N Ravishankar, the English-language poet, translator and theatre practitioner known as `Rash’, who passed away the other day, could perhaps best be described as `the Gandhian demon of Sabarmati’.
A short road opposite the old Nehru Theatre in Chittur, now a marriage hall, ends at Sabarmati, a long, low-slung house washed in pristine white.It is an address that effortlessly unsettles every myth built around its owner. The man whose poems teemed with surreal, kaleidoscopic imagery, and whose own writings and friends bore witness to an intensely anarchic past, was nothing like the figure one might have imagined. Instead, he was a gentle and soft-spoken presence whose demeanour bore little resemblance to the legend that preceded him.
Though he never received the recognition he deserved in Kerala, Raviyettan cultivated an extraordinarily wide, eclectic and enduring circle of friends that spanned the places he lived and the borderless world of cyberspace. After decades in Delhi, his return to his native Chittur and his reintegration into our circle of friends felt like the gradual revelation of a mythical figure taking human form.
The first stories I heard about the phenomenon called Ravishankar came from writer M. Nandakumar, poet Anwar Ali and Mangad Rathnakaran. The first label attached to him was that of a translator. It was only much later that I realised it was Raviyettan who had translated Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book that animated our campus debates and reading circles through the 1980s. His life in the theatre was another revelation. Only later did I learn of the experiments and adventures he shared with K K Rajan during their years at the National School of Drama.
The same group also appeared in Chronicles of an Actor, a Spanish docufilm shot in Kerala in 2001 by the Latin American filmmaker Pablo Perelman. They later mounted a stage adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo at the Regional Theatre in Thrissur. There was a certain symmetry in the fact that it was this `self-professed anarchist’ who translated Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist into Malayalam.
Looking back, it seems remarkable that Ravishankar turned to writing his own poetry in English only in the last decade or so, despite having spent years translating poetry. The international acclaim that followed, however, came as no surprise. Written in a voice that was at once fresh, fearless and fiercely original, his poems quickly drew critical attention and won wide acclaim.
His major works include How to Translate an Earthworm, an anthology of English translations of 101 Malayalam poets, including many from the newest generation; the poetry collections Architecture of Flesh and The Bullet Train and Other Loaded Poems; In the Mirror Our Graves, co-authored with Rithamvara; and the autobiographical work Dilli Ka Kalakaar Aadmi.
