"My grandmother Thankamuthasi got up at four every morning, bathed in the pond in the dim light and, after a brief visit to the temple, started the fire in the kitchen with dry palm branches and matches that she kept hidden behind the salt box in one dark corner of the shelf."

The long winded opening sentence of Nalini Warriar's Blues From the Malabar Coast, a collection of twelve short stories set in Manyapra, a small village in Kerala, takes the reader into the everyday world of the large Warriar household. The Warriars are an upper caste matrilineal caste (the author makes the common error of describing them as matriarchal). The lives of the members of the Variyam revolve around the temple. The household, which is ruled by the grandmother, Thankamuthasi, includes her widowed daughter Madhavi, who has returned home with her seven children on the sudden death of her husband, and Thankamuthasi's sons, daughters-in-law and their children.

The first six stories in the collection, beginning with the title story "Blues from the Malabar Coast" describe the world of the household as seen through the eyes of Madhavi's children. The collection opens with the story of Krishnan, one of Madhavi's son's, and describes vignettes from his childhood. The narrators in the subsequent stories, all of them set in Manyapra, are his siblings. The transition occurs in "Leela's Dream," in which Leela, a widow like her mother, gives birth to her sixth child, a son, Venugopal Shivaraman, (Ven) and dreams of her son marrying her favorite brother Krishnan's, yet unborn daughter, Seema. The second half of the collection follows Ven to Heidelberg and Quebec, his marriage to his cousin Seema, their life together in Quebec City and her recollections of growing up in India. In the concluding story "Going Back" Seema returns to Kerala for her father's funeral. At the end of her visit she promises her mother that she will return. She will not wait till it is too late.

This book joins the line of mediocre works by Indian women who have attempted to piggyback on Arundhati Roy's success. It is clearly written for a western audience and at times reads like a poor imitation of National Geographic's cultural pieces on non- western countries, complete with racist and colonial undertones, descriptions of bare breasts and animal imagery -- Krishnan, the narrator of the first story talks about the "older girls" -- "to me, they were exotic birds..." The book shamelessly renders and peddles "culture" as a commodity. I have done field-work in Kerala and found the inaccuracies in the book galling. Again, in the first story, Krishnan who was out with his older siblings was separated from the group and wandered away on his own. He lost track of time and it was dark when he returned home to find his mother yelling at her brothers, "Dogs! Go look for him! ... Don't just sit there like a fox that just farted into an ant hole! Mongoose-breath idiots!" His mother was waving a twig broom at her brothers "threatening to beat them up if they didn't move their fat asses." I don't know what world Nalini Warriar is familiar with, but in the Kerala that I know, it would be unthinkable for a woman from the class that the Variyam belongs to, for a woman to use that kind of language, much less wave a broom at her brothers.

In "Backwaters" Ven brings home his German friend Karl to "experience the sounds and smells of the Orient." Ven takes his friend to the village temple where "Karl stood in front of the inner sanctum, a streak of sandalwood paste across his forehead, hands clasped, head bent and eyes closed." Anyone who is familiar with, and has followed Kerala's religious politics will remember the furore when the singer Jesudas, a Christian, wanted to sing inside Guruvayoor temple. He was not allowed inside the temple on religious grounds. Of all the temples in India, the temples in Kerala are particularly rigid when it comes to following traditions and keeping non-Hindus out. This is one of the many unlikely events in the book.

The book is also pretty badly written. Malayalam words and phrases are introduced at random, almost as if the author suddenly remembered that she was pandering to a reader in search of the exotic. Sentences are clumsily constructed: "Education was compulsory so all could read and write,"
"the money you took from us three..."
"the water ... left small puddles here and there,"
"All bellies were full..."
There are plenty of such poorly constructed sentences and phrases.

This book was awarded the 2002 QWF Mcauslan First Book Award. To me it seemed like a great illustration of "orientalism." A book of narratives that describes life in rural Kerala, could have captured the changes wrought by the passage of time. Instead we get no sense of time or the larger picture. The stories are set in a land where "bras and other western contraptions had not yet invaded the peaceful, lustful goings on." They degenerate into descriptions of "exotic" locales, of bare breasted women, accounts of people farting, and uncles lusting after nieces whose breasts were covered with "thin cotton towels." I could not help but compare it to Pather Panchali, the classic work that describes the lives of rural families in Bengal with sensitivity and elegance. "Blues from the Malabar Coast" is just crass and tasteless.

Book Description:

More about Nalini Warriar
[Fiction] [Reviews] [Bookshelf] [Sawnet]