Book title: Blaft’s Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction Volume II
Publisher: Blaft
Price: Rs. 495/-
If you, like me, judge a book by its cover, you’d own this one by now. A woman with long, curly hair decorated with jhumkis and jasmine flowers, draped in a white translucent sari and staring out at you with long-lashed eyes on either side of a black pottu, calmly sips blood from a skull.
However, if your leanings are more intellectual than impulsive, you’d look at three parameters while rating a translated work – the quality of the original story, the smoothness of the translation and the production value of the book.
From a samasthanam on the outskirts of Madurai where a family of maharajas rules and loses its heirs mysteriously, to hideous monsters raised by scientists, to women addicted to ‘blue films’, to bloodthirsty ghosts, the collection has enough pulp to keep you turning the pages, half-curious and half-amused.
Pritham K. Chakravarthy excels as a translator. She is fastidious in her selection of which words to retain in the original Tamil, which to replace with equivalents and which to translate literally. Translation is successful when you either find it hard to imagine the book was not originally written in English, or when you feel the texture of the original and forget it is a translated work. Pritham’s technique is the latter.
While she prunes out the crudeness and vulgarity of the vernacular, one can still hear the dialogues as if they were spoken in Tamil. Except for a letter from M K Narayanan, one of the writers featured in the anthology, the translation is near-flawless. The best thing about it is that the stories don’t lose their flavour, albeit a rather pungent one.
Yes, pungent – because, while we feel the thrill of pacy narration, sadly, Indian pulp writing is way below par. It’s acceptable for one to take liberties with reality; but artistic licence does not cover amateur writing. We can laugh at them, but never with them. And little wonder, if vernacular pulp writers are churning out works at the rate they are.
For instance, a writer featured in this collection, Rajesh Kumar, has a bid under review by the Guinness World Records for writing nearly 1500 crime novels. Even over a period of fifty years, that’s thirty novels a year! How much time can one spend on writing and editing in ten days? That probably explains why he believes women can get so addicted to pornography and so turned on by it that they will seduce mechanics who land up at their homes to fix the air-conditioner.
Indumathi’s ‘Hold on a minute, I’m in the middle of a murder’ is gripping, but disappoints with its clichés. The imagination involved has the promise of potential, but it hasn’t been honed, perhaps for lack of time. The result is a story that would make you go “aww!” if a child in Class 6 came running up to show you his or her first piece of detective fiction/ horror writing, but you’re left wondering why it merited publication in its present form.
Lines like “As an old man who had seen the world, he realised that Padma and Kadiravan must be under the influence of some evil spirit” (from M K Narayanan’s ‘The Bungalow by the River’) and “She was drawn to him by his competency in computers and other electronics. He in turn was attracted by her beauty and her sharp brain” (from Resakee’s ‘Sacrilege to Love’) cannot hope for empathy from a reader whose IQ is not in single digits.
Pulp need not mean trash. But a story where a brother, who brings up his sister and beats up wastrels who hound her, is rewarded by his sister falling in love with someone who plans to kill him with the sister’s approval really doesn’t qualify as good writing.
The woman-power trip in Tamil fiction is good fun, but again, women who go “if I don’t solve this, my name is not Archana!” or insist on riding a motorbike (instead of a scooter) because “I am Karate Kavitha, aren’t I?” are comical rather than inspiring (at least, one would hope so). The dialogue is reminiscent of old box office hits we like to snigger at, and the predictability is straight off the ‘megaserials’ manufactured for the entertainment of bored housewives.
Most of these writers fall into the bracket of the self-appointed guardians of Tamil culture, who take digs at women wearing ‘tight jeans’ and T-shirts that show off their curves, but will, nevertheless, devote six pages of a graphic novella to a heroine running around with an…ahem…wardrobe malfunction (as in ‘Highway 117’ by Pushpa Thangadorai.)
The book is important not so much for the quality of the stories as to start a debate on whether popular entertainment can’t be more refined. Resakee makes a start, by writing an alternative ending ‘for die-hard romantics’.
Two-year-old Blaft’s efforts to stir up interest in unlikely genres are commendable. And the production value of their books is excellent, while their daring innovations have been hugely successful. The publishers have laboriously dug up hilarious book covers and advertisements, which provoke a touch of nostalgia for a long-gone childhood even as you double up laughing over them.
Reasons to pick up this book: the three-hour long Subramaniyapuram is summarised in six lines; the tone of the stories reminds you of why Rajkumar’s ‘Eef you come today’ and ‘Lowe me or leawe me’ (which features Mees Mawlothy) are such huge hits on YouTube; the archived material used is invaluable; you’re guaranteed at least a hundred pages of laughs.
Reasons not to pick up this book: pulp horror scares you; you’d like to think modern writing in Tamil ended with Bharathiyar and Kalki.
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