He brought Europe to villages

For the new generation of Keralites, many of them well travelled, Carpathian mountain ranges may not ring a bell.

However, for a generation of Keralites who had never stepped out of their villages, these European mountain ranges and their peaks and passes were as familiar as their own village roads, thanks to a school teacher who had decided to take to writing, that too, detective fiction.

Kottayam Pushpanath, the novelist had not only brought hundreds of thousands of readers into the world of letters through his popular thrillers but also rejuvenated the circulation of nearly a dozen weeklies in the 70s and 80s.

Pushpanath had never visited Europe. But he could transport his readers to the European mountain ranges, streets of Paris or London through his writings and aided by the the protagonist of the story, often a private detective named Marxin (with a half corona cigar on his lips).

“The cigar was to Marxin as martini was to (James) Bond,” he once said. Marxin was a composite character created using Bond and Sherlock Holmes as raw materials. His fancy for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lasted till the end.

C.G. Zachariah of Cheruvallil House alias Kottayam Pushpanath had taken to writing at a young age when he was a school student. “My mother was a teacher who encouraged me to read,” he had said.

He continued his passion even after becoming a geography and history teacher. He used to write for a magazine called Detector published by BKM Book Depot, Champakkulam.

That was the time when Central Travancore area saw the blooming of popular weeklies which had romantic serials as their staple food. However, one of the most popular among them Manorajyam soon found the going tough and its publishers decided to experiment with a new genre — crime thrillers.

The man whom it identified was the young school teacher who used to contribute to Detector under the pseudonym ‘Kottayam Pushpanath’.

Chuvanna Manushyan, the novel, was hyped as a science crime thriller as it dealt with the issue of brain transplantation for criminal purpose. By the time the serial concluded Pushpanath and the protagonist Marxin had become household names and the weekly was back on the rails. He also experimented with themes based on magic and spirituality.

By the 1990s television had taken over popular imagination and most of the popular weeklies started their slide.

Many of the technologies used by Pushpanath’s detectives had become obsolete and the key element of thrill had gone out of his novels making them unfit as resources for the visual world.