 The original title "Sundarikalum Sundaranmarum" can be literally transliterated as "Men and Women of Charm".As revealed in the preface, the author himself is non-committal about the genre to which the book falls into and leaves the question to critics and readers, adding that he had a story to tell and he has told it.Literary critic M. Achuthan in his introduction to the book, calls it first a chronicle, then a cultural history and finally a kind of historical novel.