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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (4036)	4/10/1999 2:52:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12475

Backwaters Epic- COIR by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai. india-today.com (Social realism that reflects two centuries of turmoil) March 2, 1998 By M Mukundan COIR BY THAKAZHI SIVASANKAR PILLAI TRANSLATED BY N SREEKANTAN NAIR SAHITYA AKADEMI ; PRICE: RS. 275 All through his life as a writer, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai was engaged in a battle -- with himself. The socially conscious chronicler of history crossed swords with the despairing dreamer in him. Whenever the chronicler won -- and that was the case more often than not -- it was to the chagrin of the readers. But when the dreamer won, it was a moment to rejoice. For over six decades, with 37 novels and 500 stories, Pillai has been capturing the social and political turmoils that have shaped the modern state of Kerala. He is gifted with a sharp observation and an awakened memory. His language is so starkly realistic that it is peeled to its bones. The novel, set in Kuttanad, is built in nine parts, with 139 chapters and over a hundred characters spread over 736 pages. It is the collective story of a people. The main character of the first part, the classifier, resembles, in more than one aspect, the author himself. The classifier from Thiruvananthapuram arrived in Kuttanad to record the land and properties and other assets of the people. Painstakingly he accomplished the task. In the same manner, Pillai classified the events of two centuries with mathematical precision. Not only the collapse of the matrilineal system and the social-reform movement initiated by Sree Narayana Guru, but also the freedom struggle, Partition, the communist movement, the land reforms and even the distant thunder of World War II are captured in the vast spectrum of the novel. If Pillai had come out of his shell for a while and blissfully strayed into the realm of dreams, Coir would have been what it claims to be -- a magnum opus. The late N. Sreekantan Nair may have been a revolutionary socialist but as a translator he hardly creates a stir. Even the semblance of imagery and lyricism found in the original version is missing in the translation.