Sixty five years after the publication of a novel, that got its author the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award, a controversy has broken out over its real writer. A noted critic in Malayalam says Chemmeen (The Prawn) written by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, is duplication of a story by another author. Thakazhi, as he was popularly known, has the status of a legend in India’s literary world. Chemmeen, first published in 1957 has been translated into six foreign languages besides all Indian languages. Thakazhi won the Jnanapeetha, the country’s biggest literary honour in 1984 in the backdrop of Chemmeen and other novels like Enippadikal, The Coir, Randidangazhi etc.
Chemmeen was made into a film and it bagged the President’s award in 1965, the first national honour won by a Malayalam. Thottam Rajasekharan, former director of public relations, Government of Kerala, who is also a writer of repute is the one who has caused an earthquake in Kerala’s literary world with his disclosure that the real author of Chemmeen was not Thakazhi but Vijayan Babu, a fisheries inspector hailing from the fishermen community along coastal Alappuzha.
Rajasekharan had met Babu in 1955 while he was posted as social education officer in Kuttanadu in Alappuzha. Babu and Rajasekharan used to have regular literary discussions. Babu had told Rajasekharan about the unique nature of the fishermen community.
“They believed that if the woman at home loses her chastity while her husband was away in the sea for fishing, the Mother Sea would devour the latter. I asked Babu why could not he write a novel based on this and other such beliefs prevailing in the community. He replied that he had completed a novel by name Waves and had handed it over to Thakazhi, by then an established writer in the region,” writes Rajasekharan in the latest edition of Sahitya Vimarsam, a journal for literary criticism and which maintains utmost neutrality in its observations and analysis. Rajasekharan writes that even after one or two years, Thakazhi did not return the manuscript of Waves to Babu. “When Babu and his friend Das went to Thakazhi and asked for the manuscript, the latter got irritated and shouted at them stating that he had lost the same. By 1957 I was transferred back to Trivandrum. This was followed by the demise of Babu due to typhoid,” reminiscences Rajasekharan. Thakazhi’s Chemmeen hit the bookshelves immediately after the death of Babu.
According to Rajasekharan, the plot, characters and story line of Waves were familiar to Babu’s friends as he had discussed the same with them. “His intention was to portray the fisherman as a strong-willed worker and not as a prisoner of traditional beliefs. The novel would have emerged as a volume that depicted the boldness and adventurous nature of traditional fishermen,” said Rajasekharan.
While Babu, who was born and grew among the fishermen tribe was familiar with their colloquial spoken language and characteristics, the same was alien to Thakazhi, argues Rajasekharan. He points out that the universal truth with respect to great epics is that the author should be familiar with his characters, environment and events.
“Thakazhy’s style of story telling is missing in Chemmeen because of the absence of biological affinity between the author and the plot. Chemmeen has ended up as an ordinary love story and does not belong to the genre of Thakazhi’s distinct style,” says Dr M Rajeev Kumar, literary critic who has exposed plagiarisms committed by many Malayalam writers.
He said that a work by Thakazhi should match the works of Pearl S Buck, Hemingway or John Steinbeck but Chemmeen is nowhere near the books authored by them.
