glimpses from a writer's world: o. chandu menon, his contemporaries, and their times

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2004 20: 189Studies in HistoryG. Arunima

Contemporaries, and Their TimesGlimpses from a Writer's World: O. Chandu Menon, His

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Glimpses from a writer�s world / 189

Studies in History, 20, 2, n.s. (2004)SAGE PUBLICATIONS New Delhi/Thousand Oaks/London

Glimpses from a Writer�s World: O. ChanduMenon, His Contemporaries, and Their Times

G. ArunimaNehru Memorial Museum and Library

New Delhi

Biographies by focusing on individuals and their lives become an essay on individuality,personality and privacy; in fact, the purpose of the biography is to make the subjectspecial, different and unique. However, biographies place the subject in a curiousrelationship with the historical context�in that sense they are both similar to, yetdifferent from, the novel. Both deal with interiority�yet their relationship to the �real�is very different from one another. This article is based on my ongoing work on writingthe biography of O. Chandu Menon, the first �modern� novelist in Malayalam. WritingChandu Menon�s biography poses several problems and questions. The complete paucityof private information on his life, by way of any letters, diaries or even photographsposes very serious problems for the biographer. What would the best way be then toread (or write) Chandu Menon�s life? My attempt here is to treat both his novel(s)(Indulekha and Sharada) and his life as ways of understanding and animating the endof the nineteenth-century experience in Kerala. In other words, instead of readingChandu Menon�s life into Indulekha, it is more productive to see both him and hisnovel as historically constituted products. In addition, it shall be my effort here also tounderstand Chandu Menon�s life as a phenomenon that was influenced by the complex,and changing, social circumstances in this period.

I

Biographies, by focusing on individuals and their lives, become essays on indi-viduality, personality and privacy. In fact, the purpose of the biography is tomake the subject special, different and unique. The biography has been a particu-larly Anglo-American genre and is knitted into a changing history of private lifein the West over the past three centuries or so. However, biographies place thesubject in a curious relationship with the historical context�in that sense theyare both similar to, yet different from, the novel. Both deal with interiority, thoughtheir relationship to the �real� is very different from one another. While the detailand depth of personal history are meant to illustrate everything in a biography, anovel has a much more creative relationship with the context.

Biographies also present an often untheorized problem for social historians�that of the relationship between the individual and society. While social history



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has preferred to study the past in terms of wider and more general categories ofclass, caste, community, gender or race, the biography, perforce, exemplifies aparticular trajectory in history�that of an individual�s life. Biographies do howeverpoint to changes in wider social contexts�in the family, community, locality orthe state. The emergence of a public sphere accentuated private lives, and theprivacy of a life was as much a part of a changing private experiential domain,and an attempt at understanding this change, as a response to negotiating anemergent public world. Changes in consumption patterns, urban geographies andemployment structures had an impact on notions of privacy. Everything underwenta change, be it clothing, hairstyles, eating habits or leisure activities. The biography,in that sense, is also a way of tracking the manifestation of the social in the self.

Thus, the biography, as a history of a personal life, is precariously positionedat the intersection of history and literature. With its focus on the private and thepersonal, however differently interpreted, its story distinguishes the individualfrom the wider context. Yet, as a narrative it is at pains to highlight its basis intruth as opposed to the fictional world of the novel. In India, the earliest biographiesseem to be either of political people or of literary/creative figures. Both thesereflect a public persona rather than a private life. However, it is worth reflectingfor a moment on the perceived distinction between these. In the absence of privatepapers, such as letters and diaries, how does one reconstruct a life? The questionsposed by this are the ones that have confronted western biographers, i.e., whyshould a biography be about privacy, or privacy alone? Why should a revelationbe more truthful than what may be already available within the public domain?And finally, how would a literary biography necessarily differ from literarycriticism?

This article is based on my ongoing work on writing the biography of O. ChanduMenon, the first �modern� novelist writing in Malayalam.Writing Chandu Menon�sbiography poses several problems and questions. One, he wrote just one noveland barely started another and yet has been acknowledged as the first modernnovelist. His premature death meant that we cannot say whether a prolific careerwas suddenly nipped in the bud or that Indulekha (1889), and maybe even Sharada,had that been completed, were just a flash in the pan. Unlike his contemporaries,such as the essayists Vengeyil Kunhiraman Nayanar (Kesari) and C.P. AchyuthaMenon, or journalists like Kandathil Varghese Mappilla and later the journalist,short story writer and general man of letters, Murkot Kumaran, Chandu Menondid not contribute to newspapers or develop his own essay writing skills. In theabsence of a literary oeuvre, one has to assess Chandu Menon�s literary life onthe basis of just the one novel and the available part of his second. Moreover, it isimportant to remember that his professional life was spent as a part of the judicialsystem (at the time of his sudden death he was a sub-judge at the Calicut districtcourt) and that a large part of the respect and recognition that he had in the Malabarof his time came from this association.

Nevertheless, Chandu Menon was part of an emergent literary and culturalcircle; his life and his interests reveal the constitution of such a world at the turn




of the century. Yet, the complete paucity of private information on his life, byway of any letters, diaries or even photographs, poses very serious problems forthe biographer. What would then be the best way to read (or write) Chandu Menon�slife? My attempt here is to treat both his novels and his life as ways of under-standing and animating the experience of the late nineteenth-century Kerala. Inother words, instead of reading Chandu Menon�s life into Indulekha, it is moreproductive to see both him and his novel as historically constituted products; asan upper caste Malayali grounded in a cultural milieu that was subtly changing atthis time. In addition, it shall be my attempt here to explore the relationship betweenChandu Menon, his novels, and the historical time that he inhabited. The latterhalf of the nineteenth century, all over India, was characterized by changes ineducational and professional spheres. Alongside, a reasonable degree of urban-ization offered opportunities not simply for economic growth, but also socialmobility that was hitherto much more circumscribed. The literary milieu devel-oping during this period in Kerala, inhabited by people like Chandu Menon wasclearly shaped by such changes. Furthermore, I shall also attempt to understandChandu Menon�s life as a phenomenon that was influenced by the complex andchanging social circumstances in this period.

In the course of reconstructing both this historical time and Chandu Menon�slife, I have used a variety of anecdotes from the early biographies in Malayalamwritten mainly by his contemporaries. In the absence of private papers these areuseful in illustrating certain moments in his life. Moreover, these also revealsignificantly what people chose to remember, and about the nature of early bio-graphies. Gallagher and Greenblatt�s excellent discussion on the variety of usesof the �anecdote� within literature and history, problematizes the location of theanecdote within a larger narrative.1 They point to both the discomfort that a certainkind of grand historical narrative has had with the anecdote, as well as the creativeuse of it that Marxist historians like E.P. Thompson made of it to �enliven� theirperiod. I have used these anecdotes principally for two reasons. One, most ofthese are idiosyncratic and humorous and reveal some �personal� detail aboutChandu Menon and, therefore, have biographical value. Second, these are illus-trative of certain practices (for instance, cultural or legal) that were current at thetime, and therefore can be treated as an entry point into engaging with larger his-torical questions.

II

What do we know about Chandu Menon? Precious little, sadly enough. Very mucha transitional nineteenth century figure, Chandu Menon died suddenly in 1899 atthe age of 50 when he had finished the first part of his second novel, Sharada.From his birth in an average north Malabar family, Chandu Menon became a

1 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, Chicago, 2000. Seeespecially the chapter �Counterhistory and the Anecdote�.



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literary phenomenon with the publication of his first and only complete novel,Indulekha. Yet Chandu Menon was not principally a writer. At the time of hisdeath, he was a sub-judge at the Calicut district court, not a minor post for anIndian at that time. This becomes particularly significant in light of the fact thathe did not have any formal legal training, had never studied law, and did not evenhave a graduate degree like the breed of lawyers a generation after him. Notbeing a graduate would of course not have been unusual at that time�after all,even in the 1890s there were very few graduates from Malabar. Unlike principalPresidency towns and their environs, Malabar was relatively unaffected, in certainrespects, by the social changes that resulted from contact with the West. The edu-cational sphere was one such area where the province had not witnessed too manychanges. Most educated boys of Chandu Menon�s generation would have studiedat the local village school, where the medium of instruction, for the most part,was Malayalam.2 School curricula was not developed in those times in the mannerfamiliar to us and most children would have been taught the language by readingHindu scriptures.

Chandu Menon�s childhood was spent in Talasseri, in theTiruvangad area whichwas the stronghold of upper caste Hindus. His father, Chandu Nair, who workedas a tehsildar, built the house that Chandu Menon grew up in. This house wasnamed Oyyarathu and, according to the norms of naming in large parts of southernIndia in this period, became attached to Chandu Menon�s name as a prefix. Whatmade this unusual for Kerala and for Chandu Menon�s caste, the Nayars, was thatnormally the names of men of this caste would be prefixed either by their uncle�sor their family�s name. And as the Nayars were a matrilineal caste, this wouldhave meant the name of the taravad, or natal family. Chandu Menon�s name itselfthen becomes an emblem of the changing times.

Of course, family organization and residential patterns within the matrilinealcommunity had always varied according to region but certain changes, like thesekinds of new naming strategies, were symptomatic of the changing times. There-fore, while well-to-do south Malabar Nayars lived in large �joint� families, in thenorth, such households were restricted to a few of the land-owning elite. Evenmarriage customs and resultant domestic arrangements differed in these regions.

In keeping with the spirit of matrilineal custom that gave primacy to the woman�shome, most south Malabar women never moved to their husbands� houses aftermarriage. Nor did a married couple create a separate family home of their own. Inthe north, all these three kinds of residential practices could be found, thoughincreasingly, especially by the latter half of the nineteenth century, independentsmall family units found favour. In part this was aided by the new non-agricultural

2 The medium of instruction in the madrassa schools was mainly Arabic or Arabi-Malayalam;for sections of the elite, like the educated amongst the Nambudiri Brahmins, Samanthar and theNayar, a knowledge of Sanskrit would have been essential. Sanskrit was of course not the sole pre-serve of the upper castes; it was equally a shared resource for the learned amongst the Thiyas. SeeMurkot Kunhappa, Murkot Kumaran: Jeevacharitram (Murkot Kumaran: A Biography), Kottayam,1975, pp. 3�4.




professional opportunities in towns like Talasseri and Calicut. These could be inthe police, revenue or judicial departments or in the various departments of muni-cipal administration that had been set up by the British. Chandu Menon�s fatherwas initially an amin in the police department and later got a job in the revenuedepartment as tehsildar. At this time he was transferred to a place near Kodungallur,near the southern end of Malabar.3 Here he met Parvati Amma and married her,and had five children (including Chandu Menon) from this relationship. Otherthan this he had a relationship with a woman not far from Talasseri, from whichhe had a son, Kunjambu Nair, of whom not much is known.

So Chandu Menon�s own family history reveals the complicated trajectory ofmatrilineal families in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Malabar.4 More-over, his novels too fictionalize certain aspects of this history by exploring matri-lineal families and the tensions within them. In the latter half of the nineteenthcentury there were two factors making family disputes more acrimonious. Onewas that the British legal system had defined the matrilineal family as �joint�,had attempted to curb the division and sale of property, and forced people tolive together. The second was that the changes in the educational system and thegrowing number of non-agricultural job opportunities meant that many of theyounger Nayar men, at least from well-to-do families, were tempted to seek theirfortunes elsewhere. However, this became difficult with family heads often refusingto permit the younger ones to study (or at least not financing such an education)or refusing to maintain those who sought jobs in distant places. In fact the karnavan,or the eldest male of the family acquiring the indisputable and exalted status of�head�, was part of the legal fiction of this period, which subsequently led to thisperiod being referred to caustically as karnavanmarude kalam or the �age of thekarnavan�.5

III

Chandu Menon�s Indulekha begins with the karnavan, Indulekha�s grandfatherPanchu Menon having an apoplectic fit over his nephew Madhavan daring todemand an �English education� for a younger cousin. In a moment we have atableau from a late nineteenth century Nayar taravad before our eyes: an angryfamily patriarch denouncing the legitimate rights of a younger dependent, aconservative Malayali man threatened by the potential dangers of �English edu-cation�, a traditional unchanging lifestyle under siege from modern ideas. Clearlyreality is never so stark and dramatic but there are elements here which carry aresonance from the changing worlds of Malabar and Kerala. Here one of the

3 Murkothu Kumaran, Oyyarathu Chandu Menon, Trissur, 1996, p. 29.4 It was his father and not his mother who had more than one sambandham relationship. This

was not unusual in Kerala.5 See K. Gopalakrishnan, ed., Kesari Nayanarude Krithikal (The writings of Kesari Nayanar),

Calicut, 1987.



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issues that seems to have disturbed Panchu Menon�that of �English education��needs to be understood in its proper context.

As mentioned earlier, education as we know it today was only beginning tomake its mark in Kerala during the late nineteenth century. Until the coming ofthe western missionaries (the German Basel mission in Malabar, and the EnglishChurch and London Mission Societies in Travancore areas) most of the Hindulower castes, or generally the poorer sections of society, did not receive any formaleducation. The missionaries also set up the earliest schools for girls. Later, boththe British and the native states� governments took the lead from them and beganto set up government girls� schools in different parts of Kerala. Until the mission-aries breakthrough, the village pallikudam or school would certainly have beensegregated along caste and community lines. Older forms of schooling comprisedmainly of reading religious texts and for young Hindu children this would havemeant learning to read the Ramayanam, Bharatam, Bhagavatam, or the thullalstories of Kunjan Nambiar. This knowledge was by no means exclusive, and manyamongst the lower castes who had access to learning shared this literary andreligious tradition.6 The real challenge to traditional forms of schooling camefrom English medium schools that were being introduced in different parts ofKerala during the mid-nineteenth century.

Missionary schools, like those set up by the Basel mission, not only made anew kind of learning available, but were also the earliest institutions in Keralathat helped to break the caste and community barrier prevalent in the villageschools. In Malabar the first English school was set up by the Basel mission inKannur in 1841. The one at Kallayi near Calicut followed in 1848 and in 1856 thethird school was set up in Talasseri. Chandu Menon studied in the school at Talas-seri.7 But even when he was studying at the Basel mission school, Chandu Menoncontinued to be taught both Sanskrit and English at home by private tutors. Hisfather is also supposed to have had all his sons taught Hindustani as this wasnecessary and useful for government service. Both of Chandu Menon�s privatetutors had an important influence in his life. Kunhishankaran Nambyar, the Sanskrittutor, was a well-known poet of the region and according to family lore he agreedto teach the young Chandu Menon as he noticed much promise in him. Over theyears they became good friends, and many years later Chandu Menon, workingas sub-judge at Mangalore, wrote the introduction to Nambyar�s humorous workNaricharitam, and had it published at his own cost. Though no copy of this iscurrently available, contemporaries commented that the introduction raised manyissues of literary interest.8 His English tutor, Kunhan Menon, began as a translatorat the Talasseri district court and worked his way up to the position of sub-judge.He was well versed in the English language and Chandu Menon�s own proficiencyin the language could well have been due to him. It is clear that education was

6 See Kunhappa, Murkot Kumaran.7 P.K. Gopalakrishnan, O. Chandu Menon: Navakerala Shilpikal, Ernakulam, 1982, p. 3.8 Announcement of new books, Bhashaposhini, Book 4, Medam, No. 7, 1894, pp. 267�68.




seen as a means to an end in this family, though this was as yet a new phenomenon.Chandu Menon�s educational profile was still atypical in Kerala as most familiesof his caste background feared the changes introduced by the new schools.

Such fears were not uncommon amongst the elite of other communities too.The fear of loss of religious identity meant that traditional parents kept their chil-dren away from the new mission schools that were mushrooming all over theplace by the mid-nineteenth century. An interesting anecdote from the childhoodof Kandathil Varghese Mappilla, the founder editor of Malayala Manorama andlong time contributor to, and editor of Bhashaposhini, is illustrative in this respect.Varghese Mappilla was born in a prosperous Jacobite family in Tiruvalla in 1857.Christian families in this period forbade any interaction with Hindu teachers (thetraditional asans) or the reading of Hindu texts or the puranas, or even otherkinds of literature which was seen as �Hindu�.9 Interestingly, both Hindus andChristians believed that English was a polluted language, and the traditional SyrianChristians feared that people would lose respect for their church if they learntEnglish. Thus, learning English was forbidden on religious grounds by the church,for fear that people would convert to Anglicanism. However, seeing the boy�saptitude for learning, his father initially sent him to a Sanskrit pundit from whomVarghese Mappilla learnt the entire gamut of basic Sanskrit language and litera-ture, like Siddharupam, Amarakosam, Sriramodantam, Srikrishnavilasam andRaghuvamsam. In addition, he also read Ezhuthacchan�s Ramayanam and KunjanNambiar�s thullal stories. Later, with the priest�s permission, he was also sent toan English school, which was hitherto considered anathema.10 The change in theeducation system must not be understood simply at the level of an exposure tonew ideas, nor did it replace the older system very easily. Its initial impact was increating a non-denominational space, and education that was potentially open toall. In addition, due to the preference given in many government jobs to thosewith even a basic educational qualification, young men in pursuit of careers andindependence were encouraged to educate themselves. Despite the fact that dis-crimination, primarily on the grounds of caste, was to continue into the new pro-fessional milieu, it contained the promise of a future unmarked by such distinctions.It was this that inspired many Thiya (and Izhava) and Christian youth to pursuetheir education in earnest.

IV

The legal profession was one of the earliest that offered opportunities for thosewho wished to move away from more traditional forms of livelihood like agri-culture. In Chandu Menon�s family government employment was no novelty as

9 A.D. Harisharma shows that the canonical texts written by the Udayaperur Sunahados in 1600explicitly forbade the reading of Hindu texts; A.D. Harisharma, Kandathil Varghese Mappilla,Kottayam, 1951, pp. 6�7.

10 Ibid., pp. 10�11.



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his father too had been in government service. Interestingly, the notion of a min-imum qualification required for entering the legal profession does not seem tohave been standardized as yet. Many, like Chandu Menon and his English tutorKunhan Menon before him, learnt their professional skills while on the job, andmoved up the ladder by the sheer dint of hard work. Chandu Menon joined assixth clerk at the Talasseri Small Causes court in 1864. At the time of his untimelydeath in 1899 he had become the sub-judge of the Calicut District Court. Throughouthis working life, Chandu Menon was transferred to several parts of south Malabar,though many of these transfers were accompanied by a promotion. Very early inhis career he gained the reputation of being both extremely able and impartial.11

In fact, in 1887 when he was transferred from the Calicut District Court manypeople protested by writing letters to the newspapers requesting that he be re-instated, pleading that while he had been the District Munsif there had been nobacklog of unfinished cases at the court.12 His professional integrity and personalidiosyncrasies became the subject of many an anecdote about him throughout hisworking life. Some of which help to throw light not simply on the man but alsoon the social history of legal practice at the lower level courts in nineteenth centuryIndia.

Two incidents are of particular interest here. One was a family dispute whenChandu Menon was the munsif at Ottapalam. Two men in the same taravad werefighting with each other for the position of karnavan, and each wanted a certificatefrom the munsif stating that he was the elder of the two. This was despite the factthat the family possessed the astrological charts with the time of birth of bothmen, as well as the medical certificates that confirmed their dates of birth. Sincethe age difference was marginal and the quarrel had become a court case, nothingshort of a legal certificate could now resolve the problem. Chandu Menon devisedan ingenious method for deciding the matter. He invited both men to visit him onthe same day, though at different times. The first man came and settled down fora cup of tea and a chat, when the second one arrived. On seeing him, the first oneleapt up in shock and left almost instantly. Upon seeing this, Chandu Menon wassatisfied and concluded that the second man was older. No younger person inKerala would sit in the presence of his elders.13

The second incident too is similarly idiosyncratic. This was a case that came tothe sub-judge�s court in Calicut.14 A marar (drummer) at the annual Thiya festival,thira, held at the Varaykallu temple, was unhappy with the fee that he had beenpaid, and felt he ought to have been paid a hundred rupees. The case came to thecourt and was to be adjudicated by Chandu Menon. Now Chandu Menon was a

11 Native Newspaper Reports (henceforth NNR), Paschima Taraka and Kerala Pataka, 15November 1880.

12 NNR, Kerala Patrika, May 1887; 28 January 1888.13 T.S. Ananthasubramanyam, Randu Maharasikanmar: O. Chandu Menon, M. Narasingrau

(Two Great Aesthetes: O. Chandu Menon, M. Narasingrau) Ernakulam (undated), pp. 12�15.14 Ibid., pp. 25�29.




known aficionado of the traditional arts of Kerala. At the same time the judge atthe Calicut court at this time, Davis, was known to be bad tempered and fussyabout noise. When the case came up for hearing, Chandu Menon could not passup the opportunity to listen to some fine drumming. According to the anecdote,Chandu Menon settled down to listen to a long drumming session in the courtroom. Davis, disturbed by the sounds from the other room, sent a peon across toask for the drumming to be stopped. Chandu Menon himself was known to beshort tempered, and as he appeared to be deep in a reverie, listening with his eyesshut, the peon did not dare disturb him. Finally Davis, exasperated by the events,came to the place himself. Upon seeing him, Chandu Menon ordered two chairsto be placed under the tree behind the court house and for the drummer to continue.As a judge, Davis could not refuse to listen to the �evidence�. The case was judgedin the marar�s favour, and at the end of the session, Chandu Menon gave Davistwo rupees and asked him to give it to the player as his dakshina.

Many interesting issues are evident from both these anecdotes. First, that theMalabar courts by the late nineteenth century had become a site for settling awide variety of disputes, many of which would traditionally never have foundtheir way into a formal system of adjudication. Of all the districts in the Presidency,Malabar was the most litigious and the fact that even a temple drummer couldtake recourse to official channels to get his monetary recompense is a definitesign of the changing times. Second, despite the high incidence of cases at thelower level courts, judges like Chandu Menon evolved their own style of settlingdisputes which did not necessarily take recourse to formal legal argumentation.In fact, throughout the nineteenth and even the early twentieth century, there wasa remarkable difference between the administration of justice at the lower andhigher level courts. As long as Indians who had made their way up the ranks ad-ministered the lower courts, the cases were judged according to customary criteriaand with considerable local variations.15 Moreover, exceptional officials likeChandu Menon, who were well known locally for their legal skills, could adaptwhat appeared to be non-legal situations to the court system with a great sensibilityfor local requirements, and with some degree of humour. It was this ability thatallowed him to satirize the legal system in his, unfortunately, incomplete novel,Sharada.16 Besides, it clearly pointed to the fact that he did not bow down readilyto colonial authority, but could negotiate tricky situations with great elan.

V

Chandu Menon�s was a meteoric career, especially if one is to take into ac-count the absence of any formal legal education. His rise from a mere clerk to

15 For a discussion of the case law tradition in Malabar, see G. Arunima, There Comes Papa:Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar, c1850�1940, Hyderabad,2003.

16 See O. Chandu Menon, Sharada, Kottayam, 1983.



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sub-judge at the Calicut District Court (he might have risen higher had it not beenfor his untimely death in 1899); his being accorded the two highest titles availableto Indians of his time�those of Rao Bahadur and Fellow of the Madras Univer-sity in 1898�were the result of his merit and skill, as well as the goodwill he hadamongst the most influential British officials in Malabar in his time. Severalinstances from his life reveal his ambivalent relationship to colonial rule. It waswell known that Chandu Menon was the protégé of officers like G.R. Sharp andWilliam Logan who were the most influential figures in Malabar in the decadesof the 1880s and the 1890s. Indulekha, his first novel, was translated into Englishalmost immediately after its publication in 1889 because of his closeness toW. Dumuergue, the Acting Collector of Malabar in the 1890s who also was theofficial Malayalam translator for the Government of India. He was also known tobe close to Herbert Wigram who had been one of the most influential judges inMalabar in the latter half of the nineteenth century.17 His ability and his knowledgeof Malabar customs were well respected and were the reasons for his appointmentas a member of the Malabar Marriage Commission in 1891, which was constitutedto examine the necessity for marriage reform amongst the matrilineal community.

However, Chandu Menon�s closeness to several colonial officials did not meanthat he had an unquestioning loyalty towards colonial authority or that he acceptedthat rule unconditionally. While Indulekha can be read quite easily as a paeanof praise for the English education system or the scientific and technologicalinnovations introduced by the British, it also has a complex engagement withnationalism and colonialism. In chapter 18 Chandu Menon brings in a livelydiscussion on two issues that were clearly perplexing people in Kerala at thatpoint�whether English education induced atheism, and whether the newly-formedCongress was anti-British. In his introduction to the book Chandu Menon explains,almost a little apologetically, that he had included this rather polemical chapterdisconnected with the narrative of the novel in order to answer the questions thathad plagued many of his acquaintances. Here I am not concerned with assessingwhether his protagonist Madhavan�s position in the novel (pro-Congress andmoderately religious) is reflective of Chandu Menon�s own stances regardingthese issues. What is more interesting is that it is indicative of the kinds of booksand ideas that people of his background were being exposed to by the late nine-teenth century in Malabar, and how these could have affected the ways of Malayali�modernity�.

Indulekha�s chapter 18 contains a succinct account of Darwinian notions ofevolution and Charles Bradlaugh�s use of this to sustain his argument about humanshaving a rational need to eschew religious belief. In the course of the argumentbetween two of the protagonists, Madhavan and Govindan Kutty, it is clear thatyoung �English educated� Malayali men were familiar with, other than Darwinand Bradlaugh, the works of many late nineteenth century social Darwinists, scien-tists and philosophers like Huxley, Spencer and Wallace. Additionally, English

17 Kumaran, Chandu Menon, pp. 35�36.




literary works of Milton and Shakespeare were not unfamiliar to these people, asindeed appears to be the case with some amount of classical philosophy fromSocrates to Seneca. However, the rebuttal of Govindan Kutty�s extreme atheism,derived from a reading of Bradlaugh, is achieved by Madhavan�s taking recourseto Sankhya philosophy. In this little exchange between the West and East lies animmensely complicated �modern� moment.

Chandu Menon was of the generation of Malayalis whose engagement with�the West� via the media of education, ideas or the colonial state was not an easyone. There were clearly many things about contact with the West that he foundbeneficial�from technology, to education, to modern notions about governance.However, in certain respects, especially in those that impinged on what one mightconsider a part of the �private� sphere�namely, with regard to matrilineal kinshipand its norms, or Hindu religious practices�he was not willing to either acceptthe superiority of the Western system or indeed accept that there was any necessityfor change within his indigenous Malayali one. This defense of �private� Malayalitradition is very much an upper caste Hindu�s response, though not all traditionswere considered equally inviolable by them. With regard to the question of statelegislation for the reform of the matrilineal family, for instance, the opinion wasvery divided amongst the Nayars.18 In his well-known dissenting minute submittedto the Malabar Marriage Commission which had been set up to investigate if theinstitution of marriage existed amongst the matrilineal Hindus, Chandu Menonargued vociferously for continuing with existing customary practices. He main-tained that all the arguments that had been marshalled by those proposing changesin matrilineal customs were merely reproducing Nambudiri aspersions againstthe Nayars. Excepting the fact that there was no widowhood amongst Nayarwomen, in all other respects they were as chaste as their women counterparts inany other community. The suggestion that they were licentious and adulterouswas pure calumny, as the Nayars protected their marriages with as much zeal asthe monogamous (patrilineal) communities. To allow any state intervention inthis area of Nayar life would be an attack against their caste practices and customs,indeed, their very �nationality�19

Chandu Menon�s vociferous opposition to state intervention in the �private�domain of marriage and kinship bears the mark of two seemingly opposing ten-dencies. One was the consciousness of a distinction between �private� and �public�,which is predominantly an experience of modernity. For instance his claim thatcertain areas were beyond the realm of state control was surely possible onlywhen there was some notion of a civil society whose norms were separate, andoutside the purview of the state. This idea of �the private� was one that was quite

18 For most lower caste intellectuals in this period, the entry into the public sphere was enablingin that it provided the space to attack the �traditions� of upper caste Hindu practices. Kunhappa,Murkot Kumaran.

19 Chandu Menon, Dissenting minute, Report of the Malabar Marriage Commission, Madras,1891.



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developed within Chandu Menon�s thought, despite the fact that there was nosuch clearly defined �civil society� that existed at that time. Significantly, in hisopposition to the marriage legislation he was in the minority. Not all Nayarsbelieved that they could transform family relations without state intervention.

Chandu Menon extended similar principles of �privacy� in the argument aboutatheism in Indulekha. In essence, he appears to be arguing that the ideas that werebeing presented by late Victorian rationalists like Bradlaugh in support of atheismwere not dissimilar to ideas present within India, and that too from ancient times.The ritualistic excesses that Hinduism seemed to have acquired by this period didnot constitute the essence of the faith, which emphasized that a true knowledge ofthe self was tantamount to a true knowledge of god. In denying either a differencefrom Western views, or the supremacy of the latter in terms of understanding,Chandu Menon was making a statement in defense of his traditions and culture.

Exposure to a gamut of Western ideas, then, did not instantaneously translateinto a transformation of Indian life. On the contrary, these were sifted, weighedand utilized on the basis of what appeared to be appropriate. Selfhood for thecolonial subject seemed to be the outcome of this complex process of selectionand rejection. The emergence of this kind of �privacy�, at least for members of theupper castes, then seems to be a defensive mechanism, devised in order to protectoneself and one�s community from the onslaught of outside intervention. Theexperience of modernity was but a fractured one, and was determined to a largeextent, at least in the late nineteenth century, by one�s social origins.

VI

However, the other sense of the �private��of the growth of �privacy� or �secrecy��which was linked more with the lifestyles and practices of the individual duringthe nineteenth century in the West does not yet seem palpable here. The changesin habits or customs in Kerala could be said to be the outcome of the colonialencounter in the broadest sense, but the manner in which these changes occurredwas often a result of complex and contradictory impulses. One of the incidentsfrom Chandu Menon�s life is an indication of such a complex phenomenon. Hegot his first job as the sixth clerk at the Small Causes Court at Talasseri in 1864. Inthose days, G. R. Sharp used to be the judge at this court and he readily agreed toappoint young Menon. However, at their first meeting he looked the young manup and down and then apparently, somewhat playfully, tugged at Chandu Menon�shair which was tied according to local custom in a top knot (kuduma) on the sideof his head.20 In the only available photograph of Chandu Menon (the frontispiecein Dumuergue�s English translation of Indulekha) we have a picture of him witha turban and it is not certain whether he ever cut his hair subsequent to this event.However we do know that Madhavan, the hero of Indulekha, had long hair tied in

20 Kumaran, Chandu Menon, pp. 33�34, is the first reference that we have to this incident.




a top knot and clearly for Chandu Menon that continued to be a sign of beautyand manliness for Malayalis despite the changing circumstances of his own life.

This incident is remarked upon in every biography of Chandu Menon�s inMalayalam, and clearly marked a severe breach of propriety on Sharp�s part. Inthis gesture of arrogance and excess lies one significant moment in the history of�private� life in Kerala. Most Malayali men had started wearing their hair short inthe Western manner by the early twentieth century, and it is likely that it wasthose in government employment who were the first to accept this change. Whilechanges in hairstyle for men became universal in Kerala, this was not true ofclothing, or customs involving food or eating habits. Unlike in many parts of thecolonized world where the double impact of the missionaries and the wider colonialpresence led to drastic changes in lifestyles and customary habits associated withdressing, food and comportment, in large parts of India, the changes, if any, weremodifications of older patterns. While the discourse around changes in clothingand appearance for women (e.g., covering of the breasts and the upper torso gen-erally) was more fraught,21 in the case of men it appears to have emerged as aresult of a steady inclusion into �modern� work spaces. However, Malayali menand women retained many of their traditional dressing habits throughout thetwentieth century. Particularly during the first half of the twentieth century, thedifference for men lay in changes between clothes worn to work and those athome. In fact, the crisis of modernity in the form of intrusion of Western clothingand lifestyle produced not a rejection, but a refashioning, of traditional styles.Even this, if considered excessive, was greeted with humour and derision, andbecame the staple ingredient of modern satire.

In Indulekha, Chandu Menon narrates a story that was actually from his ownlife. This is an incident about wearing slippers, which in the novel is narrated byPanchu Menon, the irascible karnavan, to Govinda Panikkar. Footwear was avery new introduction to the Kerala countryside and well into the twentieth centurymost people never protected their feet in any manner. Once a subordinate of ChanduMenon�s at Parapanangadi, one Srinivasa pattar, bought himself a pair of slipperson his way back from Calicut. As it was considered incorrect to wear slippers infront of elders or superior officers, the pattar would never dare wear his pair infront of Chandu Menon�s house but carried it covered in a piece of paper. Menonspotted this, and pestered him about it, asking if he were hiding some sweetsin the packet. Finally, Srinivasa Pattar revealed the contraband article and ChanduMenon asked him to wear them and not be silly about such a thing again. In the

21 Breast covering was encouraged as part of missionary activity in the early nineteenth century,and often this was part of converting lower caste groups. Certain royal families and Brahmin prieststreated this as a caste infringement; eventually by the twentieth century a new morality naturalizedthe change of attire that probably was influenced by changing attitudes about the issue. In essence,both the missionaries and the royalty seem to be making a claim over the lower caste woman�sbody. Unfortunately, there is very little work on what is otherwise a fascinating social history ofmentalities. For the best discussion as yet see Bhaskaran Unni, Pathombadam Nootandile Keralam(Kerala in the Nineteenth-Century), Trissur, 1988, pp. 29�34.



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novel, he transformed the incident, and the young man who was caught wearingslippers by his uncle was thrashed for wanting to acquire tastes that flouted Malayalitradition. It was not simply that it was a new form of dressing; it was more that itsymbolized a challenge to traditional forms of authority. Footwear was seen as aninsult to any form of authority�god, elders, superior officers or upper castes�and could invite very serious rebuke from any of these quarters.

Apart from situations that were seen as challenging traditional authority orlifestyle, there was simply embarrassment at being thought to be aping the West.Unlike other parts of India, like Bombay or Calcutta, in the late nineteenth centurythere were very few Malayalis who interacted with the British intimately andeven this was restricted mostly to the workplace. British officials or couples wererarely invited to Malayali homes as both sets of people were probably unsure ofeach other�s ways and treated the others� customs with suspicion. Indian andWestern food and habits were known to be different and not many wished toexpose their ignorance. Besides, the practice of having different courses or theuse of different types of utensils and cutlery to eat the food seemed strange toMalayalis who found English practices awkward and unusual. Chandu Menononce invited a British official and his wife over for a traditional meal. Being un-familiar with Malayali cuisine, they apparently confused the yogurt based accom-paniment, kalan, normally eaten with rice, for a sweet dish and ate it faking greatappreciation until he chose to laughingly point out their mistake.

Malayalam satire of this period is replete with these kinds of stories, all ofwhich point out the clumsy social situations that inter-racial interaction oftenproduced. Loss of traditional customs could be threatening to the old order; butoften this was decried also because it meant a loss of sense of self, or of a feelingof equality. For the upper castes the colonial encounter was often the first experi-ence of discrimination. Moreover, changes in lifestyle due to such diverse causesas urbanization, professionalization, or missionary activity, seems to have gen-erated a tremendous amount of unease even amongst those men who were slowlyadapting themselves to these changes. Predictably, the responses were not uniform,and the reasons for these were not simply determined by their social origins. Itwas more the nature of the change that provoked different responses. Family�reform�, for the most part, found strong votaries across caste and community. Inother matters of lifestyle, like food or clothing, the changes that occurred wereoften acknowledged, a little shamefacedly, in the form of humour. To some extent,this kind of humour (in the work of Chandu Menon, or in that of two of his con-temporary satirists, Murkot Kumaran and Kesari Nayanar) was quite self-reflexive,and though not spelt out as such, political in its critique of social change. Itcontained the complexities and contradictions of self fashioning that was a part ofthe experience of modernity for these Malayali men. Despite their shorn locks,continuing to wear a mundu, the sarong-like lower cloth worn by Malayali men,to work; eating traditional food off the plantain leaf with ones fingers; and devel-oping a modern Malayalam to meet the challenge from English were all part of




ways of defining a Malayali identity that would be modern without losing a senseof selfhood.

Thus, for Malayalis by the end of the nineteenth century, becoming modernwas intimately linked with grappling with their own sense of self. And despite theawareness of a nascent national movement, the primary locus of their engagementwas with carving out a distinct regional identity. The principle manifestation ofthis identity at the time was articulated in non-spatial terms in an attempt to createa new Malayalam. Language would be the vehicle for modernity; it would alsocreate a community of speakers. The linguistic community was co-terminous withother forms of community that had existed prior to this, like caste or religiousgroup. The difference lay in the effort to transcend the boundaries of the othercommunities and create a regional identity that was to be centred on a sharednotion of language and living space. Therefore, even though the experience ofmodernity might well have been a fragmented one, the attempts to overcome thisthrough the creation of a new language was clearly an attempt at creating a sharedspace.

VII

It is in this context that Chandu Menon�s Indulekha and the incomplete Sharadamarked a difference from earlier Malayalam literature. This was for two importantreasons. One, the Malayalam itself was different and closer to the spoken idiom.In other words, it was the harbinger of the modern Malayalam that would bestandardized in Malayalam prose writing by the twentieth century. Second,the novel was set within the world of the Malabar Nayar households, and was onethat was comprehensible to the average Malayali reader. No longer was literatureto be confined to archaic periods or to the marvels of gods and goddesses, recover-able only through the medium of a pristine, Sanskritized language. While attemptsto modernize and democratize the language had already begun, these had beenrestricted primarily to the religious realm. Ezhuthacchan�s Ramayanam in kilipattuis considered the first modern rendition of the text in Malayalam. Similarly, theefforts of missionaries like Benjamin Bailey or Herman Gundert were confinedto publishing texts and newspapers that dealt mainly with religious issues�eventhough theirs was the first attempt to modernize the language via the means ofprinting, publishing and evolving a Malayalam lexicon. The novel, and the earlynovelists, provided the critical shift in the literary sensibilities of Kerala, markingthe emergence of an entirely new literary domain. This domain could becomepossible as the world itself was changing. Printing presses, newspapers, literatureand the changed educational and professional regimes were all part of a phe-nomenon that was not simply restricted to ideas or language but found a resonancein the wider world of social interactions and lifestyles. It is to this world�itsconstitution and concerns�that we shall turn now.

The structural changes in society that initiated the creation of a new �pub-lic� sphere in Kerala, like in many other parts of the world, were linked to new



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technologies like the printing press that popularized and democratized access toideas.22 One of the earliest printing presses set up in Kerala was possibly the oneat Ambazhakyatt (north of Angamali near Trissur) which was established by theJesuits to print books and teach Portuguese, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, thoughnot much is known of it. In 1834, Swati Thirunal, the famous composer and rulerof Thiruvithancore set up the Government Press in Thiruvananthapuram with thehelp of Benjamin Bailey, the Protestant missionary. Up north, a similar situationprevailed with Herman Gundert and the Basel mission acquiring four Germanlithographs during the 1840s. The Basel Mission Press was set up in 1842 inMangalapuram and the Talasseri Mission Press in 1845.23 However, in the 1850sit was still Ezhuthacchan�s Ramayanam that was possibly the most popularlyread printed book. It was Devji Bhimji�s press, set up in the Cochin area, thatseems to have been the first to initiate new kinds of printing. Bhimji, a Gujaratitrader settled in Kerala, was the first to conceive of and encourage a new kind ofjournalism in Kerala. While Bhimji too started off with religious texts like thebhagavatam, he later pioneered the publication of modern writing and was theone who started one of the early Malayalam newspapers, Kerala Mitram, thatchanged the direction of modern journalism in Kerala.24

Just as the missionary schools began by breaking down older barriers of socialsegregation, so did the press and printing create a small reading public linked bynew kinds of ideas and interests. Therefore, even as schools and the workplacebecame the sites for a �modern� interaction, so also was a fictive community ofthe reading public created within the pages of the first newspapers and journalslike the Kerala Sanchari, Kerala Mitram, Malayala Manorama, Bhashaposhiniand Vidyavinodini. Though the newspapers were mostly bi-weekly affairs untilthe end of the nineteenth century, and never exceeded a circulation of 200 to 300,journals like the Bhashaposhini, and later the Vidyavinodini, which started in the1890s, were also the sites for the earliest experiments with new writing, and seemedto have quickly generated a lively debate on Malayalam language and literature.

This debate involved different issues, people and aspirations. One part ofit was concerned with how to modernize the language. The move away from aSanskritized Malayalam was clearly influenced by such a concern and peoplelike Chandu Menon were strong votaries of this shift. At the same time there wasno easy consensus on how to conceive of this modern Malayalam�what its rootswere (Tamil or Sanskrit), and whether it should follow an English or a Sanskritmodel for its future development. A substantial part of this discussion centred on

22 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nation-alism, Verso, 1991. For two critiques, from very different points of view, of Anderson�s notion of�print-capitalism� and its influence on the creation of language and a national culture, see ParthaChatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Delhi, 1995; andC.A. Bayly, Empire and Information, Information Gathering and Social Communication, 1780�1870,Cambridge, 1996.

23 G. Priyadarshan, Malayala Patrapravartanam: Prarambhaswarupam, 1982, p. 11.24 Polson Alengadan, Kandathil Varghese Mappilla, Cochin, 1989, p. 29.




questions about style and literary matters while an equally important part was theproblem of the necessary tools, like an adequate grammar and lexicon, whichwould help in the growth of the language. The relationship between the new lan-guage and literature, the means for its development and propagation were otherconcerns. The decade of the 1890s was the most critical in giving this discussiona direction. Here writers were as much arguing for a new Malayalam as they werecelebrating the arrival of one. These were still uncertain times and people neededto marshal many arguments in their defence in order to justify the use of this newlanguage. Within a decade the focus would move away from the newness of thelanguage itself to a discussion about the literature.

Chandu Menon�s Indulekha was considered the forerunner in the move towardsa new literature even in its own time. It received a huge amount of publicity andmost papers and literary journals continued to write about it months after itspublication.25 Contemporary critics noted two things above all. One was that itwas a novel in the �English style� and the second that, more than any novel writtenprior to it, it was responsible for creating a taste in such literature in Malayalam.26

However, for many it was the ability of this emergent literature to popularize anew idiomatic usage that was of the greatest significance. As Kandathil VargheseMappilla wrote, �[t]he English want to modernize India. And if a place is tomodernize, it must happen through the medium of its language.�27 He added that,�. . . while initially Malayalam was highly Sanskritized, later this declined as aresult of newspapers and journalism. The authors of books like Indulekha too areresponsible for the creation of a new Malayalam and the making of a new litera-ture�.28 While many contemporary critics were reasonably critical about Indulekhaand its literary merits, all agreed that its novelty really lay in its adaptation of theform and its creative use of language.

Chandu Menon�s novel Indulekha, located within a Malabar taravad, repre-sented the complex issues of language, education and identity in a light-heartedidiom. The story centres on the love affair between a young, �modern� couple,Indulekha and Madhavan. Madhavan is a young student, waiting to graduate fromMadras University (clearly �English educated�) and then embark on his legaltraining. Indulekha, though not having had any formal school education, has beeneducated at home by the best teachers and is well versed in English and Sanskrit.Many contemporaries who read the novel remarked that Indulekha was an ex-tremely �unreal� character�no woman in Kerala, they said, could be as talented,

25 Varghese Mappilla, �Malayala Pustakangal� (5 April 1890), in G. Priyadarsanan, ed., KeralaNavodhanam: Kandathil Varugese Mappilayude Mukhaprasangangal (Kerala Renaissance: TheSpeeches of Kandathil Varghese Mappila), Kottayam, 1997, pp. 31�34.

26 Achyutha Menon, �Sharada�, in CP Achyutha Menontte Nirupanangal, (C.P. Achuta Menon�sEssays), Calicut, pp. 141�43.

27 Varghese Mappilla, �English Cherna Malayalam�, in Bhashaposhini, Book 1, No. 2, 1897,p. 25.

28 Ibid., p. 27.



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educated and beautiful as her. In fact they felt that the author had clothed a �whitewoman in a mundu and made her speak Malayalam�.29 Madhavan, of course,does not seem to have made any impact on the readers at all. But despite theirhaving failed the reality test, they represented the acme of education and enlight-enment. Both Indulekha and Madhavan combined the best of the East and West.�Sanskrit� and �English� were not simply languages, or even systems of educationhere; they symbolized ways of life.

In Indulekha, Nambudiri Brahmins are shown to be generally wary of Englishand all the modernity that it entailed. However, in creating Suri Nambudiripad,Chandu Menon excelled himself in a complex form of satire. Here the Brahminhas neither English nor Sanskrit and becomes the butt of constant ridicule. On hisfirst meeting with Indulekha, with whom he wished to begin a sambandham, Thefollowing conversation ensues:

�Cherusheri repeated a Sanskrit verse to me yesterday, and I wanted badly torepeat it to you. They tell me you know English as well as Sanskrit. Now if Irepeat a Sanskrit stanza to you, do you think you will understand it?�

�I think I shall find probably find some difficulty�.�Of course you must know a little Sanskrit�, said the Nambudiripad.�Of course . . .�He had a vague recollection of only one or two stanzas, and as he had no

knowledge of Sanskrit construction, he used to make ridiculous blunderswhen he tried to repeat them, while words and phrases frequently escaped hismemory altogether. At last he used to hammer out a garbled version of the lines,and now, according to his wont, he mutilated half a stanza after seriousdeliberation . . .30

Indulekha then proceeds to demolish Suri Nambudiripad by a witty display ofher poetic skills. By making Indulekha, a Sudra (Nayar) woman, a Sanskrit scholar,Chandu Menon made a serious critique of the caste pretensions of the Brahmins.Hitherto, Sanskrit had been considered their language. Even though the fact thatMalayalam had its base in Sanskrit from the medieval period meant that evenSudras learnt the language in a manner of speaking, real proficiency in Sanskritwas always assumed to be a Brahmin preserve. In the battle about modern Mala-yalam raging in Kerala at that time, the votaries for preserving the Sanskrit basedManipravalam made a strong case to this effect.31 Well into the early twentiethcentury upper caste education would have been considered incomplete withoutSanskrit, and many continued a parallel mode of communication with each otherin the language.32 However, even as Sanskrit provided Indulekha with scholarly

29 Anonymous, �Sharada�, Vidyavinodini, Book 3, No. 12, Kannimasam, p. 150.30 O. Chandu Menon, Indulekha (English translation by W. Dumergue), 1965, pp. 165�66.31 NNR, Kerala Mitram, 11 June 1881; Kerala Patrika, 1 March 1890.32 See letters of Appan Thampuran, Appan Thampuran Library, Trissur; many of the letters to

the pandits and shastris are in Sanskrit; others in Malayalam and a few even in English.




insight and preserved her Indian femininity, it was English that gave her a razorsharp wit and enabled her to resist the unwanted attentions of the Nambudiripad.English education here was a metaphor for a modern attitude, one that ChanduMenon considered essential for young people.

Interestingly, a contemporary counter satire in that period, Parangodi Pari-nayam,33 ridiculed the idea that an English education was necessary for moderniz-ing the community. Here the main protagonist Parangodi Kutty loses all knowledgeof a Hindu way of life and culture. What is more, unlike Indulekha, she is rejectedby the most eligible man and remains a spinster for the rest of her life. ChanduMenon, in Indulekha, had managed to touch a raw nerve by speaking about twoissues that were difficult within traditional Kerala�that of women�s educationand the question of caste. In both these he had his own personal perspective, butit is significant that he located these as central to the project of modernity. Moreimportantly, he did this in a vernacular idiom�something that had not beendone successfully until now�and by that changed the direction of Malayalamprose writing in the period to come. Even those who critiqued his positions wrotein the language that he popularized. His success, as was noted repeatedly by hiscontemporaries, lay in this.

VIII

Finally, it is to these two issues�women�s education and caste�and their rela-tionship to the making of a modern Malayalam that we shall turn to now. Indulekha,as we have seen, can be read as a plea for women�s education. Interestingly,many of the copy-cat novels of that period educated their main female protagonists,though it was never very clear where, or what, they studied. And unlike ChanduMenon, they did not make clear what they felt was the purported intent of educatingwomen. In his letter thanking W. Dumergue, the translator of the novel, ChanduMenon had said, �the only thing which my readers might reasonably take exceptionto is Indulekha�s knowledge of English; but as one of my objects in writing thisbook is to illustrate how a young Malayalee woman, possessing in addition to hernatural personal charms and intellectual culture, a knowledge of the Englishlanguage would conduct herself in matters of supreme interest to her, such as thechoosing of a partner in life, I have thought it necessary that my Indulekha shouldbe conversant with the richest language of the world�.34 Though at this time �Englisheducation� for women was clearly seen as an aberration or a novelty, or even as asort of social affectation, this would change within the next couple of decades orso. Yet, in the interim, a pretty grim battle raged in the pages of the journals andnewspapers, mainly between men of different persuasions, about the necessity ofeducating women.

33 Kizhakeppattu Ramankutti Menon, Parangodi Parinayam (Parangodi�s Wedding), 1892,reprinted in George Irumbayam, Nalu Novelukal (Four Novels), Trissur, 1985.

34 Chandu Menon, Indulekha, pp. xx.



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For the most part there was a general consensus during this period that govern-ment jobs, commerce and agricultural activities, amongst all other things, weremen�s work and that women needed no education for taking care of housework.35

Besides, there was a more serious fear that educated women would becomeimmoral. While sewing and embroidery, which entered girls� school curriculafrom the mid-nineteenth century, were seen as improving activities, reading�especially novels�was seen as ruining the moral fibre. Such fears were not con-fined to Kerala, or India, during this period. Many Victorians considered readingnovels a dangerous pastime, guaranteed to lead to the ruination of young femaleminds. Similar fears dominated the minds of Malayali men in this regard, andcaution was often advised even by those who argued for women�s education.

The case was often stated in peculiar and convoluted ways. One such absurdsupporter of women�s education argued that women, like �Negroes�, were inferior,though that did not mean that they should be deprived of education.36 This wasbecause men and women were friends and siblings and not masters and slaves.Others more straightforwardly asserted that education helped to modernizethe mind and as women too had a �body�, a �brain�, and a �mind�, they ought tobe entitled to an education.37 Some were more frontally critical of the oppressiveconditions that affected women�s lives. One writer said, �judges want vakils to besubordinate to them; Nambudiris want Sudras, the castes below them; that Hindusdo not revolt makes the English happy. And so all men want women to be sub-ordinate to them�, adding that, � [the] accusation that education will spoil theirbehaviour or that independence will make them lack in virtue�how is this differentfrom karnavan who blame their anantharavar for all their faults? Men blamewomen for all their faults�.38

However, despite some radical positions such as these, in the 1890s most authorswriting on behalf of women�s education agreed that its necessity was to helpwomen become better homemakers. Educated women would manage the financesbetter and take care of childcare and nurture with skill. Servants too would becomeredundant as education would encourage women to use their time more fruitfullyin the home and kitchen, and they would spend their time in reading improvingbooks instead of whiling it away in idle gossip.39 Very few of them, like the radicaljournalist Kandathil Varghese Mappilla, wrote about women�s education in amatter-of-fact manner, with a spirit only to reform what he perceived as the separ-atist and communitarian tendencies that he saw being introduced into them. In ahighly perceptive and humorous essay about the Hindu and Christian girls� schools

35 Anonymous, �Strividyabhyasam�, Vidyavinodini, Book 2, No. 3, Makaram, p. 89.36 M. Rajaraja Varma Thampuran, �Strividyabhyasam�, Bhashaposhini, Book 2, Part II, No. 12,

1898, pp. 278�80.37 S. Subrahmanya Aiyar, �Strividyabhyasam�, Bhashaposhini, Book 1, Part 4, Dhanu, 1897,

pp. 81�84.38 Anonymous, �Strividyabhyasam�, Vidyavinodini, Book 2, No. 3, 1891, pp. 66�67.39 Aiyar, �Strividyabhyasam�, pp. 82�84.




he pointed to the differences emerging between these on community lines.40

However, such a nuanced position was rare in this period, and was very much theexception rather than the norm.

The clamour for women�s education was not the only indication that the trad-itional world of Kerala had begun to change. The caste reform movements of theperiod argued for the modernization of education, employment, and of certainaspects of lifestyle. A feeling of discrimination on the basis of caste, and thegrowth of an identity on the basis of this experience, is perceptible even in ChanduMenon�s novels. While in Indulekha, Suri Nambudiripad represents everythingthat is oppressive about the Nambudiris to the Nayars, in Sharada Chandu Menonhad begun to explore the nuances of intra-caste differences amongst the Nayarsthemselves. Within the public domain of the late nineteenth century the questionof caste discrimination, for the Nayars, became centred on two main issues. Onewas that of the sambandham relationships between Nayar women and Nambudirimen; the other was that of land rights of the Nayar tenants in relation to Nambudirilandlords. William Logan�s attempts from a decade earlier to provide Nayar tenantswith security of tenure was a response to their complaints of an unequal relationshipbetween the two castes. The attempt to create a �marriage law� for the Nayarsunder the initiative of young Nayar lawyers like C. Shankaran Nair in the 1890swas a similar response to the perceived inequities of inter-caste sambandhams.Needless to say, in both these instances there were many generalizations and thereformers generally ignored inconsistencies in their bid for securing an enablinglegislation. For instance, not all Nayar sambandhams were with Nambudiris. Infact, such a practice was restricted to the rich and powerful Nayars. Similarly, notall Nayars were tenants. Some, like the Kalyatt and Koodali families, were amongstthe biggest landowners in the region.41 Such matters however did not alter thegrowing feeling of Nayarness in the region�one that would ultimately coalescein the formation of caste organizations like the Nayar Service Society in the earlytwentieth century.

Many contemporary readers of Indulekha repeatedly thanked Chandu Menonfor creating characters like Suri Nambudiripad, and Panchu Menon, the karnavanof the Nayar taravad. In part this was due to the fact that these figures were meantto be life-like and hence, believable.42 Yet the fact that some Nambudiris wereupset by the negative representation of Suri is enough to suggest that even if notdirectly, caste feelings were definitely invoked in the conception of Indulekha. InSharada, the Punjolakara Edam taravad is described as being very rich andpowerful, replete with lands, titles and caste status (sthanam). Raman Menon,Sharada�s father, who himself was from a poor taravad, met and married her

40 Mappilla, �Thiruvthankotta Hindukalum Kristiyanikalum Thamilulla Bhedam� (The differencebetween Hindus and Christians in Travancore) 5 October 1895, in Priyadarsanan, Kerala Navo-dhanam, pp. 194�96.

41 See Arunima, There Comes Papa, for a detailed discussion of these issues.42 V.J.M., �Novel vayana�, Bhashaposhini, 1900, Book 4, Part 2, Kanni, p. 46; see also S. Para-

meshwaran Aiyar, �Nammude gadyam ezhuthukar�, Bhashaposhini, Book 2, Part 4, Dhanu, p. 87.



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mother, Kalyani Amma in Kashi. This was because Kalyani Amma had run awayfrom home to escape the oppressive environment of her marriage to an �ugly andunintelligent man�.43 Raman Menon and Kalyani Amma began living together,�as husband and wife�, in Kashi, but never returned to Kerala as her family wouldnever have accepted him. �Even though I am same caste as your taravad, becausethey have a higher status (prabhutvam), they do not have ordinary Sudra sam-bandham. Punjolakara Edam have sambandham only with Brahmins�.44 In thecourse of their continuing conversation Sharada asked her father, �What doesprabhutvam mean father?� He replied, �Your karnavan (elders of the family) usedto rule the region and had the right to protect and to punish. Now even if none ofthat exists, they still retain prabhutvam as they had these rights earlier.� �Oh, sothat is all, is it?� said Sharada.45

In this little exchange, Chandu Menon managed to establish the differencesamongst Nayars that were unfair to some and clearly chafed their pride. Thismight even have had a resonance from his own life where even though his fatherbelonged to an old and established family,46 they were not of the same status asNayar families like Vengeyil Kunhiraman Nayanar�s. Murkoth Kumaran relates aVengeyil family legend of how one of the ancestors beheaded a Mappilla Muslimand brought his head as sacrifice to the family goddess as revenge for his havingkilled a cow. He describes the power of, and excesses committed by, the big land-owning families, be they Nayar or Nambudiri.47 These �forest chieftains� (kattuprabhukkal, as he called them), had untold amounts of land and wealth and in theperiod prior to British rule could kill, or get people killed, with impunity, in theguise of meting out justice. �Even today, peasants (kudiyans), irrespective of castedifferences, are under the sway of these people . . . . They [the chieftains] had noEnglish education or modern values, as we understand them�, commented Kumaranin his scathing critique of landlord power.48 The biggest landlords or janmis ofMalabar were really like the rulers of the region, whose power was bolstered bywealth, caste status, and the arbitrary right to rule the region. More than Nayarslike Chandu Menon, it was Thiyas like Murkoth Kumaran, and others of the lowercastes who suffered deeply from such excesses. Whereas educated Nayars likeChandu Menon could in a variety of ways counter the indignities of caste differencethat they had to face, for the lower castes this was next to impossible. In an anecdotefrom Chandu Menon�s life, it is clear that he did not take kindly to what he saw asan exercise of Brahminical privilege. Once a passing Nambudiri had stopped byat his house near lunchtime. Now it was a well-known fact that no one wenthungry from Chandu Menon�s place, so as was the practice of the house, two

43 Chandu Menon, Sharada, p. 34.44 Ibid., p. 35.45 Ibid., p. 37.46 Murkoth Kumaran, Vengayil Kunhiraman Nayanar (Kesari), Trivandrum, 1933, pp. 6�7.47 Ibid., pp. 7�12.48 Ibid., p. 10.




plaintain leaves were placed near the room adjoining the bathing tank (kulappura),which was where Brahmins were normally fed in his house. At lunch time, ChanduMenon joined the Nambudiri for lunch. Upon seeing him, the Brahmin leapt upto bathe again in order to purify himself. Seeing this, Menon challenged him, andthe Nambudiri replied that as a Brahmin he could not eat with a Sudra. ChanduMenon countered that if the Nambudiri could eat with the Edathara Moopil Nayar(a grandee of the region) because he was a sthani (had status born out of landownership), he could eat with him too as he was a munsif and a mani (had statusborn out of respectability), and thus a �good� Nayar. The Nambudiri then attemptedto leave but the gates of the house were closed and he had to return. ChanduMenon apparently left him in peace to eat, and later propitiated him with adequategifts, but he had made clear his own displeasure at the Brahmin�s rudeness.49

Resisting Brahmanical power like this would have been well neigh impossiblefor even the Thiyas, the highest among the erstwhile lower castes of Kerala. Castedifference and oppression manifested itself in Kerala in a variety of ways. It waspossibly the only place in the country with rigidly enforced concepts of touch andsight pollution. An elaborate list was laid down of distances at which each of thelower castes had to stand from the Nayars and the Nambudiris, for fear of �polluting�them. Lower caste men, despite education, faced enormous difficulties and dis-crimination in their professional lives�simply by being denied employment.50

For many of them the contact with Europeans and their culture, be it Christianityor English schools, and the possibility of entering a public space where traditionalmarkers of caste had no meaning, was certainly appealing. The plaque outsideBrennan College in Talasseri, which says that anyone irrespective of caste, creedor colour can enter, is testimony to this aspect of freedom that the colonial contactbrought with it.

In the literary domain, Thiya writers like Murkoth Kumaran and Potheri Kun-hambu were amongst the earliest from a lower caste to make a mark. With hiswide range of interests and skills, Kumaran was soon well known as a writer,journalist and literary critic. A campaigner for lower caste rights, he was associatedwith several literary ventures including the first Thiya newspaper, Mitavadi. Hehimself acknowledged his gratitude to the journalist and litterateur VargheseMappilla who, as editor of Bhashaposhini and then Malayala Manorama, en-couraged most of the young writers of his generation, and also campaigned for anew kind of writing.51 Whereas the sensibility of upper caste writers like ChanduMenon for caste inequities did not extend beyond their own caste, it is from thework of lower caste, or non-Hindu intellectuals of that time that one begins tounderstand the mentality of caste oppression. In one of his speeches, VargheseMappilla took up the issue of education for the untouchable Pulaya caste. The

49 T.S. Ananthasubrahmanyam, Randu Maharasikanmar, pp. 15�19.50 C. Krishnan, �The Lower Classes in Travancore�, Madras Mail, 1 September 1890, reproduced

in K.R. Achuthan, C. Krishnan, A Biography, Kottayam, 1971, pp. 329�31.51 Harisharma, Kandathil Varugese Mappilla, pp. 103�5.



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issue of caste discrimination came up in his writings repeatedly and he was verycandid in his critique of upper caste Hindu society and its role in continuing withsuch social practices.52 That apart, it was his support for writers across caste andcommunity that made him unique for his times.

The question of �English education�, against the backdrop of this history ofcaste difference and experience of discrimination, is much larger than simplystudying a language, or even about a �western� education system. It was a complexstatement of a desire for changes in cultural values. �English� and �Sanskrit� didnot simply stand for modernity and tradition, but also suggested relative degreesof distance, or closeness, to a hidebound Brahminical order. The experience ofthe traditional order and the desire for modernity varied enormously on the basisof one�s social origins. Nevertheless, the experience of modernity for this trans-itional generation of Malayali intellectuals was one that was marked by flexibilityand possibility. The idea that merit, born out of education, would enable one tosecure a position in the world was a radical departure from the conception ofsocial life as a tightly ordered, bounded space. The early debate on language,region and identity displayed precisely this excitement about wanting to rethinkand shape afresh. The people who participated in this process would never havefound a voice within the traditional order.

Moreover, the loosening of traditional roles meant that those who may havebeen considered a very unlikely set of social equals in an older period now beganto constitute a community. Friendship and camaraderie were forged out of thisinteraction between people far removed from each other in social status�some-times even in regional proximity. The best example of this was the strong bondthat developed between Chandu Menon and two of his close friends�E.K.Krishnan (who later received the title of Diwan Bahadur) and the Kerala VarmaValia Koil Thampuran from Thiruvthancore State. Chandu Menon and E.K.Krishnan were colleagues and worked under Herbert Wigram when he was theDistrict Judge at Calicut. Their friendship matured over the years and was strength-ened also by a shared interest in hunting! After Wigram�s departure from Calicut,they jointly instituted an award in his name for the student attaining the top positionin the F.A. examination at the Zamorin�s college.53 In the case of Chandu Menon�sfriendship with the Koil Thampuran, it was their common passion for literaturethat brought them together, and it was this alone that could sustain a long-standingepistolary friendship. Throughout their lives these two men never met each otherbut shared common interests, and Chandu Menon�s own literary life is said tohave been greatly influenced by the Koil Thampuran. In turn, he published theThampuran�s Amarukashatakam at his own cost, and it is very likely that theverses from the �Shakuntalam� in Indulekha were inspired by the Koil Thampuran�sversion. Their friendship was not restricted to the literary sphere alone. In 1894,

52 Mappilla, �Keralathile kizhjatikal�(Kerala�s Lower Castes), Priyadarsanan, Kerala Navodhanam,pp. 106�8.

53 Kumaran, Chandu Menon, pp. 35�36.




the Koil Thampuran wrote to Chandu Menon, �I have waited impatiently for yourletter for many days. I hope you are not unwell. At least send me a line to let meknow this. I was troubled when I heard the news of your rheumatic pains . . .�.54

Apart from the new social bonds that friendships like these could have structured,it is worth mentioning that these were also friendships that transcended the castebarrier (Krishnan was a Thiya; Chandu Menon a Nayar and the Koil Thampuranbelonged to a Samanthar, or royal, family).

The nature of sociability too changed in this period. Unlike in an earlier era,people across caste and community, if they were connected to each other throughprofessional interests or friendship, would visit each other. Both Murkoth Kumaranand Thomas Paul mention visits to Chandu Menon�s home. Paul narrates anincident when he was introduced to Chandu Menon�s wife on one of his visits toMenon�s house in Talasseri. They had both read a piece by Paul in Vidyavinodinicalled �Matakalude bhava hitvam�, and wished to discuss it with him. Such formsof sociability were clearly novel, and marked a very Western and modern notionof interaction. Despite the fact that monogamy was becoming quite the norm forprofessional Nayar men all over Kerala (which would in any case have been trueearlier for Christians and other groups), this neither entailed the much desired�companionate marriage� that many had begun to write about, nor a necessarychange in attitudes that could have made something like socializing as a couple,common. Yet in the fictional world of infinite possibility, many yearned for �love�and �companionship�. Indulekha itself was the earliest such example of a modern�love story� and became the model for many others that followed. However, onething that is apparent in most of the early Malayalam novels is a blissful ignoranceregarding forms of modern socializing or family life. Also, their treatment of loveseems to be quite forced and empty of depth and emotion. This of course could initself have been the result of a clumsiness in handling the novel as a literary form.To an extent, however, it was also linked to the fact that �modern� life in Keralawas as yet not as bourgeois as in the West, though Western novels formed theprototype for their early Indian counterparts.

Most friendships, then, were based on a common intellectual or professionalinterest and at least at this time were between men. Publishers, journalists andwriters from such diverse backgrounds as Devji Bhimji, Kandathil VargheseMappilla, Murkoth Kumaran, Chandu Menon, and Thomas Paul could all haveinteracted closely with each other at some part of their professional lives. In manyinstances, simply sharing the same literary space created a community of intel-lectuals with at least one shared concern�of engaging with the experience ofmodernity that was shaping, and often confusing, them.

54 Quoted in Mudadi Damodaran, Gundert Mudal Sanjayan Vare (From Gundert to Sanjayan),1987, p. 41.



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IX

Even as Chandu Menon�s only novel, Indulekha, inaugurated dramatic changesin Malayalam language and literature, his life too, as we have seen, was emblematicof some of the most significant changes of the nineteenth century and not entirelydissimilar to others within the literary world. Very much a transitional figure,Chandu Menon was still of that generation of organic intellectuals who were notentirely dislocated from their roots in the course of their encounter with modernity.With a light-hearted and humorous style, he managed both literature and the legalsystem with ease. This would change by the next generation when satirists likeE.V. Krishna Pillai and Sanjayan would attack modernity with the acerbic wit ofthe neo-traditionalists. Nevertheless, what did endure was the simple, everydaylanguage that Chandu Menon popularized. Whatever the direction of change,modern Malayalam was there to stay.



glimpses from a writer's world: o. chandu menon, his contemporaries, and their times

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