and rewriting to reach its final form, was published in 1969. A year before, it was serialized in Mathrubhumi weekly for 28 weeks starting from January 28, 1968 and set off a great literary revolution and cleaved the history of Malayalam fiction into pre-Khasak and post-Khasak eras. The former era was romantic and formal; the latter is modernist, post-modernist and post-post-modernist, with tremendous experimentation in style and content. The novel, which has drawn comparisons with One Hundred Years of Solitude of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is about Ravi, a teacher in an informal education centre in Khasak, and his existential crises. The central character is shown as a visionary who completed his post graduate programme in Physics from a college at Tambaram. The novel ends when Ravi begins his journey to some other realms of existence. The existential puzzle of man as to why he should exist is explored in this novel. The novel introduced a new poetic style of prose, combining Tamil, the Palakkad dialect and a sanskritized Malayalam. It also introduced a narrative style that moved forth from reality to myths and back. The work was later adapted as a play by Deepan Sivaraman. Dharmapuranam Dharmapuranam (The Saga of Dharmapuri, 1985) is outwardly a great political satire where the author knows no restraint in lampooning political establishments. The works attempts to lampoon modes of governance through its characters and the setting. The central character is Sidhartha, modelled after Gautama Buddha, whose personality is shown to lead people to enlightenment. Though satirical in its tone, the novel has a spiritual level, too. Malayalanadu weekly announced that the novel would be serialised from July 1975, but the plan was dropped when the Emergency was proclaimed on June 25, 1975. The novel was finally serialised only in 1977, after the Emergency was lifted and it proved to be prophetic. There were hindrances for its publication as well due to its sexual-scatological language and imagery and as the atrocities perpetrated during Emergency were still haunting the public. Finally, it was published in 1985. Two years later, Penguin Books published the English translation and the book drew critical reviews. ...dangerous stuff and cut close to the bone were the words of David Selbourne, in The Times Literary Supplement and Khushwant Singh rated the novel as not the kind of novel you forget in a hurry. Vijayan himself described it as a cleansing act that