Thinakkal Padmanabhan, or TP, as he is fondly known to many, is a doyen of the short story in Malayalam. As he turned 90 last year, Samyukta India Press brought out a collection of his short stories, translated into English by Sreedevi K Nair and Laila Alex. The edition with its deceptively simple title, Stories, sits as a fitting capstone to what has been one of the most distinguished literary careers in Indian literatures. And for those unfamiliar with TP's oeuvre, the collection is an excellent starting point.
TP is an acclaimed writer in Malayalam, having been a two-time Sahitya Akademi awardee, and having received all the major literary awards in Kerala including the Ezhuthachan Puraskaram, the highest literary award of the Government of Kerala, in 2003, the Vallathol and Vayalar Awards in the same year (2001), and the Basheer Award most recently (2019), among many others. In the words of the translators Nair and Alex, "T. Padmanabhan's place in Malayalam literature is comparable to that of Edgar Allan Poe in American Literature." He writes within an august literary tradition that has seen many greats, and a long career spanning many decades since the 20th century has meant that TP has seen many literary movements and fashions come and go. Born in 1931, TP began writing at the age of 19 and has penned nearly 200 short stories of which Prakasham Parathunna Oru Penkutty (The Girl Who Spreads Radiance, 1955), Oru Kathakrithu Kurishil (A Writer Being Crucified, 1956), Makhan Singhinte Maranam (The Death of Makhan Singh, 1958), Kala Bhairavan, Gouri (1993) and Maraya (2017) have become canonical.
The alchemies of translation
At a time when translation studies is undergoing a kind of heyday in India, this collection introduces the Anglophone reader to one of the most significant voices from Kerala. Translated into several Indian languages as well as into Russian, German and French, TP's short stories were first compiled into an English translation by Prema Jayakumar in 2008 (titled Fifteen Stories) and published by Tarjuma. In 2015, a memoir and collection of essays, Ente Katha, Ente Jeevitham (My Story, My Life) was brought out by Olive Publications with an afterword by Pinarayi Vijayan, the current Chief Minister of Kerala, who has long been an admirer of the writer. Along with Jayakumar's edition and TP's own memoirs, this expanded collection of stories, introduced by the widely respected poet and literary critic E V Ramakrishnan, provides a notable corpus of TP's writings for English readerships that merits further scholarly and popular reach. Nair and Alex have included some of TP's most well-known and admired stories (such as 'Gauri', 'Across the River And Into the Trees', 'Harrison Saheb's Dog', and 'The Yellow Rose') and have translated others that should have a broader appeal beyond the borders of Kerala (such as 'Desh, a Hindustani Raaga', 'Disease and Cure', 'Gul Muhammed', and 'The Old Man'). Together, the collection brings to the fore a representatively diverse selection and tying it all together is TP's laser-like focus balanced with a benign, all-pervading humanism that shows him as a master of the short story genre.