A brilliant new translation does justice to Chirakkarode’s 1962 Malayalam classic about the low-caste Pulayas learning to reclaim their rights

Tham’ra, this lowly one has made a landmass near the outer fence.’

‘Hmmm.’ Narayanan Nair grunted... ‘Have you levelled the land?’

‘It is done, Tham’ra.’

‘Hmm. Alright. You can build your home... Do you have bamboo and coconut leaves?’

Thevan’s head sank forward. Helplessness shrouded this heart. That man, who worked hard every day of his life, did not have the means to build a house. There was something piteous in his stance!

‘I will give you bamboo and palm leaves. In return I’ll take twenty measures of paddy at the time of harvest. Remember that. Are you willing?’’’

Paul Chirakkarode, in his novel Pulayathara, published in 1962, has recorded the conversation between the labourer Thevan Pulayan and his landlord or thampuran thus. Is it something new? No, the ghettoisation and exploitation of Dalits have been discussed in Malayalam fiction even earlier, as in the short story ‘Avanu Kittiya Nidhi’ (‘The treasure he got’), written in 1945, or in the novel, Thottiyude Makan, written in 1947 by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, who is read more widely compared to Chirakkarode.

Bleeding with the people

But on reading Pulayathara, one cannot help but discover how superficial the views of upper-caste writers on Dalit life have been. Born to a converted Christian preacher, Paul Chirakkarode in his books provides not just the peripheral view most readers are accustomed to, but also an intense engaging experience of bleeding with the people who have been brutally exploited for generations.

Not surprisingly, unlike Thakazhi, Chirakkarode had to print his book with his own money. By the time the Dalit voice in literature started gaining attention, only three copies of the book were left.

Although it was reprinted after Chirakkarode’s death in 2008, it went out of print soon. That makes commissioning of this translation of Pulayathara by OUP a great socio-political mission.

Shrunken meaning

Literally, Pulayan means the owner of pulam or soil. Although the history of Kerala’s Pulaya community is almost unrecorded, it is beyond doubt that the Pulayas had a glorious past, as indicated by Anantha Krishna Iyer in Cochin Tribe & Castes (1909) and Krishna Iyer C.A. in Travancore Tribes and Castes (1939).

These books refer to Pulaya chieftains and Pulaya kings and princesses. It is the story of their social diminishing that Chirakkarode has brilliantly portrayed in his novel.

The very title, Pulayathara, is important. The translator has been sensible in not translating the word, which literally means the ‘land of Pulaya’, into English. Although ‘thara’ in present-day usage means floor or land, historically ‘tharakkoottam’ means the basic administrative unit presided over by the chieftain. In course of time, the chieftains’ house came to be called ‘thara’. The word ‘tharavadu’ (ancestral home) used by the upper-castes also substantiates this.

Chirakkarode’s novel is a poignant narration about how the grand concept of the thara of the Pulayas got denigrated into mere thara, the lowest-level ghetto, into which the Dalits were driven.

Us and you

The novel exhibits amazing craftsmanship, starting right from the description of the reclamation of land by Thevan Pulayan from the waters of Kuttanadu — which brilliantly inverts the myth that Kerala’s landmass was reclaimed from the sea with an axe-stroke by Parasurama, the Brahmin saint. The eviction of Thevan Pulayan and his son Kandankoran from Anjil Thara alludes to the myth of Onam, in which King Maha Bali was pushed down to the netherworld, patala, by the Brahmin monk.

The story thereafter is not of Thevan Pulayan but of Kandankoran and his quest to find his own thara. Only, he ventures to reclaim it from the holy waters of baptism. Chirakkarode alludes to the Biblical promised land to drive home his argument that the promised land is nothing but a metaphor for human dignity. But a Pulayan is denied dignity even after conversion.

He laments, “Oh, why did I join the Church?” The response his people get from the Church and its custodians is a guiltless admission: “if you speak up, it would be a shame for us”. But they do speak up, to ask the loud and sharp question, “Who are the us and you?”

At that magic moment, the pulayathara resurrects itself in all its glory, making Chirakkarode’s prophesy, “that the new generation has decided to speak”, come true at the end of the novel. They will speak in ‘new tongues’, of course, as this exemplary translation by Catherine Thankamma proves.

The writer is the author of The Unseeing Idol of Light.

Pulayathara, Paul Chirakkarode, ed Mini Krishnan, trs Catherine Thankamma, Oxford University Press, ₹595