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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.
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