‘Writing is a pleasure, an obsession’: A publisher’s tribute to MT Vasudevan Nair

Growing up in Bangalore in the 1950s and early ’60s, far from my roots and in a school which actively discouraged our mother tongues, I hadn’t the faintest idea about Malayalam writers or literature. Bored with unimaginative Kannada and Hindi lessons, I thought that “MT”, whose name I heard nearly every day, was a family member I had never met. My brother and I were taken to the occasional Malayalam film. We heard the drone of Malayalam news which came through a small radio atop a shelf only because our uncle was the broadcaster. No wonder Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

In the six months after high school and before pre university, a tutor was appointed to teach us Malayalam. We studied it only to please Amma but it came in handy 25 years later when I began working in Macmillan India and led a programme of English translations from eleven Indian languages. The year was 1992.

One of them was PK Ravindranath’s translation of Randamoozham, which we titled Second Turn, (1997) referring as it did to Bhima’s silent and hopeless passion for Draupadi, for whom he waited …and waited…

By then I had woken up to our massive post-colonial amnesia...

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