Introduction

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As a schoolgirl in mid-sixties Chennai, I grew up on a steady diet of Anandha Vikatan, Kumudham, Dhinamani Kadhir, Thuglaq, Kalaimagal and Kalkandu. These magazines were shared and read by practically all the women at home. Then there were other publications, less welcome in a traditional household, with more glamorous pictures and lustier stories. These we would regularly purloin from the driver of our schoolbus, Natraj, who kept a stack of them hidden under the back seat. I doubt if he knew what an active readership he was sponsoring on those long bus rides.

Households would meticulously collect the stories serialised in these weeklies and have them hard-bound to serve as reading material during the long, hot summer vacations. I remember the time one of the stories in this anthology was being serialised, in the mid-seventies. The journal was kept hidden in my mother’s cupboard. The subject matter was deemed too dangerous for us young girls. Since I was not allowed to read it at home, naturally, I read it on the schoolbus, thanks to Natraj.

Then came college days, my political awakening and my increasing involvement with theatre activism, during which I consciously distanced myself from reading pulp fiction and moved to more "serious stuff". Two-and-a-half decades of marriage, two daughters, many cigarettes and a lot of rum later, I got called upon to return to it. When Rakesh—a California-born, non-Tamil-speaking Chennai transplant who had developed a burning curiosity about the cheap novels on the rack at his neighborhood tea stand—approached me with the idea of doing this book, it was fun to discover that the child in me is still alive and kicking. I used to think of this as my literature. I still do. I just took a little vacation from it.

Of course, time had passed, and things had changed. The latest pulp novels were thin, glossy, ten-rupee jobs with bizarrely photoshopped covers. Actually, they weren’t new; they had been around for three decades—I just hadn’t read one yet! It took some time to catch up; I spent a year searching through library records for the most popular books, going on wild travels to strange book houses and the far-flung homes of the many different authors, artists and publishers, taking many crazy bus journeys and visiting many coffee houses, and doing a kind of pleasure reading I realised I had been badly missing for the past 30 years.

The Tamil people take great pride in speaking a living classical language, a language which had written texts even as early as the 6th century BC. Two things were necessary prerequisites for the reading habit to be spread throughout the general population. The first was printing technology, which until the early 19th century was available only for government agencies and for the printing of the Gospels. The second was education. In ancient society, education was privileged cultural capital, available to only a few caste groups. For fiction to move from the sole preserve of the "patrons of literature" into the hands of the masses took three centuries from the time when the European colonists first stepped on this soil.

Four decades after printing technology became available to more than just the state government and the missionaries, novels became a hit among the middle classes—though this new form of fiction still encountered some opposition.

The first books for popular readership, besides translations of the British literary canon, were typified by Prathaba Mudhaliar Sarithiram (1879), an ultra-moralistic Christian novel about the dangers of a hedonistic lifestyle. By the early 20th century, in a wholly separate sector of the readership, the British "penny dreadful" (and after World War I, the American dime novel) inspired another crop of Tamil authors, including Vaduvoor Doraisami Iyengar. His Brahmin detective hero, Digambara Samiar, held a law degree and a superior, casteist morality which set him apart from the gritty underworld in which his investigations took place. The criminal activity in Iyengar’s plots reflects the major issues of the era: the smuggling of foreign goods and subversive anti-British activities.

By the 1930s, popular fiction was in full swing. Here are some guidelines laid out by Sudhandhira Sangu in a 1933 article called ‘The Secret of Commercial Novel Writing’:

1. The title of the book should carry a woman’s name—and it should be a sexy one, like ‘Miss Leela Mohini’ or ‘Mosdhar Vallibai’.

2. Don’t worry about the storyline. All you have to do is creatively adapt the stories of [British penny dreadful author G.W.M.] Reynolds and the rest. Yet your story absolutely must include a minimum of half-a-dozen lovers and prostitutes, preferably 10 dozen murders, and a few sundry thieves and detectives.

3. The story should begin with a murder. Sprinkle in a few thefts. Some arson will also help. These are the necessary ingredients of a modern novel.

4. You can make money only if you are able to titillate. If you try to bring in any social message, forget it. Beware! You are not going to lure your women readers.

The understanding of pulp fiction in a Western context is based on the cheap paper that was used for detective, romance and science fiction stories in the mid-20th century. Tamil Nadu in the 1960s had its own pulp literature, printed on recycled sani paper and priced at 50 paise a copy. In the 1980s, with the advent of desktop publishing, printing in large volumes became more economical, and thin pulp novels began to appear in tea stalls and bus stations.

These modern writers churn out literally hundreds pages of fiction every month. The speed of production has the effect of making the plots somewhat dreamlike, with investigations wandering far afield, characters appearing and disappearing without warning, and resolutions surprising us from out of the blue.

Yet, for all their escapism, these works in no way leave behind the times they were created in; they contain reactions to, reflections on, and negations of what was going on. Hopefully the bouquet we’ve put together in this anthology can give the reader some sense of the madness and diversity of this flourishing literary scene.