Before the 1960s, Malayalam literature, whether poetry, novel,or short story, had been dominated by a parochialism centeredon the lives and experiences of Kerala, a small state of palmtrees, trading ports, and paddy fields in southwestern India.Most literary productions from this period in Kerala's historydepicted scenes, people, habits, and conflicts native toKerala—and only to Kerala. On the one hand, it is only natu-ral that a language spoken almost exclusively in this small geo-graphic area would produce a literature focused on that region.On the other hand, one could say that Kerala has been a sortof imaginative prison for Malayalam, beyond the walls ofwhich not much is written in Malayalam. By this, I do not meanthat all Malayalam fiction of this period was set in Kerala,though this is largely true, but rather that Malayalam as a lan-guage was not often employed to investigate or explore cultur-al worlds beyond those of its native provenance.