“Under the Mangosteen Tree is the culmination of a singular obsession with the life and works of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, which dates back many years….After sifting through several Indian writers, I turned to the short stories of Basheer for inspiration. Basheer’s earthy mix of humour and pathos, lived-experience and imagination, keen eye for detail and fantastic characters and situations, seemed a perfect blend for a play. I eventually selected two of his love stories, The Love Letter and The Cardsharpers Daughter and combined them into a play, Moonshine and Skytoffee in 2004.

After the passage of three years, in 2007, while idly surfing the web one day, I chanced upon the fact that Basheer’s centenary fell in 2008. We had organized a festival celebrating the Anglo-Indian community called Angloscapes in 2006 and Ifelt the urge to do something bigger for Basheer too, which would be our way of paying tribute to his extraordinary humanity and genius. Thus Under the Mangosteen Tree was born.”

- Rajiv Krishnan, Perch

On the 18th of October 2007, at 7:15 p.m., a band of actors, artists, architects, filmmakers, a musician, a radio jockey, an entrepreneur, a stage director and a French elementary school teacher all set off to Calicut in Kerala, to re-discover the ‘Beypore Sultan’. Each of us were interested in different aspects of the planned festival on Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, but we all shared the urge to experience Basheer’s world, and see for ourselves the people who’d inspired many of his best loved and memorable characters. Of the 16 of us, 3 spoke Malayalam. For several, it was a first trip to Kerala.

Three days of feasting, innumerable interviews, and 20,000 photographs later, we were back on the train to Madras, armed with multi-hued lungis. We had discovered that the spirit of the ‘Sultan of Beypore’ and the unforgettable characters he wrote about was everywhere - on the winding Calicut streets, in homes, in bookstores, in small, smoky hotels faithfully frequented by working bachelors on a shoe-string budget, in the Beypore boat yard, the beach, in university classrooms, the din of the market place, in the call to evening prayers, in the arguments of tea shop regulars, in the text books of fourth standard children, in the bustle of the main bus stand, in the minds of the politically minded, in the town’s water tanks, where old men bathe with the fishes, in the quiet, green countryside beside immense wells of red laterite stone covered with ferns and moss.

- Rashmi Devadasan, Perch

Vaikom Muhammad Basheer (1908 – 1994) was a humanist, freedom fighter, novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of India’s most widely loved and admired writers on account of his superlative wit and originality. He revolutionized Malayalam literature by challenging the literary convention of writing in Sanskritized Malayalam, and was a trendsetter for many outstanding writers who followed.

Under the Mangosteen Tree was a three-week long festival that included two plays by Perch, ‘Moonshine & Skytoffee’ & ‘Sangathi Arinhya’, a Moplah Food Festival, a travelling Photo Exhibition, film screenings, a Literary Symposium and a music concert.

>> ‘The writer and his creation’, The Hindu (Chennai), 3 January 2008
>> ‘Fete to recall Basheer's contributions’, The Hindu (Chennai), 7 January 2008