Writing culture: Of modernity and the Malayalam novel

TLDR: The authors compare the contours of two Malayalam novels, Indulekha and Padmavati, written by Chandu Menon and V.T. Shankunni Menon, respectively.

Abstract: this problem in the context of the Malayalam novel. in Kerala. Several questions spring to mind: for instance, how does one read the early ’social’ novel? Alongside this is an equally interesting problem for the historian: what does one make of the literary landscape in the early novel? In other words, how can the historian engage with the question of realism? Here I shall compare the contours of two novels-Indulekha, written by Chandu Menon in 1889, which received almost instantaneous celebrity status, and Padmavati, written almost thirty years later in 1920 by a young matriculate, V.T. Shankunni Menon. Both are squarely situated within the matrilineal taravads of Malabar, a locale suggestive of Kerala to most people. But the actuality of Kerala, then as well as now, was a m6lange of castes and communities, inheritance practices and lifestyles. If one were to look for the throbbing activity which existed in the coastal towns of Calicut and Tellicherry, replete with Mappilla merchants, Jewish traders and vagrant soldiers idling away their time, then this is not the place to look for them.