Indian Genre Fiction

Pasts and Future Histories

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, Anwesha Maity

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367479138
• eBook ISBN: 9780429850905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This volume maps the breadth and domain of genre literature in India across seven languages (Tamil, Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Odia, Marathi and English) and nine genres for the first time. Over the last few decades, detective/crime fiction and especially science fiction/fantasy have slowly made their way into university curricula and consideration by literary critics in India and the West. However, there has been no substantial study of genre fiction in the Indian languages, least of all from a comparative perspective. This volume, with contributions from leading national and international scholars, addresses this lacuna in critical scholarship and provides an overview of diverse genre fictions.

Using methods from literary analysis, book history and Indian aesthetic theories, the volume throws light on the variety of contexts in which genre literature is read, activated and used, from political debates surrounding national and regional identities to caste and class conflicts. It shows that Indian genre fiction (including pulp fiction, comics and graphic novels) transmutes across languages, time periods, in translation and through publication processes. While the book focuses on contemporary postcolonial genre literature production, it also draws connections to individual, centuries-long literary traditions of genre literature in the Indian subcontinent. Further, it traces contested hierarchies within these languages as well as current trends in genre fiction criticism.

Lucid and comprehensive, this book will be of great interest to academics, students, practitioners, literary critics and historians in the fields of postcolonialism, genre studies, global genre fiction, media and popular culture, South Asian literature, Indian literature, detective fiction, science fiction, romance, crime fiction, horror, mythology, graphic novels, comparative literature and South Asian studies. It will also appeal to the informed general reader.

Part I

Emergence of distinctions

1
Literary and popular fiction in late colonial Tamil Nadu

Preetha Mani

The literary and the popular

An unprecedented distinction between literary and popular writing emerged in debates published in Maṇikkoṭi and Āṉanta Vikaṭaṉ, two well-known Tamil magazines that were launched in the 1930s. Through short stories and critical essays, the writers who contributed to these magazines attempted to create new lenses through which to view the purpose of literature in society. Maṇikkoṭi writers championed ‘high-quality’ literary writing (taramāṉa ilakkiyam), which they considered necessary for examining everyday reality and creating social change. Conversely, Vikaṭaṉ writers – particularly writer and editor R. Krishnamurthy ‘Kalki’ – promoted ‘comedic writing’ (nakaiccuvai ilakkiyam or hāsiya ilakkiyam) as the most appropriate medium for addressing Tamil readers’ contemporary needs. These differing viewpoints created a steadfast divide between high modernist and entertainment-oriented literature in the late colonial literary sphere that continues to impact writing trends in Tamil Nadu to this day.

The Maṇikkoṭi-Vikaṭaṉ literary debates took shape in the context of significant developments in the Indian independence movement as well as a moment of heightened contention over regional language and caste politics. Gandhi’s Salt March (1930) had incited unprecedented nationalist fervour in a young generation of Tamil writers, but his retraction of satyagraha in 1933 left many of them disillusioned and in search of political alternatives. The Pure Tamil Movement (Taṉi Tamiḻ Iyakkam) and the Self-Respect Movement (Cuya Mariyātai Iyakkam) – which had already gained traction in the Tamil-speaking region in the 1920s – advanced staunchly anti-nationalist positions in opposition to Gandhi and the growing influence of the Indian National Congress (INC). These movements pitted Dravidian ethnicity against the dominance of Brahminism and North Indian Sanskritic culture, which they regarded as foreign and imperialistic.¹ When the INC came to power in the Madras presidency in 1937, its pro-Hindi position further incited Dravidian activists, who advocated for a pure Tamil language and culture unadulterated by Sanskrit and English influences. Unsettled by such political divisiveness, Maṇikkoṭi and Vikaṭaṉ writers – most of whom were Brahmins – turned to literature as a means for cultivating new forms of Tamil community on the basis of shared humanistic values.

This essay explores critical writings and short stories from Maṇikkoṭi and Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ to illustrate how Tamil writers created new genres of ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ modern fiction during the 1930s. Scholarship on Indian modernism has outlined its chronological development in relation to international modernist movements, social changes wrought by colonialism and nationalism and other pan-Indian literary trends such as realism and progressivism. Recently, Supriya Chaudhuri has marked 1922 – when the first Bauhaus exhibition was held in Calcutta – as a formative moment for Indian modernism. She argues that the inclusion of Bengali artists’ works in the exhibit, and not the Bauhaus paintings themselves, ‘initiate a modernist idiom’, which ‘must be seen as a radical liberation of narrative art from naturalistic representation’ in the Indian context.² Similarly, Vinay Dharwardker has described 1922 to 1945 as a modernist phase of ‘nationalism and experimentation’, during which Indian writers – most of whom were familiar with European modernist trends – explored urban-rural relations and the place of the individual in the future nation.³ While Chaudhuri and Dharwadker note that ‘local and communitarian’ aesthetic and socio-political concerns fundamentally shaped modernist trends in various Indian languages, they sideline these concerns to present a more general ‘panoramic survey’ of Indian modernism.⁴ The Maṇikkoṭi-Vikaṭaṉ debates demonstrate, however, that extremely localised, intimate conversations profoundly influenced the trajectory of Tamil modernism. The literary/popular distinction that these debates established situates Tamil modernism at a tangent to Chaudhuri’s and Dharwadker’s characterisations of late colonial Indian modernism as preoccupied with anticolonialism and nation building. The politics of modernism in Tamil Nadu centered instead on inculcating readers with new aesthetic sensibilities that were aimed at diffusing regional contentions regarding linguistic and caste affiliations.

The national-modern dialectic

Geeta Kapur’s 1991 theorisation of Indian modernism, still the most widely accepted model in contemporary scholarship, informs Chaudhuri’s and Dharwardker’s nod to the role of local social landscapes in the development of Indian modernisms.⁵ Responding in the early 1990s to scholarly representations of Third World modernism as peripheral to European modernism, Kapur argued that the discourse of modernism in India is marked by a dialectic between the national and the modern. In her view, the national, represented in art through references to local landscapes and ‘folk’ (indigenous, tribal, or village) issues and motifs, draws from and celebrates Indian ‘tradition’. The modern, which references Euro-American modernist trends, stands, in contrast, for an international style that is transnational and universal in scope. Constantly shifting between the two, Kapur’s understanding of Indian modernism manifests as a paradoxical ‘double-take’, which sometimes ‘serves to make indigenous issues and motifs progressive’ and other times ‘seems to subvert . . . nationalism’.⁶

Seemingly at odds, the national and the modern converge, according to Kapur, ‘on the question of self-determination’.⁷ Indian modernist works imagine the subject through an intricate confluence of references to Indian tradition and international style, through which they ‘answer an emergent [postcolonial] society’s need for renewed self-description and radical assessment’.⁸ The contradictory ways in which these convergences manifest – for example, by anachronistically positioning an ‘indigenous preindustrial realm’ as a contemporary possibility – integrate the specific social and economic circumstances of the Indian context with the globally recognisable ‘rebel figure’, the privileged subject of international modernism.⁹ In doing so, Indian modernism offers, in Kapur’s view, a structurally distinct counter-practice to the elitism of Anglo-European modernism.

Kapur valourises the national – as opposed to the local or regional – because she wishes to challenge the centre-periphery model of international modernism, which subordinates regional aesthetic criteria to Western artistic ideals. She contends that ‘from the point of view of cultural resistance to global pressures . . . the discourse of national culture is preferable to that of regional culture for the reason that nationalism is not a devolving concept – though indeed it can be a bigoted one’. Unlike regions, nations ‘cannot easily be swallowed whole, only tribe by tribe – which leaves the question begging how nations themselves swallow their own peoples tribe by tribe’.¹⁰ Thus, while Kapur acknowledges the drawbacks of nationalism as well as the persistent presence of the region in Indian modernist practices, she situates local ‘folk’ issues and motifs under the broad category of ‘Indian tradition’, which presents a complex whole that counters international style. Chaudhuri and Dharwadker similarly conceive of Indian modernism as national style, which they view as taking shape under uniquely Indian social and historical conditions and as a critique of colonial domination.

Like the Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, and Indian-English modernists that Kapur, Chaudhuri, and Dharwadker all describe, Maṇikkoṭi and Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ writers were also driven by the question of self- determination. Yet, their writings did not focus on drawing connections between selfhood and nationhood – the primary relationship undergirding Indian modernism in Kapur’s national-modern framework. Rather than developing national style, these writers used representations of the maverick individual to consider the relationship between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ Tamil fiction. Through their depictions of individual desire and will, Maṇikkoṭi and Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ writers explored how fiction and criticism might align readers with their respective literary worldviews. At issue in their disagreement over the literary and the popular was the possibility of wielding literature to construct new types of Tamil readers and communities. In the highly-charged political atmosphere of late colonial Tamil Nadu, their modernist experiments must be understood, I believe, as a response to regional caste and linguistic dissension – rather than as focused on developing and advancing pan-Indian nationalism per se.

The emergence of Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi

By the 1920s, Pure Tamil and Self-Respect Movement activists had effectively tapped into the power of journals to build new constituencies around their Dravidianist agendas. Maraimalai Adigal, Saivite reformer and leader of the Pure Tamil Movement, worked closely with the South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society (established in 1920) and wrote prolifically in recently established Saiva Siddhanta magazines of the period to propagate his vision of Tamil language, history, and culture.¹¹ Similarly, Periyar ran several Dravidian magazines connected with the Self-Respect Movement as well as the Justice Party, which he led from 1938 to 1944. He also wrote about the importance of establishing Dravidian magazines to counter Brahmin hegemony of the Tamil press, supporting all non-Brahmin magazines that emerged during the 1930s and 1940s – even those not affiliated with his movement.¹² According to Periyar, Brahmin publishers, magazines, and newspapers ignored non-Brahmin concerns and skewed the reading public towards Hinduism and Brahmin patriarchy and politics. Creating a Dravidian-run press was necessary, he believed, for cultivating and politicising a counter non-Brahmin identity. As greater alliances developed between Pure Tamil activists and Self-Respecters in the 1930s – especially regarding language politics – Saivite and Self-Respect journals combined their efforts to promote essays on their shared anti-Hindi and anti-Brahmin viewpoints and to support each other’s cultural and political activities.¹³

Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi emerged in this atmosphere of shifting power dynamics within the Tamil publishing sphere towards non-Brahmin social and political interests. When S.S. Vasan bought Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ in 1928, it was a fairly new and rather unsuccessful magazine that featured comedic writings about mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationships, minors visiting courtesans and devadasis, domestic mishaps in Brahmin households, and humourous incidents that poked fun at various caste and religious communities. These largely stereotypical scenarios were paradigmatic of comedic writing that was published in specialised magazines from the 1880s onwards and garnered a relatively small audience. Vasan’s cardinal accomplishment was the creation of new columns and sections, such as ‘Vikaṭaṉ Talk (vikatan pēccu)’, ‘Small Amusements (ciṉṉañciṛi tamāṣ)’, ‘Women’s Talk (peṇ moḻikaḷ)’, and a column for readers to send in their own experiences entitled ‘Readers’ Comedies (nēyarkaḷ vikatam)’. These features enabled Vasan to appeal to a wider audience, transforming Vikaṭaṉ into the most popular magazine of the period. In 1930, Vasan hired R. Krishnamurthy ‘Kalki’ (1899–1954), whose short stories and essays brought even greater renown to the magazine.¹⁴

Vasan’s business savvy and openness to new genres enabled Vikaṭaṉ to gain popularity. However, it was Kalki’s witty approach to and deep investment in the journal medium that established hāsiya ilakkiyam, or humourous literature, as a major genre of contemporary Tamil writing. Several of his essays used comedy to explain how magazines operate. For example, in ‘Poṭu Pattirikai! (Go Ahead, Start a Magazine!)’, published in Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ in 1934, Kalki offered advice to an imaginary inquirer wishing to start a magazine of his own. Ironically suggesting that the inquirer’s circumstances made him a less-than-ideal magazine editor in the journal world, Kalki impressed upon readers how prolific and effective for amassing readers the journal medium was:

You wrote and sent a hundred essays to magazines, and all of them were returned without being published . . . Brother! At a time when a new era of journals pervades Tamil Nadu, I have to say that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Indian genre fiction – languages, literatures, classifications
• Part I Emergence of distinctions
• Part II Postcolonial reassertions
• Part III Genres in the 21st century
• Index