B. Jeyamohan (b. 1962), based in Nagercoil, the southernmost city of the Indian peninsula, is a pre-eminent writer in modern Tamil literature. He is one of the most prolific writers in India today, as evidenced by both the volume and span of his body of work. Having travelled the length and breadth of India, his works are steeped in the literary, spiritual and classical traditions of the country, while reflecting a deep understanding of the human condition.
Jeyamohan was introduced to literature at a very young age by his mother, an ardent reader herself, and grew up reading in Tamil, Malayalam and English. His first short story was published when he was just thirteen, in Ratnabala, a children’s magazine. Following the suicide of his childhood friend, he left home and led an itinerant lifestyle that came to a head with the tragic suicide of both his parents. A period of great turmoil ended with a spiritual realisation that led him to anchor his life in writing. Jeyamohan identifies Tamil writer Sundara Ramaswamy and Malayalam poet Attoor Ravi Varma as his literary mentors who oversaw his emergence as a writer. In 1987, his short story, Nadhi, published in the little magazine Kanaiyazhi garnered critical acclaim.
He followed this up with his debut novel, Rubber (1988) that explored the theme of environmental degradation much ahead of its time. His second novel, Vishnupuram (1997), lauded by critics as a landmark work, is an epic fantasy that layers history, myth making, and philosophy. His other works of fiction include the novels Pin Thodarum Nizhalin Kural (1999), Kaadu (2003), Kottravai (2005), and Vellai Yaanai (2013), exploring diverse themes ranging from ideological anguish following the collapse of Soviet Russia to the symbol of the mother goddess in Tamil cultural history to the great famine of Madras in 1876-78.
The author’s most significant work yet is a 26-part roman-fleuve called Venmurasu (The White Drum), a serialised reimagination of the Mahabharata. Spanning more than 25,000 pages, it is amongst the longest literary works in the world. He wrote this over six and a half years, and the work was published a chapter a day on his website while he was writing it.
Apart from novels, his body of work includes more than three hundred short stories. More recently, he wrote a sequence of a hundred short stories, one for each day of the pandemic-induced lock downs. Equally prolific in non-fiction, he has penned many volumes of literary criticism, biographies, travelogues, introductory texts to Indian and Western literature as well as numerous essays on heritage and philosophy. Some important works of non-fiction include Indraya Gandhi (Gandhi Today), Navina Tamil Ilakiya Arimugam (An Introduction to Modern Tamil Literature) and Purappadu (an autobiographical account of his itinerant days).
He won the Akilan Memorial Prize for his debut novel, as well as the Katha Samman and the Sanskriti Samman in later years. In 2014, the Canada based Tamil Literary Garden awarded him the Iyal Award for lifetime achievement. He turned down the Padma Shri awarded to him by the Indian government in 2016 in order to distance himself from political ideologies of one kind or another.
Jeyamohan’s engagement with literature goes beyond writing. Vishnupuram Literary Circle, an organization formed under his aegis, holds literary conferences, meet-the-author sessions as well as writing workshops for emerging writers. On 8 May 2022, he launched the Tamil Wiki encyclopaedia, a mammoth effort to organise information pertaining to Tamil literature and culture in a single place (https://tamil.wiki). Jeyamohan identifies himself as a student of Nitya Chaitanya Yati, a renunciate monk from Narayana Guru’s order. He writes about Indian philosophy and has conducted lectures and classes on the topic.
Jeyamohan’s prolific work is just beginning to be translated into English. In 2017, a translation of his short story Periyammavin Sorkkal (Periyamma’s Words) was published in Asymptote magazine. It won Asymptote’s Fiction Prize for Translation that year. In 2022, his immensely popular collection of short stories Aram was translated into English by Priyamvada Ramkumar (Stories of the True, Juggernaut). Forthcoming translations include The Abyss, a translation of the novel Ezhaam Ulagam by Suchitra Ramachandran (Juggernaut, 2023) and White Elephant, a translation of the novel Vellai Yaanai by Priyamvada Ramkumar, which recently won the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant 2023.
Jeyamohan is a renowned screenwriter in the Tamil and Malayalam film industry. Ozhimuri (2012), a Malayalam film written by Jeyamohan based on his book Uravidangal, won him a Best Scriptwriter Kerala Film Critics Award. Jeyamohan has written for many successful films including Naan Kadavul, Kadal, 2.0, Venthu Thaninthathu Kaadu and Ponniyin Selvan.
Jeyamohan lives in Nagercoil, India along with his wife and two children. His blog can be found here: http://www.jeyamohan.in
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