“Many Truths Make the Big Truth.”: Magical Realism in O. V. Vijayan’sThe Legends of Khasak

Abstract

This paper intends to explore Magical Realism in the Indian context through O. V. Vijayan’s novel, The Legends of Khasak, initially published in Malayalam in 1969; later in 1994, Vijayan himself translated it into English. This regional novel might not have fetched global recognition, but it remains one of the most influential magical realist texts in Malayalam literature. Intriguingly though, the novel was published just two years after García Márquez’s magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and almost a decade and a half before Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Salman Rushdie’s commercial success in this genre popularized South Asian Magical Realism in the West. However, many regional writers from India had employed Magical Realism’s stylistic paradox in their works before the term officially originated in the European and Latin American contexts. Through Vijayan’s novel, this study explores how, in the Indian context, the paradoxical impulse to naturalize the supernatural deeply exists in realism’s stylistic undercurrents. The research further uses the critical framework of trauma and memory to analyze how the author attempts to recuperate the indigenous cultural identity of the natives, lost due to colonialism and capitalism, and simultaneously historicize the onset of colonial modernity and industrialization in India.