Let’s ExploreMoustache

  • Author: S. Hareesh
  • Translator: Jayasree Kalathil
Moustache
Moustache

A contemporary classic, mixing magic, myth and metaphor into a tale of far-reaching resonance.

Vavachan is a Pulayan who gets the opportunity to play a policeman with an immense moustache in a musical drama. The character appears in only two scenes and has no dialogue. However, Vavachan's performance, and his moustache, terrify the mostly upper-caste audience, reviving in them memories of characters of Dalit power, such as Ravanan. Afterwards, Vavachan, whose people were traditionally banned from growing facial hair, refuses to shave off his moustache. Endless tales invent and reinvent the legend of his magic moustache in which birds roost, which allows its owner to appear simultaneously in different places and disappear in an instant, which grows as high as the sky and as thick as rainclouds - and turn Vavachan into Moustache, a figure of mythic proportions.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS. Hareesh

S. Hareesh is the author of three short-story collections: Adam, which received the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, Rasavidyayude Charithram, and Appan. He is also a recipient of the Geetha Hiranyan Endowment, the Thomas Mundassery Prize, and the V.P. Sivakumar Memorial Prize. Hareesh is also the author of two screenplays - for the film Aedan, which received the Kerala State Award for best screenplay in 2017, and for the 2019 film Jallikattu, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and won a silver peacock at the International Film Festival of India. Hareesh works in the revenue department, and hails from Neendoor in Kottayam district, Kerala.

S. Hareesh

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORJayasree Kalathil

Jayasree Kalathil shared the JCB Prize for Literature in 2020 with S. Hareesh for her translation of his novel, Moustache. She received the Crossword Book Award for Indian Language Translation in 2019 for her translation of N. Prabhakaran's Diary of a Malayali Madman, which was also longlisted for the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award. She is the author of The Sackclothman, a children's novel that has been translated into Malayalam, Telugu and Hindi. Her other translations include Theeyoor Chronicles by N. Prabhakaran and Adam by S. Hareesh.

Jayasree Kalathil

The JCB Prize in Videos

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The JCB Prize for Literature was first awarded in 2018, since then the Prize has been awarded to 6 books.

Perumal Murugan

Perumal Murugan

Perumal Murugan is an Indian author, scholar, and literary chronicler who writes in Tamil. He has written twelve novels, six collections of short stories, six anthologies of poetry, and many non-fiction books. Ten of his novels have been translated into English: Seasons of the Palm, which was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize in 2005, Current Show, One Part Woman, A Lonely Harvest, Trail by Silence, Poonachi or the Story of a Goat, Resolve, Estuary, Rising Heat, and Pyre. He was a professor of Tamil at the Government Arts College in Salem Attur and Namakkal.

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Khalid Jawed

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M. Mukundan

M. Mukundan

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