The Hindu : Kerala / Kozhikode News : N.P. Mohammed remembered

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jan 04, 2005

Kerala

Kerala - Kozhikode

N.P. Mohammed remembered

By Our Staff Reporter

KOZHIKODE, JAN.3 . A meeting was organised to commemorate the second death anniversary of novelist N. P. Mohammed here today.

His close associate and Jnapith winner, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, who delivered the memorial lecture, said that Mohammed's works were noted during his salad days in the circle of senior writers such as Uroob, Pottekkat and Thikodiyyan.

MT's reminiscences

"Our first meeting led to a long and lasting friendship. Now it has become part of history," said Mr. Vasudevan Nair, who co-authored the novel `Arabi Ponnu' with N.P. Mohammed.

Mr. Vasudevan Nair said the idea of co-authoring a novel struck them after they came across `The Ugly America', a novel penned by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer. The book described `Sarkhan,' a fictional Southeast Asian country. "Whenever we met we did not discuss about the books we wrote or about what we were going to write. Instead, our topic of discussions dwelt upon what others wrote. We used to visit book stalls...browsed through books. smelled them...and kept searching for new ones," reminisced Mr. Vasudevan Nair.

"At that time we heard that D.H. Lawrence's novel `Lady Chatterly's Lover' was banned in the country. After the ban had been lifted we knew where the book was available. We knew what was happening in world literature," he said.

N. P. Mohammed was a great humanist and secularist. "He would often quote from the poem he liked - `Islamileye Vanmale', written by Edasseri Govindan Nair," he said.

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