Colloque : Les nationalismes littéraires

2.03 “Kesari” Balakrishna Pillai and the invention of Europe for a modern Kerala

Auteur(s) : Dilip Menon

It is not often that one man and his writings change forever the sensibilities of a people. In the decade of the 1930s, in the state of Kerala in southwestern India, A. Balakrishna Pillai (1889-1960), the erudite and politically committed editor of the Malayalam literary journal, Kesari, created a new literary aesthetic that veered the imagination of an entire generation of Malayalis towards continental European literature. It was as a nationalist that he imagined this seemingly paradoxical enterprise. This essay will explore the meaning of this local cosmopolitanism as Pillai fashioned an idea of an always already connected world that transcended the geographies generated by colonialism and nationalism. Europe, indeed the world, became provinces of Kerala that had done rather well for themselves in the realm of the imagination.

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