Chamravattam on the Bharathappuzha

Chamravattam sits on the Bharathappuzha in the Tirur region of what is now Malappuram district, and it is the village that gave C. Radhakrishnan both his childhood and, eventually, his greatest subject. He was born there on 15 February 1939 to Parappur Madathil Madhavan Nair, a veteran of the freedom movement, and Chakkupurayil Janaki Amma. Family tradition held that Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan, the sixteenth-century poet regarded as the father of the Malayalam language, was an ancestor of the line — a claim that would decades later become the seed of Radhakrishnan's most honoured book.

He was an outstanding student from the start, winning the Best Student Gold Medal at Achutha Varier High School in Ponnani. His higher education took him to Zamorin's College in Calicut, where he won the Madras University Sharpe Scholarship at the intermediate level and graduated in physics with a top-rank gold medal. He went on to Government Victoria College, Palakkad, for postgraduate work in applied physics, though he did not complete that programme.

A Scientist's Beginning

Radhakrishnan's first career was in science, not letters. In 1960 he joined the Astrophysical Observatory at Kodaikanal as a Scientific Assistant. From 1962 to 1964 he served as Officer-in-Charge of the World-Wide Seismology Centre at Pune under the India Meteorological Department. It is an unusual grounding for a novelist, and it stayed with him: his fiction is marked by a precision of observation and a habit of testing propositions rather than asserting them.

In 1964 he moved into science communication, joining the founding team of Science Today, the popular science monthly launched by the Times of India in Bombay. He is credited with a central role in making it India's first genuinely successful popular science magazine — a significant contribution in a country where the gap between scientific work and public understanding was, and remains, wide.

A long editorial career followed. He was science editor of Link magazine and the Patriot daily in Delhi from 1968 to 1972, edited the monthly Porul from 1972 to 1976, and edited the daily Veekshanam from 1980 to 1984. He served as Editor-in-Charge at Malayala Manorama between 1994 and 1997 and as chief editor of Madhyamam Daily from 1999 to 2001. Few Indian writers have moved so easily between an observatory, a national newsroom and a novel.

The Novels

He wrote his first novel, Nizhalppadukal, at nineteen. It won a competition judged against a hundred and twenty entries, was serialised, and appeared in book form in 1962 — taking the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award that year. It was an extraordinary debut for a physics student.

His central achievement as a novelist is the sequence he called Novel Navakam: nine interlinked novels written between 1972 and 1997, conceived as a trilogy of trilogies, with the three groups turning outward from Kerala to India to the wider world. The sequence comprises Ellam Maykkunna Kadal, Puzha Muthal Puzha Vare, Pullipulikalum Vellinakshatrangalum, Spandamapinikale Nandi, Ivide Ellavarkkum Sukham Thanne, Verpadukalude Viralpadukal, Munpe Parakkunna Pakshikal, Karal Pilarum Kalam and Iniyoru Nirakanchiri. It is one of the most sustained architectural projects in modern Malayalam fiction. Spandamapinikale Nandi, published in 1986, brought him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1988; Munpe Parakkunna Pakshikal won the Vayalar Award in 1990.

In 2005 he published Theekkadal Kadanhu Thirumadhuram, a biographical novel on Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan — the ancestor of family legend, reconstructed through historical research. It is widely regarded as his masterwork and won the Moortidevi Award in 2013. That a writer from a Bharathappuzha village should have written the definitive modern novel about the poet who gave Malayalam its literary form is one of the neater symmetries in Kerala's literary history.

Cinema

Radhakrishnan also directed four Malayalam films. Agni, released in 1978 and based on his own novella, was the first film from South India selected for the Indian Panorama and travelled to festivals at Mannheim, Istanbul, Moscow and Locarno. Kanalaattam and Pushyaraagam followed in 1979, and Ottayadipathakal in 1993, which also entered the Indian Panorama and drew notice at Mannheim and Tashkent. Several of his novels were adapted by other directors, including Priya, Pin Nilavu and Avidathepole Ivideyum.

Standing

His honours accumulated over six decades: the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 1962, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1988, the Vayalar Award in 1990, the Moortidevi Award in 2013, the Mathrubhumi Literary Award in 2015, the Ezhuthachan Puraskaram — Kerala's highest literary recognition — in 2016, and the K. P. Kesava Menon Memorial Award the same year. In 2022 the Sahitya Akademi elected him an Eminent Member, only the second Malayalam writer after M. T. Vasudevan Nair to be so honoured. He has also received the Odakkuzhal, Lalithambika, Olappamanna and Balamani Amma awards among many others.

Now in his late eighties, Radhakrishnan remains a working writer. The trajectory is worth stating plainly for a village-heritage record: a boy from Chamravattam took a gold medal in physics, ran a seismology centre, helped invent Indian popular science journalism, edited three newspapers, wrote nine interlocking novels and four films, and then wrote the life of his own ancestor, the man who made his language.