One-man army

It was an April evening in the early 1990s. We — a group of ‘‘aspiring’’ young poets — were discussing Kafka and Sartre at the India Coffee House near University College, Thiruvananthapuram. An old man with long grey hair growing around a bald patch, wearing a white mundu and shirt, walked into the hall. He sat on a chair in the middle, and placed a lighter and a packet of India Kings on the table. We became quiet and nervous. If he overheard anything ‘‘funny’’, it could very well become the subject of the next Sahityavarabhalam, his controversial literary column in the Kalakaumudi, a popular Malayalam weekly. Krishnan Nair, the veteran Malayalam columnist who passed away last week at 84, could be the embodiment of love and affection. But he was disliked by most in literary circles. At the time of our seeing him in the coffee house, he was having a war of words with a Malayalam poet, a professor at University College. The poet claimed that Krishnan Nair had insulted him. Newspapers and magazines celebrated this event. The poet printed his comments and distributed them. The one-page text contained astonishingly derogatory and vulgar remarks. Krishnan Nair didn’t react to it because he was not new to such attacks. He raised his voice, in his inimitable style, against everything he felt was wrong. He was not a part of any establishment, so he never made any compromises. I once saw him beating a retreat from a literary camp organised by the Kerala University after a heated exchange with one of the participants. He just walked out of the venue and didn’t come back even after repeated requests from the organisers. Krishnan Nair may not always have been right. There were a number of writers who came up with good work although he had said they would never be writers. Then there were those whose works he praised in the beginning who ended up without any success. But what made him different was his four-decade-old column, Sahityavarabhalam. It was a window to the world of literature. He introduced books and writers to Malayalam readers. People often criticised Nair saying that he only read the blurbs of books. He may have, but he summed them up so well to catch the readers’ imagination. I bought Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights solely on his recommendation, and there are many other writers I became familiar with through his columns. Krishnan Nair was also a linguist, although this facet was overshadowed by his image as critic. He treated the word as God. He taught Malayalees how to pronounce certain German and French words. He followed the same practice when he had to deal with words in other foreign languages. For many years, he taught Malayalam in various colleges. ‘‘He never showed any kind of generation gap. He was liberal, and he used to like Aristotle a lot. He was a chain-smoker. Six years ago, when I met him, he even offered me a cigarette,” remembers Thonnakkal Vasudevan, one of his students and the Principal of Government Arts College, Thiruvananthapuram. It is a pity that we will never again see this ‘‘man with an umbrella, holding four or five books in his left hand, and a cigarette in the right hand’’ on the roads of Thiruvananthapuram. But I will see him whenever I pick up a book.