ALLEGORIES OF POWER

A Reading of O.V. Vijayans Selected Short Fiction

and Political Cartoons

A Dissertation submitted to the University of Mumbai for M.A. Honours

(Research) Degree in English

Submitted by

SHIVANGI GUPTA

Under the Guidance of

DR. SHOBA VENKATESH GHOSH

Department of English
University of Mumbai
Kalina, Santacruz (East)
Mumbai 400098

MARCH 2013

STATEMENT BY THE CANDIDATE

As required by University Ordinance 770, I wish to state that the dissertation titled Allegories of
Power: A Reading of O.V. Vijayans Selected Short Fiction and Political Cartoons, submitted
by me in partial fulfillment for a Masters Degree in English, is my own work.
This work has not been submitted for the award of any other degree to this or any other
university. Any reference made to previous works of others has been clearly indicated and
included in the Bibliography.

_____________________
Shivangi Gupta
(Candidate)

Certified by

_____________________
Dr. Shoba Venkatesh Ghosh
(Research Guide)

CERTIFICATE OF THE GUIDE

I certify that the M.A. Honours (Research) dissertation titled Allegories of Power: A Reading
of O.V. Vijayans Selected Short Fiction and Political Cartoons by Shivangi Gupta represents
her original work which was carried out by her at the University of Mumbai, under my guidance
and supervision in the academic year 2012 13.
I further certify that the foregoing statements made by her in regard to her dissertation are
correct.

Signature of the Guide

(Dr. Shoba Venkatesh Ghosh)

Place: Mumbai
Date: 14th March, 2012

Acknowledgement

I would first and foremost like to thank my father, Vinay Gupta, for having introduced me to this
enthralling collection of O.V. Vijayans short fiction, which has captivated my imagination for as
long as I can remember. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my mother, Saloni
Gupta, whose unconditional love and support encouraged me to read Vijayans radical texts in
unconventional ways.
My heartiest thanks and greatest appreciation goes to my research guide, Dr Shoba Venkatesh
Ghosh, who has been extremely kind, supportive and patient with my less than perfect drafts and
annoying queries. I feel truly honoured to have had the opportunity to conduct my research under
her guidance and to have attended her invaluable lectures for the past two years, which have
been a key influence in shaping my academic as well as personal life. Without her constant
encouragement and belief in my abilities it would have been impossible for me to complete this
dissertation.
Next I would like to thank my professor and friend, Sonali Pattnaik, who took the time to
painstakingly go through my unstructured drafts and point out the inconsistencies. Her timely
interventions and fruitful discussions regarding the theoretical approaches I have utilized had a
profound influence on my work and in the way I now approach the works of O.V. Vijayan.

I am also extremely grateful to Dr. Coomi Vevina, for thinking me capable of and giving me an
opportunity to pursue the M.A. Honours (Research) Degree at the University of Mumbai and for
being extremely patient, kind and supportive.
Finally, I would like to thank my dear friends and classmates, especially Gayatri Viswanath, for
her unconditional love and support, and for helping me iron out my theoretical and formatting
issues, which I can never thank her enough for. I would also like to thank my friends Aman
Khan, Harsha Malaney, Jyotsna Morris and Aniruddh Date for constantly motivating me and
reminding me that I have a dissertation to write.

Shivangi Gupta

CONTENTS

Title

Statement by the Candidate

ii

Certificate of the Guide

iii

Acknowledgement

iv

Chapter 1

Locating O. V. Vijayan

Chapter 2 Of Allegories and Dystopias

Chapter 3 Questions of Time, History and the National/Human Subject

21

Chapter 4 The Sexualization of Politics

34

Chapter 5 Conclusion

49

Bibliography

51

CHAPTER I
Locating O. V. Vijayan
O.V. Vijayan can be seen as a pioneering figure of Malayalam modern literature; however he can
also be viewed as a silenced and marginalized figure within the corpus of modern Indian
literature. It is somewhat ironic that while he was centrally located in the national capital for
most of his career and has been a fairly revered figure of Malayalam literature, his radical
writing and art works earned him a marginal space in the canon, positing questions concerning
the politics of literary canonization and the process of its selection and exclusions. This is ratified
by the fact that O.V. Vijayan won the Sahitya Akademi award for his novel Infinity (1997),
which was more acceptable and less explicit than his masterpiece novel The Legends of Khasak
(1965). His more radical works during the time of the Emergency push democratic ideals to their
limit and expose the states silencing mechanism which violently crushes any voices of dissent
before they are able to surface.
The body of Vijayans works, and especially his short political fiction, is posited as a multidimensional text characterized by an intricately patterned interlocking of ideology and existential
concerns as C. Gopinathan Pillai rightly observes in his text titled The Political Novels of Milan
Kundera and O. V. Vijayan A Comparative Study (1996).
O. V. Vijayan can also be viewed as one of the first few post-modernist writers of the
subcontinent. Vijayan, who was also one of the leading English-language cartoonists in India,
exploded into the literary scene with his dark, brooding, profoundly unsettling novel Khasakkinte
Ithihasam (The Legends of Khasak, 1965). His writing was immediately identified as

athyadunikam (ultramodern), as the term post-modern had not come into vogue in the
critical vocabulary in Malayalam literature. Vijayan continued to write masterly short stories and
social critiques until the National Emergency in 1975, when his second novel, the masterpiece
Dharmapuranam (The Saga of Dharmapuri) was prevented from publication due to its
controversial content.
When asked about his works churned out during the tumultuous time of the Emergency, O.V.
Vijayan immediately recalls Allegories of Power from his collection titled After the Hanging
and Other Short Stories (1989). The title under which the first four short stories have been
compiled itself suggests the strong political affiliations of the text. He reveals to Rajeev
Srinivasan in an interview in 1998 that these were amongst the pieces which he had kept in cold
storage until the end of the Emergency.1
Like his novel Saga, these short stories were written before, during and after the Emergency,
with a lot of latent anger. He admits in the interview that writing during this period of his life
was a cleansing and cathartic experience. Since the emergency was imposed in June, 1975, his
book Saga along with his radical short fiction went into hiding, which gave him ample time to
meddle with the story.
Like Dharmapuranam, his short stories too seem to have been influenced by the existentialists as
well as by Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne. However, his vision and style, in general, spring
out of the classic experience of pre-modern India, relics of which have managed to survive in the
remote villages and tribal cultures of Kerala. The nascent post-modernist sensibility enabled him
to bring out the essence of the pre-modern in a scorching, flaming narrative style, much to the
1

See Rajeev Srinivasans interview with O. V. Vijayan. The Lion in Winter, 2005.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/mar/31intera.htm

confusion of the modern progressives, who claimed certainty in the matters of life and art. His
dissent from modernism was evident in his early short stories and parodies. By distancing
himself from western existentialist concerns and influences, Vijayan brought into currency a
truly unique postmodern style in Malayalam literature which approaches these questions from a
localized lens.
In his Allegories of Power he looks at tyranny, addressing and highlighting its multiple
manifestation and forms, be it as an organic quantity in the case of Oil, as allegory in The
Foetus and The Wart, or as dark comedy in The Examination. There is a certain sense of
ambiguity of good triumphing over evil in The Foetus and especially in The Wart. This
makes one wonder whether he conforms to this binary opposition or fractures it. It is therefore a
complex matter to try and fix O.V. Vijayan as he constantly surprises his readers while dealing
with volatile subjects and concepts in his works.
In his interview with Rajeev Srinivasan (op. cit.) O.V.Vijayan, while referring to his novel of
protest Saga in particular and his ideological shift in general says,
But Saga is definitely a novel of protesta predetermined offensive about the whole concept
of state, against war, cautiously written about a future where the right of the plant or the
vegetable will be upheld. In some ways, it is anti-civilizational. As in some of the short stories,
especially the ones about dystopias (Emphasis added).

To invoke the Derridian notion of the supplement, philosophy and politics merged in his
cartoons, just as revolution and spirituality coalesce in his writings, the one folding into the
other, each the others supplement. Vijayans concern about the future of humankind, the bold
mix of sexuality and politics in his stories and novels, his use of the scatological imagery to
question the banality of politics, and his deep anxiety about the cosmic order, are all unique

characteristics of a writer whose oeuvre was much more than the sum of its parts. Sex, satire and
a deep sorrow mark much of his writing.
Being proficient in both Malayalam and English has enabled the bilingual Vijayan to exploit
both languages and push their boundaries to their limits, via his literary fiction as well as his
political cartoon. Much like After the Hanging and Other Stories, the author has translated most
of his own works from the original Malayalam. It is interesting, as Rajeev Srinivasan too
suggests in his interview with Vijayan, that his translations of the short stories are perceived as
being more evocative and popular than in the original Malayalam. However, Vijayans humble
response to this statement suggests that the readers of the English version may lose out on many
nuanced cultural references embedded in his texts.
O.V. Vijayans contribution to the art of political cartooning in India has been phenomenal. The
very style he adopted, with his jagged black and white sketches punctuated by negative spaces in
the form of black lines, and his creative and satirical base lines, all are key factors in establishing
O.V. Vijayan as one of the leading English language political cartoonists of his time. Any
analysis of his Allegories of Power taken from his book titled After the Hanging and Other
Stories (1989), would be incomplete without his excellent artistic rendition and critique of the
political nexus and exercise of power during the years of the Emergency. Vijayan ingeniously
makes use of evocative visual imagery in his fiction, making his writing comparable to the pieces
of art he churned out for leading English dailies.
One of the central arguments of this dissertation is that not only does Vijayan push language to
its seams, his radical works of fiction also extend the boundaries of the modes and techniques he
deploys in his texts. The second chapter titled Of Allegories and Dystopias focuses on the

politics that Vijayan consciously engages in by using a minor form like the short story along with
the allegorical mode. Other questions taken up concern his ideological shift from the left to a
transcendental, bhakti-oriented philosophy, along with other techniques that he utilizes to make
optimum use of the allegorical mode in his short stories, especially The Wart and The Foetus.
The third chapter titled Questions of Time, History and the National/Human Subject looks at
Vijayans short fiction and political cartoons through a different lens, interrogating the nature
and importance of memory with regards to the formation of identity, of truth and histories in the
selected texts of Vijayan. I also draw upon the seminal work of Deleuze and Guattari while
addressing questions of the nomadic subject and the constant process of becoming other when
dealing with questions of the human subject.
In the fourth and final chapter, Vijayans Allegories of Power will be subjected to a feminist
analysis. It sets out to interrogate the figure of the female political leader located in the third
world scenario by looking more closely at the politics of the popular iconography and
representation of Indira Gandhi. The chapter also touches upon key issues like caste/class
oppression which add to the woes of third world women as well as questions regarding the
gender sensitivity of the author, Vijayan, and how he manages to subvert stereotypical
representations of women with the voluptuous vocabulary he utilizes in his texts.
In sum, this dissertation is an enquiry into the short fiction of a writer who has and continues to
hold a crucial position in the literary annals of modern Malayalam literature, but who is, in a
fundamental sense, excessive of all categories that seek to define and contain him.

CHAPTER TWO
Of Allegories and Dystopias

In his seminal and contentious essay, Third-world Literatures in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism (1986), Fredric Jameson argues that in the literatures of the third world,2 there is
now an obsessive return to the national question (65) and that typically this takes the form of
Allegory All third world texts arenecessarily allegorical, and in a very specific way: they
are to be read as what I will call national allegories (69). Given that [a] certain nationalism is
fundamental in the third world [literatures], what, asks Jameson, is the best suited replacement
for this trend in third world literatures? O. V. Vijayans work is certainly concerned with the
national question and, particularly in his short stories, his explorations are cast in the
allegorical mode. Vijayans significance, however, lies in that he avoids any nationalist jingoism
and rearticulates the nation by situating himself in a regional and vernacular space. And, most
importantly, he formulates a non-western postmodernist style of writing which has become a key
characteristic of postmodern Malayalam fiction.
By rejecting Western postmodernism and existentialism Vijayan refrains from merely imitating
an American (or first-world) brand of postmodernism, instead developing a unique style of
writing which focuses on specific localized issues and a particular historical trajectory. Vijayan
uses the allegorical mode of writing towards various ends. Not only does the allegorical mode
present Vijayan with an opportunity to escape directly naming those concerned, it also broadens
2

Contrary to charges leveled against Jameson for his homogenizing tendencies, Jameson clarifies that he uses the
term third world in an essentially descriptive sense and he that he has no intention of obliterating profound
differences between a whole range of non-western countries and situations (1986: 65).

the scope of the text itself so that there is a wider possibility of associations which can be linked
to its content. Through his texts Vijayan broadens the scope of the allegorical mode as well, by
subverting the conventional elements of the mode as utilized by the west and using it as a tool for
a scorching and scrupulously located socio-political critique.
Vijayans choosing of the minor genre of the short story to address national issues is, it can be
argued, a fundamentally radical move. Vijayan himself speaks of the scope of his short stories in
an interview with Rajeev Srinivasan.3 The interviewer inquires whether 'The Foetus is a thinly
veiled story of the excesses of Sanjay Gandhi and his cronies, probing the author to make clear
his objections to the Nehru Dynasty. However, Vijayan resists this cooption, instead insisting
that The story should not be reduced to the level of personal animosity towards anybody. It is
only a take-off point to indicate human evil, evil in the state and (to some extent) evil in negating
nature.
Having said that, his short story The Foetus included under the selection titled Allegories of
Power is a sweltering account of Sanjay Gandhis aggressive leadership of the Youth Congress,
the youth wing of the party, which during the Emergency gained more powers and importance
than the parent organization it stemmed from.
Mrs. Gandhi proclaimed a state of Internal Emergency under Article 352 of the constitution on
the morning of 26 June, suspending the normal political processes, but promising to return to
normalcy as soon as conditions warranted it. The proclaimations suspended the federal
provisions of the constitution and Fundamental Rights and civil liberties. The government
imposed strict censorship on the Press and stifled all protest and opposition to the government.
(Chandra 2008: 321).

See Rajeev Srinivasans interview with O. V. Vijayan. The Lion in Winter, 2005.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/mar/31intera.htm

All of these features of the Emergency of 1975 and the draconian laws put in place by Indira
Gandhi find allegorical equivalents in the texts of O. V. Vijayan. Of particular importance is his
short story The Foetus as discussed earlier, which represents the Sovereign mother-son duo
who effectively suspended democratic processes during the period of the Emergency. Indira
Gandhi is referred to as the Lady, widowed Sovereign of the village (The Foetus, 30) who
the people seldom saw while the unborn yet mobile Foetus is an allegorical representation of her
son Sanjay Gandhi. Immediately after the widowed Sovereign is introduced we are informed of
her scandalous pregnancy which is accompanied by the manifestation of fearsome omens.The
perennial spring of the temple tank dried up, even as the Lady's womb ceased its bleeding (30).
This could also be viewed as a reference to the two consecutive droughts of 1972-73 which
added to the woes of Indira Gandhis government, causing massive failure of crops and the
subsequent inflation of food grains and other basic essentials like cooking oil.
The scions of the gentry represent the Youth Congress members and a selective panel of
politicians and bureaucrats, who coerce the Astrologer to divine the Sovereigns pregnancy as an
Immaculate conception insisting that the people need such a reading. Bipan Chandras
commentary on the Emergency tells us that [t]he Emergency concentrated unlimited state and
party power in the hands of the prime minister to be exercised through a small coterie of
politicians and bureaucrats around her (Chandra 2008: 322). Indira Gandhi managed to do so by
amending The Defence of India Act which was to the detriment of citizens liberties.
The proclamation made by the leader of the gentry never reaches the village and as in the classic
case of shooting the messenger, the village drummer is found lying dead in a palm grove. Here
the village drummer represents the arrest and silencing of the media representatives under the
amendment of MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act) in July 1975, which effectively

curbed the rights of the media machinery to freely report and broadcast any material which
would potentially endanger the interests of the congress party, specifically the speeches of the
Opposition leaders. Another instance of this undemocratic curbing of the Presss freedom is
presented in the story. Initially when the Foetus is at the peak of its power, the Astrologer and the
Priest are unable of tell the future of the village and the menacing foetus due to the foetal
eclipse (42), the passing of which is rejoiced upon when the Foetus is redeemed with love and
coaxed to re-enter his mother, the Sovereigns womb.
After discovering that the trail from the drummers dead body leads to the Fortress wherein the
Lady and her foetus reside, the villagers decide to remain silent and turn a blind eye towards the
death, which they describe as an inexplicable aberration (31). This passivity and compliance
can be linked to the popular public reaction to the proclamation of the Emergency. Bipan
Chandra elaborates this point further:
While a section of the intelligentsia reacted to the Emergency with marked hostility, the larger
majority of the people initially responded to it with passivity, acquiescence, acceptance or
even, support. It was only from the beginning of 1976 that the Emergency started becoming
unpopular (Chandra 2008: 323).

In his opinion, there were a number of reasons for this kind of a reaction from the masses. For
one, the people had no experience in recent memory of an authoritarian rule, which led to a sense
of bewilderment and fear of the unknown. The main reason for this popular reception of the
Emergency was that a large number of people were impressed by the positive outcome of some
of the well-publicized Emergency measures (Chandra 2008: 323) most of which could have
been achieved despite the Emergency. The village drummers brother, however, decides to
investigate, the consequence of which is that he is almost killed by the murderous, blood-sucking
Foetus. Therefore we see in allegorical terms how the fear of arrest and coercive action of the

government effectively silenced most voices of dissent.

The corruption which riddled the entire political system and the unearthing of which led to the
strengthening of the JP Movement,4 is also one of the major themes of Vijayans Allegories of
Power. We see representations of this in The Foetus after the Foetus is declared as the new
Sovereign by the gentry, followed by carnivals of youth to celebrate the advent of the Foetus.
At the end of these carnivals, we are told, the youth would march to the fortress with offerings
of goat and roosters and bunches of bananas for the Foetus. And once they left the offerings at
the gate, it would open at night when the Foetus woke, and the hounds would tug the offerings
inside (33). It must be remembered that the court case which threatened to keep Indira Gandhi
out of parliament was based on petty charges of which political corruption was one.
Another instance of corruption has been allegorized in Vijayans short story Oil, the title of
which can be viewed as a sardonic allegorical commentary on the inflated prices of basic
household commodities like food grains and cooking oil in particular. Ayyan Chettiyar, the
money lender and owner of the sole shop in the village, and his wife Chalachi Chettichiyar dilute
their cooking oil with castor oil in order to maximize their profits. Once the people, especially
the youth of the village, begin to fall prey to a mysterious epidemic of paralysis and the threat of
discovery and consequent arrest stares them both in the face, they resort to extending favours to
the officers sent to investigate them. They first wine and dine the investigating officers, and then
seal the deal by extending sexual favours to them. Thus we see how corruption is the driving
force of Vijayans short story Oil.

Taking its name from its moving force, Jayaprakash Narayan, the JP Movement presented one of the fiercest
oppositions to the Emergency that saw months of draconian laws, extinguished freedom, Gestapo-style arrests,
severe Press censorship, forced sterilization and abject surrender by the minions of the Indira Gandhi/Sanjay Gandhi
regime that made India a fascist-style police state.

Suspension of the Fundamental Rights and civil liberties of the people, which was one of the
most undemocratic features of the Internal Emergency of 1975, also finds ample allegorical
reverberation in the texts of O.V. Vijayan. In The Foetus the new sovereign lays down a
number of autocratic laws which curb all the liberties and freedom of the villagers. The foetus
outlaws formal schooling after disrupting classes at the village school, raping the young teacher
and brainwashing the head master into silence and compliance. Formal schooling is replaced by
the pro-Foetus slogans that are to be taught by the gentry. We also see how public spaces are
encroached upon by the Foetus and his cronies when they invade the temple tank during the
festival bath where hundreds of bare-breasted women are bathing. The foetus and his young
cronies molest them, blind to identity, and search them for signs of pregnancy in order to harvest
all unborn foetuses. When on witnessing this horrid scene a grandmother exclaims to the leader
of the youth, Desist, my children! he responds in the negative, informing her that, This is the
Sovereigns search. There are no private pregnancies anymore (35). Another instance of this
encroachment of public space presents itself in a ritualistic, repetitive fashion,
Every morning now the Foetus came to the marketplace riding in the red palanquin. Behind it
in a greasy phalanx marched the little foetuses, and behind them, chanting slogans, the violent
young men of the gentry. Often, the oldest citizen of the village, its only surviving centenarian,
bought up the rear of this village. Its only surviving centenarian, brought up the rear of this
weird revue (The Foetus, 38).

When the village elder falls terminally ill due to this excessive exercise and the Priest asks him
for his reason for following the Foetus he replies, Aged disciples have always walked behind
young messiahs (38), a rhetoric which became popular during the leadership of Sanjay Gandhi.
The most intrusive and abominable law laid down by the Foetus comes to light after the shocked
Priest returns from his daughters school and speaks with her friend. She informs him of the

latest decree The Foetus has outlawed childbirth. Henceforth the village will have only
foetuses (38). Later in the narrative we see how a couple that tries to flee with its illegally
born child is intercepted and punished by death for trying to escape the confines of the village
and for not adhering to the law of the land. This can also be seen as Vijayans razor-sharp
comment on the forced vasectomies, the cause of birth control and population control being
championed by the Youth Congress under the leadership of Sanjay Gandhi. Vijayans short story
therefore draws our attention to the gendered politics of the undertaking and execution of such an
action by the government and its resulting consequences. In fact, the death of children and the
degeneration and maiming of the youth are the two constants in all four stories included under
O. V. Vijayans Allegories of Power.
The Foetus ends with the symbolic death of the widowed Sovereign as well as the Foetus.
Their demise spells the end of the foetal eclipse and also results in the end of their entire
machinery of support.
[b]lack clouds gathered over the fortress and bolts of lightning crashed on the bronze domes.
The arching banyans, primordial spiders, caught fire with an agonized whistling. The dogs
howled to their deaths and great bats winged out of the fortress into the raging fire. A solitary
chamber-maid, beating her breast and wailing, emerged from the fortress wading through its
doom with a message for the village.
The news is grim, the Priest spoke to the Astrologer in the temple, The Lady delivered. The
child was still-born and the mother too passed away.'
They walked to the village. In the lanes and on the common and beside the stiles sat the scions
of the gentry, despairing, wailing, freed into insanity. The little foetuses lay scattered, dead and
rotting (41).

By refusing to use predominantly western machineries of representation such as the novel

(Jameson, 69), Vijayan problematizes Jamesons argument formally in his texts, by choosing

instead to allegorize the short story form. Thus Vijayan makes a conscious political choice to use
the short story form. He fractures the very category of the national allegory by locating his
dystopic short stories in villages and small townships. By refusing to locate them in metropolitan
centres he highlights the deplorable condition and the plight of rural India, especially during and
prior to the declaration of the Internal Emergency in 1975.

A Citizens got to have both, dad fundamental rights and excise duties. 5

As Bipan Chandra rightly points out, the JP Movement, which was in opposition to the Congress,
with its slogan of Total Revolution and call for civil disobedience, had failed to attract and
include the urban as well as rural poor, causing it to slowly fizzle out, as has evidently been the
problem with Anna Hazares Anti-Corruption movement. Its supporters were largely students,
the middle class that was suffering because of inflation and corruption, traders and the
intelligentsia. The dissident JP Movement also got backing from nearly all non-left political
parties since there was a general sense of disillusionment with socialism.

Source: http://www.hindu.com/mag/2006/06/04/stories/2006060400360500.htm

JP often accused Indira Gandhi of trying to destroy all democratic institutions and establish a
Soviet-backed dictatorship in her hunger for power. Her continuation in office, he said, was
incompatible with the survival of democracy in India (Chandra 2008: 316).

However, the adoption of extra-legal and extra-constitutional, often violent methods by the
popular JP Movement and its reliance on the rhetoric of revolution, were for all purposes
incompatible with the functioning of a democratic political system. The main goal of the
movement, as Bipan Chandra rightly points out, was the hasty removal of Indira Gandhi. We
find resonances of this popular attitude in the selection of short stories in question, each one
having the underlying theme of a contagion, an epidemic or a murderous spore which is
feared, and which the characters struggle to cure and rid themselves of.

He can live without electricity6

Source: http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/lr/2002/12/01/stories/2002120100250300.htm

Ideologically, the anti-Congress political parties that were part of this movement in a coalition
were incompatible with one another, with no coherent leadership, message or promise for change
in government policies. We find resonances of these failures of the oppositional movement in
Vijayans short story titled The Examination.
The emperors of old, and the police inspectors who succeeded them, all had taken tributes from
the people, and had taken their women as well. But Ananthan Pillai did neither, and for these
reasons the citizens treasured his benevolent terror (66).

Therefore the Plague Control Officer, Ananthan Pillai, is described fondly by the people of
Palghat as the New Emperor of the Hooked Sceptre, the dispeller of rats in juxtaposition to the
ancient times of a head a day during the rule of the Sultan (66). The violence Ananthan Pillai
exhibits and sanctions is seen as comparably humane and therefore the people choose to turn a
blind eye to it, choosing the lesser of the two evils. It is rather ironic that both the Indira Gandhi
led Congress as well as the Jayaprakash Narayan led opposition legitimized their political actions
as being necessary to safeguard democracy in India. But in fact both were interested only in
swaying public support and votes in their respective favour in order to win political power. In
their efforts to do so they adopted anti-democratic methods and the consequence of it was the
suffering of the common man. This corrupt political manipulation of the masses and the sordid
betrayal of Indian democracy is aptly portrayed by a one of O. V. Vijayans famous political
cartoons reminiscent of George Orwells Animal Farm (1945).

THE CREATURES OUTSIDE LOOKED FROM PIG TO MAN, AND FROM MAN TO PIG, AND
FROM PIG TO MAN AGAIN; BUT ALREADY IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO SAY WHICH WAS
WHICH.7

Thus we see how Vijayan uses both the art of cartooning and the literary allegorical form as tools
to unmask the ugly, in this case piggish face of Indian politics which was riddled with
corruption, manipulation and an unrelenting thirst for power. It becomes evident that the
ideological climate during this period in Indian politics was rapidly changing and unclear. We
see resonances of this lack of ideological clarity in the works of Vijayan as well, a fact that he
concedes in the interview with Rajeev Srinivasan (1998):
There are elements that I am not able to understand fully -- in the search and in the
transcendence there are elements of bhakti that cover and overcome the element of ideology in
fiction. It is not necessary that I have become a religious person, but I have experienced in my
own life things that must be termed magical, for want of a better word.

Source: http://choukkar.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/a-cartoonist-remembers-ov-vijayan/

When asked by the interviewer about the reasons behind his ideological shift to the
transcendental mode of thought and his break away from the left, Vijayan responds by saying:
Its a long story; it began with the experiences in Hungary and Imre Nagy. I had always been a
little uneasy about Stalin. And Czechoslovakia completed my disillusionment. That also made
it difficult for me, as a writer, because my very words were associated with my left wing selfimage. A brief period of stasis and then it was a simple act to walk into the realm of the spirit:
it happened naturally and I have stuck to it ever since.

Vijayans ideological shift must therefore be viewed in the light of these failed socialist
experiments, both at home and abroad, which brought into question the possible failures of
implementing a socialist political system in both developing as well as developed nations.
In this manner, the wart said. It gave me the knowledge of willing servitude. Brotherhood was a
word of freedom, but from now on, words would change, and so would everything that came
from the sacred grottos of the mind ('The Wart', 27).

Above we see a cartoon equivalent of how Vijayan, through his allegory titled The Wart,
makes a sharp commentary on the re-articulation of words utilized as political slogans and the
recasting of the concept of brotherhood. These words and concepts like Total Revolution,
Democracy and Progress were being manipulated repeatedly in the on-going quest for
political power, by the party in power as well as the Opposition.
Vijayans interrogation of the concept of Brotherhood has strong resonances with George
Orwells 1984, wherein the Big Brother is the embodiment of an all-seeing, controlling figure
of totalitarianism in a dystopic world of the future. Thus we see how contemporary political
allegories like those of Vijayans borrow extensively from classic Orwellian critiques in
articulating their disillusionment with Indira Gandhis brand of socialism.
In his Allegories of Power, Vijayan represents a society which struggles to accommodate and
come to terms with modernity, particularly in his short story titled The Wart wherein the
protagonist struggles to hold on to traditional medicine and the old ways of life to the point of
self-annihilation. He is unable to submit himself to modern medicine which, represented by the
young doctor Aechchu Menon, ultimately betrays him. The protagonist says,
I sat uneasily in a chair in front of him. The young doctor made me conscious of my crumbling
manor and my ignorance; he was the son of a family of parvenus, the first men in our part of
the country to have mastered the medicine of the English (The Wart, 16).

Here we must also stress upon the clear link made between modernity and the British, which
highlights the anxiety of the post-colonial subject. Thus, Vijayans text has traces of a colonial
legacy and therefore incorporates postcolonial trends, putting the author in the league of other
postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh to name a few.

At one level the dystopic allegories of O. V. Vijayan can be seen as reactions to the failures of
the socialist utopia in post-independence India. Dystopias are in themselves allegorical because
they are essentially a critique of a current trend, societal norm, or political system in their
depiction of a futuristic dystopic scenario. As Bipan Chandra rightly points out in India Since
Independence, the deteriorating economic, social and political situation in pre-Emergency India
signalled a bleak dystopic future indeed:
By the beginning of 1973 Indira Gandhis popularity began to decline. Peoples expectations
were unfulfilled. Little dent was being made in rural or urban poverty or economic inequality,
nor was there any lessening of caste and class oppression in the countryside.
The immediate provocation for the rising discontent was the marked deterioration in the
economic situation. A combination of recession, growing unemployment, rampant inflation and
scarcity of foodstuffs created a serious crisis (Chandra 2008: 311).

Through The Wart Vijayan also presents a critique of the feudal system, hierarchies of which
can be easily fitted into and are comfortable and even compatible with a capitalist economy. The
protagonist represents the rich peasantry class which relied heavily on convention for its
sustenance. This was also a class which turned against Indira Gandhi and the Congress which
threatened to bring about sweeping land reforms, redistribution of land to the landless and the
abolition of bonded labour among other social reforms announced in the Twenty-Point
Programme.8 Vijayan gives us an indication of the protagonists social standing in the following
lines:
Ours was a country mansion, a granary fortress a hundred years old. Our estate had dwindled,
but there was enough to ensure a life of leisure and contemplation. I did not know the extent of

As Bipan Chandra points out in the section titled 'Public Response to the Emergency', Serious efforts were to
implement the Twenty-Point Programme; and some quick results were produced in terms of reduction of prices, free
availability of essential commodities, and check on hoarding, smuggling and tax evasion (324). But the heart of
Programmes agenda was the upliftment of the rural poor, which it failed to implement effectively.

the lands nor how much grain they yielded, but Chaaththan, the head serf, kept count of things
for me as had his father for mine. Suma disapproved of this, complaining often of my
ineptitude, but I would tell her that Chaaththan knew better (The Wart, 14).

Thus we see how Vijayans Allegories of Power in some senses redeems the long discredited
form of allegory by politicizing it; where the personal, the political and the fictional are brought
together in order to fully understand and digest the experience of something as momentous and
as haunting as the Emergency which lasted from 1975 right up to 1977. O.V. Vijayan can be
viewed as the third world intellectual who is perforce, due to his location, always-already a
cultural intellectual who is also a political militant, the intellectual who produces both poetry
and praxis (Jameson 1986: 75).

References
Jameson, Fredric. 1986. Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism. Social
Text, No. 15 (Autumn,), Duke University Press, pp. 65-88.
Chandra, Bipan. 2008. India Since Independence. New Delhi: Penguin.
Vijayan, O.V. 1989. After the Hanging and Other Stories. Translated from Malayalam to
English by the author. New Delhi: Penguin Books.

Web Sources
See Rajeev Srinivasans interview with O. V. Vijayan. The
http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/mar/31intera.htm

Lion in

Winter, 2005.

CHAPTER 3
Questions of Time, History and the National/Human Subject
O.V. Vijayans collection of short stories titled After the Hanging and Other Stories (1989),
unleashes a full-scale attack on the state and brings into question various metanarratives which
are generally left unquestioned, accepted as the absolute truth without further interrogation. This
constant questioning of metanarratives and boundaries displays a strong postmodernist streak,
which resonates with other well-known works by the author. In this sense he does a great service
to his readers by problematizing these notions through his self-reflexive texts, positing a harsh
allegorical commentary on the post-Nehruvian abuse of political power in India. The words of
the narrator in the powerfully evocative and chillingly grotesque short story The Wart capture
the generalized spirit of this crucial era in Indian political and social life:
Generations of my people had mediated on this seer with trust, and I could see no other path for
me either. This was my sin, and this now my moment of unburdening (Vijayan, The Wart,
13).

It is interesting to note how, for the unnamed narrator/protagonist of the story, the unburdening
is in the telling, the narration of his fragmented yet powerful, almost overwhelming experiences.
It is ironically the unconventional memoir of an individual who is clearly unable to break away
from conventions, unable to transition from, to invoke Antonio Gramsci, common sense into
good sense9 . The fear that prevents the protagonist of the story from making this transition has
been symbolized by the wart, the fear of social unacceptability and exclusion, the need to belong

Gramsci describes commonsense as the diffuse, unco-ordinated features of a general form of thought common to
a particular period and a particular popular environment (1971: 330). Good sense on the other hand is a
conception of reality that has gone beyond common sense and become, if only within narrow limits, a critical
conception (333; emphasis added).

to a community by blindly following the codes and dictums laid down by it. The Sage and the
forefathers are viewed as revered and distinguished figures. But the protagonist is unable to cope
with change; he relies on the methods which suited his father and ancestors but does not evolve
with the times. This can also be linked to the political stance of Indira Gandhi and her reliance on
the Gandhi family tag which was her biggest asset as far as consolidation and imposition of
power was concerned.
The Wart is the first story to feature in the section titled, Allegories of Power. The story has a
circular form, almost mimicking the karmic circle. It begins with the protagonist feeling dwarfed
in the garden he had once tended to, which he had ownership of. He feels dislocated and
alienated; his home has been rendered un-homely, thrown into what Freud would term das
unheimlich and which Bhabha explains as an estranging sense of the relocation of home and
the world (Bhabha 1994: 13).
Imperceptibly a change came over my relations with people. It was a curious idler first, a man I
encountered at the village library, who stared hard at me; then another and another and another,
until I found myself driven gently but relentlessly into a prison of their awareness of me. Still I
could have carried the wart, now as big as a tomato, in the hammock of my lip, and trudged to
the hospital in the town, but in my way was all that my forbears and I had lived by (The Wart,
18).

The final step of his alienation and isolation is when the protagonist hears his wife Suma tell
their son Unni that the wart is a contagious disease:
I chose not to hear my sons reply, the strength for that knowing had gone from me and slowly
I climbed up to the paneled attic, which would henceforth be my home (18).

What is evident here is how this acute feeling of alienation is imposed not only by the state
machinery but in fact through human contact and societal recognition practices. The

narrator/protagonist is isolated out of societys fear of the abnormal. The fear of contagion
keeps everyone at bay. Here it is also possible to raise questions about how an instance of
resistance to the norm is considered contagious. Further, that which is socially unacceptable and
threatening is deemed as unnatural so as to justify its elimination by those in power. In doing so
the threat of imitation of this act of resistance to power by other individuals is also eliminated.
Once his wife and child leave him, the narrator/protagonist lives in complete isolation except for
his brief contact with the head serfs sister-in-law, who cleans up, prepares his meals and departs
for the day. He becomes sexually involved with her but the wart takes over this act of pleasure as
well when it turns into a huge black phallus and repeatedly violates the poor woman even after
she is dead:
Now the last spaces of my freedom vanished, the spaces I had conjured with my desperate lust.
The prison closed around me, and I was left alone with the wart, my prison warden (26).

Thus, the protagonist once again loses all hope of human contact and in the process turns into a
less-than-human entity while the wart becomes transformed into a huge black elephant fated to
be worshipped as the sacred elephant of the temple.
The protagonist says, I have sinned the sin of the gentle and the pious, and so must make
amends. I must communicate I go back to the wart, drawn to revisit my sin. My sense of time
fails me, I cannot recall with any measure of certainty when it all began (13).
Here we see how both the protagonist of The Wart and Vijayan himself question and dismantle
the very notion of linear Time. Even the sequence of the protagonists memory is punctuated
with periods of delirium and total memory lapse, which illustrates how memory is shot through
with gaps and fissures and unaccounted for lapses. He becomes a marginal figure, reduced to a

speck, spatially located in the garden, which becomes symbolic of the liminal space which lies
both outside and yet inside the home. Geography therefore becomes important and this liminal
space becomes the site of radical possibility due to its peripheral nature, which fractures the
legitimizing basis of the power exercised by the state. Homi Bhabha, for instance, refers to the
liminal as a potentially disruptive in-between This interstitial passage between fixed
identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without
an assumed or imposed hierarchy (Bhabha 1994: 5).
But, to revert to the treatment of the experience of time in Vijayans story, it is useful to recall
Jurgen Habermas thesis in his essay Modernity versus Postmodernity that PostEnlightenment Modernity signaled, above all, a radically changed consciousness of time
(Habermas 1981: 4). This echoes Henri Bergsons influential ideas about two different
conceptions of time les temp, that is, time as the intellect divides it and marks out in
specialized units such as seconds, minutes, hours and so on; and la duree, or time as duration
that is indivisible, continuous and subjective. Most significantly, the idea of duration underlines
the fact that time is characterized by interpenetration, which is the overlapping of current
experience and memory (see Bergson 1968). And Michel Foucaults primary goal in his
conception of the History of the present is not to understand the past but to understand the
present; or, to put the point with more nuance, to use an engagement with the past to understand
something that is intolerable in the present. We see this trend in the works of Vijayan as well, as
the protagonist of The Wart takes us from the present to the fragmented past and back to the
present.
At that the woodpeckers cackle spoke, not in my ear but within my mind,
You transgress the law.

Wherein do I transgress? I asked.

Memory, the wart said. Memory is a crime against history (26).

The states erected dominant version of History, Truth and the Human/National Subject engages
in the exclusion of those which do not fit in to this category. Just as the protagonist of The
Wart ultimately shrinks to the size of a microbe, those who pose a threat to the existing norm
are doomed to the same fate. This resonates with question of why, in the grand scheme of things,
he is unable to fit himself, locate himself, within the linear framework of time and normative
subject-hood through the course of his narrative. The truth must be backed by factual evidence,
therefore the dominant version of the truth must, by definition, exclude the memoirs of memory.
Memory is by nature fragmented and discontinuous, thereby its inclusion into the field of truth
threatens the prevailing structure, which relies heavily on an imposed sense of continuity and
coherence. Thus we see how Vijayan consciously ruptures the states dominant versions of
history, truth, linear time and the human subject by presenting alternatives to them all
alternatives which refuse to be categorized and escape definition. Memory becomes Vijayans
tool to dismantle the machine of repression, namely the state, which produces antiproduction
signifiers which are there to close off and forbid the emergence of every subjective group
process, as Roland Bogue enumerates in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari.
In my worms voice, thin like a pupal thread, I cried out: pious Brahmins, this is no elephant,
this is a microbe. I shall tell you its tale. But the Brahmins were gone. The wind rose and the
dead leaves rustled (The Wart, 29).

The voice of the now marginalized protagonist is no longer audible to the human ear and his
words are drowned out by the mere rustling of dead leaves. It is due to this silencing by the
representatives of religion, the priests, that the protagonist feels the need to narrate his story. His

voice has no place in the official history of religion, which is also managed by the state.
Therefore the unnatural origins of the wart-turned-elephant must be muted in order for it to be
legitimized as an object of worship. The official narrative cannot accommodate such an
unnatural event and process of becoming and must therefore marginalize those voices which
present such accounts of aberrations. We can also find textual evidence for this forced
repression and elimination of uncomfortable histories and events from the official version in his
other short story titled The Foetus:
The Priest gasped, and said after an agonized silence, This is unnatural, nothing like this has
happened in this village before.
Far from it, it was happening all the while. For many generations the lords of the fortress had
willed their power over us, and this manifests itself in this blob of slime' (The Foetus, 33).

Here we see how repressed memory of the unnatural erupts when the astrologer confirms that it
is in fact the widowed Sovereigns foetus that has unleashed terror in the village. Thus we see
how O. V. Vijayan is making a pointed comment regarding how official histories are at odds
with collective memory, thereby suggesting that this falsely coherent and naturalized version of
history can be ruptured through the tool of memory.
The knife blazed now, and I remembered my great uncle. We are a gentle and pious people, but
our genealogy is punctuated by proud and regal ancestors as wellit cleansed the scalp round
his tuft and the base of his phallus, so that he was shorn anew into nakedness and could romp
down the hillside to seek out wedded matrons and sow in them the seeds of bastard
sovereigntyand the children, in the incestuous unknowing of their ancestry would chase and
mate with one another (The Wart, 19).

Here while narrativizing an alternative history accessible only through memory in The Wart,
which implodes and brings into question the protagonists seemingly gentle and pious ancestry,

Vijayan also highlights that memory can become a tool for empowering and mobilizing the
fearing/docile subject into action:
[P]erhaps the knife and its power compelled me. The suicidal violence of my great uncle
welled up within me along with the futile resistance of the gentle and the pious, and in a great
mingling I held the wart with my left hand and with the right drew the knife along its stem (20).

Set in the town of Palghat during the plague epidemic of 1946, Vijayans short story titled The
Examination interrogates the intersections of history and specific geographical locations. We are
told about a street in the town that, [t]his dingy street was redolent with history, it was called
Sultanpet, to commemorate Tipu Sultans invasion (61).
The reluctance of the towns newspaper and media machinery to aptly portray the seriousness of
the epidemic suggests how the media can be manipulated by the state to serve its larger interests.
Instead of focusing on the plague itself, the newspaper account ironically capitalizes on the
historical value of the town.
The towns newspaper, a reluctant commentator, wrote, Palghat is a famous town, and it gives
us great pride to recall that in the good days of old its twenty square miles were an empire of
four kingdoms. It is a pity that this fell disease has attacked such a historic town. People thus
afflicted will have their daily observances, like spinning, disrupted. They will experience great
inconveniences and possible death (The Examination, 61).

Thus Vijayan, though his text, tries to highlight how history is manipulated, used and abused,
glorified and marginalized, by those in power to suit their needs. After the epidemic has been
effectively managed by the officer in charge, Ananthan Pillai, the following commentary
appears:
The events about to be narrated here will probably seem unconnected with those narrated in the
preceding pages. This is a correct assumption; here is no sequence, as in all history (66).

Years after the epidemic Ananthan Pillai is revered and remembered as The New Emperor of
the Hooked Sceptre, the dispeller of rats (66), and is commemorated for his heroism by all the
town folk. They give long speeches in praise of the man who captained the war of man against
bacillus but Vijayan adds that none who spoke in praise of the officer had clear memory of the
traumatic epidemic. Here we see how memory has been manipulated and recast in order to deify
and justify the misdeeds and excesses of the tyrannical officer.
O. V. Vijayan forces us to interrogate concepts like that of the Human Subject, which is in itself
a production of the state. Vijayans short stories have a tendency to be anti-rationalist, signalling
an epistemological shift in the way one approaches concepts of History, Time and The
Human/National subject, all of which are being constantly managed, codified and concretized by
state machinery, but which also manage to escape and evade it. One can draw an analogy here
with Gilles Deleuzes radical engagement with the officially circulated History of philosophy
that has marginalized the transgressive philosophy of Nietzsche. Deleuze, however, sees
Nietzsches philosophy as an escape route, a line of flight, from dominant Hegelian thought.
Stemming from the argument put forth by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (1977) that all desire is social rather than familial, I would like to propose that
even though the protagonist seems to be caught within a quintessential Oedipal family scenario,
he fashions an escape into nomadic life through his metamorphosis10 aided by the wart. When
the protagonists son Unni becomes upset at the prospect of the wart being surgically removed, it
immediately throws up questions regarding the incestuous oedipal desire of the son for his

10

This reading draws upon Ronald Bogues essay One exemplary reading, Kafkas rhizomic writing machine
which presents a Deleuzoguattarian reading of Kafkas story Metamorphosis. See Brogue 2008:110 - 111.

mother. But instead we see how the protagonist himself uses this reluctance and fear of his
young son as an alibi for his refusal to undergo surgery, which he regrets deeply in retrospect.
Today I recall my words in sorrow, and know, my son, wherein I failed you. You were pure
and young, ignorant of the ways of the microbe; I ought to have armed you with that
knowledge (The Wart, 17).

It is vital to view the oedipal identity as a construction of the state, a model best suited to
curbing, taming and managing of desire, which in Deleuzian terms is multiple, erratic and
polyphonous. By denying the elevation of family relationships and the unified self to positions of
pre-eminence Vijayan resists and deforms the structures of Oedipalization, and therefore the
onus of the ultimate choices of not having the wart surgically removed rests entirely on the
protagonist/narrator.
The wart was now a slab of meat. I felt the burden within as well; in vain I sought a place in my
mind where I could rest it awhile (22).

Here we see Vijayan blurring the lines between the psychological and the physiological self
wherein the protagonist attempts to seek, in spatial terms, a concrete place within the
psychological to rest that which is overbearingly physical. The ancestral knife can be viewed as a
tool for subverting convention, which the wart orders thrown into the well. The wart can
therefore be viewed as a totalitarian force, which invades the protagonists body as well as his
mind.
Fear gave me the energy to rise and move; I went up to the mirror to take a look at the wart. It
hung from my lower lip like a sea turtle. The red patch I had seen and which I had mistaken for
inflammation and possible decay, now opened up into a mouth, vampire lips drooling spit and
pus and the black dots into a pair of eyes, little eyes winking lewdly at me from the mirror. The
lips moved now and once again I heard the spectral cackle of the woodpecker. As I listened
intently the cackle defined itself into words of frenzied and obscene abuse (The Wart, 25).

The image of the self and the other are fused together and viewed in the same mirror, therefore
the boundary between the normal and the abnormal has been breached and rendered useless. The
horror of no longer recognizing the self manifests as the wart in the image reflected back by the
mirror. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the problem in an oedipalizing world is to find, what
they call, a line of flight which is not necessarily a search for absolute liberty or escape but
simply a means of movement, a way of transforming a situation in this case by becoming nonhuman and de-subjectifying the self in order to deterritorialize the human subject. The
relationship between the protagonist and the wart can be viewed as, in the words of Remy
Chauvin, a parallel evolution of two beings which have absolutely nothing to do with one
another (Bogue 1989: 111). It is a becoming which is mutual deterritorialization. When this
mutual transformation is achieved and the protagonists body shrivels off the large body of the
wart-turned-elephant, the protagonist exclaims: But I had my freedom, the freedom of the
castaway (29).
This can be read as signalling the absolute deterritorialization of the human subject represented
by the narrator/protagonist. This mutual transformation is ratified by the various instances
presented in the text which suggest a shared experience between the wart and the protagonist, be
it while walking towards the well to dispose of the knife or in the necrophiliac encounter with
Naani, the head serfs sister-in-law, wherein the pleasure of the wart-turned-phallus is that of the
protagonist as well. The narrator manages to escape the oedipalized familial trap in the process
of becoming-other, thus escaping into a nomadic, less-than-human existence:
All nutrients were withheld from my blood stream. Within me grew a hunger like an unseen
fire that licks through mountain crevices. I began to dwindle, even as the wart grew by leaps
and bounds; I became a mere appendage (28).

If the narrator/protagonis of The Wart finds an escape route from subject-hood, familial and
societal constraints through his transformation into a less-than-human entity, The Foetus
presents us with a reversal of the very same process, wherein the murderous foetus must be
coaxed with love into re-entering the womb of his Sovereign mother and thus become human.
The cycle is reversed and the less-than-human, yet all powerful foetus finds his line of flight
through becoming human just as the Ape in Kafkas short story, A Report to an Academy.
In The Foetus, Vijayan presents a stark picture of how power operates and consolidates itself
by instilling fear in its subjects.
Rushing to the grove, they found the village drummer lying dead. There were marks of
strangulation round his neck, and a gash near his heart; all the blood had been drained away
from his body and from where he lay a broad trail of slime stretched towards the village,
punctuated with bloody drip. The peasants followed the trail and discovered that it led to the
massive gates of the fortress. They stood hesitant; just then a conch sounded inside the fortress,
and the fierce hounds tethered in the kennels howled in spectral relay (31).

The trail of slime which leads to the dark fortress of the Sovereign can be viewed as traces
which evidently mark the source of the killings and connect them to the source of power,
residing in the fortress. The fierce hounds can be equated with the Repressive State Apparatus
(Althusser 1971) which coerces the villagers into complacence and silence. Gradually the trails
of slime and the marks of the hounds feet become a common sight in the village, pointing us in
the direction of Michel Foucault who says that power is never monolithic, never concentrated
within one entity or institution, but is in fact diffused and invisible. These markers of power help
to keep the villagers in constant fear and therefore in check, thereby effectively discouraging any
action against the wielder of power.

We are told that [t]he village accepted the death (of the village drummer) as an inexplicable
aberration, and chose to forget it (31). These aberrations are to be left un-recorded in official
histories, just as the scandalous news of the widowed Sovereigns pregnancy must be confirmed
as an immaculate conception in order for it to be legitimate. This is achieved by the young
scions threats to the Priest and the Astrologer of the village, both of whom represent the old
patriarchal order, juxtaposed by the new matriarchal one represented by the widowed Sovereign
and her foetus.
The village council is overrun and occupied by the youth of the village and the old order
crumbles under the tyrannical rule of the new sovereign, the Foetus. New laws are put in place
whereby formal education is denied to the youth and schooling is replaced by slogans which are
to be taught by the gentry. And, that is not all: The Foetus has outlawed childbirth. Henceforth
the village will have only foetuses (38).
In this fashion Vijayan presents us with various instances wherein the language of legality is
misused and modified in order to suit the needs of those in power, just as was the scenario during
the National Emergency of 1975. The forced brainwashing and submission of the old
Insurrectionist of the village in The Foetus presents an instance of how revolutionary ambition
is nipped in the bud by the repressive elements of the state machinery. Even the feeblest threat
like that posed by the aged Insurrectionist must be dealt with immediacy. The foetus must
vampirize the revolution as well as historical memory in order to eliminate any threat to the
new order.
A strong postmodernist streak is evident in O.V. Vijayans short stories, which repeatedly bring
into question the notions of linear time, history and representation by recasting the natural as the

unnatural and the grotesque. Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to Kafka a postmodern attitude
towards language, an avant-garde politics aimed at the creative subversion of social
representations, and an impersonal Nietzschean laughter that transforms grotesque absurdity into
affirmation through the productive activity of writing (Brogue, 1989, 122). The same qualities
can be ascribed to this selection of short stories by O.V. Vijayan, who engages simultaneously in
formal experimentation and political activism in art which aims at deforming and denaturalized
ideological codes of representation. This artistic strategy is nothing short of revolutionary, as
Vijayan coaxes his readers to read between the lines, and delve deeper into many important
existential and political questions.

References
Althusser, Louis. 1970. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus. Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays. Translated Ben Brewster. Monthly Review Press.
Bergson, Henri. 1968. The Creative Mind. Translated Mabelle L. Andison. New York:
Greenwood Press.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture London: Routledge.
Bogue, Roland. 1989. Deleuze and Guattari: London and New York: Routledge.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1977. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London
and New York: Viking Penguin.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and
translated Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishhart.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1981. Modernity versus Postmodernity. New German Critique, No. 22.
Vijayan, O.V. 1989. After the Hanging and Other Stories. Translated from Malayalam to
English by the author. New Delhi: Penguin Books.

CHAPTER 4
The Sexualization of Power
As Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan aptly puts it in her book titled Real and Imagined Women: Gender,
Culture and Postcolonialism (1993), Indira Gandhis historical importance as a woman leader
of a postcolonial democratic nation and as an influential third-world political figure has not yet
been subjected to extended feminist enquiry (Sunder Rajan 1993: 99). This is because for the
most part feminists themselves have been deeply divided on the relation of women to questions
of political power and authority. Women in leadership roles, especially when located in the third
world scenario, cannot however be regarded as being representative of the general status of
women in these countries. How must we then locate someone like Indira Gandhi, daughter of exprime minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who herself held the prestigious post of prime minister
from 1966 to 1977, within questions of womens issues and more importantly within the Indian
male-dominated political arena? It can be argued that even though women in India have held
prominent positions in government, their overall status in Indian society has undergone very little
change. These are questions with no easy answers, and feminists are divided over whether truly
revolutionary change in the status and condition of women can be brought about by securing
parliamentary positions for women or through mass movements and external activism.

Mary Fainsod Katzensteins opening commentary in her paper titled Towards Equality? Cause
and Consequence of the Political Prominence of Women in India makes these discrepancies
visible:

Mrs. Gandhi's Prime Ministership symbolizes the anomaly of women's position in Indian
politics. On the one hand, women appear to be prominent at an elite level of politics. On the
other hand, there persist gross inequalities between male and female in Indian society as a
whole-testified to by an imbalanced sex ratio, severe differentials in wages and work
participation, and a host of other factors (Katzenstein 1978: 473).

Katzenstein further interrogates the role of women who hold important political office and asks
questions concerning how these women are able to negotiate within a male-dominated political
system deeply shot through with patriarchal prejudice and masculine anxiety. She suggests that
women leaders must then have honorary male-dom conferred upon them as a gesture of
tokenism in exchange for their internalization of male norms. This, she suggests, is a strategy
they may use in order for them to be taken seriously as capable political leaders. This explains
the rapid change in the popular representation of Indira Gandhi which transitioned from the
dumb doll image to that of the only man in the parliament:
A cartoon appeared in one of India's English dailies picturing Mrs. Gandhi seated at a table
with a number of other politicians. Referring to Mrs. Gandhi's strong-handed leader-ship, a
leadership which belied the earlier expectations of some party bosses that she would rule in
name only, the cartoon's caption read, "the only man in a cabinet of old women (Katzenstein
1978: 473).

Reading Vijayans Allegories of Power from a third-world gendered perspective throws up just
as many questions: questions of the authors gender sensitivity, the fictional representation of
women in positions of power, and the function and representation of these women as historical
icons. Although it could be argued that women have held important positions in Indian political
and social life right from the freedom struggle, we must question as to how they have been
represented to the Indian public by way of the media and the political machinery, what is the
agenda behind these kinds of representations, and whether these representations correspond with

the ground reality as far as Indian society is concerned. While discussing the fiction of O.V.
Vijayan it is also imperative to interrogate the relationship between women and authoritative
political power, which are traditionally at odds with one another.
The impression that Indian women occupy an important place in Indian politics has been
created, then, more by the visibility of a Few women, Mrs. Gandhi and a number of historical
figures, than by the presence of substantial numbers of women leaders (Katzenstein 1978: 478).

Here one may also find the intervention presented by Trina Nileena Banerjee, in her piece
Political Iconography and the Female Political Leader: The Case of Indira Gandhi, Some Initial
Questions, useful to answer questions concerning the postulation of women leaders in terms of
the art, literature and history of the subcontinent. She begins her paper with a quote from the then
General Secretary of National Affairs, Virendra Khanna, whose words deify Indira Gandhi and
present her as the ultimate political icon for the generations to come. His comment, however,
has a strong underlying current of religiosity:
The coming generation will feel extremely proud of the name of Indira Gandhi. They will
worship her as the personification of Sita, Laxmi and Durga. Long live Indiraji (cited in
Banerjee 2012).

It must be argued that since the time of the national struggle for independence right up to the
contemporary politics of India, the influence of Hindu religious iconographies has been fairly
strong in bestowing power upon and garnering popularity for political figures. The above
comment must also be viewed in light of Brinda Boses observations in her introduction to
Translating Desire (2003) which sheds light on the right wings manipulation of the image of

Hindu goddesses like Durga in order to mobilize its female faction during the tumultuous time of
the Hindu Muslim riots (Bose 2003: Introduction xv).

Religious Hatred11

It is interesting to see how similar strategies were being implemented by a pseudo-secular

political party like the Congress in order to put their leader on a pedestal. A similar scenario is
enacted in Vijayans short story titled The Foetus which can be viewed as a thinly veiled
allegorical text, elaborating the excesses of Sanjay Gandhi during his leadership of the Youth
Congress. The powers of the widowed Sovereign and her uncontainable Foetus are defeated by
the litany of the Devi. Here Rajeshwari Suder Rajan argues that the widowed Sovereign, the
fictional representative of Indira Gandhi, allegorically stands for despotism, metaphysical
evil and political dynastic power, while the power of the Devi, who is the antagonistic force to
the Sovereign, can only stand for the divine powers of grace (Sunder Rajan 1993: 106). Since
the Emergency was overthrown by the historical collective will of the people in 1977,
Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan rightly points out in her analysis of The Foetus that, the prayer that
invokes the goddess must represent the law, or the Constitution, through which means the
Emergency was revoked (Sunder Rajan 1993: 107). Both the forces of power which operate

11

Source: http://indulekha.com/colours/2006/07/blog-post.html

within the force field of Vijayans text are embodied by allegorically represented female
characters.
The figure of the widow is traditionally associated with the a-sexual, docile and tabooed female
subject in Indian society. Vijayans scandalous and overt sexualization of the despotic Sovereign
thus makes the reader uncomfortable, as her sultry honeyed voice chimes through the gates of
the fortress to address the scions of the gentry on behalf of her strengthening Foetus. It must be
remembered that at the outset of her political career, there were fervent objections made to Indira
Gandhis even shaking hands with male members of foreign delegations on account of her social
status as a widow. Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan points out that although the widowed Sovereign is
presented as a highly sexualized figure, [s]he remains invisible in the text, as in the narrative
only her portrait is seen and worshipped (represented in the carnal fullness of middle age,
pregnant, naked) (Sunder Rajan 1993: 106). Although Sunder Rajan goes on to argue that
despite her sexualized representation the widowed Sovereign is not gendered in any other way,
one could draw upon Trina Nileena Banerjees argument that specifically looks at the image
created for Indira Gandhi in the national imaginary. By overly sexualizing the sinister figure of
the Sovereign, Vijayan consciously and effectively desecrates the god-like status accorded to
Indira Gandhi during her reign as prime minister. Therefore, this technique deployed by
Vijayans text can be seen as a radical move towards countering the age old political tradition of
drawing parallels between Hindu-centric religious figures and Indian political and historical
leaders.
The sexual imagery in O.V. Vijayan is almost always presented as scandalous and bordering on
the grotesque. While Vijayan indulges in excessive eroticism in order to extricate the divine from
the political and the historical, we must take into consideration observations made by Harold

Bloom in his text titled The Grotesque wherein he elaborates that [t]he problem remains that
grotesque is essentially something we distrust, the hidden demonic fantasy that still torments and
attracts us, the shadow we repress because we dont want to confront this central problem in our
society (Bloom 2009: 21). This general attitude towards the grotesque signals another trend in
the writing of Vijayan, which by incorporating the grotesque, the abnormal and the unnatural
tries to draw much needed attention towards the unacknowledged absurdities and wrong doings
in our corruption-infested male-dominated political system as well as patriarchal Indian society.
Via the grotesque he compels his readers to unearth, almost in an archeological fashion, the
hidden agendas of political parties in the contemporary India political scenario.
In his story, The Foetus, there is a presence of incestuous strains wherein the mother figure is
sexualized to a great degree. This incestuous strain is further strengthened by Vijayans
description of the mob of youth, the scions of the gentry, who molest the women of the village
having their ritual festive bath at the temple tank, under the pretext of searching them for signs
of pregnancy which has been outlawed and must therefore be reported to the Sovereign. They
commune with the Foetus in carnivals of youth (33) and stand guard when the Foetus rapes the
school teacher and other women of the village. These instances in the narrative all point towards
state-sanctioned atrocities, which are legitimized through the letter of the law, and have farreaching consequences. A contemporary example of the same presented itself during the war
with Bangladesh under the prime ministership of Indira Gandhi, during which the armed forces
were given a free hand to rape, loot and brutalize at their discretion. Women are therefore
threatened and become more vulnerable during times of war, religious unrest or autocratic rule as
was the case during the Emergency. We find echoes of this age-old threat to women in Vijayans
The Examination as well:

The emperors of old, and the police inspectors who succeeded them, all had taken tributes from
the people, and had taken their women as well. But Ananthan Pillai did neither, and for these
reasons the citizens treasured his benevolent terror (The Examination, 66).

Here we must note Vijayans paradoxical use of the phrase benevolent terror to describe the
Plague Control Officer, which is not only an apt description of Indira Gandhis reign, but also
points to the patriarchal and patronizing attitude of the officer, Ananthan Pillai himself. By
elaborating on the officers attitude towards women, especially the tribal aboriginal women of
the village, Vijayan makes a key observation about the gender insensitivity of the police forces
and bureaucratic machinery. The aboriginal women who cut fodder from the foothills and sold
bundles of it to horse-cart men to earn a living, we are told, enlivened the conversation by
making water where they stood with the green loads on their heads (61). This can be viewed as
a counter-masculine physical act, by way of which they pose a threat to masculinity by way of
their performance12 of a masculine act. We are also informed by the author that this action of the
aboriginal women also gave the buyers an erotic incentive (61), a comment which makes clear
the nexus between capitalism and the use of women and the erotic in advertising to make a
commercial product salable. Ananthan Pillais first encounter with these aboriginal women is
telling. Through their splayed legs and parted sarong he could see their dark shapely thighs as
he sized him up as an anthropologist and administrator (63). This comment also brings into
question not only the male gaze, but the gaze of the anthropologist, which is itself freighted with
patriarchal anxieties. At first he marvels at these aboriginal womens bodies and by way of
association makes a direct link between domesticated milch cattle and the women From the
milk his mind wandered to udders, and then to the aboriginal teats(63). However, when he
witnesses the ground beneath their feet getting sodden with urine he leaps out of his chair to
12

As used in Judith Butlers Thesis of Performativity, which she introduces in her seminal text Gender Trouble:
Feminism and Subversion of Indentity (2006).

confront and berate them. On seeing the officer the aboriginal women are described as turning
their bovine gaze on the officer in their gentle carnal excretion (63). Here it becomes unclear
whether the gaze of these women is being described as bovine by the officer Ananthan Pillai,
or by the narrative voice of the author. Nonetheless, what becomes clear is the disturbing and
direct association of these women with the less-than-human cattle.
O. V. Vijayan continues his absurd affair with the erotic and the grotesque in his story titled The
Wart. After the protagonists wife Suma and his son Unni leave him on account of his growing
wart and his reluctance to have it surgically removed, he becomes completely isolated. His large
country mansion becomes his prison, and the wart, his prison warden (The Wart, 14). In
order to delude himself into believing he is free, the protagonist takes recourse in lust. As he
himself says, Thus does the unfree man seek freedom, in lust; like the condemned prisoner who
spends his last moments not on God but mating with empresses in his fantasy (24). He then
becomes sexually involved with his head serfs young and beautiful sister-in-law, Naani.
Vijayan transcends the taboo of incest in The Wart, and the reader encounters an instance of
necrophilia, the ultimate sexual taboo, as the wart transforms into a huge black phallus which
repeatedly rapes the rotting dead body of Naani. Here we see how the wart must necessarily be
considered as more than just a phallic symbol, since it transforms into the tangible physical
phallus itself:
Piercing through the pus and scab, an enormous phallus had come out of the wart. I fell away,
but I felt a miraculous power pulling me up. It was the wart, drilling down beneath my scalp
and holding me up in an unseen lasso. I found myself lying on Naani once again, now my face
on her pubis. I felt the black phallus rise; the wart took Naani ! (The Wart, 25).

Towards the end of The Wart we are told by the narrative voice that the poor woman Naanis
death was hushed-up and left unacknowledged, swept under the carpet, where all uncomfortable
and scandalous facts ultimately come to rest. Here Vijayans text makes us aware of the fact that
because she belongs to a lower caste and class of society, her death is inconsequential. In spatial
terms she dies within the space of the ancestral mansion, which is unable to accommodate her
memory. Also, the nature of and reason for her death raise questions against the class and caste
in power, and therefore must be forgotten, left unaccommodated by official historical record as
well as the unofficial collective memory of the village. Thus, through the text of O. V. Vijayan,
we see the continued legacy of class and caste discrimination and oppression, a problem the
Congress was ineffective and uninterested in dealing with. This oppression exerts added pressure
on the lower caste female subject, who is left unaided and unprotected, completely at the mercy
of patriarchy and religion as well as capitalism.
I am appalled by the enormity of my sin as I recollect how the wart rose and fell on
Naani, taking her to a tumultuous climax, and how I shared the experience with the
wart. I had till then considered the wart an alien impurity, but from now I was to know
that this thing, which I had fostered with the nutrients of my body and the folly of my
piety, was flesh of my flesh (The Wart, 25).
This shocking sexual encounter gives the protagonist a sense of being inextricably linked to the
wart. But it is more vitally a confession to the reader as the protagonist says at the very
beginning of his narrative, he must go back to the wart which he draws upon to revisit his
sin (13). The function of the confession has been theorized by Foucault in his explorations
into the workings of power. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1978), Foucault
describes how Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we
rely on for the production of truth (Foucault 1978: 56). He outlines that continuous incitement

to discourse and to truth emerged concurrently with an ever-expanding array of confessional

techniques which helped to give the confession a central role in the order of civil and religious
powers (Foucault 1978: 58). Although Foucault theorizes specifically within the context of the
development of modern western discursive formations, his thesis can be usefully deployed to
read the mode of the confessional in Vijayans story. The narrator/protagonist in The Wart
insists on telling his tale in order to confess, and therefore, revisit, the heinous crime he has
committed, as an outsider, a witness, through his narrativization and enunciation of the event.
Just as in the case of Truth Commissions, as the one set up in Argentina, the protagonist sets out
to resolve his inner conflict by confessing to his crime, but in doing so is effectively creating an
imagined duality, which allows him the position of an innocent witness who has somehow been
wrongly implicated. Here we come face to face with an unreliable narrator, who does not allow
for the voices of the other characters to be heard. But Vijayan adds a further level of complexity
to this confession that is apparently a candid act of self-unmasking, but is, in actuality, a
disavowal. With the narrator-protagonists acknowledgement of the wart being flesh of his
flesh we see how he collapses the very duality he creates through the narrativization of his
crime, which may be viewed as a narrative technique used by Vijayan in order to reveal the
unequal status of the victim, Nanni.
Vijayans Allegories of Power presents to the reader another instance where power is
inextricably linked to the question of sexuality. In his short story titled Oil, we are confronted
with an inert sexuality which manifests as a trope of the paralyses of the youth of the village,
caused due to adulterated oil sold by the Ayyan Chettiyar, the money lender and owner of the
sole shop in the village, and his wife Chalachi Chettichiyar, who practices an eroticized form of

medicine. In this story we see how those in power are hyper-sexual, while in contrast the youth
of the village are rendered paralysed and unable to even consummate their marriages.
We return to The Wart in order to further interrogate the workings of power. Just before their
first sexual encounter, the protagonist and Naani have an intense conversation during which the
protagonist sadly reveals to her that Suma and Unni are unlikely to ever return to him. Naanis
reaction after the delivery of this news in worth noting:
Naani asked me nothing more; her eyes wandered about the room; and soon she was aware of
nothing but the little things, the cobwebs, the drying peels of banana, the crumpled ball of
paper in the corner. She picked up a broom and began to sweep (The Wart, 23).

To make a cinematic connection to this action of Naanis, a scene from Anurag Kashyaps
controversial and bold remake of Devdas retitled Dev D (2009) could be evoked, wherein when
the protagonist Dev tries to make sexual advances towards his now married lover Paro, she
immediately comments on his lack of hygiene and begins to clean up the space. But to get back
to Vijayans story and the specific instance quoted above of Naanis response to the protagonists
words; one could easily fall into the trap of criticizing Vijayan for presenting a stereotypical
female character who adheres to what is expected of her, displaying the traditionally feminine
qualities of caring and nurturing and fulfilling her traditional roles of maid by day and whore by
night. But in fact this would be too simplistic a reading of Vijayans The Wart. Instead, it could
be argued that as a woman belonging to the lower servant class, by turning her attention to
cleaning up the house Naani attempts to reorganize and transform the private space of the
protagonists mansion in order to replace his wife Suma and occupy a social space as the woman
of the house. Her actions can be viewed as a feminine strategy to territorialize the social public

space by re-territorializing the private space, in the process of which she hopes for class
mobility, a way out of class/caste oppression.
The protagonist finds absolution from his crime and the violence he inflicts upon Naani, as was
discussed earlier, by confessing to his act through narrativization. But her caste identity entails
that we interrogate the socially superior or privileged identity of the protagonist, the perpetrator
of violence.
It is rather ironic that the wart first appears as a symbol of prosperity and luck. As the narrator
himself says, initially the wart is seen as an agent of sexual desire and enticement but slowly the
seeds of doubt and suspicion begin to sprout and take root in Sumas mind, and the wart quickly
transforms into a repulsive appendage which elicits the fear of being contagious. It is from here
on that Suma begins to ignore and turn down her husbands sexual advances, an action which we
can read as an attempt at self-preservation from the fear of the unknown. The anxious protagonist
sadly recounts her moments of reluctance when he says, Something told me that she had made
love not to me but to my other self, the one without the wart, an adulterous fantasy which made
me despair (14). It is noteworthy that this adulterous fantasy of Sumas becomes a precursor
to her final betrayal and abandoning of the protagonist for the young doctor Aechchu Menon.
After the protagonist makes the attic his new home, one night Suma goes up to him with a pot
full of herbs and medicaments prescribed by the Vaidyan. On seeing this gesture of hers the
protagonist feels emotionally overwhelmed and makes an attempt to become intimate with her.
He says, I threw my arms around her; she did not resist, but when I bent over to kiss her, she
said, We should not. It is not for me, but for our son that I deny you so (19). Suma uses the
pretext of caring for their son as an excuse for not having sexual intercourse with him.

Traditionally as a wife she is bound by the institution of marriage to provide pleasure to her
husband as and when he desires, but the wart and the fear of it being contagious become a viable
excuse for her to be able to refuse sex with her husband. However, we see how Vijayan gives us
subtle narrative hints regarding her growing preference of Aechchu Menon over the protagonist.
After their son, Unni, comes down with a cold and fever, which Suma blames her husband for,
Aechchu Menon is called in to administer the appropriate treatment. On learning that his patient
is in the bedroom the protagonist observes that Aechchu Menon followed Suma into the
bedroom and I went in after (17).
Vijayans Allegories of Power has been translated from the original Malayalam to English by
the author himself, who is bilingual and proficient in both languages. However some nuanced
associations may escape the readers of his English texts. It is interesting to note that in The
Wart, the son of the protagonist is named Unni, which literally translates as a mole or a small
wart. The protagonist is consciously portrayed as a good father, with strong paternal instincts for
his son. This contrasts with the representation of Suma, the protagonists wife, who elopes with
the young doctor Aechchu Menon and leaves their son, Unni, to be raised by his grandparents,
effectively separating father from son. All these reasons can be seen as contributing factors for
the protagonists need to reproduce through his own body. In light of this we can view the wart
as a manifestation of what the male body is capable of reproducing independently, which brings
out the distinction between reproduction through women versus men. If we were to read between
the lines, Vijayan seems to suggest through his text that men are only capable of creating a
monster.
Contrasting with the two powerful female figures in The Foetus are the two male figures of
power represented in The Wart. The protagonist of this text must make a choice between the

sage Dhanvantari and the omnipresent/omniscient male God. When his final metamorphosis is
complete and the protagonist shrivels off the large black body of the wart-turned-elephant, he
exclaims, It was in my folly, my lord God, that I forgot Your perennial becoming. You are the
prisoners door (29). His folly lies in the fact that he blindly followed the principles laid down
by the sage, but in the end it is the omniscient Hindu-male God figure who gives him the
awareness of the living force which fulfilled itself as much in the toxic microbe as it did in the
seeds of life (29). God becomes the giver of knowledge and is thus seen as all powerful. Michel
Foucaults thesis on the nexus between knowledge and power immediately springs to mind.
However in both of Vijayans texts, The Wart and The Foetus, it becomes imperative to
examine his Hindu-centric conception of the divine. The litany of the Goddess in the latter and
the redemptive Gayatri Mantra at the end of The Wart, both signal this trend in the texts of
Vijayan, which could be attributed to his ideological shift from the left towards a transcendental
mode which has deep undertones of bhakti, which also has the presence of a central male God
figure at the core of its philosophy.
Thus we see how O.V. Vijayans grotesque, explicitly sexual and powerful collection of short
stories under the section titled Allegories of Power uncover, effectively interrogate and
question the nature of the sexual politics which lies at the heart of both political as well as social
life.
___________________________________________________________________________

References
Bloom, Harold and Hobby Blake. Eds. 2009. The Grotesque. New York: Infobase Publishing.
Bose, Brinda. Ed. 2002. Translating Desire: The Politics of Gender and Culture in India. New
Delhi: Katha.

Butler, Judith. 2006. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge.
Dev D. 2009. Director, Anurag Kashyap. UTV Motion Pictures
Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod. May 1978. Towards Equality? Cause and Consequence of the
Political Prominence of Women in India. Asian Survey, Vol. 18.
Foucault. Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Foucault. Translated Robert
Hurley. New York: Random House, Inc.
Vijayan, O. V. 1989. After the Hanging and Other Stories. New Delhi: Penguin.

Web Sources
Banerjee, Trina Nileena. 2012. Political Iconography and the Female Political Leader: The
Case of Indira Gandhi, Some Initial Questions.
http://humanitiesunderground.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/

CHAPTER 5
Conclusion
The aim of this dissertation, which concentrates on the short fiction and political cartoons of
O.V. Vijayan, is to establish a strong underlying connection between his visual and literary
representations of the volatile political atmosphere of the 1970s and the contemporary political
impasses and ambivalences of the Indian political system. Vijayans political allegories and art
works are very much relevant to our current situation, especially in light of the growing political
and bureaucratic corruption in our country. Vijayans tactful use of the allegorical mode to avoid
direct naming, his negotiations with the strict censorship of his times, and his unconventional use
of fiction have made his texts a rich source of existential, political and theoretical ideas. His
constant fissuring of boundaries and meta-narratives keeps his readers on their toes, constantly
enticing them to question both social as well as political norms that are generally left
unquestioned.
Recently a statue of O.V. Vijayan which was, after much contention, placed at the Smrithi
vanam (memorial) in Rajas HS Kottackal in Kerala, was found vandalized. The school, which
the author had previously attended, had faced fierce opposition from the Indian Union Muslim
League despite having secured all the necessary permissions for the setting up of the statue. This
incident not only sheds light on the rising level of political intolerance but also indicates the
continuing relevance of O.V. Vijayan in the politics of Kerala even today. The Indian Union
Muslim Leagues opposition to the statue of Vijayan highlights the fervent use of religion as a
political tool to fulfill the agendas of vote bank politics. It is the relevance of this marginalized

author and his works which makes it crucial for us to study his works in light of contemporary
events.
Although Vijayan excessively draws upon the bhakti philosophy, and his representations of God
and the divine can be called Hindu-centric, his works in no way belittle other religious beliefs.
The author himself makes clear in his interview with Rajeev Srinivasan (2005) that his reference
to God and the divine does not necessarily make him an overtly religious person, much less a
Hindu right-wing fanatic. It is therefore critical to view the works of Vijayan as a product of the
authors time, class and caste identity.
From our observations in the last chapter, one might like to view Vijayan as being gender
sensitive, but this notion could be problematized due to his fervent borrowing from the bhakti
tradition, which in some senses could be viewed as patriarchal. However, his stories like The
Foetus provide a space for interrogating the gendered politics which is at the heart of birth
control policies devised by the state, concentrating on the forced vasectomies carried out during
the Emergency under the leadership of Sanjay Gandhi. Thus Vijayan can be viewed as someone
who constantly eludes being labeled and fixed into categories.
By presenting us with fictitious dystopias, Vijayans allegories can be seen as enriching our
understanding of the present, which is essential for envisioning a brighter future. It is only when
we are presented with an image of what is undesirable that we can hope to articulate what it is
that we desire. His Allegories of Power, therefore, empower the reader by presenting the
mistakes of the past, so that they may not be repeated in the future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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http://indulekha.com/colours/2006/07/blog-post.html
-----------------------. 2002. Cartoon He can live without electricity
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/lr/2002/12/01/stories/2002120100250300.htm
------------------------. 2006. Cartoon A citizens got to have both
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2006/06/04/stories/2006060400360500.htm
------------------------. 2009. Cartoon The Creatures outside looked from pig
http://choukkar.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/a-cartoonist-remembers-ov-vijayan/

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http://humanitiesunderground.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/
See Vijayan, O.V. 2005. Interview with Rajeev Srinivasan The Lion in Winter.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/mar/31intera.htm