A Commentary on Locales and Treatment: O.V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak

The texts used as locales for rustic characters are in majority texts into which history, social fabric, and cultural contexts play a major role. The local imagery and context are found in abundance in such writings. In defining a text's "regional-ness," the matter of its genre might not seem a touchstone of much value. The plots themselves form motifs which are rich in history and manners, which rely upon relatively static, periodic, historical reference points to arrange and provide nomenclatures for such writings. The present paper stresses the rustic setting of characters, motifs, and stylistic conventions that can delineate the shape and presentation of a text (the text's genre, in other words) but also understands these matters as inevitably representing and promoting specific versions of culture. Kerala is substantially recognizable as contingent upon certain identifiers: geographic, social, cultural, political, as well as historical and linguistic contingencies that make up what is known and named as "the Southern." We might begin to address definitional questions by noting that in the given time O.V. Vijayan's The Legends of Khasak has itself become a genre. The ideological as well as artistic processes that identified the introduction continued to do so throughout the novel against a national urban-education complex in the country. Khasak is in a valley in the inner space of Mother Earth. Twelve mosques in ruin form a ring, a mandala around the village, holding the infinite time of Khasak stagnant. The Legends of Khasak, rich in imagery and thought sets itself into the task of interpreting the ramifications for traditional assumptions about their place within a conservative society. It combines pastoral thematic with modernist technical attitudes. The novel doesn't have any specific storyline. Instead a disjointed series of events brings forth a rich environment of myths driven society. Its stories, have not constructed idealized myths of a romantic or tragic past but by confronting falsely based narratives of dominance as found in any typical Indian setting.