Literary Representation of the Ashtamudi Lake sketched through Poetic Imagery: An Exploration based on Selected Poems in Malayalam

Ashtamudi, with its flora and fauna is showcased as an enriched cultural landscape and as a recurring poetic image in literature, paintings and films. Ashtamudi lake often foregrounds as a character and a strong motif in representing the flow of life and fertility in literature, where Kollam is set as milieu. Literature of Kollam often delineates how water sources, especially Ashtamudi lake becomes a cultural landscape in the representation of human life. This paper analyzes the literary representation of Ashtamudi lake through vivid lacustrine poetic images in the portrayal of the life of the natives , and as a cultural landscape , as a means of living, as a backdrop for evoking emotions like love, sexuality, poetic and artistic creativity, entertainment, and how it satiates the visual, auditory, olfactory,tactile and gustatory senses in poetry. As Jon Anderson points out, “Cultural life does not take place in vacuum” (3) and human life is highly dependent on a context or a place, as things occur in a context that influences values, emotions, attitudes, celebrations, and activities. Keywords: Cultural Geography, Cultural Identity, Sensuality, Lacustrine Imagery, Symbolism, Phenomenology Literature is a representatio