When there are mafias specialized in smuggling of gold and narcotics, sand, sex, private schools and colleges, liquor, hospital and land can literature lag behind? The literary award mafias in Kerala have their tentacles over the selection committees that decide the winners of the State-controlled Kerala Sahitya Akademy and Ezhuthachan Award Committee (the highest award in Malayalam) .
Literary lovers were perplexed when this year’s “Vilasini” Award was conferred on P K Pokker, a self-styled postmodernist writer who is a hardcore CPI(M) activist. “Though he has authored more than a dozen books on literary criticism ,nobody in the field of criticism has bothered to touch these books with the barge of a pole. To put it briefly, all his works belong to the genre known as trash,” C K Anandan Pillai, chief editor, Sahitya Vimarsam, told The Pioneer.
Pokker was awarded the Vilasini Prize by the Kerala Sahitya Akademy in violation of all guidelines specified for this prestigious honor. The award was instituted by Vilasini (the pen name of one of the all time greats of Malayalam literature, M K Menon) with the intention of honoring authors who undertake comprehensive study on novels published in Malayalam. Menon is the author of many classic novels including The Inheritors, the longest novel ever written in India.
When he came to know that there were no writers specializing in studies of novels in Malayalam, Menon, a journalist-turned-novelist set apart a corpus fund and instituted an award to encourage those who take up serious studies in Malayalam novels. He had set three conditions while instituting the award. The honor should be named after O Chandu Menon, Malayalam language’s first ever novelist and his name should not find mention anywhere in this connection. Menon also put a stringent condition that collection of articles should not be considered for this award. “This was to encourage serious study on a particular novel which would elevate the status of such novels to global standards. What the Sahitya Akadeny Award jury has done is to throw the guidelines into trash bin and select a fourth grade book full of grammatical mistakes and literary aberrations,” wrote noted critic A B Raghunathan Nair in a research paper published in Sahitya Vimarsam.
Nair has pointed out hundreds of such mistakes in Pokker’s book “Blue Light of Creativity,” a collection of essays on the literary works of Vaikkom Muhammed Basheer. There are so many factual as well as grammatical errors in Pokker’s work. The basic requirement to be considered for the prize is that it should be a comprehensive study on the novel.
What Pokker has done is to write some articles and got it published as a collection,” writes Nair.
