Khasakkinte Ithihasam-O.V Vijayan (review by Anil Surya)

Khasakkinte Ithihasam is a path breaking Malayalam novel written by the Indian writer O.V Vijayan. First published in 1969 and generally referred to as kahasak in literary circles, the novel has run into fifty reprints in the last forty years, making it one of the most popular and largest selling novel in South Asia. Khasakkinte Ithihasam has also been translated into French, German and English.

               This novel literally revolutionized Malayalam fiction. Its interweaving of myth and reality, its lyrical intensity, its black humor, its freshness of idiom with its mixing of the provincial and the profound and its juxtaposition of the erotic and the metaphysical, the crass and the sublime, the real and the sublime, the real and the surreal, guilt and expiation, physical desire and existential angst, and its innovative narrative strategy with its deft manipulation of time and space together created a new readership with a novel sensibility and transformed the Malayali imagination forever.

            The novel begins with the arrival of Ravi at koomankave.  It is crafted in the form of the spiritual journey of an undergraduate drop out, Ravi, plagued by the guilt of an illicit affair with his stepmother. Ravi abandons a bright academic career and he desserts his lover Padma and leaves on a long pilgrimage, which finally brings him to khasak. Where he was assigned to start a single-teacher school as a part of the District Board’s education initiative. The novel extensively deals with Ravi’s encounter with the local people of khasak, Allappicha mollakka, Madhavan Nair, Sivaraman Nair, Khaliyar, Maimoona and his Students Kunhamina, Kochusuhara, Kuruva.
                                 Khasakinte ithihasm does not have a single narrative plot. It recounts the numerous encounters of khasak from a spiritual and philosophical perspective. Through these encounters, vijayan narrates numerous stories, myths and superstitions cherished in Khasak. The culture of Khasak is opposite to the scientific and rational world outside, which is now making inroads to Khasak through Ravi’s single-teacher school. Through the myth and the stories, Vijayan also explores similar encounters in the past recounted by the people of Khasak, enabling him to have a distinctly unique view of culture encounters across time and space.                                  
                                         Vijayan ends his novel in a tragic way. Padma, Ravi's lover calls him back and Ravi decides to leave Khasak. In the end, he commits suicide through snake bite while waiting for a bus at koomankavu.