The
Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction
Blaft Publications 2008
Web: http://www.blaft.com
Pulp
fiction is a term used in the west for cheap paperback novels which were genre
based primarily within detective, romance,
horror and science fiction fields. They were common in the mid twentieth
century and marked by all manner of excess, filled to the brim with action, sex
and strange plots. The term pulp came from the cheap paper that they were made
from. Their origin was in the vast number of cheap pulp serial magazines which
were popular from the 1920s to 1950s.
When
I think of Indian literature or Tamil, I don’t immediately think of pulp
fiction and yet that is perhaps because as a Westerner I have a certain “exotic”
view of Indian literature and do not see its breadth or depth. This book
certainly changed my mind ! By the 1950s, it seems, Tamil Nadu had its own pulp
literature. Pritham K. Chakravarthy in “Tamil Pulp Fiction” notes that these
novels were, ‘printed on recycled sani paper and priced at 50 paise a copy,’
she continues“ 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.”
The
Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp fiction offers for the first time in English a
great selection of Tamil Pulp fiction tales and what great tales they are ! On
the back of the book we are told these tales include “Mad Scientists,
hard-boiled detectives, vengeful goddesses, murderous robots, scandalous
starlets and drug fuelled love affairs” – sounds alright to me ! There are
seventeen tales by ten of India’s bestselling authors and they are a damn good
read. Certainly to fit them into a single volume they are relatively short and
as they are translated by a single individual, the tone all seems much the same
and perhaps misses some of the nuances of each author, but that is a trifle. We
are in luck just to have an opportunity to read such tales ! It also includes some
sixteen pages of colour covers from the books in the centre of the book.
This
is a very unusual anthology and one which offers a very different take on pulp
fiction and is worth making the effort to get hold of.
(If
you have trouble finding a copy, it is available via Amazon.com)