ABSTRACT
Paul Zacharia is a highly original Malayalam writer who has written mainly short stories. He is not consciously modernist in that Nehruvian modernity does not seem to preoccupy him. But his whimsical fiction has recognition of life’s absurdity without verging on satire. Some of the stories are too capricious to be interpreted but one could attribute his kind of ‘modernism’ (which does not have the solemnity of the others) can be traced to Kerala arriving at its own kind of modernity – as distinct from that mediated by the West or colonialism – because of the way the region has developed – with its high literacy levels, urbanisation and more uniform development. This is substantiated by the writing of OV Vijayan and Basheer, the other Malayalam writers represented here who, while being involved in India, also take a more distant view of the issues that Indian language writers take solemnly Of special interest in the collection (in the story Bhaskara Pattelar) is Zacharia’s sardonic view of people from his region migrating outside and blending into the new milieu without asserting their own regional identities.
