Abstract
Biographies by focusing on individuals and their lives become an essay on individuality, personality and privacy; in fact, the purpose of the biography is to make the subject special, different and unique. However, biographies place the subject in a curious relationship with the historical contextÛin that sense they are both similar to, yet different from, the novel. Both deal with interiorityÛyet their relationship to the ÎrealÌ is very different from one another. This article is based on my ongoing work on writing the biography of O. Chandu Menon, the first ÎmodernÌ novelist in Malayalam. Writing Chandu MenonÌs biography poses several problems and questions. The complete paucity of private information on his life, by way of any letters, diaries or even photographs poses very serious problems for the biographer. What would the best way be then to read (or write) Chandu MenonÌs life? My attempt here is to treat both his novel(s) (Indulekha and Sharada) and his life as ways of understanding and animating the end of the nineteenth-century experience in Kerala. In other words, instead of reading Chandu MenonÌs life into Indulekha, it is more productive to see both him and his novel as historically constituted products. In addition, it shall be my effort here also to understand Chandu MenonÌs life as a phenomenon that was influenced by the complex, and changing, social circumstances in this period.
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