Fictional Form and Public Address: The Early Political Novel of Travancore

About the Speaker

Udaya Kumar is Professor at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has previously worked at the University of Delhi, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. His recent research focuses on death and contemporary culture, forms of life writing, cultural histories of the body, and idioms of vernacular social thought in Kerala. His most recent publications include Writing the First Person: Literature, History and Autobiography in Modern Kerala(Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016).

Abstract

Histories of the novel in Malayalam often regard the first decade of the twentieth century as a period of lull. However, an important genre appeared at this time in the princely state of Travancore: the political novel. This paper will focus on two novels by K. Narayana Kurukkal (1861-1948) – Udayabhanu (Morning Sun, 4 vols., 1905) and Parappuram(Rockface, 3 vols., 1908). Centred on Travancore court and allegations of abuse of power, these novels addressed issues of sovereignty by creating a fictional apparatus where auratic, idealistic registers in narration worked in tandem with satirical, disgust-producing descriptions of those in power. Without constructing a comprehensive allegorical structure, these texts invited processes of decoding which sought to constitute the fictional public as a political entity. Their piecemeal, fragmentary organisation of fictional elements allows us to see the heterogeneous forms of address of early novels and their transactions with other genres of public utterance.

Report

The talk, “Fictional Form and Public Addresses: Early Political Novel in Travancore” was delivered on the Bhasa Diwas by Professor Udaya Kumar. It dealt with the early forms of political novel in Malayalam, through the perspective of two novels by K. Narayana Kurukkal Udayabhanu and Parappuram.Both these novels are written within the first decade of the 20th century and are a commentary on the Royal court of Travancore. A form of scandal journalism is employed, where the court and the monarch are not referred directly but through a veil of fiction.

Parappuram deals with an episode in Travancore history, where the king marries the former wife of a palace official and the power of the official increases beyond his stature.Kurukkal uses an imaginary kingdom and a small village to portray this story. The same story is told but by using characters like a village chief man and a Nair servant in place of the King and his official. Kurukkal presents a commentary on the nepotism and politics with the court through this novel, without making any direct references to the monarch.

Udayabhanu similarly uses the backdrop of the Mahabharata to comment on the ‘outsider’ dewans of the Travancore state, which was greatly disliked by the public. Unlike other retellings, The central story plays out as a second Mahabharata where the Kauravas and Pandavas are united and fight against an outside clan. This is a direct reference to the dewans employed in the Travancore state, most of who were non-Malayali Brahmins.

In conclusion, it can be seen that political commentary in a princely state was vastly different from British India. Yet it is striking that this commentary is done by the use of fiction. The question remains, how different are these books, in form and style, different from novel and fiction writing of that period?

By Pratiti, Undergraduate Class of 2020