This photographer shoots places mentioned in Malayalam literature

The year was 2019. After repeated requests, photo-artist D. Manoj finally got permission to meet literary doyen and Jnanpith award-winner M.T. Vasudevan Nair at his home in Kozhikode, Kerala. By then, “MT” had withdrawn from active literary engagements and made only rare public appearances. Fiercely private, he had turned down many who sought an audience. But Manoj had a trump card―a series of photos on his laptop.

 

“I opened the laptop and began showing him the photos,” Manoj recalls. “After just three or four images, he asked me to stop. Then, without a word, he placed the keyboard in front of him and said, ‘You sit over there’.”

 

Nearly 200 photographs were shown. MT examined each, reading the captions and immersing himself in the visuals. “Some he lingered on, as if drawn deep into memory. Some he skimmed through quickly. A few he went back and watched again,” says Manoj.

 

When he was done over an hour later, MT leaned back in the sofa, rested both hands on either side, and settled into that familiar pose, one hand cradling his chin.

 

“He sat there, staring out the doorway for a long while, then slowly closed his eyes,” says Manoj. “And I can say this with certainty―he had travelled back, deeply, into the vivid, intense memories of his childhood and youth. Because what he saw in my photographs was the very imagery he had witnessed in person―maybe 60 to 70 years ago.”

 

The photo series MT saw was Manoj’s painstaking attempt to recapture the iconic imagery in the writer’s landmark 1955 novel Naalukettu. And the captions for each photograph were, in fact, lines from MT’s novel. “I use photography to investigate how the key elements in a novel took shape from the imagery that its writer had witnessed at some point in their life,” Manoj explains. “I do not think it is an exaggeration if I claim that there is no other photo-artist in this ‘literature photography’ category.”

 

Over the past 15 years, Manoj has completed literary photography projects on seven classic Malayalam novels. Each series comprises around 200 photographs, all of which have been compiled into books. His passion for Malayalam literature, he says, was kindled in childhood because of a rural library managed by his father―a modest shopkeeper whose store stood next to the library.

 

“I was terrible at English and maths in school,” Manoj admits. “But I excelled in Malayalam because I loved reading its literature. I first read O.V. Vijayan’s 1969 novel Khasakkinte Ithihasam (The Legends of Khasak) when I was in the eighth standard. I didn’t grasp its deeper emotions or philosophical layers then, but its vivid imagery stayed with me.”

 

The novel opens with the sentence, “When the bus came to its final halt in Koomankavu, the place did not seem unfamiliar to Ravi.” For Manoj, too, it was a similar feeling whenever he visited Thasrak, a village near Palakkad town with a thick canopy of trees, that became the surreal world of Khasak.

 

“After studying photography, the first thing I did was buy an omni van. My first trip, along with three friends, was to follow the trail of Vijayan’s Khasak,” he says.

 

Later, when he had a camera of his own, Manoj began taking pictures of Thasrak. “Many of those early photographs looked like the real Khasak,” he says.

 

Manoj recalls several instances when he had to go the extra mile to recreate the world envisioned by the author. While working on his photo series based on Punathil Kunjabdulla’s Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel Smarakashilakal (1977), he even replaced a portion of the roof at Kunjabdulla’s alma mater with palm leaves to faithfully reconstruct an iconic scene.

 

Punathil had drawn from his memories of studying at a Mappila (Muslim) school. Back then, the building had a roof made of palm leaves. There’s a scene in the novel where a partly autobiographical character, Kunjali, places a manjadikkuru (red lucky seed) in a beam of sunlight that filters through the palm-leaf roof. When the light shifts, it gives the illusion that the manjadikkuru is moving on its own. “A friend tells Kunjali that the manjadikkuru is ‘walking’,” Manoj explains. “That’s the moment I wanted to capture.”

 

Since the school now has a tiled roof, Manoj sought special permission to re-thatch a section with palm leaves. He waited two days for the right light conditions and took nearly 600 photographs. From those, two final images were selected to demonstrate the concept―one of which won the Kerala State Lalithakala Akademi Award.

 

While working on MT’s Naalukettu, Manoj had to revive the nearly forgotten tradition of pakida kali (a traditional dice game) in the author’s native village of Koodalloor. The novel features a character, Konthunni Nair, who is an expert in the game. Manoj brought together a group of locals who still remembered pakida kali and re-enacted the scene at the location mentioned in the novel. Staying true to the text, the game was played using bronze dice, just as described in Naalukettu.

 

The river Nila is a vital character in Naalukettu, and its many moods are vividly described in the novel. “So, I photographed Nila across different seasons―winter, summer, and monsoon,” says Manoj. Many of these photo series took years to complete, and he made it a point never to contact the authors before finishing the work.

 

“I believe that once a novel or literary work is published, it belongs entirely to the reader,” he says. “So, when I try to bring the imagery in a novel to life, it’s always shaped by how I, as a reader, imagined it.”

 

Interestingly, while working on a photo series based on M. Mukundan’s Mayyazhipuzhayude Theerangalil (1974)―a novel that vividly and mystically captures the political and social backdrop of the former French colony of Mahe―Manoj had actually seen Mukundan in Mahe. “But like anyone else, I just greeted him. I didn’t mention that I was working on something based on his novel,” he says.

 

Later, when Manoj’s photo-textbook on the novel was released to mark its 50 anniversary, Mukundan wrote a foreword for it.

 

“Many tourists have taken snapshots of the views of Mayyazhi and carried them away,” he wrote. “But those photos have never been seen again by the people of Mayyazhi. They don’t belong to them. The photos taken by tourists are for their own enjoyment. However, Manoj takes photos to capture the soul of Mayyazhi and give it to time. Time is the keeper of memories.”

The Week