Bahuleyan Jeyamohan is one of the most prominent and prolific contemporary Indian writers, publishing in both Malayalam and Tamil. In recent years, translations of his work into English have brought him to a wider international audience, introducing a distinctive literary voice rooted in Indian philosophical and literary traditions and marked by emotional intensity and intellectual depth.
For Ukrainian readers, however, Jeyamohan may be of particular interest for another reason: his familiarity with Ukraine’s Symon Petliura and his reflections on Eastern Europe. How did an Indian author living nearly 8,000 kilometres from Ukraine become interested in a Ukrainian political leader? What impact did the collapse of the Soviet Union have on Tamil Nadu, Jeyamohan’s home state in southern India? And why might his work resonate with Ukrainians who, after over four years of full-scale Russian invasion, continue to hold on to hope?
The Ukrainian Week spoke with Indian writer and literary critic Bahuleyan Jeyamohan to explore these questions.
— Your blog features Tamil-language articles on the Ukrainian political leader Symon Petliura and on Ukraine’s history. In our correspondence, you mentioned writing those articles in the early 2000s, before the internet was widely available. How did you first come across Symon Petliura, and where did you find information about him — in English-language sources or Tamil translations?
— I think it all started with How the Steel Was Tempered — a Soviet propaganda novel by Nikolai Ostrovsky. It was translated into Hindi and Tamil by one of our leading Marxist scholars, S. Ramakrishnan, and published in 1972.
I read the book and almost immediately felt that something was off. As a reader, I can usually tell when a work is speaking honestly and when it is not. The novel felt deeply pretentious to me — very eloquent on the surface, but ultimately defending something deeply wrong.
The way it presented history was completely one-sided, and that stayed with me. I wanted to understand what was behind it. There was no internet at the time, so I went to the library and started digging for information about Petliura.
Eventually, I came across something striking in a book translated from French into English. It told the real story of Symon Petliura — his murder, and the trial that followed, which was built on false grounds. It had a powerful effect on me. I could not understand how the killer of such an important figure could be acquitted so easily. From that moment, I knew I wanted to write about Petliura, and I started digging deeper into his life.
Until then, I had thought of him only as a political and military leader. But I discovered that he was also an intellectual, a scholar and a writer. Learning about his cultural work and his role in preserving Ukrainian folklore and culture moved me deeply. I ended up writing an article about him, which was later republished on my website some fifteen years later.
Even today, I still can’t really read much about Petliura — there’s very little available in either English or Tamil. But I’ve always had a deep respect for him. When I was in France three years ago, I even tried to visit his grave, but the cemetery was closed for security reasons and I had to turn back. I still hope I’ll get the chance to go one day.
I have a personal theory as a writer: great nations and great societies are often shaped by great writers. India itself, in many ways, was shaped by Jawaharlal Nehru. He was not only a politician and statesman, but also a writer and philosopher.
Even today, his books on India remain important, especially because of their philosophical outlook and remarkable balance. That is why I have such deep respect for Jawaharlal Nehru. And I feel the same respect for Symon Petliura.
– You also mentioned in our exchange your book on the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the trade union movement in Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state. Could you tell us a bit more about it?
— The book is called The Sound of the Following Shadow (Pin Thodarum Nizhalin Kural, 1999). The Indian trade union movement was actually created by left-wing ideas that came from the Soviet Union. It also had many remarkable personalities and made an important contribution to our culture and economy.
But over time, the movement became increasingly static and began to deteriorate. Gradually, trade unions became an instrument of the communist party. They became less concerned with workers’ rights and welfare and more focused on political agendas and ambitions. Trade unions increasingly served as tools through which parties pressured governments and pursued influence. Internal power struggles became common. There were campaigns to isolate people, damage reputations, and push individuals out. In many ways, I saw similarities with patterns associated with the Soviet regime.
By the time the movement had already entered a period of decline, the Soviet Union collapsed. After 1992, India entered a period of economic liberalisation, and trade unions gradually lost much of their influence. So, I wrote about the failure of the trade union movement and the impact that the collapse of the Soviet system had on it.
– Throughout our conversation, you’ve referred to “Soviet Russia.” Do you mean the Russian Soviet Republic within the USSR, or the Soviet Union as a whole? [In earlier and later answers, we have replaced “Soviet Russia” with “Soviet Union” for clarity — Ed.]
— Not Russia — Soviet Russia. I mean the Soviet empire, the Soviet Union. It had an enormous influence on India. When I was a small boy, I used to buy a magazine called Soviet Land. It was mailed directly from Moscow to my home, and I read it eagerly.
I still remember how every page carried a map of the Soviet Union, with a small dot marking Moscow. The caption read: “Moscow — the capital of the world.” And as a child, I believed it without question. That illusion only shattered when I was in my twenties.
That was my generation. We grew up believing in those ideas and admiring the icons of the Soviet Union for a very long time. We did not have access to real history — most of what reached us was propaganda. Even today, many people still believe narratives created during the Soviet period. I wanted to write against that.
– As students, were you aware that the Soviet Union included different countries, or did it all simply register as “Russia”?
— Until around 1992, I had very little understanding of the smaller countries inside the Soviet Union. To me, it was a single political and cultural space.
I didn’t know there was Ukraine. I didn’t know there was Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, or many of the other republics.
– Has anything changed in public attitudes around you in India — particularly in Tamil Nadu — since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022?
— Even today, the two main communist parties in India — the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) — still hold a largely Stalinist view of history. For them, nothing fundamentally went wrong in the Soviet period. Criticism of the Soviet Union is often seen as something manufactured by the West. That remains their position. But younger generations no longer simply accept what these parties say. The situation has changed completely.
Something interesting has happened with my novel The Sound of the Following Shadow. It is still in print and continues to be widely read. Young readers often tell me similar things. Some say: “I didn’t know who Lenin was. I didn’t know who Stalin was. I had to look them up on Wikipedia to understand the book.”
Suddenly, these figures have become distant history. Many younger people in Tamil Nadu know very little about the Soviet system. For them, it belongs to another era, and they turn to Wikipedia to make sense of it.
— What does Eastern Europe mean to people today?
— They are trying to understand these issues through the lens of contemporary politics.
After reading my article on Petliura, some young readers wrote to me saying that if a government sets out to destroy the reputation of a scholar or public figure, it can shape how the world sees that person for decades. I replied that even a power as large as the Soviet Union could not permanently bury someone like Petliura. Within a few decades, his reputation changed, and today he is once again regarded as an important historical figure.
For me, that says something important about intellectual honesty. Truth can be suppressed for a time, but not forever.
– As I read the stories in your collection Stories of the True (originally titled Aram in Tamil — Ed.), I was struck by the sense of hope that runs through each story and character. For Ukrainians, hope is also crucial — surveys suggest that, despite years of full-scale war, it remains one of the strongest emotions people hold on to. Is this sense of hope something rooted in Tamil culture, or does it come more from your own experience?
— You may know something about my personal life. When I was young, both my father and mother died by suicide. After that, I travelled across India for about a year, living almost like a beggar. When I eventually returned to ordinary life and began writing, it became a form of healing for me.
I travelled across India and met many remarkable people — especially those who had achieved something meaningful in their lives. I found that they often carried a quiet but steady sense of hope and inner strength.
So I began writing with a strong sense of hope and idealism. But when I reached around fifty, much of that idealism suddenly faded. I felt lonely and depressed. At the time, India’s political system seemed deeply troubled. Corruption scandals were breaking everywhere, and the atmosphere felt bleak. I lost faith in institutions — in political parties, political ideas, political leaders.
Then, one day, I remembered a woman from the first story in Aram, and it suddenly became clear to me: hope and moral strength do not necessarily belong to great historical figures. They are often found among ordinary people. To recover that sense of hope, I wrote a story.
As soon as I finished it, I uploaded it to my website. I went downstairs to make myself some coffee, came back up, and before I knew it I began writing another one. I felt an overwhelming urge to continue. I went on writing story after story — eventually twelve in total — and they later became Aram.
The collection gradually grew into something of a cult work in Tamil because many readers seemed to recognise themselves in it. They were looking for hope, and they found it there. Even today, it remains one of the most widely read short-story collections in Tamil, and has since been translated into Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and several other languages.
I think that response came because the hope in these stories is not artificial or ideological. I know the harder side of life very well. I have lived on the streets. I lived with beggars for more than a year. I know what hunger feels like, what it means to have nothing to rely on. I also know the realities of caste and untouchability in India.
So in these stories, I am not avoiding darkness. In fact, many of them go straight into the harsher realities of India. But even there, in that darkness, there is light — the light of home, the light that exists among ordinary people, among those living on the street, among those who continue to resist injustice and oppression.
I know exploitation exists. I know suffering exists. But I also believe there are always people who resist it — people who stand by one another, who struggle for something larger than themselves. That is why I continue to have hope. Humanity still believes in freedom. Humanity still believes in equality. Humanity still has compassion.
That belief is not abstract for me. I saw the collapse of the Soviet Union with my own eyes. If someone had told me in 1990 that it would disappear within a year, I would never have believed it. And yet it happened.
Our great Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar once said, “A single drop of tears falling at the gate of a great palace has the power to destroy it.” History keeps proving that even the most powerful structures can fall — and I saw one such system collapse in 1991.
