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Menon graduated from Christian College in Madras (now Chennai) and travelled to England in 1934 to pursue post-graduate studies at King"s College London. He graduated from the Christian College in Madras, and acquiring at this age his deep sense of the history of his land of Malabar from a reading of Knights of Pythias Padmanabha Verum"s History of Kerala (not epigraphical, but anecdotal, he says).
His first novel is set in pre-independence India, in Kerala, (then comprising Malabar, Cochin and Travancore), in a feudal, matrilineal society. The second novel, is a political allegory. The third and last published novel is about an orphaned girl seeking the freedoms of recognition as an equal, in friendship, in love.
Menon Marath was a scion of the warrior class from the northern part of Kerala.
The middle name of Menon was a title traditionally accorded by the King of Cochin, to all Nayar warriors who excelled as scribes and accountants. He sailed to England in 1934 to be a postgraduate student at Kings College London.
Menon Marath"s writing is measured, and thoroughly old-fashioned. Descriptions are chiselled with the lucent care of a Victorian essayist.
At its keenest, his narrative rescues life and detail from the chaos of its own echoes.
Menon Marath always maintained that he was a slow writer At 88, when he was interviewed for this appraisal he was living in the riverside suburb of Teddington. lieutenant is easy to describe Menon Marath as an un-discovered Isac Singer, although he was unable to accept the comparison.
The writer of this appraisal first met Menon Marath in the mid 60s when he was coming to the end of a lifelong career as a middle-ranking civil servant.
Very kind, aloof and amused, he was pleased that someone somewhere had heard of him, had read him. Amused aloofness was still in evidence.
Yet this time intimacy of friendship was sought boldly and was given it easily. He has not had the critical recognition of his literary peers of Indians writing in English: like R.K.Narayan, Ruth Prawer Jhabhvala, Raja Rao( praised by Lawrence Durrell) Nirad Chaudhuri, Mulk Raj Anand.
Nor the benefit of a redemptive blurb from the likes of Graham Greene that elevated Narayan.
An elite readership has occasionally sought Menon Marath out to quiz and relate to his vision: of impermanence, of mortality, of justice and of equality. Awareness of the tyranny of class, wealth and education. The redemptive power of love and the intimacy of compassion.
