On Reading The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction

Since it was first released in 2009, I had resisted the urge to pick up a copy of the Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction. The book’s cover, featuring a sari clad buxom young woman wielding a pistol, promised the kind of guilty entertainment that I associate with Bollywood potboilers of the 90s. Having grown up on a healthy diet of English Classics and eventually armed myself with a Masters in English Literature, I like to think that I am rather selective about my reading. Not for me the pretentious writers who claim to have arrived, with their urban dramas that demystify the IITs and address the issue of inter-caste marriages.

But with Tamil Pulp Fiction, the choice to ignore the book was somewhat tougher. The cover apart, the book promised an entry to popular Tamil culture of the kind that has always been out of my reach, despite having spent the best part of my formative years in Madras. I grew up in a home where English was predominantly used for communication and went to a school which actively encouraged mastery over the language. Speaking Tamil inevitably became a mere survival skill-it helped me get past the rickshaw drivers, pay bills and order for extra crisp dosas. What’s more, I stayed blissfully smug about the language hierarchy in my life and by the time I realised what I was missing, I had moved out of Madras.

When I finally bought the book last week, it felt like the culmination of an existential battle between my rather elitist approach to literature and my need to reclaim (discover?) my Tamil roots. Ironically perhaps, Pritham. K. Chakravarthy, the translator and compiler of the anthology says in her introduction to the book:

"This book is an attempt to claim the status of literature for a huge body of writing that had rarely if ever made it into an academic library, despite having been produced for nearly a century."

If buying the book was a culmination, reading this was truly the anti-climax. It has made me wonder if my Masters degree had closed some doors for me even as it had opened others.

My internal angst aside, the book delivers on its cover’s promise of entertainment. Detective fiction, love stories of the Mills and Boons brand, science fiction, social messages and supernatural thrillers-each short story contributes to a rather heady cocktail. The stories, originally penned in colloquial Tamil, have been collected from serialised stories in weekly magazines and the cheap glossy-covered novels that you would find stacked in roadside tea stalls. The selection spans half a century-from the late 1960s to the present and most of the writers are evidently household names amongst many Tamilian families. The collection also throws in interviews of the writers and the cover pages of the original publications, which make for a delightful insight into popular entertainment of the yester years. As I read the book, I could almost picture my aunts and uncles in their younger days, eagerly scrambling each week to find out what happened to their favourite characters-hurricane Vaij, Shankarlal, Jeeva or Susheela.

For me, the success of the book is in its translation. Chakravarthy manages to keep alive the Tamilian identity of the characters, while making the stories accessible to the wider English-reading audience. And in the rather twisted scheme of things, this seems to reflect my own state of limbo between the two languages that define my identity! Salman Rushdie in his Imaginary Homelands perhaps says it best:

“Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”