Thalayolaparambu, a village near the temple town of Vaikom in what is now the Kottayam district of Kerala, gave Indian literature one of its most distinctive voices. Vaikom Muhammad Basheer was born there on 21 January 1908, and when he began publishing he took the name of the neighbouring town as part of his own, so that the geography of his childhood is carried in the name on every one of his books. Few writers have stayed so close to the speech, the humour and the small domestic worlds of the place they came from, and few have turned that closeness into work of such lasting reach.

A childhood in Travancore

He was born into a Muslim family in the princely state of Travancore. His father was a timber merchant, and the household was neither wealthy nor destitute, of the ordinary middling sort that Basheer would later write about with unusual tenderness. The backwaters and paddy country around Vaikom, the mosque and the market, the extended family with its aunts and grandmothers and unruly children, all of this entered his fiction more or less directly. He attended school in the usual way, but formal education did not hold him for long.

The freedom movement and the years on the road

The turning point came with the Vaikom Satyagraha, the campaign of the 1920s against the exclusion of lower-caste people from the roads around the Vaikom temple. Mahatma Gandhi came to Vaikom in connection with the agitation, and the young Basheer saw him. The effect was immediate: he left school and joined the freedom movement. He went north into Malabar to take part in the Salt Satyagraha and was arrested. He also brought out an anti-British journal, Ujjivanam, which drew further attention from the colonial authorities and further imprisonment.

Between and around these spells in jail came the wandering years that made him a writer. For a long stretch he moved across India with no fixed home and no fixed occupation, taking whatever work came to hand. He cooked, worked in hotels, told fortunes, operated a loom, acted as an agent for sporting goods, and turned his hand to a long list of other trades. He travelled as a mendicant in the company of Hindu sanyasis and spent time with Sufi mystics, absorbing two devotional worlds at once. These were not literary years in any conventional sense, but they supplied almost everything he later wrote: the hunger, the roadside characters, the prison cells, the spiritual restlessness and the deep sympathy for people living at the edges of respectable society.

A new voice in Malayalam prose

When Basheer began to publish, Malayalam literary prose was largely formal, Sanskritised and self-consciously elevated. He wrote instead in the language people actually spoke, including the particular idiom of Muslim households in central Kerala, with its own vocabulary and rhythms. Grammarians objected; readers did not. His sentences were short, plain and often very funny, and the humour sat directly against poverty, loneliness and cruelty without cancelling either.

Just as important was his choice of subject. He wrote about the poor, about prisoners, about people the literature of the time did not consider fit material, and above all about the everyday life of ordinary Muslim families in Kerala, which had scarcely appeared in Malayalam fiction before him. He treated his characters without condescension and without moralising, allowing them their appetites, their absurdities and their dignity at once. The result was a body of work that could be read by scholars and by people with very little schooling, and which is still quoted in ordinary conversation in Kerala.

The major books

His best-known works are short, and their brevity is part of their power. Premalekhanam (Love Letter), published in 1943, is a comic novella about courtship that also glances at religious difference. Balyakalasakhi (Childhood Friend), from 1944, tells of a love that poverty destroys, and is widely regarded as one of the finest short novels in the language. Shabdangal (Voices), published in 1947, is darker and more disturbing, and caused considerable argument when it appeared.

Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu (My Grandad Had an Elephant), from 1951, uses comedy to examine nostalgia for lost family status and the value of education, particularly for girls. Pathummayude Aadu (Pathumma's Goat), published in 1959, is an affectionate and very funny account of his own household, its quarrels and its animals. Mathilukal (Walls), from 1965, draws on his prison experience: a man in jail forms an attachment to a woman he can hear but never see over the wall that separates the men's and women's sections. It was filmed by Adoor Gopalakrishnan in 1990. Janmadinam is another of the stories that remain in the standard reading of his work.

Beypore and the later honours

In his later life Basheer settled at Beypore, near Kozhikode on the Malabar coast, where he received a constant stream of visitors, writers, students and admirers, often seated under a tree in his compound. From this he acquired the affectionate title by which most of Kerala still knows him: the Sultan of Beypore.

Recognition came steadily. He was elected a Fellow of the Sahitya Akademi in 1970, one of the highest distinctions Indian letters can confer, and later received the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Fellowship. The Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri in 1982. He also received the Lalithambika Antharjanam Award and, in 1993, the Vallathol Award. He died at Beypore on 5 July 1994, at the age of eighty-six.

His reputation has only grown since. His books remain in print, are set in schools and universities, have been translated into many languages and continue to be adapted for stage and screen. For the village of Thalayolaparambu, the connection is permanent: a boy who left its school without finishing became one of the writers by whom modern Malayalam is measured.