[1] It set off a great literary revolution and cleaved the history of Malayalam fiction into pre-Khasak and post-Khasak.

Vijayan authored many volumes of short stories, which range from the comic to the philosophical and show a diversity of situations, tones and styles.

He was also an editorial cartoonist and political observer and worked for news publications including The Statesman and The Hindu.

[2] Born premature in the seventh month, Vijayan was sickly from childhood and spent most of his time confined to his room.

His father O. Velukkutty was an officer in Malabar Special Police of the erstwhile Madras Province in British India.

[10] The former era was romantic and formal; the latter is modernist, post-modernist and post-post-modernist, with tremendous experimentation in style and content.

The novel, which has drawn comparisons with One Hundred Years of Solitude of Gabriel García Márquez,[11][12] is about Ravi, a teacher in an informal education centre in Khasak, and his existential crises.

[13] The central character is shown as a visionary who completed his post graduate programme in Physics from a college at Tambaram.

The central character is Sidhartha, modelled after Gautama Buddha, whose personality is shown to lead people to enlightenment.

Malayalanadu weekly announced that the novel would be serialised from July 1975, but the plan was dropped when the Emergency was proclaimed on June 25, 1975.

This great education in spirituality is got in those barbarous days of Delhi when the Sikhs were maniacally hunted after and mercilessly butchered following the murder of Indira Gandhi.

Beyond autobiography and history, the novel is a journey down the collective experiences of a family in search of an awareness about oneself and his clan.

This search is of great importance when the collective experiences of the subculture are very bitter and the individual sense of the clan identity is much superior.

The stories, which range from the comic to the philosophical, show an astonishing diversity of situations, tones and styles.

O. V. Vijayan's best known collection in English is After the Hanging and Other Stories which contains several jewel-like masterpieces, in particular the title story about a poor, semi-literate peasant going to the jail to receive the body of his son who has been hanged; The Wart and The Foetus about the trauma of the fascist Emergency; the transcendental The Airport, The Little Ones, and several others.

[20] Vijayan was also an editorial cartoonist and political observer in various news publications – The Statesman and The Hindu – and later turned freelancer.

His searing comment on Indira Gandhi's Emergency rule and about her return to power in 1980 would remain high points in the history of Indian cartooning.

[24][25] His body was taken to Kerala by special flight and was cremated with full state honours at Ivor Madom crematorium in Pambadi, Thrissur near Thiruvilwamala on the banks of the Bharathapuzha where his nephew, Ravi Shankar, a known cartoonist, lit the pyre.