China unveils novel advanced military aircraft

China appears to have tested novel sixth-generation stealth military aircraft as videos of the warplanes went viral on social media.

Mysterious tailless aircraft were seen flying over Chengdu city in southwest Sichuan province, though the defence ministry is yet to confirm the speculation.

Both jets are tailless, meaning they do not have vertical stabilisers to help maintain control. Such aircraft are typically kept stable by computers that interpret the pilot’s control inputs and make it impossible to detect.

The test flight coincided with the birth anniversary of Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China. The aircraft designs are separate from airframers Chengdu and Shenyang and may be among the most sophisticated manned fighters in the world.

The larger of the two designs is roughly diamond-shaped, with three air intakes for its engines, two alongside the fuselage and one on top – an extremely unusual configuration. The smaller one has a more conventional layout, but no tail.

Both have the lack of 90-degree angles typical of stealth shaping for reduced radar detection. “It really looks like a leaf,” Defence Times, a website based in Chengdu, wrote on Weibo.

The new Chinese aircraft are not the first modern tailless designs. The Northrop Grumman B-2 and B-21 stealth bombers are both flying wings, and several uncrewed aircraft, such as the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 and China’s CH-7, lack tails.

The Chinese military flaunts its new technology at the end of the Western calendar year in late December or January.

In May 2024, the military said its J-20 stealth fighter jet, also known as the Mighty Dragon, can easily reach supercruise. Beijing has reportedly deployed as many as 250 of the stealth aircraft, first introduced into service in 2017, but its capabilities are not publicly known.

At the November Zhuhai air show, China revealed the twin-engine J-35 stealth fighter jet.

As China continues to modernise its military, the designs “show the willingness of China’s aviation industry to experiment and innovate”, said Euan Graham, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

“Whatever the merits or demerits, it appears to be a highly original design,” he told Reuters. “They deserve kudos for that, and should shake off any lingering complacency that the U.S. and its allies always set the pace.”

The US defence department said it was “aware of the reports” but did not have an additional comment beyond what was included in its annual report on the Chinese military this month.

China on Friday also launched a new amphibious assault ship which is designed to strengthen the navy’s combat ability in distant seas.

The Sichuan, the first ship of the 076 type, is China’s largest yet, displacing 40,000 tonnes and equipped with an electromagnetic catapult which will allow fighter jets to launch directly off its deck, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

The ship is designed to launch ground troops in landing crafts and provide them air support. It is also equipped with the “arrestor technology” that allows fighter jets to land on its deck.

China’s first amphibious assault ships, the type 075, launched in 2019.

Chinese military expert Song Zhongping compared the Sichuan to a “light aircraft carrier”, according to state media Global Times.

Israeli airstrikes kill 50 Palestinians as troops storm Gaza hospital

At least 50 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike near the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza on Thursday night.

The Israeli military subsequently stormed the hospital, Al Jazeera reported. The soldiers used loudspeakers to order patients and staff to leave within 15 minutes and cut off communication to the facility before storming it, the outlet said.

The hospital, one of the last functioning healthcare facilities in northern Gaza, has been under a sustained Israeli attack for weeks.

“There are nearly 50 martyrs, including three of our medical staff, under the rubble of a building opposite Kamal Adwan Hospital in the Beit Lahia Project area after it was bombed by Israeli warplanes,” the hospital director, Hussam Abu Safia, was quoted as saying by the Turkish news agency Anadolu.

The latest attacks on Gaza came as a wave of Israeli airstrikes hit Yemen’s main airport on Thursday just as the World Health Organization’s director general was about to board a flight there.

A crew member of a UN plane was injured when Israeli jets bombed the Sanaa airport earlier on Thursday, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X.

The rest of the team left the airport and were “safe and sound” in Sanaa, UN associate spokesperson Stephanie Tremblay said.

An assessment of the damage to the airport would be made on Friday to ascertain if the UN delegation could leave Yemen, she added.

Even as ceaseless Israeli attacks worsen the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, an organisation monitoring food crises globally withdrew its warning of imminent famine in the northern part of the besieged Palestinian territory under Israel’s “near-total blockade” after being pressured by US officials, the Associated Press reported.

The rare public challenge from the Joe Biden administration to the work of the US-funded Famine Early Warning System, or Fews, which is meant to reflect data-driven analysis of unbiased experts, drew accusations from aid and human rights figures of possible political interference by Washington.

A finding of famine would be a rebuke of US ally Israel, which insists its war on Gaza is aimed against the Hamas militant group and not against its civilian population.

In its withdrawn report, Fews said unless Israel changed its policy, the number of people dying of starvation and related ailments in north Gaza could reach between two and 15 per day sometime between January and March.

The internationally recognized mortality threshold for famine is two or more deaths a day per 10,000 people.

US ambassador to Israel Jacob Lew this week called the warning by the globally recognised group inaccurate and “irresponsible”.

Mr Lew and the US Agency for International Development, which funds Fews, claimed the findings failed to properly account for rapidly changing circumstances in north Gaza.

The US embassy in Israel and the State Department declined to comment.

Fews confirmed on Thursday it had retracted the famine warning but expected to rerelease the report in January with updated data and analysis. The group declined further comment.

Usaid confirmed it had asked Fews to withdraw its report warning of imminent famine issued on Monday.

The dispute points in part to the difficulty of assessing the extent of starvation in largely isolated northern Gaza, where thousands of people have fled an intensified Israeli military crackdown that aid groups say has allowed delivery of only a dozen trucks of food and water since roughly October.

In publicly challenging the findings of Fews, the US envoy “leveraged his political power to undermine the work of this expert agency”, Scott Paul, a senior manager at the humanitarian nonprofit Oxfam America, said.

Mr Paul stressed that he wasn’t weighing in on the accuracy of the data or methodology of the report.

“The whole point of creating Fews is to have a group of experts make assessments about imminent famine that are untainted by political considerations,” Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said.

“It sure looks like Usaid is allowing political considerations – the Biden administration’s worry about funding Israel’s starvation strategy – to interfere.”

The US, Israel’s main backer, provided a record amount of military support in the first year of the war. At the same time, the Biden administration repeatedly urged Israel to allow more access to aid deliveries in Gaza overall and warned that failing to do so could trigger US restrictions on military support. The administration recently said Israel was making improvements and declined to carry out its threat of restrictions.

Military support for Israel’s war on Gaza is politically charged in the US, with Republicans and some Democrats staunchly opposed to limiting support over the suffering of Palestinian civilians trapped in the conflict. The Biden administration’s reluctance to press Israel for improved treatment of Palestinian civilians undercut support for Democrats in last month’s elections.

Israel’s war on Gaza has so far killed over 45,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to the local health ministry. The air and ground assault has caused widespread destruction and displaced around 90 per cent of the besieged territory’s 2.3 million people, often multiple times.

The assault began in October last year after a Hamas attack killed 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers and saw 250 taken hostage.

Additional reporting by agencies.

Possible sale of Monet on Chinese social media causes disbelief

An art gallery’s claim that they sold an original Monet work on a social media platform has sparked disbelief on Chinese internet.

Gallery Boss’s Backyard Garden posted a Monet listing on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media and e-commerce platform often likened to Instagram, on 9 December.

The gallery post carried a picture of the painting, apparently a 1908 work from Claude Monet’s Nymphéas series depicting the famous water lilies in his garden at Giverny, France, along with the message: “Looks like no one on Xiaohongshu has ever sold a Monet Water Lilies before.”

Gao Zhen Yu, owner of the Xiaohongshu account who runs Gao’s Fine Art gallery in Avignon in southern France, claimed in the post to have records of the seven prior owners of the painting as well as details of when it was exhibited, The South China Morning Post reported.

The website of Gao’s Fine Art says they have galleries in Beijing, Taiyuan, Xi’an, and Mauritius as well. They claim to hold more than “5,000 contemporary and modern art masterpieces”, including works by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Jean Dubuffet, Keith Haring, and classic works by artists like Peter Paul Rubens, Eugène Delacroix, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Monet.

When the post first went up, it got over 20,000 reactions as most users thought it was a stunt. But another post on 17 December by an account called Ours Gallery said a buyer identified only by their surname Tian had reached out after seeing Gao’s post and purchased the artwork for several hundred million yuan. Gao posted screenshots of a text conversation between the two which purportedly show the buyer confirming the purchase and arranging for it to be shipped to Switzerland.

The Independent has reached out to Gao for more information on the sale.

The post led to a flurry of activity on the platform as most users were baffled by the idea that someone would buy a piece of art of such value on a social media platform.

According to the SCMP, the painting in the post matches the details that appear in the Catalogue Raisonné, an annotated listing of an artist’s works. Monet’s Catalogue Raisonné, which was compiled by the Wildenstein Institute and first published in 1996, states that the last known appearance of this painting was in 1976, at a Christie’s London spring auction.

Earlier this year, an expert in art authentication managed to detect up to 40 counterfeit paintings for sale on eBay, including pieces supposedly by the likes of Monet and Renoir.

Is it right to cut Afghanistan off from international climate funding?

The Taliban’s demand for access to global climate finance amid Afghanistan’s worsening droughts, floods, and food insecurity has sparked a global dilemma: will the hardline regime’s inclusion be seen as legitimising their brutal curbs on women and girls?

At the recent Cop29 in Baku, the Taliban delegation attending as observers for the first time since 2021, made their case for a full party status in future climate negotiations and access to international climate funds.

“It is the right of our people, who are among the most vulnerable to climate change,” Mutiul Haq Nabi Kheel, the National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) chief, tells The Independent. “We should not be invited as guests [in the next COP] but as full participants.”

The plea comes as Afghanistan endures relentless climate disasters. Earlier this year, flash floods in Ghor and Badakhshan swept through villages, killing dozens, displacing thousands, and washing away farmland. Prolonged droughts left over 12 million people, nearly a third of the population, facing severe food insecurity. The climate crisis has pushed the country, which contributes less than 0.1 per cent of global emissions, into a devastating cycle of drought, floods, and hunger.

The Taliban’s return to the climate stage has sparked a debate on whether the world can deliver aid to Afghanistan without recognising a regime that stands in direct opposition to human rights values. Any participation by the Taliban has led to a global pushback in the past.

When the de facto rulers sent officials to Qatar this year for a meeting with UN officials, Human Rights Watch said the move could do “irreparable harm to the UN’s credibility as an advocate for women’s rights and women’s meaningful participation”.

The concerns persist as the Taliban continue to isolate women from public life, even closing the last few remaining avenues of work such as paramedical and midwife training recently. In a 2023 report, Amnesty described the Taliban’s actions as “relentless and targeted oppression of women and girls”.

Yet the worst brunt of Afghanistan’s exclusion from climate finance, which has stalled critical projects that could mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis, has also been borne by its most vulnerable people.

Humanitarian groups and climate experts argue that inaction is punishing the Afghan people, not their rulers. “Try explaining to an Afghan woman how you’re helping her by holding back,” says Graeme Smith, senior consultant for Crisis Group. “If she sees her crops failing and her children going hungry, she doesn’t care about global politics, she cares about survival.”

Before the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, the country had access to international funds such as the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and the Adaptation Fund. However, the Taliban’s lack of international recognition halted these flows overnight.

“About $2.8bn worth of ongoing infrastructure work just stopped,” Smith says. “Water projects, irrigation systems, they’re sitting out there, rusting in the desert.”

This funding freeze has left the international community reliant on UN agencies and NGOs to deliver climate-related aid through humanitarian channels. However, experts warn that these efforts, while essential, are piecemeal and lack the scale needed to address the challenges.

Srikant Misra, Afghanistan director for ActionAid, describes the shortfall in disaster preparedness: “In Ghor, we saw floods wipe out entire villages because people had no time to respond. Simple measures like check dams, flood barriers, or rain gauges could have saved lives. But there’s no funding for even these basics.”

Misra says the lack of community education, particularly in rural areas, increases the risks. “When rains or snow come heavily, people don’t know how to react. Communities have no tools or information to anticipate disasters.”

For Afghan women, the consequences are disproportionately severe. “When disasters strike, women suffer the most,” says Shahin Ashraf of Islamic Relief. “They cannot access markets to buy food, and the rising costs of essentials like flour make survival even harder for families led by women.”

Despite the Taliban’s limited technical capacity and resources, they have attempted to address some of Afghanistan’s environmental challenges. Projects like the Kush Tepa Canal, which aims to provide irrigation to thousands, have been touted as key initiatives. Yet experts are skeptical of their effectiveness.

“They dug a trench in the desert,” Smith says, “but without technical expertise and funding, it’s unclear whether this will deliver long-term benefits.”

At the same time, climate adaptation requires national-level coordination, a challenge in Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s international isolation has left the government out of key discussions.

Smith explains that isolated, small-scale projects cannot replace the coordinated infrastructure planning needed to tackle floods, droughts, and water management. “Water flows across districts, across borders. Without a national plan, what are we really solving?”

The Taliban’s observer status at Cop29 was a start, but securing full party status at Cop30 in Brazil next year will be far more contentious.

The symbolic weight of such recognition, coupled with access to funds like the GCF, would put many governments in a political bind.

“Western decision-makers are held accountable by voters and social media outrage,” Smith explains. “If money flows into Afghanistan and the Taliban cuts ribbons on new infrastructure projects, the backlash could be immense, even if the funding saves Afghan lives.”

Despite this, humanitarian organisations stress that the international community cannot afford to ignore Afghanistan’s worsening climate crisis.

“This is not just about responding to disasters,” Misra says. “It’s about preparing communities for a future that’s already here, building infrastructure, supporting farmers, and empowering women.”

Afghanistan’s vulnerability to the climate crisis is compounded by decades of war and instability, which have eroded institutional capacity at every level. In villages across the country, families face impossible decisions. As droughts persist, crops fail, and floods destroy homes, the absence of resources leaves entire communities without a path forward.

Experts argue that solutions exist. While direct funding to the Taliban remains politically unpalatable, alternatives, such as channeling funds through UN agencies, NGOs, or regional partnerships, could allow critical work to resume.

“The people of Afghanistan cannot wait for political solutions,” Ashraf says. “We cannot punish women and children for the actions of a government they did not choose.”

Smith believes the focus must remain on results, not optics. “Climate change doesn’t care about politics. It’s hitting Afghanistan harder than almost anywhere else. If we’re serious about helping Afghan women and children, we have to find a way to act.”

India concerned as China approves world’s largest dam in Tibet

China has approved the construction of the world’s largest hydropower dam on the eastern rim of the Tibetan plateau despite protests over its ecological impact and concerns it could affect millions of people downstream in India and Bangladesh.

The dam, located in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo river, could annually produce 300 billion kWh of electricity, according to an estimate provided by the Power Construction Corp of China in 2020. That is more than triple the 88.2 billion kWh capacity of the Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest, in central China.

The project is expected to play a major role in meeting China’s carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, stimulate related industries such as engineering, and create jobs in Tibet, Chinese state media Xinhua reported on Wednesday.

A section of the Yarlung Zangbo falls a dramatic 2,000m within a short span of 50km, offering huge hydropower potential as well as unique engineering challenges.

The outlay for building the dam is expected to eclipse the 254.2bn yuan (£27.80bn) it cost to construct the Three Gorges Dam.

Constructing Three Gorges required the resettling of 1.4 million people.

Authorities have not indicated how many people the new project would displace and how it would affect the local ecosystem, one of the richest and most diverse on the plateau. The site of the project is located along a tectonic plate boundary which is a zone for earthquakes.

At least four 20km-long tunnels must be drilled through the Namcha Barwa mountain to divert half of the river’s flow to harness its power, according to reports.

But according to Chinese officials, hydropower projects in Tibet, which they say hold more than a third of China’s hydroelectric power potential, would not have a major impact on the environment or on downstream water supplies.

India and Bangladesh have nevertheless raised concerns about the dam, with the project potentially altering the river’s course downstream.

India is concerned that Chinese projects in the region could trigger flash floods or create water scarcity downstream.

An Indian lawmaker previously raised concerns over China building the dam in the bordering region of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as part of southern Tibet.

The Yarlung Zangbo becomes the Brahmaputra river as it leaves Tibet and flows south into India’s Arunachal Pradesh and Assam states and finally into Bangladesh.

“We cannot trust our ‘neighbour’. You never know what they can do,” Ninong Ering, a member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) told the parliament in July.

“They can either divert the entire river flow drying up our Siang or release water at once causing unprecedented floods and havoc downstream.”

Additional reporting by agencies

Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe phones home after ‘touching Sun’

Nasa has confirmed that its Parker Solar Probe is “operating normally” after making the closest-ever approach to the Sun by a spacecraft.

The pioneering probe made its closest approach to the star on Christmas Eve, zipping past just 3.8 million miles from the solar surface at a speed of about 430,000 miles an hour. This is only about 4 per cent of the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Nasa did not have contact with the spacecraft during the historic feat as it endured temperatures of up to 982 degrees Celsius.

The American space agency confirmed that it received signals from the probe on 26 December, just before midnight EST. “Parker Solar Probe has phoned home! After passing just 3.8 million miles from the solar surface on 24 December – the closest solar flyby in history – we have received Parker Solar Probe’s beacon tone confirming the spacecraft is safe,” Nasa said in a post on X on Friday.

Parker is expected to send back detailed data about its condition and experiences on 1 January 2025. This data could help scientists measure how matter is heated to millions of degrees near the Sun and offer further insights into how solar winds originate.

While the Sun’s warmth makes life possible on the Earth, severe solar storms coming from its surface can cause temporary radio communications and power blackouts on the planet.

As the Sun is currently at the maximum solar activity phase of its 11-year cycle, scientists hope to further unravel how energetic particles released from it reach near light speeds and affect the Earth.

Since its launch in 2018, Parker, the fastest object ever made by man, has circled closer to the Sun, flying past Venus and using its gravity to move into a tighter orbit.

Its previous passes closer to the Sun helped scientists unravel the finer structures of solar wind and also map the outer boundary of the Sun’s atmosphere.

The probe, built to withstand temperatures of up to 1,371C, is expected to continue circling the Sun at this distance until at least September.

What happened to the Boxing Day tsunami babies 20 years on

In the aftermath of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka and many other countries on Boxing Day 2004, I was the least likely candidate to volunteer my help. Footage of the waves wiping out beachside hotels where I’d once sat sipping cocktails round the pool left me terrified. I’ve always had a huge fear of the water since nearly drowning in the sea when I was nine, and the fact that we’d have been wiped out too if we hadn’t cancelled our planned family trip to Sri Lanka that Christmas haunted me.

My eldest son, Ryan, had other ideas. He had stepped in to help out in the office of the travel company in Sunbury that I had run for years with my husband. A few days after the tsunami had hit, a call came in from one of our agents in Sri Lanka.

They described how in some places, the water had come in more than 2km inland and how over 30,000 had been killed in Sri Lanka alone. The devastation was of a scale nobody could comprehend, they desperately needed help. Ryan booked a flight to leave the next day, and I knew I had to go with him.

It was to be a decision that would radically change our lives. We arrived to find rubble where familiar houses and fishing shacks had been and found people were living in tents, distraught and exhausted.

We were taken to an orphanage in Galle – one of the main cities – and it shocked us to our core. In the crumbling old building, there was a strong stench of urine and no running water or electricity. There were babies and small children everywhere; four or five to a cot, lying in filth and screaming to be fed. Terrified toddlers cried with arms up high, but there was nobody there to comfort them.

We were told that some of the children had been on the Colombo to Galle train which had been carrying 1,500 passengers when the wave hit. More than 1,000 people lost their lives and many children were separated from their families and older siblings. Most of them didn’t have names or any records of their dates of birth when they were taken to random orphanages.

Instinctively I picked up a tiny baby who was screaming incessantly in her soiled cot. Instantly she stopped crying and just looked at me. At that moment, I knew I couldn’t walk away. Her name was Piyumi, and I made a silent promise to help her.

Five weeks later, all the big charities were starting to leave Sri Lanka; they’d sanitised the water, got people safely living in tents and there was no infection. I too had returned to England but was desperate to go back. What about all the orphans and displaced children? I knew nothing had changed for the children I’d seen that day.

Getting nowhere with the big charities, I decided to raise some money myself. At first, I started small, raising £4,000 by organising coffee mornings and finally was able to return to Sri Lanka a few months later. With the help of the national childcare commissioner, I made sure the money was used to install water and stable electricity supplies and buy washing machines, cots, toys, nappies and baby milk for the orphanage.

It was clear to me that Piyumi was not thriving; unlike all the other little ones who would climb all over me when I brought them sweets, she’d hide herself away. When I was told Piyumi’s brother, Isuru, then 11, had been located in another orphanage, and that their mother, Badrani, was also alive I was filled with hope. But with a missing husband, Badrani was homeless, and with no means of supporting her family, she wasn’t able to take Piyumi and her brother Isuru out of the orphanage.

More funds were needed, so in 2005 we founded Their Future Today and I organised a medieval banquet fundraiser at Hampton Court House. The £26,000 we raised was spent on completely renovating the entire orphanage.

More funds bought some land and built a little family house for Piyumi and Isuru to live in with their mum. But first, we had to go through the courts to prove Badrani was a fit mother. Finally, in 2010, when Piyumi was six, they became the first family that the charity reunited permanently.

One of my trustees said: “Well you’ve done what you promised to do, got her back with her family, so you can draw a line under it now.” Part of me felt relieved because it had been so stressful dealing with bureaucracy in a foreign country with hardly any resources. But after two days, all I could think about was all the other children – so reuniting children with their lost families became a life-long mission.

It turns out that globally at least 80 per cent of more than 5 million children in orphanages have at least one living parent and extended family. Most are abandoned through poverty. We’ve rallied friends, family, clients, and colleagues to support our fundraising efforts, to ensure that we make a direct impact on improving the lives of these vulnerable children and others like them.

Over the years I’d visit Sri Lanka three times a year for meetings about the charity’s many projects and would always make time to visit Piyumi and her family, where I was welcomed with open arms. Of course, Piyumi has seen me many times over the years without knowing the full story of how she changed my life and the lives of hundreds more.

When I finally told this shy young woman, then aged 15, the whole story she said she had no memory of being in the orphanage – moving into their home as that little six-year-old was her first memory. Her wish, like mine, was that every child in the orphanage could feel loved and have the chance to go home. And that is what we are now trying to do today; to give every child a home and advocate and provide alternative family and foster care training nationwide in Sri Lanka, which was an unknown concept there.

While it’s never been easy to fit in alongside family, my job and caring for elderly relatives, I’ve always felt like I have to keep returning to Sri Lanka. Slowly it has rebuilt, those babies are now in their twenties, but the scars on the country and its people remain.

It has been a family effort to help them – Richard holding the fort when I have to be there and our three sons Ryan, Adam and Joel involved in many different ways. Even my elderly dad was a big supporter – our first regular donor, he helped us to give out school book packs to rural children to give them an education and a future.

When we became a registered charity in 2010, I gave up the travel agency work, realising I couldn’t do both jobs well. Through Their Future Today, we’ve now reunited 17 children with a parent or family member, assisting with readoption through the courts, and establishing the children in local schools, as well as providing housing and support.

We’re now focussing our efforts on preventing child abandonment through education projects launching a preschool in the local community, helping youngsters access education and malnourished children get daily school meals. We’ve also given hundreds of institutionalised young people vocational training and provide a sanctuary to help care leavers overcome their trauma.

Tragically, Piyumi’s brother Isuru passed away in a motorbike accident a few years ago, when he was 16, leaving her and their mother heartbroken. But now, aged 20, Piyumi is working as a classroom assistant and her confidence is steadily growing. She is part of a loving and supportive community and recently enrolled in art classes at a technical college – and it’s wonderful to witness her progress.

In 2017 I was awarded an MBE for community services in Sri Lanka. I look back on how much has come from that day so many years ago when I just wanted to protect that lonely, vulnerable child and give her a future. Because of her, many more children now have one.

Find out more about Their Future Today here

Celebrated Indian writer MT Vasudevan Nair dies at 91

MT Vasudevan Nair, one of India’s most renowned writers, died on Wednesday. He was 91.

Nair died in a hospital in Kozhikode city in the southern state of Kerala.

Madath Thekkepat Vasudevan Nair’s seven-decade career spanned literature, journalism and film, leaving a lasting impact on India’s cultural landscape.

His stories, often set in the countryside and drawing on his childhood, celebrated the range of human emotion and connection.

Nair was born on 15 July 1933 in Kudallur, a small village in Kerala’s Palakkad area, and grew up a voracious reader. He started writing very young.

“I was born in a village, on the banks of the Bharathappuzha, where the world of literature, writing and books was non-existent. Newspapers used to come by post, delayed by three days. Books reached me once in a blue moon,” he said in an interview with Sahapedia in 2019.

“Once I reached high school, I started reading everything. After reading, I wanted to write something. I knew I could not match the writing I had read, but, in my loneliness, I felt like scribbling something.”

After graduating college, Nair joined the Malayalam magazine Mathrubhumi in 1956 and went on to become its editor in 1968. In this role, which he stayed in until 1981, Nair is often credited with discovering and mentoring young writers who went on to have prolific careers.

He was awarded Jnanpith, India’s highest literary honour, in 1995 and the Padma Bhushan, the country’s third-highest civilian honour, in 2005 . He received the highest civilian award given by Kerala’s state government, the Kerala Jyothi Award, in 2022.

Nair’s debut novel Naalukettu, meaning the legacy, about the decline of the traditional joint family in post-Independent India is considered a classic in Malayalam literature and won Nair his first Kerala Sahitya Akademi award in 1959, when he was only 25.

The novel, first published in 1958, went on to be translated into 14 languages. It continues to feature on bestseller lists and was adapted into an award-winning television film in 1995.

“Characters, their predicaments — that’s what inspires me. The crossroads they find themselves in — they trouble us,” he said in 2023, in an interview with The Indian Express.

He wrote nine novels and 19 collections of short stories, multiple essay collections, memoirs, and travelogues, all known for his particular style which looked at complex human emotions and how they operated within their specific social circumstances. His 1984 work Randamoozham, translated as The Second Turn, a retelling of the Hindu epic Mahabharata from Bhima’s perspective, is considered a groundbreaking work in Malayalam literature.

Nair also worked as a screenwriter and director in Malayalam cinema. His first screenplay, Murappennu in 1965, was described by The Hindu as “one of the most significant films in the history of Malayalam cinema”. He won the national award for best screenplay a record four times—for Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha (1989), Kadavu (1991), Sadayam (1992), and Parinayam (1994).

Nair made his debut as a director in 1973 with Nirmalyam, which went on to win the national award for best feature film.

Tributes poured in after news of Nair’s death broke, with the Kerala state government announcing two days of mourning.

“Saddened by the passing away of Shri MT Vasudevan Nair Ji, one of the most respected figures in Malayalam cinema and literature,” prime minister Narendra Modi said.

“His works, with their profound exploration of human emotions, have shaped generations and will continue to inspire many more. He also gave voice to the silent and marginalised. My thoughts are with his family and admirers. Om Shanti.”

Kerala’s chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, posted on X: “With MT Vasudevan Nair’s passing, we have lost a doyen of Malayalam literature who elevated our language to global heights. A true cultural icon, he captured the soul of Kerala through his timeless works. His steadfast commitment to secularism and humanity leaves behind a legacy that will inspire generations. Heartfelt condolences to his family and the cultural community.”

“I shared a long-standing relationship with him. He gave me some of the most significant characters in my acting career. I also had the opportunity to work with him on two films under his direction. He was one of the popular novelists and screenwriters, not just in Kerala but across India,” said Malayalam actor Mohanlal.

Kamal Haasan, one of the biggest names in Tamil cinema, wrote: “We have lost a great writer. The greatest personality of the Malayalam literary world, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, has left us. My friendship with him was fifty years old. He was the creator of ‘Kanyakumari,’ which introduced me to the Malayalam film world. Our friendship continued till the recent release of ‘Manorathangal.’ He has contributed great novels to the Malayalam literary world and became a successful screenwriter. His demise has caused me great pain. He contributed to all forms of writing with his own uniqueness and has retired. This is a huge loss. It will deeply distress South Indian literary readers. My heartfelt tribute to a great writer.”