Mother Tongue, in Translation

Recommendations is a weekly column, in our Books section, where we invite a well-known author to recommend four books translated from an Indian language. These are not just recommendations, but books that have made an impact on their creative world. 

This month, we will feature author Saharu Nusaiba Kannanri’s selections.

Under the Wild Skies: An Anthology of Modern Malayalam Short Stories  
Edited by K Satchidanandan 

Malayalam is my mother tongue and yet I write in English. One of the reasons for this can be attributed to the fact that I started reading literature pretty late in my life, when I was a university student in north India. But I remember picking up this book in 2007, in Delhi, and encountering an impressive panoply of writers from my home state, spanning different generations and styles. In other words, I discovered literature written in my mother tongue through an English translation. Edited by K Satchidanandan, the eminent poet, the book schematically brings together different generations of Malayalam story writers so as to enable the reader to broadly trace the arc of Malayalam fiction’s evolution, from its leisurely upper caste beginnings in the late nineteenth century, through the oral realism of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, and the aesthetic radicalism of Madhavikkutty to the high modernisms of Anand and N.S. Madhavan.

One discovers a language with a complex legacy of influence, most notably of Communist Russian and post-colonial Latin American Spanish. These are in no way the best stories Malayalam has to offer, nor are they the best of these authors themselves, yet they make for an excellent introduction to a rich literary tradition in a language that has come to occupy — within the short span of a century — a central place in Indian literary firmament.