The Author and his Milieu Vaikom Mohammad Basheer, who did not publish much in his literary career spanning threedecades, managed to revoluonize the Malayalam literary scene, especially the art of storytelling, by bringing in radical themes and subjects and also by rejecng Sanskrised Malayalamin favour of the colloquial and the vernacular. His literary vocabulary consisted of words drawnfrom the daily life of common people and the same was absolutely necessary if he wanted tomake his stories work and give them the avour of pulsang reality. His characters were the poorand the marginalized and in his view their experiences were as worthy of literary treatment aswere the experiences of kings and queens.He saw no dierence in the language that arculatedtheir experiences and the so-called literary language or the language of literature.Basheer was born probably on January 20, 1908 at a small village in Vaikom in Kerala. He was theeldest of six children of Kayi Abdu Rahiman, a prosperous mber merchant, andKunchachumma. Born in a God-fearing Muslim family, Basheer had already completed his studyof the Quran by the age of eight He aended a primary Malayalam School in his village for someme but because his parents were slightly progressive in their atude, he was sent next to theVaikom English School, though he con nued to learn Arabic from a Muslim tutor at home.Basheer was at an impressionable age when Mahatma Gandhi came to visit Vaikom in March1924 as part of the Satyagrah movement Already drawn towards the freedom struggle andtowards leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad and others, Gandhi’s visitproved a watershed for Basheer’s naonalist leanings. He ran away from home to parcipate inthe freedom struggle and reached Calicut which was the hub of naonalist acvies in Kerala.Here he joined the Al-Amin newspaper and took part in the Salt Satyagrah on the Calicutbeaches. His arrest was inevitable and along with the other freedom ghters he too wasincarcerated and sent to the Cannanore Central Jail.Basheer’s experiences at the jail were painful and tortuous. He was subjected to a number ofatrocies which in turn wrought a dramac change in him. From one extreme he went toanother. Abandoning the Gandhian doctrines of Ahimsa he turned towards terrorism and saw init an answer to curb foreign dominaon. Now he wanted to follow in the footsteps of SardarBhagat Singh, Raj Guru and Sukhdev. From Al-Amin he moved to Ujjevanam (The Revival)newspaper which catered to the spread of the terrorist movement. Needless to say, once againthe police came into acon. The paper was banned, all subversive material was conscated andBasheer, along with his other mates, had to go under-ground in order to evade arrest.From then on it was a constant struggle for Basheer, to somehow dodge the hawk eyes of thelaw enforcers and this in turn set him on his extensive travels. For the next seven years hetravelled all over India, reaching as far as the shores of Arabia.
