ABSTRACT
Vaikom Muhammad Basheer is a Malayalam writer who is also very popular, and he not only writes in a colloquial language but also works with motifs like love, longing and friendship that have won him a wide following; he evidently relishes his renown. This chapter examines two novellas, an early one that is about a young man’s experiences in the War (World War II) – told to Basheer as narrator – and the other, a more mature work based on Basheer’s own experiences in jail during the Freedom Struggle, and about mutual love with a woman prisoner he never sees because she is in a separate section on the other side of a high wall. Basheer has developed an authorial persona, and most of his writing is in the first person. His humanism is mediated by his authorial voice, and he emerges from each of his stories as a tolerant, good humoured person who naturally draws others to confide in him since he is non-judgemental. A feature that emerges is his ‘federal spirit’, being involved in the idea of India as a unified nation but primarily immersed in the local which is Kerala with its cultural specificities.
