Chendamangalam

Chendamangalam, in Ernakulam district, is one of the more historically layered villages in Kerala — a place where a synagogue, a mosque, temples and a church stand within a short walk of each other, and where handloom weaving has been practised for centuries. A. Sethumadhavan, who writes as Sethu, was born there on 5 June 1942, and that inheritance of overlapping communities became one of the central preoccupations of his fiction.

He was schooled at Paliam High School in the village and then studied physics at Union Christian College, Aluva, taking his degree at eighteen. Early postings scattered him across India, and the travel — as he has often said — did more for his writing than any formal literary training.

Two Careers at Once

Sethu's working life reads like that of a man who refused to choose. He began in central government service in north India before joining the India Meteorological Department at Bombay in 1962. In 1964 he transferred to Trivandrum and worked in the meteorological unit at the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station, then at the Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune and the Railway Board in Delhi. In 1968 he changed direction entirely and joined the State Bank Group as a probationary officer.

He rose steadily through Indian banking: General Manager at Corporation Bank, then Chairman and Chief Executive of South Indian Bank from 1999 to 2005, and later a director on the board of the State Bank of Travancore. Throughout those decades of balance sheets and board meetings he was also publishing some of the most inventive fiction being written in Malayalam. It is a combination almost without parallel in Indian letters.

His first short story was written in a Delhi attic in 1967, prompted by news of the drought in Bihar. It was published in Mathrubhumi Weekly under the editorship of M. T. Vasudevan Nair. Nearly six decades on, his output runs to more than twenty novels, some twenty short-story collections and four books for children.

Pandavapuram

The novel that made his name is Pandavapuram. Its central figure is a woman waiting in an unnamed town for a lover who may not exist, and the book slips continually between memory, fantasy and event without ever settling the question of what is real. It won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for the novel in 1982 and the Muttathu Varkey Award in 2003, and it has travelled further than almost any modern Malayalam novel — translated into ten languages including English, French, German and Turkish alongside Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Odia and Marathi. It was adapted into Bengali cinema as Nirakar Chhaya. Its blending of the ordinary and the hallucinatory placed Sethu at the front of the generation that moved Malayalam fiction beyond social realism.

The Chendamangalam Novels

Adayalangal returned him to the world of his birth, drawing on the historical communities of his native region and the marks they left on one another. It won the Vayalar Award in 2006 and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2007. He returned to related ground in Aliya, published in 2013, which deals with Jewish migration to and from Kerala — a subject barely touched in Malayalam fiction before him, and one that a boy from Chendamangalam was uniquely placed to write.

Marupiravi won the Odakkuzhal Award in 2013. Other novels include Niyogam, which took the Viswadeepam Award in 1989, Uyarangalil, which won the Padmarajan Award in 1994, and Kaimudrakal, which won the Malayattoor Award in 1999. The Cuckoo's Nest follows a former nun building an institution devoted to tolerance and plural belief; Anthakavallikal takes up environmental damage and the case for organic farming. His short-story collection Pediswapnangal won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for the story in 1978.

National Book Trust and After

In September 2012 Sethu was appointed chairman of the National Book Trust, succeeding the historian Bipan Chandra. He was removed from the post in March 2015, six months before his term was due to end, and replaced. The episode was widely reported at the time as a political appointment displacing a literary one.

His later honours have been substantial. He received a Kerala Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 2020, the Abu Dhabi Sakthi Award for children's literature the same year for Appuvum Achuvum, the Sahithya Parishad Puraskaram in 2021, and in 2022 both the Mathrubhumi Literary Award and the Ezhuthachan Puraskaram, the highest literary honour conferred by the Government of Kerala. He also won the Kerala State Film Award for Best Story in 1997 for Poothiruvathira Ravil, and four of his works have been filmed.

What holds the career together is a refusal of the expected shape. Sethu did not give up a profession to write, and he did not write about the profession he kept. He simply did both, for fifty years, and the fiction that came out of it is quieter and stranger than most — concerned with waiting, with the marks communities leave on each other, and with the ordinary places, Chendamangalam among them, where all of that happens.