Re-reading the reception politics of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s Shabdangal in Kerala

The essay closely studies the debates triggered by Shabdangal (Voices, 1947), the first work in Malayalam that touched upon themes of non-heteronormative union, written by Vaikom Muhammad Basheer (1908–1994), which opened up dialogues on the notions of “reading” as an endeavour of culture and self-making in Kerala. We argue that the controversies and debates triggered by the work are useful sites to reflect upon the limitations of paradigms of progress and reformist enterprises of early twentieth-century Kerala and to understand the shifting notions of “permissible” and “propriety” in literature in the literary public sphere. In this essay, the differential responses to the work at the time of its publication and in the recent past (leading up to the present) are explored through text-to-reader reception (forewords, criticisms and commentaries) and text-to-text (translations and intertextual references). We delve into the opinions of non-professional readers to bring to the fore the hitherto unexplored affective dimensions of reading that do not necessarily condone or contest critics’ notions of propriety in literature, which shed light on articulating difference from a non-dominant perspective. This reception-oriented approach is an important step in the politics of alterity that subverts the pedestalization of “critical scholarship” within Kerala.