Retelling an epic-like struggle in Kerala in a contemporary setting

CHENNAI: “Even now no one knows how many people perished in the Vayalar shootout,” sighs Aparajitha, a research student from Delhi who comes down to Punnapra-Vayalar to get “an accurate account” of the Communists-led October 1946 uprising in those two villages of Kerala. Disha at that point exclaims she wished she could fly backwards in time as in HG Wells ‘time machine’, an idea with which Aparajitha concurs after hearing the story of comrade Anakahashayan’s role in that great struggle; it later exploded into a ‘rebellion’ by an assorted mass of working class people- fishermen, toddy tappers, agriculture labour, coir factory workers, Dalits and so on-, against the exploitative and highly oppressive regime that Sir C P Ramaswamy Iyer, widely known as CP, as then ‘Diwan’ of erstwhile Travancore state was trying to impose on the people, even toying to introduce the ‘American model’ of executive Presidency in that small princely state, reducing the King to a mere figure-head and allegedly wanting to assume all executive powers unto himself! Kochhu Raghavan master was narrating the story of Anakhashayan…Not exactly story, but history, said Kochhu Raghavan master.” These lines do give a flavour of this masterly epic-like historical novel by one of Kerala’s very distinguished novelist, KV Mohankumar, IAS, whose award-winning novel in Malayalam, ‘Ushnaraashi- Karappurathinte Ithihasam’ has now been translated into English by Manjula Cherkil, as ‘Manhunt: The Seashore Saga of the Punnapra-Vayalar Uprising’. Significantly, this felicitous, gripping English translation comes on the eve of “hundred years of the formation of the Communist Party of India.” The massive 609-page novel that seeks to retell the history of a turnaround period in modern Kerala’s economic and social history, from about the late 1930s’ till Sir CP Ramaswamy Iyer “relinquished his powerful position and left Travancore forever” four days after India got her Independence on August 15, 1947, as the author puts it-, in a quasi-fictional mode, sparkles as stories within a story, capturing the pathos and tragedy of the subalterns, of the underprivileged that climaxed into a bloody confrontation of spears and stones against the guns and bullets of the erstwhile Travancore state police and army. However, even as this saga unfolds through the eyes of who may be called the third generation of comrades’ kin - Aparajitha and Disha generation-, Mohankumar’s text bristles with multiple levels of meaning; it is also a throwback, albeit briefly in parts, to the ideological differences within the Left movement in the country, the post-war fallout of B T Ranadive’s ‘armed struggle strategy’ provoking Nehru to declare CPI as “illegal”, the Left parties then changing their strategy, the subsequent emergence of a more radical Maoists movement to contemporary right-wing currents amid globalization; all these and more lend to the larger story a continuity with breaks, and yet affirming a thin hope in keeping alive ideals of Marxism as a universal form of egalitarian humanism to this day.