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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
Will Blaft Peter Out? Will Blaft Pan Out?
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| We read the first Tamil Pulp Fiction for novelty. The second time around we’d have liked either a feast of reason or a flow of soul. |
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Published : 1 October 2010 |
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| The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction – Volume 2
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| A |
LL PUBLISHING HOUSES eventually grow up and face
the real world. (Some, indeed, start out sere and yellow.)
The longer the youthful enthusiasm lasts, the
more interesting the books are going to be. There is always,
these days, something called ‘the bottom line’ whose thrall
is ineluctable. It grows larger, until it consumes the vision;
its basilisk
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eye, its threat of chill penury, represses the publishers’ noble page, freezes the genial current of their souls. Then they no longer do what they want, but what they think readers want. Then the marketing boys and girls take over, and bye-bye happiness.
| ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF BLAFT PUBLICATIONS |
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Slave Girl, author/artist unknown,
Rani Comics, April 1994
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Blaft began with a bang two years ago, with an Anthology
of Tamil Pulp Fiction. It was well received, as it deserved
to be. For my sins, a quote from my review in the Deccan
Herald is among those that proclaim the second volume:
“As we draw near the end of 2008, I see this anthology as possibly the most significant contribution to Indian writing
this year.”
There are wasted words there, but I hold by it. It is in the
hope that not all those words are wasted that I track Blaft’s
journey. Two years later, Tamil Pulp Fiction II is on the
stands, and it’s a good time to take stock.
There is an essential paradox to Blaft’s translations of
the fiction available at tea shops and railway stations. The
original products are devoured by literate people, but seldom
by those who set a value on literature. Their readers
are often those who cheer Rajini and Vijay and ‘Captain’
Vijayakanth and Chiranjivi from the cheap seats. Or they
are housewives with little else to do in the long afternoons,
or travellers with a couple of hours to kill and no interest in
improving their minds. These are stereotypes, but fitting to
the subject.
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Ten Murders by the Demon by
Manohar, cover painting by Ganesan |
The translations, though, are for an immensely more
sophisticated class of reader. These readers are the Anglo
types, familiar with British and American pulp writing
of the last 75 years, but who do not limit their reading to
such fiction. These readers, at best, know Modesty Blaise and Philip Marlowe; think Agatha Christie pap and know
Sherlock Holmes to be exquisitely stylish pap. They know
there is no pulp in the US or Britain anymore, except for
pulp porn. There are no dime novels, no penny shockers.
Publishing is too expensive; there’s money in the market.
They also perhaps know that John W Campbell, along with
the writers he nurtured in the 1930s behind lurid covers of
slimy monsters molesting bosomy blondes, produced what
are now considered classics of science fiction.
(There is another, more localised brand of reader for the
translations, the Kalki-and-Hindu types, who have probably
brushed up against Tamil pulp before. Or their parents
have. They enjoy the Blaft version differently, for it’s all familiar
to them, and evokes a pleasant sense of long ago and
far away. I belong, more than a little, to both camps.)
First-generation Indian readers of English do not read
Blaft. They’re often in the IT racket, on the fringes of technology
and management. It’s difficult enough for them to
keep up with textbooks or how-to-do-better books. If they
can, they get into Chicken Soup. Chetan Bhagat and his ilk
have been a great boon for them: they have access to literature, and it’s cheap.
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Curse of the Rock Angel
by Ilaiyaraja. |
What the Anglo reader expects from pulp is not entirely
what the Tamil reader does. The Tamil reader is, on average,
satisfied with thrills. Rajesh Kumar, in an interview in
Tamil Pulp I, claimed higher accolades:
What is the message I have in my crime stories? ‘He
who sows evil will reap the punishment.’ We are creating
awareness among the public here. I seriously think
we should be awarded the Gnanapeet and Sahitya
Academy Awards’
[Sic—and it’s a measure of how far out of the mainstream
the Blaft people are that they used these spellings.]
Alas, medium counts, sometimes for more than message.
The consumer of Indian pulp now seeks a certain standard
of writing, of technique and of reason: detective work. (Cultural
differences, of course, make for variations in writing
and technique.) The weak point in Blaft’s project, it seems
to me, lies in the last—the part played by reason.
I have a collection of pieces that Raymond Chandler
wrote for US pulps in the 1930s. He only published the first
of his acclaimed novels in 1939, and he cannibalised many
of his shorter pieces for his longer works. The 30s pulps—in
both crime and science fiction—were, at the time, generally
treated with disdain by literary people. That is, they had
much the same place on the scale as Tamil and Hindi pulps
have held in the last 30 years. Few saw the quality of Hammett
and Chandler—who are as seminal as Hemingway and
dos Passos.
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Karate Kavitha shows what she’s capable of, even when tied to a chair in Highway 117. |
Chandler’s stories are full of gore, and sex is just behind
the curtains. The same can be said of Tamil and Hindi pulp.
Indian pulp, of course, has much religion, religious superstition and tradition. Little of it seeks to be revolutionary in
a social context. You could say Hollywood takes the place of
religious myth in Chandler’s stories, which are set around
Los Angeles. But the chief difference between Anglo and
Indian pulp, it seems to me, is the part played by logic, and
logical reasoning.
This is seen in our films as well. The worst-made Hollywood
B and C films generally stick to some logical pattern.
There is a storyline which follows the thread of deduction so
dear to post-Renaissance Western man. Our films are very
often intuitive, even when they are inductive or deductive.
They rely on coincidence, on sentiment; not reason. Thus,
it is an axiom in our romances that brothers separated at
birth must come together again. In Amar Akbar Anthony
they do so by the accident which causes them all to donate
blood to their injured mother.
Even in the ‘offbeat’ Bombay films which have won such
praise lately, there are often great gaps in plot which could,
you’d think, be bridged without strenuous effort by the
writer and director. Apparently, they don’t much matter.
This is also the mindset of those who write the Tamil pulps,
because it’s the attitude of those who consume them.
| T |
AMIL PULP II begins with a long novel (162 pages) by
Indra Soundar Rajan, who also had a 40-page story
in the first volume. His forté is the myths and folk
traditions of the Tamil country, and the earlier story was
an improbable, woman-takes-rebirth-for-revenge yarn.
This one, ‘The Palace of Kottaipuram,’ is about a royal family
whose male heirs all die
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before the age of 30. The clan had been cursed, a century ago, by a wronged woman. The deaths, however, turn out to be the work of some of the palace servants, oppressed by the rulers for generations.
‘Kottaipuram’ is one of Soundar Rajan’s greatest hits,
which is saying something. It first appeared in weekly
doses, so it pauses for breath at critical moments. But you’d
have to be a Tamil of the Tamils, rooted in the land, to enjoy
it—precisely because it loses its magic outside its own
medium. And while this 1990 novel is politically correct,
standing up for women and Dalits, Soundar Rajan cannot
eschew the tricks of his trade: “As her moped bumped over
the potholes, her ripe breasts jiggled like a collection box.”
‘She,’ here, is the heroine, whose love for the last heir
enables her to foil the dastardly plot. Beginning the volume with this relentlessly involved story was a mistake. We feel
no sympathy for either the doomed prince or for the conspirators.
It’s an effort to read on.
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Cover for The Ghost Puja, a ‘chilling mystery novel’ by
‘the master of ghost stories’ PD Sami, published by Novel
Magudam (Novel Mask) circa 1970. Artist unknown. |
‘Highway 117,’ a graphic story, is a misnomer. There’s no
highway; 117 is the number of a train. Here, Karate Kavitha
and an archaeologist, Umesh, solve a case of temple-idol
robberies. The story is infantile—“Are you Karate Kavitha?”
“How did you know?” “Your bag says so.” —and so is the
art. Umesh loses his mustache in one panel, grows it back in
the next. There is a cheap tit-show thrown in. Many Blaft
readers, I should think, have grown up on Marvel and DC.
They’d laugh at this. What worries me, too, about stories
like this and ‘Kottaipuram’ is how the police are only there
in the final scene, just as in the films. More of that later.
‘The Hidden Hoard in the Cryptic Chamber’ has a cop for
a hero, but he’s mostly there to catch the swooning heroine
in his arms. Here we have a mad doctor who breeds monsters.
The next two stories, ‘Hold on a Minute, I’m in the
Middle of a Murder’ and ‘The Bungalow by the River’ play
the supernatural card, only ‘sub-natural’ is perhaps more
apt. There’s little in them to raise hairs. If there’s no feast
of reason, a flow of soul should make up for it, but that’s
lacking too.
Rajesh Kumar is in the running for the world’s most published author. He had a clutch of stories in Tamil Pulp I,
which were dazzling in their range and inventiveness. His
‘Hello,  Dead Morning!’ is a proper, well-made detective
story with the police doing the detection and the ends
neatly tied. The late Resakee’s ‘Sacrilege to Love,’ like his
story in the first volume, is a satire on the romantic mores
of Tamil society. But these two alone, at the end, cannot
quite balance the deadweight of 444 pages out of 511. At
495 rupees, this is a book to be borrowed, not bought; to be
snacked on, not swallowed whole.
| T |
HE PEOPLE AT BLAFT are good people with interesting
minds. Rakesh Khanna edits maths books and
educational websites—among other things. Kaveri
Lalchand runs a boutique, designs clothes and holds events—
among other things. Pritham Chakravarthy, who has translated
both volumes, is an activist and a performer—among
so many other
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things. They have a passion for finding the hitherto untrumpeted and publishing it. They’re not in it for the money. But there’s always that bottom line.
Tamil Pulp I sold extremely well. Lalchand says college
students bought it. Those interested in pop culture bought
it. Those in the US whose grandparents read Tamil magazines
bought it. Americans who are not NRIs were also interested,
and the Blaft people have a hunch there’s a good
market out there. The stories were discussed at New Delhi parties, and no doubt also in Mumbai, Kolkata and Bangalore.
And certainly Chennai and Kochi.
So the market is among the sophisticated—the Anglos, as
I’ve called them. Tamil Pulp I was a stunner—no one knew
it was out there. Readers expected better from the second
book, not more—or, rather, less—of the same. The first time
you buy it for rarity value. The next time, you are already
blasé; you know all about it and lecture your friends. The
emphasis in this book is on the mysterious and supernatural,
but there, among readers who’ve got over the first
shock, you’re competing with The Omen and Stephen King.
In crime, you might not get as good as the Swedes have of
late, but you should at least outdo Christie. (Give up hope of
Chandler.)
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The Palace of Kottaipuram.
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Police procedure is what solves most crimes. A crime
writer who ignores this fact and makes the cops out to be
bumblers is not being true to life. Poe and Conan Doyle created
the myth of the gifted amateur. Émile Gaboriau, being
a Frenchman, was actually very sound on what the Préfecture
does, but the English ignored his model. Chandler said,
with tolerant contempt, something like, “I don’t know how
the English police put up with these fellows. The boys in my
town would give them a bad time.” Unfortunately, Indian
writers take their models from Britain instead of from Ed
McBain or, what would be better still, Indian crime and the
Indian police.
The Anglo readers want logic. They want suspense. When
you start out with the premise that a Chennai college student
is the reincarnation of a village heroine murdered 18
years earlier, you know she’s going to win. And you have
to believe in stuff like that to read it. Even if you’re keen on
pop culture, once is quite enough.
For the Blaft people, unless they want to become strabismic
from looking at the bottom line all the time…no, they’ll
do that anyway. But it’s time to be more discerning—to discriminate,
in every sense of the word. What works well in
Tamil will only work in English if it suits a certain formula,
which publishers have not yet discovered. To adapt a line
from a James Bond film, “The first time it’s shock value, the
second time it’s mildly ticklish, the third time it’s a yawn.”
Readers intrigued by the discovery of what works in Tamil
won’t come to the lure again. Blaft’s foray into Hindi pulp
ended suddenly, for reasons that aren’t pleasant. They’re
still keen on pulp fiction from other languages, but they
must be very, very careful.
They have published other genres than pulp fiction, as
their catalogue shows. Short stories, a graphic novel, cinema
art, folk tales—all offbeat and very much in need of
the sophisticated market Blaft gives them. The market, the
Indian reader, also badly needs to know these books exist.
Most of them haven’t been reviewed in the journals I get up
north, and I ordered a raft of them when I visited Chennai.
The catalogue shows a dozen books. In two years, that’s not
bad going. And their production standards are very high. I
must say, though, that Tamil Pulp II had too many editorial
lapses.
It’s a tough racket, publishing. That’s why I’ll stick to
writing about it. And I’ll cheer Blaft from the sidelines.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Gambhir Samasya
25 January 2011
04:58 PM
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I can safely say that I have never read a more patronising and blinkered article in my life thus far.
I read 'literature' however vijay wants to define it. I also read pulp. And I learn equally from both.
I fear he has projected his own 'intelluctual' outlook and his way of learning, perhaps, onto an entire population.
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