Dubai: A book of essays by a Malayalam writer who lives in the UAE has won a prestigious award in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
P. Manikandhan's book titled Malayaliyude Swathwaneshanangal (Malayali's search for selves) won this year's N.V. Krishna Warrier Award for the best critical work from the Kerala Bhasha Institute (state institute of language), regarded as a premier body engaged in modernising language and literature in the state.
Manikandhan was one among nine literary scholars and writers who received awards under various categories on September 15 at Thiruvananthapuram, the state's capital.
An engineer by profession, Manikandhan works as the head of design and quality assurance in an engineering consultancy firm in Dubai. Married to a doctor who runs her own medical centre in Sharjah and a father of two, Manikandhan said he devoted an average of two hours a day to read and write, in spite of the demands of a busy professional and expatriate social life.
He has been regularly writing articles for mainstream publications in Kerala, including Bhashaposhini, Madhyamam, Vijnana Kairali, Sahitya Lokam and Deshabhimani.
Manikandhan maintains an active presence among UAE's many Malayali cultural forums.
In its award citation, the institute said the author had gone beyond established approaches and attempted to analyse contemporary issues using a comprehensive humanistic approach.
The volume, a collection of essays written over the past seven years, covers a lot of topics from the Gulf migrant workers' literary endeavours to the new politics of "eco-feminism".
Current trend
"[The work] epitomises the current trend of extrapolating literature into the much wider and socially relevant area of cultural studies. Language and literature becomes, along with the post-critical thinking on politics, environment and feminism, another framework to make sense of and to grapple with the pressing issues arising out of a culture of globalisation."
Manikandhan said that although Gulf expatriate writers had a passion for writing, they lacked the will to work hard. "Lack of reading and critical knowledge is the main reason why they have fallen behind mainstream writers," he said.
According to him, the nostalgia among the Malayali migrant workers in the Gulf could not be compared to the existential plight of an exiled writer elsewhere in the world. Nostalgia could not in itself be transformed into great literature, he said.
He urged Malayali writers in the Gulf to familiarise themselves with and draw inspiration from the works of Arab expatriate writers, who even when they were in exile, strove to depict their plight in relation to the historical and political realities of their home countries.
