It is half a century since M.T. Vasudevan Nair—fondly called ‘M.T.’ by Malayalees—began his career as a novelist with his debut work Naalukettu. As OUP India now brings out its translation, Naalukettu: The House Around the Courtyard, it becomes a magnificent marker of M.T.’s literary jaitrayaatra (triumphal march) down the last five decades, with weighty novels, novelettes, short-story collections, plays, screenplays, travelogues, biographies, autobiographical writings, essays and writings for children.
M.T. created a language all his own—terse, minimalist in expression, and purely Valluvanaadan (of the erstwhile Kingdom of Valluvanaad) in the dialogues of his rural and countryside characters, which is being imitated, for the last fifty years, with varying degrees of success by different writers irrespective of the regions they hail from!
Several films and serials from all over Kerala, imitating the language of M.T’s scripts adopted the Valluvanaadan dialect for their scripts, at one time. Such has been M.T.’s influence over the Malayalam world of letters and arts.
This Jnanpith Award-winning author, who has fans all over India and abroad, had been the legendary editor of the most prestigious literary and cultural weekly of Kerala, Mathrubhumi, for over four decades in different stints,