Kovilan

Kovilan was born in Kandanassery in Guruvayur, Thrissur to Vattomparambil Shanku Velappan and Kotakkattil Kunjandi Kali. He did his early education at the Kandanisseri Excelsior School and Nenmini Higher Elementary School. He then joined the Sahitya Deepika Sanskrit College at Pavaratty at the age of 13. He had the good fortune to attend classes by the scholars like K. P. Narayana Pisharody, P. C. Vasudevan Elayathu, M. P. Sankunni Nair, Cherukadu and Srikrishna Sharma. Even as a student, he had shown interest in writing poems and stories. As a budding writer, poetry was Kovilan's primary passion. But life and time of his adolescence – the oppressive colonial and feudal rule, the casteist social milieu, widespread rural poverty that climaxed in stark famine during the war years, the agony of fracturing familial and social bonds and the inner urge to rebel maturing into politically conscious militancy – compelled him to switch over to fiction as a wider arena of self-expression.

A staunch follower of Mahatma Gandhi, Kovilan left the Sanskrit College to participate in the Quit India Movement. That marked the end of his formal academic education. By the time he quit, he had written at least three novels.

He joined the Royal Indian Navy in 1943 and was trained in Anti-submarine Detecting Operations. He served in Bengal sea, Burma and Singapore. He quit following the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 and returned home. While back in Kerala, Kovilan maintained a close friendship with Vaikom Muhammed Basheer, Joseph Mundassery and C. J. Thomas. He also took part in the trade union movements. In 1948 he passed SSLC and worked for a while as a stenographer for Joseph Mundassery. In 1948, he joined the Indian Army Corps of Signals as Radio Mechanic.[4] He also specialised in electronics. For five years he lived in the Himalayas. While in army, he came in contact with soldier-turned-writers Parappurath and Nandanar. He also worked as National Cadet Corps training officer at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He retired from the Indian Army in 1968 as Havildar Major and settled down at Pullanikunnu at Kandanassery.

Kovilan married Kottilingal Ayyappan Sarada who was a teacher on 5th May 1953. His wife predeceased him in 1999. They have three children: Vijaya V A(Retd Peofessor, S N College, Varkala), Ajithan V A(UAE) and Amitha V A (Retd Superintendent, LSG). Their spouses are Adv. Vakkom R Jayaprakash, Beena Ajithan (UAE) and K V Anil Kumar(Videocon) respectively. His grand daughters are Adv. Pournima Mankad Jayaprakash and Dr. Arya Ajith Vattamparambil. His grandsons are Atul Vasudev and Aswin Dev, who are working at Technopark, Trivandrum and Infopark, Kochi respectively.

Kovilan died on 2 June 2010 in Kunnamkulam, aged 86.[5]

Ever since Kovilan's stories started getting published in the periodicals of the 1950s, critics have marked him as 'unique and original' not only for the power of language and deftness for characterisation but also for choice of themes and intense experiences they sought to convey. Right from his debutant novel Thakarnna Hridayangal written at the age of 19 he was obsessively vigilant nit to emulate any models, set not only by others but by himself also. While many established Malayalam writers often betrayed their limitations because they hardly had any experience of living outside their immediate environs, Kovilan had hands-on experiences on riddles and dilemmas of human life as much of his youth in military camps as a radio mechanic, far away from home and hearth. Kovilan's characters depicted, subtly, how human dignity and freedom are hallowed out through regimentation, by powers that be in independent India also just as in the colonial regime. They, however, do not accept their destiny, unquestioned. Kovilan keeps this element of resistance and rebellion in his characters burning. Kovilan's stories that shed light on the lives in and out of military barracks marked a remarkable change in the way stories had been told in Malayalam literature. Kovilan has written four novels—A Minus B, Ezhamedangal, Thazhvarakal and Himalayam—with military experiences as their background. Apart from the pan-Indian lives and terrains that he introduced, through writings, he restructured the narrative concepts, hitherto familiar to Malayalam fiction. Kovilan jettisoned the idea of linear narrative woven around a protagonist. He experimented with the new technique of so many characters revealing themselves at so many junctures simultaneously in a cobweb-like narrative pattern.

Kovilan's visions are reflected in his works, right from the choice of the subject to the use of the language and imagery. Even when he shared the concerns of the progressive writers movement of the state, his sensibilities were radically different. When many of his peers were passionately experimenting with modernist trends in fiction writing, drawing inspiration from popular English and European writers, Kovilan sought his roots and soul, the traditions, culture and language of the common people, the soulful tales and tunes of the community that he lived in, and the countless characters that he encountered in his speckled life. Poverty and hunger had been the primary concerns of the writer. His quest for human dignity and art of telling complex stories in a stunningly simple language were remarkable. Writer and social critic Sukumar Azhikode once said that the gap between life and literature was very little in Kovilan's works.

Kovilan was a staunch votary of the labour class during his lifetime. Kovilan was always in the forefront in opposing tendencies against democracy. He was as one of the early leaders of the progressive literary movement. Kovilan was a storyteller who embraced leftist humanism and possessed an impressively high degree of social perspective. Kovilan's works had immensely contributed to transforming a community bogged down by conservatism to one that was progressive and socialist in outlook.[6]

In a 1977 article titled Modernism in the Novel, Kovilan talked about one of his most important concerns as a writer: "To put a live human being on the post-mortem table in his fundamental state, without his clothes or make-up, to open him up like a frog in the zoology lab, with his chest and abdomen nailed flat, and his heart pounding still, even after the studies – we have not had many such instances in our novels, to show the beats of human character in the raw like this... Hunger is a human being's primary craving... And the war pangs of hunger are the true nature of human beings. The ruckus that happens here in the pretext of ‘modernism' is enough to drown these pangs of hunger. This is not literature, but literary vulgarity." In another article written nearly a decade later, he said: "Dialogues will never become literature. A writer cannot realise the vagaries of human life merely through dialogues. But, human being! It is never a single being. More masquerades than a chameleon. Never-ending masks. As the masks fall off one by one, the story touches you more and more deeply."

Poet and critic K. Satchidanandan notes:

He wrote pure prose, not poetic prose. In an era when prose writers revelled in poetic expressions, Kovilan wrote a prose that was plain and lean. Its beauty was raw and unadorned. Though Kovilan's works were initially categorised as Pattala Sahityam or soldier's writings, it was clear after the publication of Thattakam and Thottangal that they were more than that. Writers seek legends. Kovilan realised that there is a legend behind every man. He sought to document this. He explored the legends of his village. His stories bridged local and regional history.[7]