[4] The novel tells the story of a young university student, who leaves a promising future to take up a primary school teacher's job in the remote village of Khasak.

[8] The novel was "translated" into English by Vijayan in 1994 (under the title The Legends of Khasak, Penguin Books), but this version differs substantially from the Malayalam original.

[4] Khasakkinte Itihasam was inspired by the Ottupulackal family's stay at a village called Thasarak near Palakkad (in central Kerala) for a year.

[3][8] In an afterword to the English version of the novel Vijayan wrote:[9] "It had all begun this way: in 1956 my sister got a teaching assignment in the village of Thasarak.

This was part of a [Kerala] State scheme to send barefoot graduates to man single-teacher schools in backward villages.

[2] The protagonist, Ravi, a Malayali final year under-graduate student in Madras, is haunted by the guilt of an affair he had with his stepmother.

He thus abandons the prospects of a bright academic career, deserts his girlfriend Padma and leaves on a long journey, which finally brings him to the remote (fictional) village of Khasak near Palakkad (central Kerala).

The narrative strategy of the novel is characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction.

At the end of a series of events, including the threat of suspension from the authorities, Ravi keeps his word to his ex-girlfriend Padma to leave Khasak.

The novel ends with Ravi in the monsoon rain, waiting for his bus to leave the village, watching a snake that had struck him withdrawing into its hole.

[7] Orthodox readers charged it with 'obscurity', 'partly because of its new idiom and partly its play with space and time' (which contrasted with the familiar, chronological narration).

"Its interweaving of myth and reality, its lyrical intensity, its black humour, its freshness of idiom with its mixing of the provincial and the profound and its combinatorial wordplay, its juxtaposition of the erotic and the metaphysical, the crass and the sublime, the real and the surreal, guilt and expiation, physical desire and existential angst, and its innovative narrative strategy with its deft manipulation of time and space together created a new readership with a novel sensibility and transformed the Malayali imagination forever."

"It might be the author's truthful "self-dissent" during the course of the writing that made Khasak, which otherwise would have ended up as a mundane village romance, a seminal work that addressed some of the deeper issues of an enlightened individual's personal and social existence in the post-independence period.

Everything in this novel — the theme, the characters, the language, the style, the narration, the way myth and reality, realism and fantasy mix — was ingenious and unprecedented in Malayalam."

"Today, [O. V.] Vijayan is viewed as the greatest living writer in Malayalam, with an amazing, almost magical, grip on the Malayalee ethos and language."

[7] The English version was published long after Vijayan experienced an 'epistemological break' after meeting the monk Swami Karunakara Guru.