The Great Tamil Escape

Smart-alecky detectives and sassy heroines are only some of the pleasures of pulp fiction, says NISHA SUSAN

IN THE 1998 Malayalam movie, Ayal Kadha Ezhuthkuyanu, Mohanlal plays Sagar Kottapuram, a pulp-fiction writer who simultaneously writes a dozen serialised novels for magazines every week. Spurned by an IAS officer he immediately begins churning out a novel about her. Each instalment of Gazetted Yakshi (Gazetted Demoness) is eagerly awaited by his adoring audience, the heroine’s job is endangered and high-jinks ensue. Malayalee readers are habitually sardonic about painkili katha, Malayalam pulp, but Ayal depended on its audience’s intimacy with the genre.

Sagar Kottapuram was modelled (down to his portmanteaux pen names) on astoundingly prolific Malayalee novelists. In real life, across the border in Tamil Nadu, novelist Rajesh Kumar was more fertile than scriptwriters could imagine. In forty years Kumar has written and published over 1250 novels and over 2000 short stories. Kumar is one of the ten authors featured in the intriguing new Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction. Kumar is one of the best-selling authors in a strong market where 15 monthly magazines with names such as Best Novel and Everest Novel sell as many as 7000 copies each. Publisher RM Kumaravel says that the market is one-fourth of what it was a decade ago. The rapid spread of Englishmedium education means that there are fewer people reading Tamil pulp. Kumaravel describes his audience as “8th pass, 10th pass.” When asked if he had any plans of diversifying into English, he chortled in embarrassment and said no. But despite his misgivings, in fledgling publisher Blaft’s translation, the genre is engaging and shows a surprising range.

Less smutty and less sentimental than Malayalam’s voluptous fare, Tamil’s smartalecky detectives and working-class Cinderellas often draw inspiration from crime and romance fiction from the West, not just for archetypes but also for its notions of modernity. Classic pulp-fiction writer Tamilvanan wrote in the 1960s of Shankarlal, a detective with a cow-lick and dark glasses who dashed around the world a la James Bond. Contemporary writer Pattukkottai Prabakar’s dashing men and women have a patter going that any fan of the hard-boiled style would smile at.

Intellectuals may announce proudly that their mothers never allowed ‘those novels’ into their homes. But in Kerala people still buy their weekly fix at the corner store along with other provisions. And to many Tamilians the pocket novel is nothing to be ashamed or proud of, just a way of whiling away a long hour on the bus. Tamil pulp-fiction flourished for a century until it hit the road-blocks of 24-hour television and snobbery.

With its overblown art and seemingly declasse themes, it is easy to assume that the time is ripe for the genre to be translated and embraced as kitsch. Even Blaft’s cover with its comely, gun-toting good-girl seemed ready to inspire the patronising coos of those who newly love hand-painted movie hoardings and match-box covers.

To anthology editor Rakesh Khanna who discovered the novels at tea-stalls in Chennai, Tamil pulp was as unfamiliar as the city he had just made his home in. But several factors saved it from the fate of being curated and not read. Translator Pritham Chakravarthy had grown up reading them and her selection has not sanitised the genre. Alongside readily acceptable characters such as Subha’s karate-kicking Vaijayanthi, she included, Indra Soundar Rajan’s rather less easy-to-swallow Jeeva who finds that she is a reincarnation of a woman who died swearing vengeance. Chakravarthy says, “I have spent the last year buying new novels from the teastall, raiding from everyone’s library, asking every auto-driver for suggestion. I have read hundreds and hundreds of pulp-fiction novels looking for the signature stories of each author.” Even the cover has been designed by Shyam, a popular pocket-novel illustrator.

SOME OF the authors may agree that they write ‘pulp fiction’ other Tamil authors of a high degree of competence have been given this name simply because they sell. Charu Nivedita, whose novel Zero Degree has been translated into English by Blaft, has sold over 20,000 pocket novel copies of his book in Tamil. This is a book that Khanna describes as “a thoroughly post-modern novel about a man with a 30-foot penis. He talks about anything from the Rwandan genocide to Kashmir to the Tamil literary scene to Chennai wine shops to Alejandro Maita.” Charu himself says “I think every society needs pulp fiction. I don’t think my work is pulp-fiction but the Tamil literary establishment thinks that if you are popular you are not literary.”

Khanna says, “Many of these writers are delightful nutcases…” K. Arivazhagan, changed his name to Charu Nivedita (for Charu Mazumdar and Sister Nivedita) to mark his shift from a writer of religious works to an agnostic author of highly stylised, radical fiction. Charu’s books may have been serialised by pulp-fiction publishers but he wrote at least one novel sitting in the Park Sheraton. Like the elusive B. Traven, author of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, no one has ever met short story writer Brajanand VK, not even his publisher. Many of these writers have created characters, such as Shankarlal, have inspired cinema and others actually write scripts for big-banner Tamil cinema.

For every householder who refused to have the pathu-roopa novel (ten-rupee novel) in her house, there are ten who hid Ramanichandran’s new romance between their sarees. Ramanichandran may live quietly in Mylapore with children and grandchildren but she absolutely rules the pathu-roopa novel market. This author of 125 novels, she is the only one who has characters kissing or necking. Even the racier Rajesh Kumar (who has written anything from science-fiction to tear-jerkers) and Indra Sounder Rajan have all their sex off-stage. Vidya Subramaniam is a working woman like many of her characters. She and other pocket novelists (with varying degrees of realism) write about a certain kind of working-class, modern woman who was once the staple of Amol Palekar movies but has disappeared out of popular culture.

For those innocents who think of everything south of the Vindhyas as an undifferentiated mass, it might be educational to read of a young Tamilian dismissing reincarnation as a plot from a cheap Telugu movie or of Moonlight Agency’s Bharat telling his partner Susheela to ‘beware of their new office boy. He watches Malayalam movies.’ Pulp authors and publishers agree that their readers may throw away the book after reading it. So it seems silly to look for reasons to read the Blaft anthology other than easy pleasure. •