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This paper attempts to do a close reading of the travelogue to reveal the inquisitiveness of a Raja who had close associations with the British administrators, as one who attempted to step out of the boundaries of his kingdom with an ethnographic intent. Veera Kerala Varma, later referred to as the ‘Maharaja who passed away in Kashi’ had an untimely death due to smallpox and his travel narrative reached Kochi along with his physical remains. The Raja who started his pilgrimage from Trippunithura was accompanied by a royal retinue which included his tour manager, a white medical doctor named Bingle and a few other servants. The ‘travel notes of the Raja of Kochi’ which was available in the form of his personal journal describes his meetings with many British officials and common people on the way, in addition to sketching the varied geographies and religious places that he visited during the 220 days long pilgrimage. Raman Namboothiri and was published as Kochirajavinte Kashiyatra (The Cochin Raja’s travel to Kashi) in 2013. This travelogue in English was later translated into Malayalam by M.
Raja Veera Kerala Varma IV, who ruled the erstwhile princely state of Kochi (Cochin) in South Western India, wrote an account of his pilgrimage to Kashi (Benares) during the years 1852-53. Pilgrim narratives constitute a significant number of travel narratives which appeared in Sanskrit, English and various Indian bhashas in the 18 th and 19 th centuries. Keywords: literary history, Malayalam novel, Indulekha, politics of canon, colonial modernity in KeralaĬentre for Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. It also examines how the literary history of early Malayalam novels shaped the cultural memory of colonial modernity in Kerala. This article would explicate in detail, on what gets compromised in canon formation when aesthetic criteria overshadow the extraliterary features. This calls for a perusal of the literary critical tradition in which the overarching presence of Indulekha has led to the eclipsing of several other works written during the turn of the twentieth-century, resulting in a skewed understanding of the evolution of the genre. Interestingly, the literary histories which established the legacy of Malayalam prose tend to trace a linear history of Malayalam novels which favoured the ‘Kerala Renaissance’ narrative, especially while discussing its initial phase. The inception of novel as a literary genre is widely regarded as a point of departure for Malayalam literature leading to the development of modern Malayalam, thereby shaping a distinct Malayali identity. This article analyses the politics of the literary canon of the early twentieth century Malayalam novels with particular focus on the impact of the novel Indulekha (1889) in literary history.
The Indulekha Moment and the Malayalam Literary Canon: On the Literary History of the Early Twentieth-century Novels in Kerala, South India 1 Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Indian Institute of Management Indore, ORCID id: 0000-0002-0041-919XĢ Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras,, ORCID id: 0000-0003-3997-8711
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