The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction Edited by Rakesh Khanna Blaft Publications Dh66
In the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the tea kadai, or tea shop, is a multipurpose establishment. It will, of course, fulfil the promise of its name by serving tea, poured from a shiny kettle into small glasses that invariably become too hot to hold. But it will also offer hard biscuits, stored in large jars of thick glass. It will often have a telephone, from which, in the years before the cellular era, people without landlines at home could call their friends and family. It will sell beedis - thin, hand-rolled Indian cigarettes - and matchboxes. The owner will ration out gossip free of charge. And there will be Tamil pulp novels, usually suspended from a clothesline strung between the doorposts like gaily-coloured handkerchiefs hung out to dry.
The covers of these novels are masterpieces of kitsch art. They often contain a gun or a knife, unless the novel's theme is religious, in which case a fierce deity will glare out at the world. Most often, though, the cover will present a woman; she may be seductive, horror-stricken or possessed, but she is always luridly drawn, with a hint of cleavage whenever the artist can manage it. Rakesh Khanna, a self-described "tea shop junkie" first encountered Tamil pulp while studying at the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu. Inevitably, the covers caught his eye; they catch everyone's eye.
"There would be all these lurid, interesting covers, and I'd learnt enough of the Tamil script to figure out whether they were horror novels, or detective novels, or whatever," says Khanna, who was born in California to a Punjabi father. "And I'd always think: 'Man, I wish I could read this stuff!'" To that end, he started his own translation and publishing house, Blaft, which earlier this year released the English-language Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction. Its cover features a demure Tamil girl with jasmine flowers in her hair and spectacles perched gingerly on her nose, over which she directs a come-hither look with limpid eyes. And, of course, there's a whacking great pistol in her right hand.
The Blaft Anthology collates short stories and novellas - featuring, a blurb promises, "Mad Scientists! Hard-Boiled Detectives! Vengeful Goddesses! Murderous Robots! Scandalous Starlets!" - by some of the most prolific pulp authors of the last several decades. It is also speckled with a selection of original pulp art. In her translator's note, Pritham Chakravarthy describes her selection process: "I spent a year searching through library records for the most popular books, going on wild travels to strange book houses and the far-flung homes of the many different authors, artists and publishers, taking many crazy bus journeys and visiting many coffee houses, and doing a kind of pleasure reading I realised I had been badly missing for the past thirty years."
Chakravarthy's selection includes two stories that sum up the genre's surprising diversity. Hurricane Vaij, a 1993 short story by two authors collaborating under the pen name Suba, is a sturdy pulp staple told almost entirely through dialogue. Detectives Narendran and Vaijayanthi of the Eagle Eye Detective Agency are hired to track down a politician's son. They end up battling a heinous and pleasingly improbable plot hatched by Vanilarasu, a mash-up of nearly every villainous stereotype ever devised. "He had large eyes. A long beak of a nose, hooked slightly to the right. Spectacles. A mouth full of crooked teeth, a wild mop of hair, a creased brow."
Pushpa Thangadorai's My Name is Kamala, one of the book's longest stories, is an excerpt from a 43-part series of a far more sombre tone than Hurricane Vaij. Kamala, the narrator, is a young girl who has been kidnapped and sold into a brothel in New Delhi. Given the sensitivity of the topic, it is remarkable that the series was even published, particularly in the mid-1970s. Thangadorai based the series on extensive interviews he conducted with prostitutes; in this sense (and despite his prose, which is often clumsy), he is more Truman Capote than fantastic pulp fabulist. But his work is nonetheless "pulp", simply because it was serialised in, and owed its wild success to, a cheaply printed, "unliterary" magazine.
The quality of stories Chakravarthy selected is uneven; perhaps this was inevitable for a pulp anthology. Rajesh Kumar writes one sharp story about a corrupt judge accused by his daughter of being "ready to sell your own eyes". But, in his attempts at science fiction, he only manages to be feebly moralising. Idhaya 2020, the titular robot of one story, runs on what its creator calls a "bio-memory chip" that helps her distinguish between good and bad. "Which is better for health, whiskey or brandy?" a scientist asks Idhaya. "Both are dangerous to health," Idhaya responds with smug piety before dispensing some righteous, gun-enabled (and boring) punishment.
Chakravarthy, in her prefatory note, calls the plots of the collection's stories "somewhat dreamlike, with investigations wandering far afield, characters appearing and disappearing without warning, and resolutions surprising us from out of the blue." If this accounts for the book's inconsistency, it also makes the fiction more quirkily enjoyable. A pulp story often functions as a shattered prism, bending light at odd angles to illuminate corners of Tamil society that would otherwise be overlooked. Reincarnation, for instance, is never discussed in the mainstream media, but a haunting Indira Soundara Rajan story called The Rebirth of Jeeva hints at just how pervasive the concept remains. Rajan's protagonist, a young girl, is seeking revenge for injustices she claims to have suffered in a previous life. "This is the 20th century, you know" a disbelieving police superintendent scoffs. "We've just launched a space rocket from Sriharikota."
Chakravarthy's translation from colloquial Tamil into colloquial English sacrifices note-perfect accuracy for readability. "Pritham and I argued a lot," Khanna recalls. "We played around with the English - not making it totally American, which would put off Indian readers, but at the same time we wanted it to be readable internationally." Stories like Rajesh Kumar's, composed almost entirely through dialogue, presented less of a challenge than others. "Soundara Rajan's story had more description and more cultural references - which made it trickier to translate."
The Blaft Anthology is important for a number of reasons beyond its aesthetic. The book, Chakravarthy says, "is an attempt to claim the status of 'literature' for a huge body of writing that has rarely if ever made it into an academic library." Tamil pulp still sells very well, if not as furiously as it did in the 1980s. Rajesh Kumar, the superstar of this genre, could in fact lay claim to being the most productive novelist in the world, having written over 1,500 novels and 2,000 short stories; almost every one of his novels, moreover, has sold around 100,000 copies. And the genre is old, older than is commonly assumed. As far back as 1933, a Tamil author named Sudhandhira Sangu published an article titled The Secret of Commercial Novel Writing. Some of his invaluable suggestions were as follows:
(i) The title of the book should carry a woman's name. (ii) Don't worry about the storyline… Your story absolutely must include a minimum of half a dozen lovers and prostitutes, preferably ten dozen murders, and a few sundry thieves and detectives. (iii) The story should begin with a murder. Sprinkle in a few thefts. Some arson will also help. These are the necessary ingredients of a modern novel.
Of course, neither popularity nor longevity alone make a genre worthwhile, or "literary". But Tamil pulp has another feature that, combined with its historic popularity, makes it worthwhile of serious consideration. As the critic Mukul Kevan has pointed out, there is a severe dearth of truly popular Indian literature written in English. This has been alleviated only slightly by recent bestsellers by Chetan Bhagat. The English-speaking world has always taken its literary impressions of India from Salman Rushdie, Amitav Gosh and VS Naipaul, authors who, for all their virtues, appeal to only a thin upper crust of Indian readers and fail to reflect much of what is happening in the country today. The swelling popularity of the Blaft Anthology, which can now be found in bookstores in New York and California, suggests a desire for a new, broader window onto contemporary Indian culture. Translations from the vernacular speak to this desire by tapping into a vast reservoir of myriad Indian fictions, many of them as strange and wonderful as the best in this anthology. The floodgates just need to be cracked open a little wider.
S Subramanian, a New Delhi-based journalist, has written for The New Republic and the Far Eastern Economic Review.