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The
life and works of Edasseri
Govindan Nair have
assumed greater socio-literary significance after his death.
Readers of Malayalam poetry now go back to him with renewed
interest; critics recognize him as one of the most important poets
of Malayalam. On the one hand, his works attempt to truthfully
reflect the untold effects of socio-economic changes which
metamorphosed the life of Kerala in the second and third quarters
of this century; on the other, they also try to critically
redefine - with an inimitable mix of anxiety, irony, humour and
objectivity - its changed priorities and concerns. Steeped at once
in the local mythological tradition as well as the pressures of
modernisation, his poems also represent the ambivalent reaction of
a Third World poet of his time. Spread as they are almost equally
in the pre and post Independence eras his writings offer eternally
valid commentaries on the Gandhian politics with notes of
approval, admiration and dissent, evaluate the beginnings of
socialist awareness in Kerala and analyse the pitfalls in the
short term political strategies and long term economic policies of
the Nehruvian era.
Edasseri’s writings also afford a very different perspective of
the various aspects of womanhood; he has been rightly called the
bard of the heroic Motherhood. And long before ecology and
environmental pollution were heard of in this state of Kerala,
Edasseri has internationalised the impending problem and
prophesied the inevitable doom. Now, practitioners of Feminist
Literary theory and eco aesthetics have re-discovered in him a
kindred spirit. Edasseri also ranks as a major playwright and
eminent prose writer of Malayalam. Interestingly he is one poet
who has inspired many of his successor poets as a subject of
poetry. |
