Menon Marath

Who was Menon Marath?

Sankarankutti Menon Marath, better known as Menon Marath, was an Indo-Anglican novelist who settled in England and spent more than half of his life there. Menon graduated from Christian College in Madras and travelled to England in 1934 to pursue post-graduate studies at King's College London. His first novel The Wound of Spring is set in pre-independence India, in Kerala, in a feudal, matrilineal society. The second novel, The Sale of an Island is a political allegory. The third and last published novel Janu 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 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 K.P. Padmanabha Verum's History of Kerala. He sailed to England in 1934 to be a postgraduate student at Kings College London. Unable to complete his studies, with a marriage and children soon to follow, finding a job to sustain a family became his priority.