O.V. Vijayan (1930–2005) was an acclaimed Malayalam novelist, short story writer, cartoonist, translator, columnist, political analyst, and public intellectual. In a literary career spanning almost half a century, he published six novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eight volumes of non-fictional prose, three volumes of reminiscences, three volumes of cartoons, and four self-translations. This book offers a comprehensive understanding of O.V. Vijayan’s work by analysing his fictional and non-fictional works, cartoons, and columns, and situates him in the context of Malayalam literary culture and Indian literature at large.

The volume discusses themes such as the politics of everyday life; culture, religion, and the changing nature of Indian society; struggles of a writer and thinker; the idea of socially responsive radical modernism; ecology and subculture; and the politics of self-translation. These readings explore Vijayan’s legacy as an iconic figure of modernism in Malayalam fiction who reinvented its language; as an unrelenting critic of the modern nationstate and its excesses; as a post-colonial thinker; and as a visionary who transcended the binaries of the mundane and the magical, the political and the spiritual, and the premodern and the postmodern.

Part of the Writer in Context series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of Indian literature, Malayalam literature, English literature, comparative literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, global south studies, and translation studies.