Similarly, in the South. Sundara Ramaswamy’s collection of essays has set Tamil circles abuzz. A novelist and lapsed Marxist, Ramaswamy died a few months after his Aalumaigal Madippeedugad (Influences and Values) hit the stands but his provocative take on everything and everyone from the Shankaracharya to Jayalalitha to the Leftists and prominent writers is still raising hackles. Tamil novelist Jayamohan too came out with a series on the pioneers of modern Tamil writing—Ilakkia Munnodigal (Literary Pathfinders).
In Malayalam, too, it was the year of the short story rather than novels. Indu Menon’s collection of short stories, Oru Lesbian Pashu (A Lesbian Cow) is among the new voices in Malayalam, unusually bold and typically rife with sharp humour.
In Kannada it was Girish Karnad’s play Odakalu Bimba (Broken Images) that captured the present malaise in regional literature. The play is about an unsuccessful Kannada writer who turns into an international celebrity by writing a novel in English. But ironically, it was in Kannada that the novel refused to be overshadowed by other genres. The year yielded at least two top-rate novels: Armane (Palace) by K. Veerabhadrappa is a tapestry of narratives of life in the Bellary badlands and Thomas Munro’s struggle to bring law and order to the region. The other novel, Halla Bantu Halla (The Stream Overflows) is an accomplished debut by Shrinivas Vaidya, a family saga from the Mutiny to Independence.
