SALMAN RUSHDIE may dismiss India’s vernacular literature as ‘provincial’, but if he restricts himself to a diet of English language books from the subcontinent, then he will miss out on some stimulating reading. A tell-all tale by a former nun and the confessions of a sex worker are currently the two best-selling books in the state of Kerala in southern India. When it comes to literacy, India is ranked one-hundred-and-twenty-third in the world, with a rate of sixty-five per cent. But in Kerala, literacy is close to one hundred per cent, which translates into a market of thirty-one million people with a vociferous appetite for literature written in their mother tongue of Malayalam.

     Mridula Koshy is an Indian author who was educated in Kerala and now lives in New Delhi. In July, she published a collection of short stories called If it is Sweet, which has been shortlisted for India’s Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize. She recently discussed Kerala’s love of literature on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show. 

 

Are the people of Kerala India’s biggest readers? 

 

I think pretty close to being the biggest. There are a couple of other regional languages: Bengali, Assamese, maybe Marathi and Gujarati as well that have significant-sized literature being written and read in those languages, being translated into those languages. But there’s nowhere else in India where you have the literacy level that Kerala enjoys.

 

And why is Kerala such a literate state?

 

I think it has a lot to do with the communist-led governments in Kerala. Kerala is a pretty restless electorate, so there is this habit of switching parties from one election cycle to the next, so they are either voting in the Congress Party, which has dominated national elections in India, or they’re on alternate cycles electing the communists. And there’s more than one communist party – I can’t always keep track of which is in power at the moment. Their literary mission has seven objectives, the sixth of which was the provision of facilities for libraries and reading rooms. It’s not just about making sure that one hundred per cent of the population can read at a simple level; at the government-level there is an interest in literature. 

 

There’s also PN Paniker, who’s seen as the founding father of the literacy movement in Kerala. 

 

He’s sort of a demigod figure. He spearheaded a lot of what is still going on today: door-to-door sales of books, literary rallies, reading rooms, libraries. This work started in the early 1960s. 

 

Is there a particular genre of literature that appeals to people in Kerala, or do we see the full range? 

 

No particular genre. The literacy movement under PN Paniker and some of the organisations he created, like the KSSP [Kerala Sasthra Sahitya Parishad – Kerala People’s Science Movement] promoted ‘scientific literature’, and Kerala is one of the interesting places in the world where girls perform at par or surpass boys all the way through higher levels of education in the sciences. This kind of reading certainly seems to have a deep impact on the population and on gender roles, for one. But the Kerala reader also reads fiction, written in Kerala by writers in their language, Malayalam, and literature from other parts of India, and from all over the world. The biggest publisher in Kerala is DC Books, and DC Books, if you go to their web site, lists authors including Che Guevara, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens. So you get your political literature, your biology and your literature from a century ago in England. And all of it in translation, in Malayalam. 

 

Are there many writers from Kerala writing in Malayalam who are translated into English – or indeed, into other vernacular languages of India? 

 

There are some efforts. India has a body charged with this work, the work of translating regional languages into English, and into other regional languages, but English in particular, because it becomes the bridge language from which other translations occur. If you translate a novel written in Malayalam into English, it can then be translated into Bengali or Assamese or Marathi, or even French or German. It doesn’t happen as much as it should. The literature from Kerala, written in Malayalam by Malayali writers, is so very lively, so experimental, so compelling, that I feel it’s quite a shame that we don’t see more of it in English. I read in Malayalam, but at a basic level, so mostly I read it in English.

     We had one of the Malayalam language greats, MT Vasudevan Nair, celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his book Nalukettu in 2008. It has sold maybe 400,000-plus copies over the past five decades. Oxford University Press published an English translation last year. 

 

Many of us tend to think of Indian literature as coming from Bengal, the great Rabindranath Tagore, for example, or of writers from the Indian subcontinent writing in English – people like Salman Rushdie, and many others. Rushdie, however, has been very disparaging about literature in vernacular language. He suggested that books written in languages like Malayalam weren’t worth very much. 

 

This was quite a huge controversy in the community of readers in India. And I think this was in the preface to a collection that he edited in 1997 with Elizabeth West, for a compilation of writing in the English language from India. And he actually claimed in the preface that the vernacular languages were inferior to the stronger and more powerful body of work which comes from Indian writers writing in English. And the controversy extended so far as to produce a counter-anthology of works written originally in regional languages. There is a war of books and a war of ideas around what Indian literature actually is and, if Rushdie, as he said, felt that true Indian literature was best represented by Indian writers writing in English, then we had another whole camp that thought otherwise. There’s been a lot of angst over the years about who we are, writing in English, and what does this mean to use the colonial language, and whether we are participating in a project of subjugating ourselves and the regional languages are getting wiped out. Time has passed and I think there is less of the angst now because regional languages are not being wiped out. They’re lively. Literature is being produced in these languages. States like Kerala are an exemplar of this. 

 

There’s been a boom, too, in newspaper publishing in the vernacular and so on, so certainly India’s regional languages are very much alive. I wanted to ask you about some of the titles, because, as I understand it, one of the best-selling books in Kerala at the moment is written by a nun. What’s the story there? 

 

This is a book titled Amen in English, and we have an author who was a nun until about a year or two ago, and this ex-nun quit the church after thirty-two years. And the book is being released at a time in Kerala where there’s a lot of introspection and controversy around the church and particularly around how nuns are treated in the church. There are claims that there’s a good deal of oppression. Girls are entering the nunnery in numbers, as they always have in Kerala, where Christians are a significant portion of the population – something like almost twenty-five per cent of the population. And it’s a powerful institution; young girls join and there’s no way to unjoin easily because there’s social pressure. In many cases they’ve joined it in the first place because of economic reasons within the family – perhaps there are a number of daughters and as each one gets married off the family’s resources are depleted. The church is seen as an option. 

 

The other book that’s had phenomenal success in Kerala was written by a grandmother, a woman in her fifties, and it’s her exposé of her life as a sex worker. 

 

Yes, this is by Nalini Jamila, the book is Autobiography of a Sex Worker, and it is a little bit older than Amen, Sister Jesme’s book. Both of these books are examples of a particular trend or current in Malayalam literature right now, which is the autobiographical memoir-style writing, from people who do not normally fall into the literary world, who would not be considered writers and would not see writing as an option for them. There’s one with a labouring-class person writing about his life. There’s a hunger and an avid interest in hearing the genuine story right from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. And that mirrors a trend in literature all over the world, where the authentic story is being privileged. 

 

Nalini Jamila’s book also provoked a lot of debate about the role of women; she took a view that working as a sex worker, prostitution, gave her a certain mount of freedom – from her husband, for example. 

 

Yes, that’s right. In the book there is mention of a number of relationships that she’s had with men in the years that she worked as a sex worker. And she prefers the term ‘sex worker’. These were in some cases men who fell in love with her when they first encountered her as clients and wanted to marry her. In some cases she had children with them. I was at the Jaipur Literary Festival last year and Nalini Jamila spoke. There was someone in the audience, a young man, a journalist, who stood up and made an impassioned plea to her; did she not see that she had hurt these men with the kind of drive toward independence that she professes. And he was clearly quite rattled by the kind of politics that she professes. They had an interesting exchange after the panel discussion and I translated between them. I really enjoyed her personality, her take on what it is to be a woman, her very interesting but not completely unique understanding that being a woman finding her place in the world does not have to be prefaced on being with a man in a monogamous relationship. For her, sex work was the door to a kind of freedom. Nalini is now a grandmother; her daughter understands that her mother is a sex worker. The book covered quite a bit of the mother-daughter engagement around this question, with the mother initially unwilling to tell her daughter who she is, and finally telling her. 

 

And what about the affordability of books and the value placed on books. Are books very highly valued in Kerala? 

 

There is a long tradition of making books affordable. This was important to Paniker, the founder of the literacy movement; it’s important to the KSSP, the organisation that publishes a lot of the literature that the movement advocates. Copies sell at about sixty, seventy rupees a copy, sometimes even cheaper. Some books are as cheap as ten or twenty rupees a copy. In the city I live, New Delhi, we don’t have a Barnes & Noble but we have Crossword Books, we have Oxford University Press, we have Teksons Bookshop. These are big bookstores, air-conditioned, with displays and plate-glass windows, and you can browse, and you can get yourself a cup of coffee in the café built in to the bookstore. Books sell for anywhere from three hundred rupees a copy; easily five to six times what a book in Kerala costs, and upwards. A Harry Potter would cost you maybe nine hundred rupees – close to twenty US dollars. You could walk out of a bookstore with a fancy hardback collection of photography, an art book, for three thousand rupees. We’re talking one hundred times the price of a book in Kerala.

     There’s also a long tradition of serialising books in a number of magazines that have been in existence in Kerala for decades. I think a novel has actually been written as the magazine is being issued, so that each week the writer is coming up with the chapter that the reader then encounters. It’s very much like what I’ve heard happened in England when Charles Dickens wrote his novels – people waiting for the ships to come in with the next episode of Little Dorrit or The Old Curiosity Shop. In the homes of family members of mine, the shelves that run along the living-room walls are stacked with old, dusty copies, eighteen or twenty issues, each with an episode of the book. The magazines have another kind of value now.

 

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This is a transcript of an interview broadcast on 15 October 2009 by The Book Show on the Radio National network of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow).