Vaikom Muhammad Basheer has lived a life as varied and exciting as the stories he wrote.

More than five decades ago, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer altered the map of Malayalam fiction. Unknowingly. He, who was not quite sure of its alphabet, revolutionized the art of storytelling in Malayalam. A radical change in the literary vocabulary was, in fact, essential to make Basheer's narratives work. Words drawn from the workaday world of common people became vibrant when he used them in a functional and seemingly artless manner.

A gripping raconteur, he turned to account all his experiences when he began writing. Politics and prison, asceticism, pickpocketing, homosexuality, all were grist to his mill. The private and the public, the world of action and the world of imagination, coalesced when Basheer wrote fiction and quasi-fiction. His wide travels symbolize his journeys to the different regions of human experience as well.

Basheer's ignorance of literary conventions, and the lack of the homogenizing social background that had moulded the writings of his contemporaries, combined with a native talent for narration, made him the unique writer that he was.

Basheer’s work intrigues by its range of tone: at times serious; at times artless; but most often, with an irrepressible sense of humour just beneath the surface.

"Though one would sense great revolutionary spirit in his work, what he offered were simple pictures of the life in the poor, illiterate Muslim community of Kerala trying to adjust to modernity, religious pluralism, and socialism."

A simple and poignant story of unfulfilled love.

The story is set against the background of a declining middle-class Muslim family, vividly portrays the Muslim customs and manners.

A story with the strange beauty of a myth. It is spiced with pleasant humour and coloured with images and anecdotes from Muslim religious lore.

A moving tragicomedy woven out of the everyday life of a large impoverished Muslim family. Here the appeal is universal because it comes from the alchemy of the author’s art which transmutes the most trivial things of day-to-day occurrence into the stuff of exquisite art.

Kamala Das was born in March 1932 in Punnayoorkulam in Malabar, Kerala, India. A prolific and bilingual writer, with innumerable poems, short stories and novels in English and Malayalam to her credit, she writes as Madhavikutty in Malayalam and as Kamala Das in English. A recent convert to Islam, she is also known as Kamala Suraiya. She lives in Kochi (Cochin), Kerala.

Kamala Das is undoubtedly among the most sensitive writers of short fiction in India today, a perfect artist who captures the complex subtleties of human relationships in the smooth textures of her simple and lyrical idiom.

Some of the distinct characteristics of her works are magnificent obsessions with childhood, ageing and death, sure hold over the primary passions, unerring understanding of unconscious drives and confident yet delicate handling of sexuality.

Das ‘s writing and life display the anger, rage, rebellion of a woman struggling in a society of male prerogatives.

This autobiography also can be read as a critique of the victimization of women in a patriarchal society. Das realizes the powerlessness of the female body and she believes that for the victimized woman in a patriarchal society, sexuality makes her physically, emotionally and spiritually vulnerable.

Das chooses writing against suicide, self- inscription against self- destruction and so takes the first steps of revolt against a symbolic/ political system that has oppressed her.

In My Story, Kamala Das, a poet famous for her honesty, tells of intensely personal experiences including her growth into womanhood, her unsuccessful quest for love in and outside marriage, and her life in matriarchal rural South India after inheriting her ancestral home. While at home, the rich families tried to kill her with magic because they fear that her writing will reveal their immorality.

Kamala Das says: ‘My Story is my autobiography which I began writing during my first serious bout with heart disease. The doctor thought that writing would distract my mind from the fear of a sudden death... Between short hours of sleep induced by the drugs given to me by the nurses, I wrote continually, not merely to honour my commitment but because I wanted to empty myself of all the secrets so that I could depart when the time came, with a scrubbed-out conscience.’

M. T. Vasudevan Nair was born in Kudallur, a village in the southern Indian state of Kerala, in 1933. His first volume of narratives came out in 1952. His debut novel Nalukettu (1958; The Ancestral House) won him the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 1959. Since then he has written eight more novels including Manju (1964; The Mist) and Kaalam (1969). He has also published eighteen volumes of short stories, as well as travelogues, literary essays and children’s books. He has been honoured with the Jnanpith Award, the most prestigious Indian literary award, and numerous other accolades.

But M. T. Vasudevan Nair has not only made a reputation for himself as an author and long time editor of the influential weekly literary magazine, but also as the prize winning script writer and director of Malayalam movies. His cinema work includes more than forty film scripts, and the direction of six feature films, three documentaries and one TV series.

His literary and cinematographic oeuvres focus on rural south Indian society. British colonialism and the independence of India led to fundamental changes of traditional matrilineal structures in the northern Kerala (Nair) communities. M. T. Vasudevan Nair is considered the principal chronicler of the breakdown of the family system. Many narratives draw from the history of Kudallur, Nair’s home village, which is characterised by the dissolving of feudal structures and values. Nair uses a concise and lyrical language to depict the correlation between conditions of society and the anxieties and emotional involvements of his characters. M. T. Vasudevan Nair lives in Calicut, Kerala, India.

The Mist is the story of a young, resident school teacher at a school on a hill station, waiting for the man who had befriended and deserted her during a tourist season nine years ago.

V. K. N. (V. K. Narayanankutty Nair) noted Novelist, Short Story Writer and Journalist was born in Trissur, Kerala. He worked as a journalist in Delhi for several years. He has been writing short stories and novels since 1955 and has fifteen novels and nine volumes of short stories to his credit. His writing style is bathed in sarcasm and satire.

Rendered into English by the author himself and set in the fast changing Delhi the work in original Malayalam bears the title Aarohanam or The Ascent. Rightly so, as the story revolves round a band of opportunists engaged in political rancour and social climbing, throwing norms and values to the winds. Sardonic, sarcastic and even funny at times the rat-race for power depicted in the novel is typical of the Indian body politic where opposing tides of interest swell and ebb seeking o smother one another.Remarkable for its wit, candour and sarcasm Bovine Bugles is a capital study in scandal, scum and venality

M. Mukundan, one of the pioneers of modernity in Malayalam literature, was born in 1943 in the former French colony of Mahe. Though he carved a niche for himself in Malayalam literature through his existentialist novels that heralded an era of creative anarchy in Kerala, Mukundan never ceased to experiment not only with themes and locales but also with form. Hence, he is regarded as a writer who appeals to all generations of readers.

He is the winner of various prestigious literary awards including the Central Sahitya Akademi Award in 1996 and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government in 1998.

Till 2003 Mukundan was cultural atache at the French Embassy, New Delhi. He now spends his time in Delhi and Kerala.

Mukundan’s birth place Mahe provides the background to most of his work. Mahe came under French rule about 300 years ago. Mahe was the name given to Mayyazhi - the mouth of the black river - by the French. India’s attaining independence in 1947 also affected the life in Mahe with large scale demonstrations for freedom being staged in 1948. The demonstrators raided government offices, and hoisted the Indian National flag on the administrative building. But this euphoria met a quick death with the arrival of the French Navy.The fight for freedom got a fresh lease of life again in 1954. When demonstrations began again, it got more support from the inhabitants of Mahe, and the French finally agreed to hand over Mahe to India.This past history of his birth place forms the back bone of Mukundan’s On the Banks of the Mayyazhi.

The novel is like a miniature painting full of minute details that are lucid and succeed in telling a very human story. The grand old grandmother, Kurambi Amma, is the main thread that runs through the entire novel, setting the tone to the story, making the reader participate in the lives of the various people who are affected by the historical developments of Mayyazhi. It is Kurambi Amma’s stories that paint the relationship between the half-French population of the town and its Indian inhabitants. It is her stories that describe the many characters of Mayyazhi, that show again and again how poverty does not necessarily rob human life of its essential dignity and how life can be made acceptable by having faith and tolerance. Mayyazhi has rich sons. Like Leslie Sayiv, who wears a hat, coat and trousers instead of a mundu, drives the best horse carriage of the town, stops by every evening to share a pinch of snuff with Kurambi Amma, and whose memory haunts Kurambi Amma's nights for many years following his death. Still life is poor for most of the inhabitants of Mayyazhi. There is Kurambi Amma's own son, Damu, who earns his living as a writer of deeds in the law court. The entire hope of the family is pinned on Dasan, the elder son.

Then there is Dasan, a brilliant student, who sacrifices all the hope his family including his beloved grandmother Kurambi Amma has in him, to devote himself to freeing Mayyazhi from the French rule. All these lives are nothing but commas on Mayyazhi's time line. Normally they flutter like dragonflies over the Velliyan Rock, a silvery island, a cluster of rocks in the sea where souls rest between births and which guards in its womb the secrets of the lives and births of the folk of Mayyazhi.

The struggle for freedom is the refrain of the book but this theme remains mainly in the background. It is life as it is lived by the common man, as it is affected by the ideals of national freedom that is important in the novel. The language is extremely sparse but rich in associations it evokes, the style restrained yet delicate.

P. Sachidanandan who writes under the pen name Anand was born in 1936 at Irinjalakkuda, near Cochin, Kerala. Written more than twenty books including novels and short stories. Several of his works are available in English including Death Certificate, Twilight Encounters and Vyasa and Vighneshwara. He is an unusual writer known for his serious and thought provoking works of fiction, focusing on current topics and social themes.

Stolen Gods depicts the shattered urban life with all its intensity. Anand’s city is not that of the affluent and of their vanities but that of expatriates, evicted, tribal, beggars, orphans and of the gypsies.

One of the finest and innovative writers of India Paul Zacharia was born in Kottayam, Kerala.

His first collection of short stories was published while he was in his final year in college. Since then nine volumes of his short stories, six novellas, a travelogue and several collections of essays have been published. One of his novellas, Bhaskara Patelarum Ente Jeevithavum, has been made into a movie by the renowned film director Adoor Gopalakrishnan.

He spent over twenty years in Delhi associated with publishing and media related activites.

He now lives in Trivandrum, Kerala.

Praise the Lord is the monologue of Joy, a typical Christian rubber planter in Travancore. His mind opens up in all its naiveté before us as we pass through the one-man narration. Other characters in the narrative are viewed through Joy’s eyes. What fascinates the reader more here is not the story itself, but the narratorial voice - unsophisticated, estranging, lustily observant - as well as the drama that unfolds in short sequences and flashbacks. Through revealing gestures Zacharia probes the mindset of the community.

What News, Pilate? is a marvelous retelling of the story of Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ in the form of a letter Pilate writes to his boyhood friend Antonius. He is also vaguely conscious of Yeshu’s (Jesus) great mission and looks upon him with a mixture of awe and pity, even envy, as he is adored by beautiful Jewesses.

Zacharia recreates the scene of Yeshu’s murder and his resurrection in all its dramatic intensity. He even employs the dramatic form of direct conversations characteristic of early fiction to bring to life these scenes. If his moral concerns and awareness of the body remind one of the commitment of a Nikos Kazantzakis, his sense of drama with its humour touch calls to mind Dario Fo’s comic mysteries.

N. S. Madhavan was born in the port city of Cochin, India, in 1948. He was educated in the University of Kerala, where he majored in economics. In 1970, while he was still a student, Madhavan won first prize in a story competition conducted by a prestigious Malayalam literary journal. This debut, he later recalled, freed him from the fear of rejection slips.

In the last three and a half decades Madhavan had published five collections of stories. Considered a master of the oeuvre, his stylistic and linguistic dare had won him both critical acclaim and occasional brickbats. His books run into many editions and are part of curriculum for modern Malayalam literature.

An avid soccer fan, (a long-time admirer of the Arsenal), he follows international football leagues. In 1990, decade-long writers’ block ended for him with the story, Higuita, which was about the quixotic and eponymous goalkeeper of Columbia’s World Cup team. From text books to church sermons to college plays, the story soon captured the imagination of the readers and is considered a milestone in Malayalam short-fiction.

Higuita was followed by When Big Trees Fall, which is set against the riots against the Sikhs following Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s killing, has been recently made into a major Hindi film, Kaya Taran. Another landmark story, Blue Pencil, is about an ageing newspaper editor, who through minor copy-editing, unambiguously condemns the demolition of a mosque – Babri Mosque — in the Northern India. "More often than not," Madhavan once said in an interview, "pollen flying about from contemporary events, than imagination, fertilise minds."

It was only in 2003, he published his first novel, Litanies of Dutch Battery. Set against the background of the city of his birth, the novel is a roller coaster ride through micro-histories, nascent days of a newly independent country, the growth and decline of ideas, and above all, tragedies brought by randomness of events. In a span of 18 months, the novel had gone into 5 editions.

In 1975, he was selected to the Indian Administrative Service, the premier civil service of the country. He was seconded to the Hindi-speaking Bihar cadre. From Kerala, a state with Western level social indices and where he is recognised mostly as a writer, Madhavan easily transited to Bihar, socially most backward state in India, and where people see him as an official. In his youth he was a Maoist student leader, and

recently in an interview he spelt out his political credo as unflinching faith in secularism in a multicultural society and in democratic processes. Madhavan’s ‘bank of identities’ makes him a favourite with the magazine interviewers.

He has won many awards, including Kerala Sahitya Akademi’s award and the prestigious Odakuzhal Award for short-fiction. He had won the annual Katha (New Delhi) award for the best Malayalam short-story, thrice. Recently, he visited France as a member of a delegation of writers in Indian languages.

Many of his stories are available in English through translations, though they have not been brought out as a collection. His stories have also been translated to other Indian languages and a few to French, Spanish (Latin American) and German.

Madhavan shuttles between Patna in Bihar, where he works, and Delhi, where his wife and daughter live. In between he finds time to spend short spells in his far away home state of Kerala.

A girl was born to young Matilda and a fifty-year old boat-maker, Matheus. She was christened Edwina Theresa Irene Maria Goretty Anna Margarita Jessica. Jessica for short. She was born four years after India got freedom, in a delta called Dutch Battery, not far away from the Cochin harbour.

Jessica belonged to the community of Latin Catholics; called so, because the Portuguese had

converted them from the low-caste Hindus. Three Western powers, namely, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British successively ruled Cochin. In many small ways, Cochin’s layered history played out in the lives of the islanders.

Jessica grew along with the nascent republic. She witnessed a protest meeting by the delta people against Sir Edmond Hillary, who was accused of snatching away the glory of conquering Mt. Everest from the Indian, Tenzing. In her childhood she saw the arrival of electricity and subsequently, the radio to the delta. She also noticed that the sway of the Church of St. Sebastian and the parish priest, Father Pilate (named so by the delta people for his compulsive habit of washing hands), being challenged by the young Communist Party. Jessica was six years old when the Communists came to power in Kerala. Two years later, in a struggle spearheaded by the Church and other religious organisations, the Communists were thrown out of power. Those were dizzy years for Jessica.

Events of faraway lands had its echoes in Dutch Battery. Protest against killing of the deposed Hungarian leader Imre Nagi by the Soviet troops, resulted in banishment for a local communist. For more than a decade, Pushpangadan, a primary school maths teacher, single-mindedly pursued a proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem. The local Church held a

memorial service for the assassinated John F Kennedy, the first Catholic President of United States. That day Jessica got her first periods.

Jessica thought it was hard for people to love her, because she was plumb and dark. She was coming in terms with her body, when one day, Pushpangadan, the maths teacher, tried to molest her.

Against the counselling of her parents and well-wishers (because, she was a girl), Jessica decided to take revenge on the maths teacher. It was a fight that she both won and lost. She won, because it drove Pushpangadan to suicide. She lost, because, all of a sudden, she became the villain of the piece. Increasingly isolated and cornered, Jessica decided to go mad.

The novel, which starts with pre-natal thoughts of a frolicking Jessica in her mother’s womb, ends on a cold steel hospital table, where she was receiving electric shocks. She felt that she was swimming down the river that propelled the turbines to produce power, to the sea at the harbour-mouth.

Born in Trissur, Kerala.

Discontinued studies while at primary school.

Currently working as the co-coordinator of Kerala Sex Workers Forum.

The Autobiography of a Sex Worker, by Nalini Jameela, is a candid recollection of the experiences a sex worker in Kerala had in decades of professional life.

It is rather a political statement that a sex worker is also a human being who has a life to tell and that her story too deserves attention. It is, in this sense, a voicing of the marginalised.

The book is more of a social text that documents those realities of the world which never appear in the mainstream of public discourse. It throws light on the lives of several people — not just the sex workers and their clients but also those who

the sex workers deal with as part of their profession, including the police, the judiciary, the politicians, the media and others. It is also the record of the way these helpless women united for their common cause and started demanding their legitimate human rights. It is also a thorough exposal of the hypocrisy of our conservative society.

The book is episodic in nature with fifty-six chapters that are more or less independent. In addition to narrating the experiences of an individual it also voices the strong opinion of her professional community on many issues including questions of morality and legality. Nalini Jameela comes off in all these accounts as a liberated woman with strong convictions and opinions. She also comments on a number of events, issues, and personalities.

Born in Eranakulam, Kerala.

He is the chairman of one of the leading banks in South India.

Published more than thirty fictional works.

Received several major litrary awards.

He lives in Trissur.

Deserted by her husband, Devi looks for reasons in a mysterious mindscape where paramours wreck homes to settle scores. She waits everyday for the paramour, doing penance to bring him to her. And when he finally arrives, we find that he has no existence, save in Devi's mind. Pandavapuram deals with different layers of reality and time.

E. P. Unny has been a professional cartoonist for over 25 years. He is now the Chief Political Cartoonist with The Indian Express, the widest-circulated English Daily in India. Perhaps the first to introduce the graphic novel in India. Unny’s Free India was serialised in 1997 by The Indian Express Sunday edition. Since early ‘90s he has been experimenting with this genre in Malayalam, his mother tongue. He has sketched and written a travel book, Spices & Souls- A Doodler’s Journey Through Kerala. In the summer of 2002, he toured five draught-prone districts of the southern Indian State of Andhra Pradesh and produced a book of sketches and text: Language, Landscape & Livelihoods-a very different look at human developmental issues as cartoonist.

A Doodler’s Journey Through Kerala Someone up there must surely have mixed feelings about this place. He gave Kerala a great geography and carpet-bombed it with history.

From times difficult to date, the region has seen a steady stream of men engaged in every conceivable pursuit from business to pleasure. Explorers, invaders, proselytisers, traders, travellers, town planners, tourists and sundry seekers of well being and nirvana. Now, I join this formidable array with my sketchbook. But then, I belong to that special breed of non- resident Keralites. Kerala educates (or so we would like our employers to believe) and exports manpower. And we keep coming back whenever we can.’

Spices & Souls is all about the true, colourful images that create unpainted Kerala and is rejuvenating therapy for both the native and the visitor alike.

Spices & Souls is a treat, not of cliched photographs but sketches covering every nook and corner of Kerala; from the rundown church originally built by the Portuguese to the low-cost houses of Laurie Baker, through Kunnamkulam and Kodungalloor to Kochi, Kozhikode and Thiruvananthapuram.

Chennai, the capital city of Tamil Nadu in southern India, is a major film production centre. Cinema in this part of the world has meant a lot more than entertainment. It impacts on almost every aspect of life. It has defined the politics of the region. Political movements have been built around cinema. For the voters, film heroes and heroines are living gods. As many as five heads of state governments have come up

from these studio floors. Out here it is a heady combination of money, power and glamour.

Madras Talkies is a graphic novel on the world of cinema set mainly in Chennai. It tracks a young college-going girl who gets drawn into the bizarre world of films. From her semi-protected middle class home in Delhi this Tamil Brahmin teenager gets banished to her over-protective grandparents in Chennai to avoid familial

embarrassment over her affair with a Christian. Ironically, through a series of life situations that imitate cinema she gets to be a film star. In a way, she tricks herself into cinema. The novel unfolds to reveal the tinsel world before and beyond the movie camera and explores how she might possibly trick herself out of it.

Madras Talkies seeks to tell something about Chennai, a unique city built on steel concrete and celluloid images.

Middle Ages is a graphic novel that opens in Delhi. Here, on the fateful 9-11,a middle-aged bachelor gets a visitor, his Boston-based nephew. The young man walks in and belongs to two homes at once. He becomes the unsuspecting connect between the two. The American home he grew up in and his native Indian home where he is forced to overstay. He is the emotional space walker between the new world of tech-terror and an ageless world of cunning, endurance and survival. The novel follows the young man and his uncle through a Delhi winter that turns grim and foggy and predictably tapers off into a riot of colours – the spring festival of Holi.

1.To pose three fundamental questions and explore possible answers: (a) Do we really enjoy Kathakali? (b)If we do, why? (c) How does it become a craze or addiction to those who enjoy it?

2. To familiarize the readers / audience with certain other unique features of the art form — features which are so simple that they are hardly noticed and rarely understood. For example how a performance is abridged or expanded to suit unexpected exigencies or the disarming naiveté of the improvisations made on the stage in full view of the audience without disrupting the dramatic illusion.

3.To attempt a fair, objective assessment of this art form, taking into account its crudities and absurdities.

Chapter 1

This is an introduction to give an over-view of Kathakali as a theatre form and to look at it in the context of other ancient performing arts of the world. Only a very rapid survey is intended, for it is a subject beyond the scope of this book.

Chapter 2

Opens dramatically with the descriptions of some incredibly ferocious, sweetly tender, gentle, graceful, grotesque, even vulgar scenes presented

psychological impact on the audience. Do the characters achieve the status of archetypes? How is the aesthetic experience generated and what is its rewarding and elevating/sublimating effect on the audience-these questions are tackled.

Though a number of books and pamphlets are available on Kathakali, few among them strike a balance that is fit for the interested lay reader. The pamphlets are mainly aimed at attracting tourists and necessarily shallow in content. Some books are comprehensive and are aimed at the learned audience and have a higher take-off level. This book attempts to introduce the subject and deal with it in a detailed manner to meet the needs of the lay interested reader. This book will be simple and comprehensive and is expected to fill in the present lacuna in Kathakali related literature. It certainly attempts to give the writer’s personal and original insights and not to be a mere repeat of existing works on Kathakali. It is hoped to enliven new interest in the ancient, classical art among the contemporary secular generation by providing an easily accessible manual or handbook and to deepen the understanding on a sound basis.

He lives in Kottayam, Kerala.

The aromas and flavors of the Kerala gastronomic experience are unique. A typical Kerala meal, like Mediterranean food is carbohydrate-dominated, consisting of a combination of several dishes such as boiled rice or Chappathi, a meat dish, a vegetable dish, a pulse dish, a sauté, a thoran (a mix of vegetable or meat or seafood with coconut and spices), a curry, a pickle and at least one form of a buttermilk served simultaneously. Rice is the main dish and all other dishes that are rich in spices, flavour and aroma are accompaniments. 

techniques, progressive methods and health conscious recipes have made the unique Kerala cuisine accessible to people around the world. This well thought out series of books is a