Ayyappa Paniker

Abstract An architect of poetic modernism in Malayalam, Ayyappa Paniker nevertheless cannot be treated as a strict adherent to the tenets of modernism in his poetic practice. He is a kind of maverick in his practice of writing. His deep respect for the tradition of romantic writing in his language illustrates that his modernism contains within it a number of contradictory elements. Paniker’s modernism also represents a kind of literary cynicism that even as it upholds certain characteristics of modernism, chooses to unearth the paradoxes in the modern mind which are left undocumented by dominant versions of writing. One might say that he is a modernist, a postmodernist, a romanticist, and an anti-romanticist, all at the same time. His prose works would furthermore reveal him to be the formulator of a unique theory of reading that brings together the principles of Indian and western aesthetics in a creative way.