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Literary Review
Endpaper
Desi pulp fiction is here
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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More middle brow than low brow, and not as noir-ish as American pulp fiction, the stories in the anthology represent what is popular today in Tamil writing.
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A willingness to take risks: The founders of Blaft.
The cover was half Anandha Viketan, half Quentin Tarantino: a bespectacled girl in a sari carrying a gun. TAMIL PULP FICTION it read in orange-yellow bold. And, above it, in smaller font: The Blaft Anthology of –‘. Blaft? Who or what was blaft? It was odd to see that particular cover illustration — which I was more used to seeing in Tamil weekly magazines — on a book cover. You can’t miss it in bookstores; its striking cover beckons at you from the shelves. On closer inspection, it turns out to be the first anthology of Tamil pulp fiction to be translated into English. Selected and translated by Pritham Chakravarthy and edited by Rakesh Khanna, it features 17 tales of crime, romance, science fiction, and detective stories. This was certainly good news: I had always wanted to find out what Tamil pulp read like, and Blaft, a new, independent publishing house in Chennai, had magically conjured up just such a book to fulfil the wishes of several pulp addicts like me. Blaft figured it was high time these stories were made available in English.
“Mad scientists! Desperate housewives! Murderous robots! Scandalous starlets! Sordid, drug-fuelled love affairs!” screams the lurid back cover of The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, in the tradition of all those trashy American pulp paperbacks. What is also fun about the book is that it includes the original illustrations and cover art for these stories from the magazines and novels they first appeared in. (Check out the book’s jacket illustration by Shyam, and the sketches by Jeyaraj inside.) The writers included here are all the Tamil pulp legends, but for many of us unfamiliar with their work, they would just be names — but for Tamil readers they are not just household names but literary gossip at the tea kadai (chai stalls) and bus stand. It was here at these tea stalls that Rakesh Khanna first discovered them. “I’ve been madly curious about this literature since I first moved to Chennai.” Rakesh told me, “and started noticing them on the racks at the tea stall. My Tamil is pretty lousy but I can at least read when they write English words in the Tamil script, and looking at titles like ‘Super Mega Detective Novel: Night of Blood’ over a photoshop montage of Iron Maiden album covers, I was hooked.”
Closer to genre writing
He roped in two other book lovers, Rashmi Ruth Devadasan and Kaveri Lalchand, and embarked on a project to have these stories translated in English. They founded Blaft, a publishing house that grew from their desire to make Tamil pop culture more widely known. Reading the stories, however, I discovered they were more popular than pulp, more middlebrow than lowbrow. They are not that brand of exploitative, over stylised, hardnosed pulp fiction. These stories are closer to genre writing: horror, sci-fi, mystery and the thriller. The themes that run through them are artificial intelligence, corruption, slimy politicians, the supernatural, vigilantes and the modern, liberated woman. Once you settle down to the idea that it’s not going to be pulpy in that noir-ish American way, you relish how stripped to the bone these stories are. They swiftly get to the point. Pritham Chakravarthy’s translation gives the stories directness, wit, and precision. You find yourself riffling the pages in quick, easy pleasure.
Rakesh agrees that the stories represent what is most popular in Tamil writing. But not like Sujatha or Stella Bruce popular, who are widely translated writers found in mainstream bookstores and considered literature. But closer to being the bestseller on the racks of tea kadai stalls. “We wanted to include the current bestsellers, who are Ramanichandran in the romance category, Rajesh Kumar in crime and sci-fi, Indra Soundar Rajan in supernatural/mystery, and Pattukkottai Prabakar and Suba in the detective genre. We went through a lot of Tamil “chick lit” before deciding on the Vidya Subramaniam stories to represent that genre — many of the other writers indulge in long rambling discussions of household finances and family politics that would have taken up half the book.”
My favourite story here is “Matchstick Number One”, by Rajesh Kumar (as prolific as 1,250 novels! 2,000 short stories!). Its clever, suspenseful plot would make a nice Vijaykanth vigilante movie where he is judge, jury and executioner. I wasn’t as impressed by the story that represents Suba (the pen name of Suresh and Balakrishnan), “Hurrican Vaij”. Suba’s stories feature a young sleuthing couple from the Eagle Eye Detective Agency and their assistant John Sundar. One author’s identity here remains a mystery, even the publisher is in the dark. Blaft feels that the South Asian writing being published in English all fall in a really narrow range, mostly aimed at one particular type of reader, and very unrepresentative of what most South Asians actually read themselves. They want to bring out translations of popular fiction, as well as more experimental, cutting-edge fiction by authors in all Indian languages, including English.
Exciting work
Blaft is also keen on bringing out graphic novels and art books. Already out are Zero Degree by Charu Nivedita, transgressive fiction that is a “mad patchwork of phone sex conversations, tender love poems, and numerology” and when this key sketch, by Chennai-based artist Natesh, which is a “collection of some seventy ink drawings of surreal combinations of hands, women, fish, tigers, eagles, and rhinoceroses that showcases the amazing things Natesh can do with a simple black line”. Currently in the works are a collection of short stories and flash fiction by Kuzhali Manickavel, a book of highly surreal Tamil folktales by Kee. Rajanaryan, and even some Bengali and Urdu thrillers. The presence of Blaft is great news for readers and writers, who can expect independent publishing houses like this one to take chances on (and believe in) writers and manuscripts that others won’t.
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