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S. MENON MARATH :
(An Appraisal Of A Novelist That The World Forgot)
By: T.R.K
1996
The opening page of Menon Marath's first novel published in 1960 when
he was 54, has an epigram from Li Tai Po ("Dawn reddens in the
wake of night, but the days of our life return not. The eye contains a
far horizon, but the wound of spring lies deep in the heart"), which
lances the heart cruelly of all hopes of immortality. If he did not
know it himself then, when he published "The Wound Of Spring", this
quasi-existentialist theme runs like an unseen stream through all his
three novels.
The novel is set in pre-independent India, in Kerala, (then
comprising Malabar, Cochin and Travancore), in a feudal, matrilineal
society. Using the history of India's early days of struggle for
independence as a mere echo, the equal protagonists are set firmly mid
stage, with a story to enact; in a womb-like space of cool action.
Krishna Menon, the patriarch of the "tharawad", the sprawling joint
family hive, runs this hostellary of several separate families
all confined to their rooms with their brood of children and infants
with occasional night guests of husbands, claiming their visiting
rights . Families co-here during dinners. There is the ritual total
recall of the Nayar's glorious past as a soldier-warrior clan, whose
ancestral armoury of swords and shields are enshrined in an unlit room
in the house. The new generation of Govindan, his younger brother Unni,
and his sister Meenakshi, and all sundry unnamed cousins and
friends have heard the distant thunder of Gandhi's call for non-violent
struggle for independence, of demolishing boundaries of caste and
inequality. This reverberates in the hearts of everyone, imbuing the
older members with moral outrage, the middle-aged with moral anxiety,
the young with the dreams and dilemmas of rebellion. The Nayar
"tharawar" is no longer a tranquil fastness; it is a prison about to
implode, and ultimately disintegrate.
Unni is the youngest son of the family whose mother had broken
away from the iron clasp of tradition 30 years earlier, by
electing to train as a singer. Unni is untainted by bigotry of
privilege,of class and tradition. His awkward love for his mother and
his sister is free of judgement; his playfulness with the family's
servants is a cool and just acknowledgement of equality of all human
beings.
Unni runs away from home, rejected emotionally by his mother
Parvathi, whose egotism as a singer, selfishness as a person cannot
touch the source of her love for Unni. She discriminates in favour of
her elder son Govindan,not much older than Unni, who is soon to become
the "Karanavar", the manager patriarch of the family, only to feed his
humourless ego.
The world outside the safe boundaries of Nayar home is in violent turmoil. Moslem Moplahs have risen in armed revolt against centuries of servitude and disadvantage. The Nayar middle class secure in their privileges resents the Gandhian inspiration behind the Moplah uprising. Unni joins the roving circus visiting his town, like perhaps hundreds of youngsters before him, as the perfect, magical escape. Abused and enslaved by the circus owner, he jumps off the train and finds himself in the heart of the Moplah revolt. He witnesses the torching of Hindu homesteads, and the looting. He undergoes the final humiliation of being branded a spy by the escaping contingent of Moplahs on the run, returning from a fire bombing foray. Soldiers who do not even speak his local language capture the Moplahs, and Unni. He is once again transported in an airless train carriage with the rebels, to an unknown fate. Chance intervenes; Unni and others are thrown out in a confused getaway, and he is shot in the elbow.
Menon Marath charts the course of his characters faultlessly, if ponderously; evoking and subsuming as he goes along, switching narrators fluently. Unni is rescued, nursed and repaired by a family of untouchables. As tenant farmers they work ceaselessly, unquestioningly; acceptance of their role keeps them in this solitude of bondage. They are confused and anxious at having a member of the master class of Nayars as a house guest. Unni, works in the field alongside them in an expression of wordless bond between their hearts. Unni sees them open up and accept him, transcending the divide of caste. He falls in love with the loquacious 18 year daughter of the family, Cheethu. He marries her and fatalistically wills his return to his joint family home. Govindan is now the insecure despotic Karanavar. Parvathi from the retreat of her moral indifference, suddenly redeems herself shedding the armour of her selfishness, in a scene scorched by a sudden passion for justice, and recognition of love as being transcendent to scripted loyalty to tradition. She leaves home with her bedding and her silver, with Unni and his untouchable wife Cheethu to the banishment of a remote home in the wilderness . Govidan's unforgiving greed, fear, incomprehension, in a Machiavellian alliance with tradition takes swift, punitive revenge.
Menon Marath's writing is measured, and thoroughly old-fashioned. Descriptions are chiselled with the lucent care of a Victorian essayist. At its keenest, his narrative rescues life and detail from the chaos of its own echoes.
Menon Marath says he is a slow writer. At 88, he lives in the riverside suburb of Teddington; in the silence of old age, he is writing his fifth novel, the fourth is still trawling the literary agents' corridors in search of a publisher. It is easy to describe Menon Marath as an un-discovered Isac Singer, although he is unable to accept the comparison.
Menon Marath is a scion of the warrior class from the northern part of Kerala. The middle name of Menon was a title traditionally accorded by the King of Cochin, to all Nayar warriors who excelled as scribes and accountants.He graduated from the Christian College in Madras,and acquiring at this age his deep sense of the history of his land of Malabar from a reading of K.P. Padmanabha Verum's History of Kerala( not epigraphical, but anecdotal, he says). He sailed to England in 1934 to be a postgraduate student at Kings College London. Unable to complete his studies, with a marriage and children soon to follow, finding a job to sustain a family became his priority.
I first met Menon Marath in the mid 60s when he was coming to the end of a life- long career as a middle-ranking civil servant. Very kind, aloof and amused, he was pleased that someone somewhere had heard of him, had read him. I met him 20 years later working part time as a librarian at the Buddhist Society in Pimlico.Amused aloofness was still in evidence. Yet this time, I sought the intimacy of friendship boldly and was given it easily.
He has not had the critical recognition of his literary peers of Indians writing in English: like R.K.Narayan, Ruth Prawer Jhabhvala, Raja Rao( praised by Lawrence Durrell) Nirad Chaudhuri, Mulk Raj Anand; nor the benifit of a redemptive blurb from the likes of Graham Greene that elevated Narayan. An elite readership has occasionally sought Menon Marath out to quiz and relate to his vision : of impermanence, of mortality, of justice and of equality; awareness of the tyranny of class, wealth and education; the redemptive power of love and the intimacy of compassion.He hides this and his general air of agnosticism expertly by weaving them, like Isac Singer, into a flawless structure of his good story telling.
His two other published novels are more sparely written. "The Sale of an Island" his second novel, published four years after the first is a political allegory. Its land owners, tenant farmers, and migrant workers are locked in an implacable fatal dance of feudal imperatives. The island is about to be sold off by the landlord with no regard for its several families of tenants, who have lived on the island, perhaps for generations. Legal and moral rights are infringed, and battle lines are drawn.
Menon Marath launches into an investigation of ultimate morals, and yet this transcendent theme is weighed down by its infelicitous actors. One of the protagonists declares at the end that there are no ultimate winners, or losers: History and Time are indifferent to all outcomes.
One can easily see Menon Marath all agog with his questions: when does a Man's responsibility to his fellow human beings cease; what are the boundaries of Man's sense of equity, is there absolute justice? Should one stand up to transgressions of human morals? What is honour, what is compromise, what is cowardice? And yet the grand theme burdens the inhabitants of this small insignificant island, foregrounding a small insignificant town, somewhere in Kerala, with a script that leaves them one -dimensional and tongue-tied. A novel so sparely written deserves a careful reading if only to regret the loss of an opportunity for Menon Marath to have written it differently.
The theme, in deceptive disguise carries across to JANU, his last published novel. It is about an orphaned girl seeking the freedoms of recognition as an equal, in friendship, in love. It is a heavyweight pre-occupation for minor actors; but Menon Marath transfigures them
Janu loses her father and then her mother early in life and is brought up in her father's brother's household, where she is more a servant than a relative. She is raped by her cousin; eventually she goes back to her old home, where she encounters a man, who is a political terrorist in hiding.Janu marries him, finds happiness. It ends once again, with the death of her husband. She takes to the road, and finally comes to a Shiva temple, where she surrenders herself to a life with a personal God.
Once again inanimate objects, trees, rocks, cloud cover and
rain, the hum of the world come alive with foreboding, and enforce
ground rules. Fortunately, unlike in A Sale Of An Island, they are not
interventionist, they are light, almost lyrical. Reading Janu, one is
chilled by the cold passage of these descriptions, this transference of
emotions to external objects, reminiscent of Truman Capote's The Grass
Harp. Janu's transcendence is a mirror-like empathy of her whole being.
Menon Marath's description of Janu's rape is an example:
"Then there was he, crossing the floor and coming towards her.
Janu felt she had to wait. Then his arms were around her and his
ravenous lips on her breasts. He dragged her to his bed into whose
softness their tow bodies were thrown. His face was cold; as it
approached hers she saw that behind the wet skin there was a strange
sad terror. Lying beside her he was a much diminished,rather ludicrous
and coarse man. He no longer commanded, he begged and grovelled. The
room which was his private universe now rejected and expelled him: it
was a small long room with only furniture in it. Even his passion was
halted. Because he had gone beyond what was right there was no longer
any dignified retreat for him. Her resistance would be unbearably
humiliating to him. That would be too painful to witness. Because she
was so full of pity for him, she was able almost to see everything that
was happening in that room from within his world."
Menon Marath told me that he attempted to "shake the burden of chronology" in writing JANU. I had wondered if the Publishers had demanded parts of JANU to be cut, as editorial joinery seemed to be in evidence. The novel takes into account a " processsion of time", and not a "progression of time", says Menon Marath. It could prove to be a commendable addition to a list of classic feminist resurrections. Menon Marath has held an elite group of Indian feminists in a spell. They cannot come to terms with a male novelist's sympathetic portrayal of JANU, an inarticulate, uneducated Indian woman, abandoned, orphaned, enslaved, raped, expelled, visibly falling down a chasm. How did Janu discover the secret of living forever in the present, at the very heart of human moral quandaries, equally in empathy with her aggressors, and friends?