KOCHI: In 1975, a professor walked into an MA English class at Maharaja’s College and announced a news with an element of excitement. “Gunter Grass is in town!”
A girl student immediately stood up and asked in all innocence, “In which theatre, Sir.”
Some of the students remember how disappointed professor T Ramachandran was-who later became a forerunner in progressive Malayalam literature under under his initials TR-when a literature student thought Gunter Grass was some foreign film which had been just released.
Despite the setback, TR was so excited about the novelist’s masterpiece 1959 novel ‘Tin Drum’ that he suggested the union to invite the literary giant to the college for an interaction with students and teachers. The Swedish Academy conferred Nobel prize for literature to Grass only in 1999.
Writer S Ramesh, who was the president of Maharaja’s College union then, clearly remembers what followed.
“You must understand the time frame when all these happened,” he said. “1974-75 was when SFI, the student’s wing of Communist Party, swept polls in every college across the state for the first time. It was also the time when college campuses were in the grip of a philosophy of negation.”
“On one-side, there was strong support for extreme left wing philosophy, while on the other, you had the campaigners of modernism. Western writers- Satre, Camus, Nietzsche, you name it- were widely read as they fit well into these scheme of things where the prevailing climate was that of disappointment.”
Consequently, the college union, which had likes such as the present MLA Thomas Issac as councillors, were promoting western literature at best. Even John Abraham, an upcoming filmmaker then, was a regular at Maharaja’s with his collection of Negro poetry.
Grass, in the 60s and 70s, was much involved in writing about the themes of disillusionment, in a post-WWII, post-Nazi society Germany. When T R Shivashankaran Nair put the suggestion to invite Grass before the then magazine editor, he immediately went out in a car to the Government Guest house and secured the great author’s nod.
Grass readily accepted the invitation and came over. “It seems like he took a stroll around the college, I have heard that he liked the view from the top of the college library,” recollects writer N E Sudheer.
In his interaction, Grass spoke briefly about his convictions and observations. “I’m an artist. But I persist to be part of any idea that touches life or changes life. That’s why I do not want to be constrained just to art but want to spread out to all fields in life including politics,” he reportedly told TR during an interview for the college magazine.
When asked about his observations regarding the literary scene here, the 87-year old writer, who died on Monday, took a pun at Indian writers. “When I walked into a writer’s workshop in Calcutta (Kolkata), I saw a pathetic bunch of poets reciting poems about flowers and clouds to each another. Indian poetry is still in its premature stage of growth,” he said in the interview.
It was not the first time Grass made public his reservations about the Indian society. Upon hearing his demise, writer N S Madhavan tweeted that he had kicked up a storm by passing snide remarks on Kerala nurses.