Bahuleyan Jeyamohan (born 22 April 1962) is an Indian Tamil and Malayalam language writer and literary critic from Nagercoil in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
His best-known and most critically acclaimed work is Vishnupuram, a fantasy set as a quest through various schools of Indian philosophy and mythology. In 2014, he started his most ambitious work Venmurasu, a modern renarration of the epic Mahabharata and successfully completed the same, thus creating the world's longest novel ever written.
His other well-known novels include Rubber, Pin Thodarum Nizhalin Kural, Kanyakumari, Kaadu, Pani Manidhan, Eazhaam Ulagam and Kotravai. The early major influences in his life have been the humanitarian thinkers Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Drawing on the strength of his life experiences and extensive travel around India, Jeyamohan is able to re-examine and interpret the essence of India's rich literary and classical traditions.
Born into a Malayali Nair family in the Kanyakumari district that straddles Tamil Nadu and Kerala, Jeyamohan is equally adept in Tamil and Malayalam. However, the bulk of his work has been in Tamil. Jeyamohan's output includes nine novels, ten volumes of short-stories/plays, thirteen literary criticisms, five biographies of writers, six introductions to Indian and Western literature, three volumes on Hindu and Christian philosophy and numerous other translations and collections. He has also written scripts for Malayalam and Tamil movies.
Personal life
Jeyamohan was introduced to Arunmozhi Nangai as a reader and married her in 1991. Their son Ajithan was born in 1993 and daughter Chaitanya in 1997.
Early life
Jeyamohan was born on 22 April 1962 in Thiruvarambu of Kanyakumari District, Tamil Nadu, to S.Bahuleyan Pillai and B.Visalakshi Amma. Bahuleyan Pillai was an accounts clerk in the Arumanai registrar's office. Visalakshi Amma hailed from a family of trade-unionists. Jeyamohan's siblings were an elder brother and a younger sister. Bahuleyan's family followed him around on his work-related transfers to Thiruvattar and Arumanai towns in the Kanyakumari district.
Very early on, Jeyamohan was inspired by his mother to take up writing. Jeyamohan's first publication during schooldays was in Ratnabala, a children's magazine, followed by a host of publications in popular weeklies. After high school, Jeyamohan was pressured by his father to take up commerce and accountancy in college. The suicide of a close friend drove him to drop out of college and constantly travel the country in search of physical and spiritual experience. He supported himself by taking up odd jobs and writing in pulp magazines all the while reading voraciously. He took up a temporary job at the Telephones department in Kasargode where he became close to the Leftist trade union circles. He received many of his formative ideas on historiography and literary narrative during that period.
Visalakshi and Bahuleyan committed suicide within a month of each other in 1984, and this drove Jeyamohan further into an itinerant lifestyle. He met writer Sundara Ramasamy in 1985 who took on the role of a mentor and encouraged him to take up writing seriously. Jeyamohan also got another mentor in the form of Aattoor Ravi Varma who sensitized him to the delicate balance between art and life. In parallel, Jeyamohan was an avid reader of Indian classics and philosophical texts like the Bhagavad Gita.
Politics
Jayamohan supported the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) party during the 2014 Indian general election.
Career
Fiction & literary criticism
In 1987, the journal Kollippaavai published his poem Kaidhi (The Prisoner). In the same year, Nadhi (The River) was published in Kanaiyazhi with a critical mention from writer Ashoka Mitran. The journal Nigazh published Bodhi, followed by Padugai ('The Riverbed'). Critics heaped praise on Padugai for its evocative narrative that wove together myths and contemporary visuals. Jeyamohan wrote his first full-fledged novel Rubber in 1988 and then re-edited and published it in 1990.
The novel won the Akilan Memorial prize for its path-breaking portrayal of the ecological and sociological impact of rubber cultivation in the South Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Jeyamohan's speech at the awards function was well received, and he further developed those ideas in Novel (1990), an exploration of the art form and its ideologies, and Naveena Thamizhilakkiya Arimugam, a comprehensive introduction to modernist Tamil literature.