The Malayalam short story celebrated its centenary in 1991. During these hundred years of its dynamic and even turbulent existence, it has passed through several phases in terms of theme and idiom, structure and ideology; a history in which periods of gradual evolution alternate with periods of rupture, and syntheses are preceded by major aesthetic shifts and philosophic revolts.
Like other Indian languages Malayalam too has had a long tradition of oral narration before the modern short story came into being. Most of them were imaginative retellings of tales from Indian mythology and epics or legends from Kerala's own life and history, first recorded by Kottarattil Sankunni in his Aitihyamala (A Garland of Legends). The first printed stories in Malayalam were translations of stories from English or parables from the Holy Bible, both of a moralising kind. The Malayalam text books of the second half of the nineteenth century designed didactic tales from Aesop's Fables, Panchatantra or the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. All these helped the maturing of Malayalam prose that soon became a perfect tool for the realistic narration of contemporary life and for imaginative self-expression, bringing into being the modern institution of the 'author'.
The first 'short story' proper in Malayalam, most scholars believe, is Vasanavikriti (The Mischief of Instinct) published in the Vidyavinodini monthly in 1891. A dramatic first person narrative, the story lays bare the tensions and regrets of a man who has just come out of jail after serving a long term of imprisonment and has made up his mind to go to Benares to expiate his sin. Vasanavikriti declares its identity as a short story through its close-knit narrative structure and the psychological drama it plays out. The story was published anonymously; but most researchers agree that it was authored by Vengayil Kunhiraman Nayanar who used to assist C.P. Achyuta Menon in editing Vidyavinodini.
It is possible on the basis of major shifts in sensibility to divide the history and the genre in Malayalam into five phases admittedly with the risk of some simplification, since each aesthetic conjuncture, and since several levels of sensibility co-exist and transition in the discourse is the product of an overdetermined fight for hegemony at each moment of literary evolution.
The first phase during which the short story as a genre began to make its presence felt in Malayalam may be said to have lasted for four decades, from 1891 to 1930. The writers of these stories thought of storytelling as no more than a pastime: they never considered it a proper medium for the criticism of life. The writers belonged to the same leisured class to which their readers belonged. The stories were wordy and descriptive; the structure was one-dimensional and the narration, direct. The stories dealt with hunting, romance or recent history. There were also detective stories after the model of Sherlock Holmes tales. Rarely the stories also took up for criticism social evils like drinking, love of gold, and child marriage as in the works of Moorkoth Kumaran.
Love portrayed in these stories was always idealised, platonic. Some of them were so eventful that they could easily have evolved into novels while others, like those of K.Sukumaran were humorous stories almost verging on the ribald. Entertainment was the chief if not the sole aim of short-story writing in this early phase.
But the scenario changed radically towards the end of the 1920s when Kerala was passing through a social renaissance in the fullest sense of the term. Kerala's public sphere began to be formed as part of this Renaissance that began with a self-criticism of the feudal caste society. In its early stages the social reformers were constrained to operate within the structures of caste in order to abolish sub-castes, purge the caste of evil and outmoded beliefs and practices and initiate their people into modern knowledge and useful crafts. All castes were involved in this process of auto-critique and re-orientation though the chief thrust that really shook the whole society up from its complacency and stupor by a shock treatment was subaltern since only the lower castes were capable of dreaming of a casteless society which naturally meant depriving the upper castes of their special privileges. The success of the Sree Narayana Movement that spearheaded the restructuring of the society lay in its subtle reversal of the significance of the oppressors' legitimating discourse through a secular reading of their sacred texts and a subversive use of their signs, symbols and images: a typical Indian reformist strategy employed by Vivekananda and Gandhi in their broader struggles against orthodoxy including the caste system itself. The second stage of the Renaissance that came with the formation of the Congress with its total disavowal of colonialism produced the first line of truly secular intellectuals in Kerala while the third stage, a natural outgrowth of the earlier phases, consisted of a reorientation of the Renaissance towards a resurgence of the marginalised brought together on the basis of class. Communism in Kerala, unlike in most other parts of the world, is our indigenous democratic phenomenon rooted in Kerala's social reform and nationalist movements of the earlier decades, though its identification with the backward castes and its democratic complexion are yet to be adequately theorised. What concerns us here, however, is the impact that the three-tier movement had on literature. Literature had established itself as a social sub-system in Kerala by the sixteenth century A.D., but it began to be recognised and assessed as literature only when Kerala's public sphere began to be formed as part of this general democratic movement that we have already qualified as Kerala's Renaissance. The translation of classics from Sanskrit and English providing a norm for the critical appreciation of literature and the original composition of long verse narratives, epics, novels, short stories and essays led to the establishment of the 'aesthetic' as a specific realm of life and culture and transformed literature from the sacral to the secular. The codification of grammar helped the growth of a prose style. Literary criticism consolidated the specificity of the 'aesthetic' while literary journals like Vidyavinodini, Kesari, Kerala Patrika, Swadesabhimani, Bhashaposhini and Mangalodayam and organisations like 'Sahitya Parishad' and 'Bhashaposhini Sabha' provided ample scope for expression and dialogue. The spread of modern education and printing techno-logy further activated the growth and expansion of the public sphere. Literature was released from its ritual use with the undermining of traditional word pictures by the basic ideology of fair exchange.
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