An old photograph of M T Vasudevan Nair (right), wearing glasses and a light striped shirt, smiling while facing the camera. K Ramachandra Babu (left) facing past the camera stands next to MT.

M T Vasudevan Nair (right) with the Indian cinematographer K Ramachandra Babu (left). MT's work chronicled the changes in Kerala’s society over the last century, but they retain conservative elements in their representation of caste and gender.Ramachandra Babu / Flickr

Where MT Vasudevan Nair leaves Malayalam literature

The Malayalam literary giant’s merits and limitations in addressing Kerala’s traditional caste, gender and social hierarchies defined frontiers that other writers must now transcend

Anjana is a second-year doctoral student at the Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai. Her research looks at the interaction between the city and different gender identities through the medium of social spaces.

Published on:

25 Feb 2025, 8:32 am

A version of this story was originally published in Malayalam in Ala.

THE RECENT DEATH of the Malayalam literary doyen M T Vasudevan Nair provoked a deluge of tributes in the South Indian state of Kerala and beyond. Apart from his enormous literary contributions, MT, as Nair was popularly known, had a prolific career as a screenwriter and director in Malayalam cinema. He won several national and state awards, including the Jnanpith Award in 1995, India’s highest literary honour, as well as the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 1970. MT’s works brought the culture, dialect and ethos of Valluvanad, a chiefdom located in present-day central Kerala, into the broader discourse of Malayalam literature and of global literary conversations. Born in 1933 in the town of Kudallur, in Kerala’s Palakkad district, MT gained renown for his humanistic storytelling, and for his exploration of complex relationships and societal realities with remarkable nuance and emotional depth. His literary works – novels, short stories and screenplays – are celebrated for their lyrical prose and complex characters, as well as for an authentic portrayal of Kerala’s cultural and social milieu.

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India

literature

gender

caste

Kerala