M Mukundan: “I was born in Mahé, but I’m a product of Delhi”
Writing from the Shoreline of Empire: M Mukundan on Memory, Myth, and a Tiny Island's French Past
Indiadailyupdate.com – At roughly ten square kilometres, Mahé — called Mayyazhi in Malayalam — is barely larger than a mid-sized city park. Yet this sliver of land, hemmed by a river on two flanks and the open sea on the third, carries a colonial history dense enough to fill an entire novel. M Mukundan, who grew up on its streets and later served as cultural attaché at the French embassy in Delhi, drew on that history for On the Banks of Mayyazhi, a work translated from Malayalam into English by Gita Krishnakutty. In conversation, the author unpacked how a childhood spent straddling two sovereign territories shaped both the novel's architecture and his own sense of belonging.
A Bridge That Crossed Two Nations
The most vivid image Mukundan recalls is a footbridge spanning the Mayyazhi river. Before Indian independence, one half of that structure sat in French territory and the other in Indian territory. As a boy, he would cross daily to school or errands on the far bank, mentally narrating his own small act of international travel.
"Every day, when I'd go to the other side, I'd say, I'm travelling to France, and on my way back, I'd come to India. Imagine that — no passport, no visa, nothing."
The anecdote captures something rare in colonial historiography: a border that was porous, domestic, almost quaint. Mukundan also recounts a story his grandfather told about the island's French-era ruler, who would host distinguished visitors from Paris in an old bungalow. The host would gesture toward the opposite riverbank through a French window and remark, pointing at the Indian side, "Look, that's India." For Mukundan, such episodes constituted ready-made literary material — no archival research required, only the act of translation from lived memory into narrative form.
The Grandmother Who Would Not Let Go
The novel's central figure is an elderly woman, a grandmother, who finds herself unable to comprehend why her neighbours suddenly demand that the French administration depart. The historical backdrop is Gandhi's Quit India campaign, which reached even the smallest outposts of colonial presence. Yet in Mahé, the transition was remarkably bloodless. Mukundan acknowledges the critical reception the book attracted: reviewers labelled it a "pro-colonial novel" precisely because the protagonist's confusion and affection for her French neighbours reads, to some, as an endorsement of the occupying power.
"Because I wrote from her point of view, people said you're justifying colonialism. Of course, I'm not. There can be several perspectives on colonialism, and it's her perspective."
He insists the novel is an exercise in multiplicity of viewpoint rather than apology. The grandmother's attachment to the French neighbours — rooted in decades of uneventful coexistence, in a French-speaking schoolmate who visited the family home, in the simple absence of violence — is presented as one valid emotional truth among many. Historian Romila Thapar has observed that different regions of India experienced colonialism in fundamentally different registers; Mahé, Mukundan argues, belongs to a quieter, more ambiguous register than the Bengal or Punjab narratives that dominate popular memory.
Velliyamkallu: The Silver Rock and the Cycle of Souls
Beneath the historical scaffolding runs a mythic current. Local legend holds that a cluster of rocks called Velliyamkallu — literally the "silver rock of Mayyazhi" — serves as the destination of the soul at death and the point of re-entry at rebirth. Mukundan wove this cyclical cosmology into the novel's structure, pairing the mythic loop with the linear arc of the island's political history so that the two timelines reinforce one another thematically.
Delhi, the Embassy, and the Limits of a Local Story
Mukundan left Mahé at twenty-one for Delhi, where he took up a post at the French embassy. He describes the French colleagues as courteous and, in the specific context of Mayyazhi, non-exploitative. But he is careful to draw a hard line between that narrow experience and the broader French imperial record. The torture of Algerians, the devastation of Indochina, and the literary reckonings of writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline — whose 1932 novel Voyage au Bout de la Nuit remains a staple of French-language curricula — remind readers that colonialism's violence was neither uniform nor optional.
"I didn't mean to say [with On the Banks…] that the French were very nice people, but that in this small place that they had occupied — they didn't disturb it because they were always at war with the English, and, as a result, they needed a foothold."
The strategic calculus he describes is instructive: Mahé's value to Paris lay less in extraction than in its position relative to British holdings. Unlike the British, who systematically plundered Indian resources, the French garrison in Mahé maintained what Mukundan characterises as a comparatively benign administrative presence. That distinction, he stresses, is local and contingent — not a generalisation about metropolitan France.
Migration, the French Army, and a Recurring Motif
Migration threads through much of Malayalam fiction, and it recurs in Mukundan's own body of work, including the JCB Prize-winning Delhi: A Soliloquy. During the French period in Mahé, a significant number of islanders departed by sea — aeroplanes were still decades away — many of them recruited into French military units. Several fought in French campaigns, binding their personal histories to a foreign state's wars. The novel, in tracing such departures and returns, treats migration not as a footnote to politics but as the primary engine of identity formation for a community the size of a small town.
For readers approaching On the Banks of Mayyazhi for the first time, the book offers something uncommon in postcolonial literature: a story told from inside the colonised community's own affective landscape, where affection, confusion, and quiet resentment coexist without resolving into a single ideological verdict. Mukundan's Mahé is neither a paradise nor a prison; it is a ten-square-kilometre place where a boy could cross a river and, depending on the direction of his walk, enter or exit a foreign country without so much as a stamp in a passport.
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