Mid-sixties Madras: A schoolgirl is seduced by the lusty serials in the weeklies stacked under the back seat of her school bus. They belong to Natraj, the driver. Turn of the century Chennai: A young mathematician is frustrated by an unquenchable thirst for the ten rupee novels on the rack of his neighbourhood chai stand. He cannot read them in Tamil.
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| Rakesh Khanna and Kaveri Lalchand, the two directors of BLAFT |
Pritham K. Chakravarthy remembers her mother concealing the impious popular fiction, avidly if furtively read by the adults of their traditional household, little knowing what her daughter was helping herself to on her long bus rides to school. When it was time for college and she no longer took the school bus, Chakravarthy turned to more ‘serious stuff’. Two and a half decades later, she was tempted to return to the fiction of her childhood by Rakesh Khanna; yes, that compulsive man of numbers, the tea drinker, lost without translation. Khanna, together with his wife Rashmi Devadasan and friend Kaveri Lalchand, had set up an idiosyncratic publishing house called BLAFT.
The Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction translated by Chakravarthy would be BLAFT’s first publication – just the thing for people like Khanna who’ve always wanted to read between the transfixing (and titillating) covers of Tamil bestsellers. And for Chakravarthy who’d grown up to become a scholar, theatre artist and activist, it was like coming home: “I used to think of this as my literature. I still do. I just took a vacation from it.”
The anthology, edited by Khanna, spans 40 years and includes ten stories from seven prolific and best-selling writers across the genres: science fiction, crime, romance. Its cover of a bewitchingly beautiful bespectacled woman with a finger on the trigger of a gun is explicit about its contents: MAD SCIENTISTS! HARD-BOILED DETECTIVES! VENGEFUL GODDESSES! MURDEROUS ROBOTS! SCANDALOUS STARLETS! DRUG-FUELLED LOVE AFFAIRS! Chakravarthy chose to include an excerpt from a serialized story which she was not allowed to read as a child: En Peyar Kamala (My Name is Kamala) by Pushpa Thangadurai, is fiction based on extensive interviews with sex workers. Another story in the compilation which would have been forbidden is Sweetheart, Please Die! written by Pattukottai Prabakar, who has been writing detective fiction since the 1980s. He begins the story by inviting the reader to be an accomplice in a ‘minor transgression’ – reading the personal diary of a young girl called Madhumitha.
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| Some of their publications |
But BLAFT is not just about the pulp fiction regularly consumed by millions of Indians. It also publishes experimental fiction, pulp art and graphic novels. Charu Nivedita, whose Tamil novel Zero Degree was translated into English by BLAFT, was K. Arivadhagan in a previous incarnation. He was a writer of religious works who turned agnostic and radicalized his writing both in form and content. Zero Degree has been described as ‘transgressive fiction’. It includes telephone sex, love poems, letters to a daughter, South American revolutionaries, Rwandan genocide and a multiple choice test: “Muniyandi says it is not worth reading this novel without first reading Masoch and Marquis de Sade. Do you agree? Yes [ ] No [ ].”
Kuzhali Manickavel’s Insects are Just like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings is an extraordinary collection of thirty-five short stories – sad yet funny, illogical yet insightful, graceful yet taut:
“I love the way they talk, don’t you?” said Amala.
“Who?”
“Sri Lankan Tamils. It’s like they are trying to sing but their voice never quite takes off.”
BLAFT discovered Manickavel on the internet and defines her writing as irreal. G.S. Evans, the co-editor of Cafe Irreal elaborates on it: “In an irreal story … not only is the physics underlying the story impossible ,.. but it is also fundamentally and essentially unpredictable (in that it is not based on any traditional or scientific conception of physics) and unexplained.”
Moonward, a dark graphic novel by Appupen, shows the evolution of a world that is not unlike our own, a world that can only extend moonward because it is losing ground and its people are losing their minds. It combines fantasy with commentary on the human condition and the destruction of worlds, like crumbling or melting cheese. And yes it’s also about food and the lack of it: “Ananthabanana chanted praises to himself in order to conquer his hunger.” Moonward also explores isolation and boredom, metamorphosis and the possibilities for survival. Appupen is the pen name of artist George Mathen who paints, draws cartoons, tattoos and plays drums in the Bangalore based band Lounge Piranahs.
BLAFT’s publications have also extended to translations from the Hindi. Surender Mohan Pathak’s The 64 Lakh Heist, first published in 1977 and reprinted over 15 times, is about a man who never wanted to get involved in a heist but got roped in. Heroes, Gundas, Vamps & Good Girls is a collection oversize postcard of the covers of Hindi pulp fiction ranging from social drama to horror. The images are by A.M. Siddiqui a.k.a. Shelle who created the cover designs for an estimated 4,000 books. (You can’t really blame him for losing count, can you?) In another postcard book titled Times New Roman & Countrymen Vishwajyoti Ghosh merges classified advertisements in the Indian press with declassified Hindi film visuals. Exploring sexuality and other taboos is very much part of Chennai-based artist Natesh’s superbly produced book of bold ink drawings titled When This Key Sketch Gets Real Tongue is Fork Hen is Cock When This Key Sketch Gets Real My Baby Eagle's Dream Comes True.
Ki Rajanarayanan’s Where are you going you monkeys? is a collection of folktales from Tamil Nadu illustrated by Trotsky Marudu. The book includes a chapter of ‘naughty and dirty’ tales tied up in a red ribbon to deter children from reading them. Rajanarayanan found himself freed up to speak as he wished: “When I first published these stories in popular weekly magazines, several editorial atrocities had to be committed. It was impossible to publish the exact words of the storyteller as recorded. This was, in a way, a loss to the Tamil language itself.”
BLAFT works out of the Madras Terrace House which Kaveri Lalchand, one of its directors, set up. It’s a beautifully renovated old building with space for artistic expression - art exhibitions, film screenings and poetry readings are regular events. Lalchand is upbeat about the positive response the offbeat BLAFT has had from the press. They are extending their list of writers and expanding their distribution network: “We’ve made contact with writers instantaneously on the internet and sometimes travelled for days to reach one.” Kaveri Lalchand will be at the Galle Literary Festival this month to relate the adventures of setting up and running BLAFT.
Wondering what BLAFT means? I’d forgotten to ask when I met the two directors so decided to first look up the urban dictionary. It provided several options: To punch in the chest was one. Cute, clever, mischievous, rebellious, furry, or some combination thereof was another. An email to Khanna and he suggested I use this: A Blaft is a member of an extinct family of cirripede crustaceans which lived in the early Permian era. Not at all furry. And I know he provided a different explanation to another journalist: Take a 20 kg weight and drop it on a pomegranate. What you hear is ‘blaft’. He did say though that they deliver a different definition every time someone asks.
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