Novelist and screenwriter P.F. Mathews has said that prominence of the upper castes has always remained strong in Malayalam literature. He cited the way the novel Indulekha was celebrated and works like Saraswathi Vijayam were relegated to oblivion.
He was talking at a ‘Coffee with Author’ organised by Pranatha Books in the city the other day. The interests of the upper castes remained foregrounded not just in literature but in cinema as well. “This was why subaltern writings never became revolutionary. This was also why the regional dialectical variations were forgotten, he said citing the examples of Ponjikkara Rafi and C. Ayyapan who wrote brilliant stories in Malayalam.
Mr. Mathews recalled how the novel Chavunilam written by him in the 1980s remained unmentioned for years. But when it became a movie, for which the screenplay was also written by him, it faced criticism from some upper caste writers. The film was never appreciated from an aesthetical point of view, he said.
Shaji George of Pranatha spoke.
