iyer) or a fiction writer’s meanderings into activism. He is best a hyphenated entity in this phase.

Even after his legal troubles ended post-1947, controversy followed him. His calls for reform and his resistance to moralism—naming a book Pavappettavarude Vesya

(A Prostitute of the Poor), exposing ethical hollowness in Sabdangal (Voices)—kept him on edge. At a time when writers split into aestheticists and socialists, Basheer charted a third path: Writing about spirituality, the Sufi-Yogi worlds and ethical complexity, as CR Parameswaran noted.

Friendship was his forte, humour his tool. He spoke lightly and irreverently of all castes and religions. This fluidity feels empowering to today’s content creators.

But synthesizing such contradictions wasn’t effortless—it must have been excruciating. As NS Madhavan observed, it possibly drove him to madness. In an age when mental health conversations resonate with a huge section, Basheer, an author to be hospitalized in a lunatic asylum, becomes a person to reach after. Overwriting takes skill, social sense, and the right attitude—not to sound self-righteous or off-putting. When done right, it resembles Google’s landing page: The simplest interface masking the most complex backend algorithm. Basheer reads a bit like that.

(N P Ashley teaches English at St.Stephen’s College, Delhi and is curator of Mathilukal Basheer Museum at Dayapuram Educational and Cultural Centre, Chathamangalam)