Few writers are so completely identified with their birthplace that they carry it as a name. Thakazhi, a village in the Alappuzha district of Kerala, in the backwater country of Kuttanad, was where Sivasankara Pillai was born on 17 April 1912, then part of the Kingdom of Travancore in British India — and it was the name he took as his own. For more than sixty years, readers across India knew him simply as Thakazhi, and the village and the writer became inseparable in the Malayalam imagination.

Kuttanad

The region shaped everything he wrote. Kuttanad is one of the few places on earth where farming is carried on below sea level, on paddy fields reclaimed from the backwaters and held by bunds against the water pressing in on every side. It is a landscape of canals, coir yards, boat routes and low green fields, worked by labourers whose lives were, in Thakazhi's childhood, governed absolutely by caste, debt and the seasons. A short distance west lie the fishing settlements of the Alappuzha coast, a separate world with its own customs and its own perils.

Thakazhi grew up watching this closely, and he never lost the habit. He trained in law and practised briefly, but the profession did not hold him. What did hold him was the conviction that the people around him — the labourer in the paddy field, the woman twisting coir, the fisherman who reads the sea for a living — were fit subjects for serious literature, and that their lives could be written without either sentimentality or condescension.

The social-realist novelist

He became the central figure of social realism in Malayalam. His fiction of the 1940s took up questions that polite literature had preferred to avoid: caste degradation, hereditary occupation, agrarian debt, the position of the labourer against the landlord.

Thottiyude Makan (Scavenger's Son, 1947) followed three generations of a family bound to the work of manual scavenging, and refused to look away from either the physical reality of that life or the social order that enforced it. Randidangazhi (Two Measures, 1948) turned to the paddy fields of Kuttanad and the agricultural labourers who worked them, and its title — a measure of grain — states its subject precisely: what a human being's day is worth. These books were not tracts. Thakazhi's realism was built from close observation and from ordinary speech, and his characters retain their dignity, humour and contradictions even in the most degraded circumstances.

Chemmeen and Kayar

Chemmeen (1956) is his most widely known work and one of the most famous novels ever written in Malayalam. Set among a fishing community on the Alappuzha coast, it draws on the belief that the safety of a fisherman at sea depends on the fidelity of the woman waiting for him on shore, and builds from that belief a story of love across community lines with an inexorable pull. Its power lies in the specificity of the setting — the boats, the shore auctions, the credit that ties every household to a merchant — as much as in the tragedy at its centre. The 1965 Malayalam film based on the novel became a landmark of Indian cinema and carried the story to an audience far beyond the language.

If Chemmeen is his most loved book, Kayar (Coir, 1978) is his most ambitious. It is a vast, multi-generational chronicle of Kuttanad, tracing families and land across roughly two centuries as ownership, caste relations and law are transformed. Its title is exact: coir, twisted from coconut husk, is the region's characteristic labour and also a figure for the way lives are wound together into something that holds. Kayar attempts what few Indian novels attempt — to write a whole region's history through the households that lived it — and it is generally regarded as the summit of his work.

Honours and legacy

Thakazhi received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1957 and the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honour, in 1984 — the same year he was given the Vayalar Award. The Padma Bhushan followed in 1985 and the Ezhuthachan Puraskaram, Kerala's foremost literary distinction, in 1994. He was also honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship and with the Kerala Sahitya Akademi's award and fellowship. He died on 10 April 1999, a week short of his eighty-seventh birthday.

His achievement can be stated simply. Before Thakazhi, the labouring and fishing communities of Kerala appeared in Malayalam literature chiefly as background. After him, they were at the centre, written from the inside, with their work described accurately enough that a reader could learn from a novel how a coir yard or a fishing boat actually operated. He helped make the Malayalam novel an instrument for examining society, and he did it without abandoning storytelling — his books were read not out of duty but because people could not put them down.

His name still carries the village with it. Anyone who reads Chemmeen or Kayar in any language is, in a small way, saying the name of a place in Alappuzha district — which is exactly the kind of permanence a village might wish for.