Of Tamil Thoughts and English Novels

In the winter of his life R K Narayan allowed me to make his acquaintance.

I consider it a rare honour that has come my way ever. He had turned 90- “It’s just a number, nothing to celebrate”, he had remarked with his trademark detached amusement when I wished him then. He shared his time and space between his granddaughter’s house in T.Nagar and his son-in-law’s flat in Alwarpet until he passed in 2001 in Chennai.I would visit him at the ground floor Alacrity flat on Eldam’s Road to chat with him at odd intervals.

Narayan belongs to the group of pre-Independent writers in English in India who along with Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand paved the way for modern Indo Anglo fiction that is witness to much glamour, huge advances and literary accolades these days. For someone from his age and time Narayan, who had failed to clear his English exams, did not have second thoughts about writing in English though he had lived and schooled in then Madras and was born into a Tamil family. It seemed natural for him to write and express his ideas in a language that was ‘foreign’ but that which he chose to make his own. He never made Tamilness an important identity in his works and it was not Madras, but the fictional town of Malgudi that was the setting in his fiction.

There is much debate over how Indian writing in English has managed to seek attention from the English-speaking Western world thereby negating the fund and mine’s worth of vernacular writing in Indian languages. A recurring question pertains to how authentic and ‘Indian’ urbanized, elitist, upper class Indian writers are in mirroring an unequal society such as ours through their English novels. As also the niggling discomfit about their inclusion of translations and an index of vernacular words as if to pander to a Western audience’s easy acceptance. Nararyan lived in those times when his literary stature rose without the accruements of today’s literary advances and hooplas or compromises.

However a steady stream of authors in English since the 1990s has managed to give volume of a body of work from the land of the Tamils. David Davidar, Penguin editor has managed to trace his roots back to the south-he hails from Thoothukudi-in his two novels, The House of Blue Mangoes (2002) and The Solitude of Emperors (2007). Lesser known authors like Suguna Iyer in her The Evening Gone has managed to capture a bygone era of a group of Tamil scientists and the oppressive family life of upper class Tamil women trapped in tradition. It has fine sentiments but has gone unnoticed. Cauvery Madhavan, a copywriter from a Madras-based advertising agency, set up home in Ireland and produced a couple of novels. Paddy Indian, her first was about multiple identities set in 1987 and recently The Uncoupling (2003) is about a middle aged couple, the Shankers, whose marriage comes to a test during a holiday in Europe. Githa Hariharan has some reknown though her Tamilness is hardly a component of her body of her works.

Bangalore-based Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet 2005 was critically acclaimed. It was a series of short stories on accomplished and upper class Tamils living in Bangalore as part of the early IT boom. SriVidya Natarajan’s breezy laugh-riot, No Onions Nor Garlic released in 2006 is a witty satire on Madras and its denizens. Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Generation 14 on cloning set in the 24th century is a little known sci-fiction published this year. There have been many that have gone unnoticed among the authors from Tamil Nadu in English including a young relative of Narayan TS Tirumurti whose Clive Avenue can best be described as dull and drab. Timeri Murari is an old Madras resident whose last work The Small House (2007) is equally disappointing devoid of colour and juice. Kalpana Swaminathan, though not living in Chennai, is a physician whose whodunits and her sleuth, the maami Lalli, are interesting and intriguing.

I just finished reading Anu Jayanth’s The Finger Puppet ( 2008). It is a fine novel of revisiting a homestead of the 1960s in the town of Tiruchirapalli. Its protagonist is a 13-year-old girl with a speech impediment and her struggle within to combat her disability. It is a family of little women, the talented elder sister, the incoherent and wounded middle sister, and the youngest- fiesty and acerbic led by the loving and long suffering mother. The group is lorded over by the father, a brutal male Anglophile patriarch, who has pretensions of modernity.

Perhaps there’s hope for more from the small tribe of Tamil authors writing in English, to come with something more, perhaps a big novel of ideas. Literary parlour gossip indicates that Chennai based dancer, poet Tishani Doshi’s debut novel The Pleasure Seekers will be soon out and is touted as a big number. Chennai based Tulsi Badrinath’s Melting Love will be out soon and has been shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize as is Kavery Nambisan’s The Story that Must Not be Told.

Hopefully Madras or Chennai’s day on the literary map in Indian fiction in English is sure to come.

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