The first thing I remember hearing about O.V. Vijayan’s “Khasakkinte Ithihaasam” (“The Legends of Khasak”) is the unusual Palakkadan Tamil-Malayalam of the book. Before reading the book, I imagined that Vijayan’s Tamil-Malayalam was surely linked to my own grandfather’s idiosyncratic Palakkadan bhasha which my largely ‘good-Malayalam’ speaking family loved to take shots at. Unfortunately my Malayalam, at the time, lacked the dexterity required to read “Khasakkinte Ithihaasam” with ease. All the same, I looked forward to visiting my grandfather's Palakkad through “The Legends of Khasak”. The Palakkad I had grown up around, however, had little to do with Vijayan’s world. Palakkad to me was summer afternoons spent walking across paddy fields to visit some relative or the other. To me, my achachan’s Palakkad was a sleepy warmth that occasionally grew stiflingly hot.
Khasak could not be more different from my Palakkadan haunts of Perungotukurussi and Ottappalam. Where Perungotukurussi seemed matter-of-fact, Khasak brimmed with an air of mystery and mysticism. Through city-bred Ravi, Vijayan gradually guides you into a world that seems far from anything you would deem real. Khasak is surrounded by a ring of thirteen mosques that both protect it and cordon it off from Palakkad. Khasak shares with Ottappalam the characteristic of seemingly infinite time. Time that could be whiled away devouring appam and steamed bananas at Aaliyar’s teashop, or in trying to catch a dragon-fly with your bare hands. Perhaps, the timelessness that I associate with Palakkad is the slow-moving nature common to childhood. But Khasak’s infinite time served to suspend the time of history. There is rarely any mention of the state of Kerala, let alone the nation throughout the novel – as if those concerns have been left beyond the mythical mount Chethali.
What we are left to ponder over is not history but mere stories, patched together under the watchful eyes of the Sheikh, the Goddess and Chethali. Ravi comes to Khasak as its first ever schoolmaster. Despite churnings of the English-speaking outsider steamrolling over Khasak’s traditions in the village, Ravi forgoes the rigid schedules and syllabi of schooling in favour of storytelling. The story of spiders who eat their mates after lovemaking and the story of two sister spores present at the dawn of time. His pupils would respond in kind with stories like that of the humble hedge lizard, in whom the evil spirits of Khasak resided.
The emergence of the Red party at the end of the novel signals a shift in how Khasak will henceforth measure time. They see Khasak as a “fortress of resistance” that has to be folded into the flow of History. Ravi (and Vijayan), however, having heard both sides, insist that there is something about the magic of Khasak that must be preserved from modernity.
Published October 6, 2026
