THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Real-life events have often inspired writers to create fiction that borders on reality. Feminist scholar and activist J Devika, who is well-known for her translations of major literary works, is coming out with an allegorical tale loosely, but surely, based on an event that shook Kerala’s conscience over two years ago.
The event in question is the battle that young mother Anupama waged to get custody of her one-year-old baby boy, who her parents had taken away from her when he was just three days old. The child was later handed over to the Kerala State Council for Child Welfare without her consent and given to an Andhra Pradesh-based couple for adoption.
Anupama and her partner Ajith took their battle to the streets and the judiciary after failing in their bid to get police and council authorities to respond to their pleas. In courts, Devika backed them up with repeated interventions. The couple tasted victory when a DNA test proved them to be the biological parents. The child was returned to them.
Devika, who was in the thick of the action, has based the book on the stormy events. ‘Kunhu Thee’ (Little Fire), which is to be published soon, has already been shortlisted for the DC Books Children’s Literary Award.
The events that unfolded in 2021 inspired the book, notes Devika, which is in the form of a fairy tale. “Of course, it does deal with the moral and ethical questions Anupama and Ajith’s struggle raised. They were the inspiration, nothing more. My novel deals with the struggles of the common people against powerful humans and structures that serve only their interests. Fairy tales are stories of hope and survival of the utterly powerless in times when social hierarchies are impossible to surmount,” she adds.
Spread over 28 chapters, the novel speaks of the struggle of a princess to recover her child, born out of her relationship with a common soldier. “What is unfolding in Kerala nowadays is stranger than events we read in history. Our democratic institutions are crumbling. It is as though we are back in a time of unsurmountable hierarchies,” states Devika.
The novel starts with a tiny flicker of life that descends from the Milky Way -- which seeks a suitable body to grow on earth. It finds it in a willing woman, Nirupama. The novel takes many dimensions as Nirupama and her lover, Ani Kuttan, struggle to start a life in the wake of opposition by her powerful father, the king. Unlike in fairy tales, the novel’s characters have strange names, including ‘Mindapootham’, ‘Kapatyeswari’ and ‘Kroor Kumar’.
When asked about the genre, Devika says she believes that in an increasingly divided world, locked into social media echo chambers, the only hope perhaps is to address the child that lives in almost every human being, that which is beyond division. “The child is that part of us which reminds us constantly that what matters in life are not our quarrels over petty power and things, but all that ground us as human beings -- which we take for granted -- emotional security, warmth, kindness, empathy. In our world, hope exists only in that space.”
Anupama’s son Aidan, she said, is her first grandchild. And his name appears in the book. Aidan will inherit the copyright to the book through my will, Devika said. “We live in difficult times and politics is so shallow that the struggles of young people who struggle against the state may be erased from the written record of history -- even by feminists -- and so I want to record them as fairy tales,” Devika said.