O. V. Vijayan

Vijayan worked for decades as a political cartoonist and journalist in Delhi, drawing acidly satirical cartoons on Indian politics for national newspapers, alongside a fiction career that began with a decade spent writing and rewriting The Legends of Khasak before its 1969 publication.

The novel exiles Ravi, a disgraced astrophysics student turned village schoolteacher, to the fictional hamlet of Khasak, where myth, superstition, and the villagers' own unhurried cosmology slowly dissolve his rationalist certainties, a break from Malayalam fiction's dominant social realism so complete it took years to find a publisher willing to risk it.

He continued writing increasingly dark, allegorical fiction, including The Saga of Dharmapuri, a savage satire of the Emergency-era Indian state, while his cartoons remained a parallel, equally influential career until his death in 2005.