Delhi Gathakal (Delhi: A Soliloquy) by M Mukundan


                                                          Delhi: A Soliloquy (Malayalam)


Delhi Gathakal portrays the lives of ordinary people in Delhi beset with the turmoil of Indo-Pak and Indo-China wars and their aftermath, the Emergency, and the anti-Sikh riots. The novel progresses through the stories of a bunch of protagonists, especially Malayalis living in Delhi from the early 1960s to the present.


The work is important in that it records, using the tools of fiction, a certain period in the history of a particular region. However, a major disappointment was that the narration was purely linear following a traditional storytelling style and hardly using any modern techniques of fiction. The novel is almost entirely set in Delhi and hence replete with Hindi words. However, almost all of those words are transliterated with the wrong pronunciations in Malayalam.

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