Gita Krishnankutty on translating M. Mukundan’s On the Banks of the Mayyazhi, the time-haunted novel of love, memory, and colonial unease, now reissued in a 50th anniversary edition
In the half-forgotten coastal enclave of Mayyazhi, a French outpost in Kerala in the 1940s, a young man stands at a crossroads. The tides of nationalism are rising, the French grip is weakening, and history is beginning to shift. In On the Banks of the Mayyazhi, the seminal 1974 Malayalam novel by M. Mukundan, a prominent fiction writer from Kerala, this moment of upheaval is rendered as an intimate memory, refracted through the life of Dasan, a gifted youth torn between colonial promise and anti-imperial conviction. The result is a literary time capsule — lyrical, unsentimental, political in its marrow — now available once again in English through Gita Krishnankutty’s finely tuned translation.
Chennai-based Krishnankutty, one of India’s foremost literary translators who has been translating works of MT Vasudevan Nair, Lalithambika Anterjanam, Paul Zacharia, Anand and others into English for several decades and has received the Katha Award for Translation twice (in 1993 and 2000), first brought Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil into English in the 1990s. Her rendering of Mukundan’s prose preserves its quiet power, slipping between the lyricism of nostalgia and the sharp clarity of resistance. Krishnankutty remains faithful to the original’s emotional register — its layered silences, unresolved tensions, and sudden surges of beauty.
The 50th anniversary edition of the novel has been jointly published by HarperCollins and DC Books. In this interview to The Federal, Krishnankutty talks about the challenges and joys of translating On the Banks of the Mayyazhi. She observes that the tender, ill-fated love story of Dasan and Chandrika, alongside the bond between Girija and Achu, nearly eclipses Mayyazhi’s history in the novel. She admires how Mukundan weaves linguistic and cultural elements so subtly into the backdrop that they never disrupt the story’s gentle rhythm. She also shares that Mukundan’s voice in On the Banks of the Mayyazhi is “the voice of the teller of a folk-tale or of a sthala-purana, the history of a place” and she chose to preserve the voice, pacing, and atmosphere of the original. Excerpts from the interview:
On the Banks of the Mayyazhi is a novel deeply rooted in the rhythms of the town — its air, its history, its contradictions. How did you navigate the challenge of capturing not just Mukundan’s words but the texture of a place so specific in its linguistic, cultural, and emotional atmosphere?
At the time when I was working on this novel, On the Banks of the Mayyazhi, not much was happening in the world of translation, nor was I fully aware of the complex nature of my task as a translator. I felt the opening sentence, ‘Long, long ago, that is, before Dasan was born…’ held the charm of a story a grandmother might have told her grandchild and, as it progressed, the narrative seemed to me to confirm this feeling. The ill-starred love-story of Dasan and Chandrika and the relationship between Girija and Achu, which starts out by being thorny but ends surprisingly well, almost overshadow the history of the town and its people, which unfolds without great drama. It seemed to me that Mukundan handled the linguistic and cultural elements in the narrative with a touch so light and deft that they did not present a weighty challenge. I felt that he used them only as a backdrop to the events that took place in Mayyazhi and that he was careful to make sure they never intruded upon the gentle pace of the story.
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Mayyazhi exists in a liminal space — French yet Indian, past yet present, mythical yet real. How does Mukundan use this duality as a literary device, and what were the challenges in conveying that fluidity in translation?
I think the fluidity of the liminal space you speak of is achieved by the tone of informality, a mingling of affection and respect that marked the way the Indian and French characters in the novel communicated with one another. Very early in the novel, Kurambi Amma’s exchanges with Leslie Sayiv convey this to the reader and after a while, the reader ceases to even think of it as a possible literary device. Meanwhile, local customs and superstitions keep the Indian, the mythical and the regional aspects of everyday life in Mayyazhi vibrantly alive. Mayyazhi grandmothers regularly narrate both the story of Jeanne d’Arc as well the legend of Vaisravanan Chettiar, who is a native of Mayyazhi, to their grandchildren. Since Mukundan himself grew up in this world, I am inclined to think that he would not have regarded its duality as a device but as an integral part of his life, as something he would never have thought strange or problematic.
Given that Mukundan worked at the French embassy for nearly four decades as a cultural attaché, do you see an authorial distance in the way he reconstructs the French colonial experience in Mayyazhi? Did that influence your approach as a translator?
No, I do not feel that Mukundan maintains an authorial distance from Mayyazhi or its experiences. On the contrary, when I first read the novel, I sensed a nostalgia for the past in the way he recreates it, as if he wants to transmit the memories of that time and that space to people who did not know them at all, as well as record those memories for those in Mayyazhi who did not live in that time and space. Mukundan later told me that he knew every character in the novel, that they were people he loved and grew up with and that, although he might have fictionalised certain traits in them and certain experiences they went through, they were all real, a part of his life in Mayyazhi.
Mukundan’s prose is known for its deceptive simplicity — an almost unadorned style that carries immense depth. Were there moments where you felt English demanded a different kind of expressiveness, or did you consciously resist embellishment to preserve his voice?
I have always found simplicity of language one of the most challenging hurdles in translation. The temptation to add a layer of expressiveness that seems desirable, even necessary, is not easy to resist. So yes, I consciously resisted it, wondering all the time whether it was the easier way or the right one. As the story progressed however, it became clearer to me that Mukundan had chosen a simple, direct idiom deliberately, to achieve the tone of a tale told by a grandmother. Later, he told me that this is the only work for which he has used this kind of language.
The French presence in Mayyazhi, unlike British colonial rule in India, has a certain surreal quality in the novel — at once ephemeral and deeply entrenched. How did you approach translating this colonial legacy, which doesn’t fit into the more commonly told British-Indian narrative?
People who actually lived in Mayyazhi and incidents that really took place on its soil form the material of Mukundan’s novel. The surreal quality that we sense is not imposed upon Mayyazhi, it is part of the ambience of this place. It is clear that neither the spirit of Mayyazhi nor its history fit into the British-Indian narrative we are familiar with and the reader is aware of this from the very first page of the novel. Mukundan uses images and words that highlight the unique atmosphere of Mayyazhi as refrains that constantly recur in the story — like the belief that souls rest between births on the cluster of rocks known as Velliyan Kallu in the form of dragonflies, or the echo of the hoofbeats of Leslie Sayiv’s horse that Kurambi Amma continues to hear long after Sayiv is gone. These refrains serve as a device not only to sustain the surreal element in the novel but also to remind us that Mayyazhi is a real place. Once again, I think the simple and direct narration helps readers to comprehend the text in spite of the fact that several Malayalam words recur in it, while repetitions make it easier to recognise images and experiences that would otherwise escape attention.
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Were there specific words or phrases you wrestled with because their Malayalam connotations couldn’t fully be carried into English?
I do not think Mukundan uses cultural idioms, customs or beliefs that carry incomprehensible or untranslatable weight. The characters we meet in Mayyazhi, the spots they haunt, the customs they observe, are common to any village or small town in Kerala and the words and phrases Mukundan uses are familiar to all Malayalis. They become unique every time the device of frequent repetition invests them with music or when they emphasize the Indian ethos that vibrates through Mayyazhi, weaving an ineffable magic into its French colonial veneer.
Mukundan’s storytelling often moves in a way that doesn’t conform to Western novelistic structures — it follows the ebb and flow of memory, myth, and lived experience rather than a rigid arc. Did this require any recalibration in translation, especially in terms of pacing and rhythm?
Mukundan’s voice when he narrates the story of Mayyazhi never wavers, it is the voice of the teller of a folk-tale or of a sthala-purana, the history of a place. Being Mukundan’s own lived experience, the memories and myths that are an inalienable part of Mayyazhi are woven into this tale. The narrator’s voice, whose pacing and rhythms are familiar to Indians, is immediately recognisable and comprehensible. Therefore, I do not remember grappling with words or phrases, ideas or themes that I could not grasp. However, the deliberate simplicity of his language made me anxious — would I be able, I wondered, to capture it?
Some translations become entirely new works in their own right, while others seek to be as faithful as possible. Where does On the Banks of the Mayyazhi sit on that spectrum for you?
A translation certainly becomes a new piece of work, but as a translator, I would never dream of being unfaithful to the original. I thought it was important to try to maintain the cadences, the clarity and the gentleness of Mukundan’s prose, since they are as meaningful to the novel as its characters and events.
Mukundan’s novel is political, but not didactic — it’s filled with lives that go on, loves that flicker and fail, people who resist and people who comply. As a translator, did you ever feel the need to amplify certain nuances that might not be immediately obvious to an Anglophone reader?
Mukundan’s mode of storytelling is so unambiguous that I did not feel an Anglophile reader would fail to comprehend the nuances of speech or action in Mayyazhi. Yes, although the novel is political, although it describes a struggle for freedom and its outcome, it does not dwell on outraged protest against the colonial masters or the cruelty of the colonisers themselves. Mukundan told me that the French colonial experience in Mayyazhi was mostly peaceful, that the way the people of Mayyazhi thought of the French was very different from how the British were regarded in other parts of India. The novel certainly illustrates this.
Kerala’s literary landscape is vast, multilingual, and deeply tied to its history of radical thought. Where do you think Mukundan’s work stands in this larger tradition, and do you see its themes resonating with contemporary readers in English?
On the Banks of the Mayyazhi is distinctly different from all Mukundan’s other works. Political in intent and absolutely non-didactic in tone, as you pointed out, he has deliberately chosen and unwaveringly maintained the voice of a grandmother narrating a sthala-purana not just to tell the story of his native Mayyazhi, but also to convey how different the colonial experience was for this little corner of Kerala from the rest of India. Contemporary readers in English who have never heard of Mayyazhi or are unaware of its history might not appreciate the nuances of Mukundan’s novel, its political theme or the limpid mode of narration. However, it certainly figures in Kerala’s literary landscape as a gem as iridescent as the dragonfly that is its leitmotif.
