Current mood:	depressed
Entry tags:	m krishnan nair, sahityavaraphalam

The Day Literary Criticism Died
M Krishnan Nair is dead.

Krishnan Nair who? No, not that one, though he was famous in his own right. I refer to Sāhityavāraphalam Krishnan Nair, a name that should be familiar to any Malayalee who has even a passing interest in language and literature.

A fiery literary critic, Prof. M Krishnan Nair was arguably single-handedly responsible for introducing three generations of Malayalees to modern world literature. His column was called Sāhityavāraphalam — “literary weekly horoscope”, to translate it verbatim. But his column had no loose predictions or fluffy generalisations.

Krishnan Nair believed in plainspeak. His column first appeared in the late 1960s in Malayālanādu magazine, before it moved to Kalā Kaumudi. In the 1990s it started appearing in Samakālika Malayalam. That’s around 40 years of writing the same column in the same engrossing, inimitable fashion.

It was thanks to Krishnan Nair that names such as Umberto Eco, Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges came trippingly off the tongue when I was a student of ‘BA Literature’ in Kerala in the late 1980s.

It was from him that we aspiring litterateurs first heard the words ‘deconstruction’ and ‘postmodernism’ used correctly. It was from him that we came to toss Jacques Derrida and Noam Chomsky into casual conversation. It was from him that we learned Varindra Tarzie Vittachi was of Sri Lankan descent and not Italian as his name seemed to indicate.

Marcel Proust was a particular favourite, and he would often quote from Remembrance of Things Past. “വിശ്വവിഖ്യാതനായ പ്രൂസ്ത്” was how he reverently referred to him, and we dutifully elevated Proust to deserved divinity in the pantheon of French writers. If Krishnan Nair said Proust was god, so he was.

Yes, it was an age of innocent exuberance, and Krishnan Nair’s critiques provided much intellectual fodder for us earnest scholars.

As a critic, M Krishnan Nair cut no slack to even budding writers. He had no patience for bad writing — whether it was flowery poetry, obtuse fiction or effete criticism. We used to joke that “scathing scatology” was one of his weapons. Here’s how he critiqued a short story that appeared in a Malayalam magazine circa 1988 (and I translate from memory):

“X dives into the depths of his imagination as we anxious readers wait with bated breath, expecting him to rise to the surface with a priceless pearl in his hands. However, when X eventually surfaces, all we see in his hands is the noxious excrement of some sea creature...”

Or this:

“My friend [the publisher of a prominent Malayalam weekly], was out on his morning constitutional when he saw budding writer Y squatting by the roadside and defecating. He advised Y: ‘Don’t mess up the road; why don’t you come and shit in the pages of my magazine instead?’ So Y accepts the invitation — and we readers can hardly bear the stench...”

Excoriating? Certainly. Gross? Perhaps. But what many people didn’t know was that he was always amiable and gentle in person. M Krishnan Nair always made it clear that his scathing remarks were directed at the creation and not the creator. And though a lot of people bore him grudges, his fans greatly outnumbered them.

M Krishnan Nair’s allusions and anecdotes were often sexually explicit. I recall how he once described a train journey where the young woman opposite him, in an act of supreme boredom, allowed the pallu of her saree to slip bit by bit as the miles went by, giving him a clear view of youthful breasts struggling to be contained in an inadequate blouse. It sounds prosaic when put thus, but Krishnan Nair made it humorous and erotic and lecherous, all at the same time. As with Khushwant Singh, I fancy even Krishnan Nair wasn’t above a certain egoism when it came to perceived attention from the fairer sex.

Another of Krishnan Nair’s foibles was a dogged adherence to what he felt was the appropriate pronunciation of foreign words. He was openly dismissive of those who forgot to omit the ‘s’ in Camus or pronounced Gide as ‘guide’. It was because he was such a stickler that we figured out how to say apparent tongue-twisters such as Jorge Luis Borges and Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. But he often took things too far. For instance, he would insist on rendering Freud as ഫ്രായിറ്റ്, which even I knew to be quite wrong. And seeing how he shoehorned Henrik Ibsen's Rosmersholm into the Malayalam script, it would frankly have been unpronounceable in any language.

Despite an ardent wish among us to meet the man in person, I always had the fear that he would behave as brusquely as he did in his writings. The fear was unfounded, but how was an 18-year-old to know that? A friend of mine, Ashok, even went to the extent of composing a long mail to him, but I don’t know if he had the courage to post it. He was probably scared it would come back with severe scrawls all over it, as the result of Krishnan Nair sir’s ruthless literary tweaks. Or worse, find a mention in the next instalment of Sāhityavāraphalam.

I had the chance to meet the man when he spoke at a gathering in Trivandrum in 1992, but again passed up the chance. There’s time I thought. Yes there was time all right — 14 long years, in which I made no attempt to get in touch.

And earlier this evening I heard he’s no more.

Rest, but not in peace, M Krishnan Nair. Even as I write this, I have no doubt you are, in some parallel universe, ripping to shreds someone’s pathetic attempt at literature. As you said once, quoting Kipling:

“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you
If all men count with you, but none too much...”