Tamil pulp fiction, with its scandalous starlets and hardboiled detectives, arrives in pacy English translation. The publishing house even solves the mystery of an enigmatic authorBrajanand v.k. submits crime fiction in envelopes with no return address to various publishing houses in Chennai. He is a writer that no one seems to have met. His writing, however, is part of Tamil crime and spy fiction that lines the tea stalls of small towns and cities and accompanies passengers on trains and buses. The mad scientists, hardboiled detectives, vengeful goddesses, murderous robots, scandalous starlets and drug-fuelled love affairs have filled the pages of these novels for years, but they were accessible only to those who could read Tamil. That is where the hero of our story steps in — a brand new publishing house with a name that raises a few eyebrows — Blaft. They have just released The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction (edited by Rakesh Khanna, Rs 395).It features 17 stories by 10 best-selling authors of popular crime, romance and science fiction, none of which has ever before been translated into English, along with reproductions of wacky cover art and question-and-answer sessions with some of the authors. The publishing house is the brainchild of three people — Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, who has been working with filmmaker Gautham Menon since his debut Minnale; her husband Khanna who came to Chennai from Berkeley a decade ago and works as editor-in-chief of an e-learning website; and their friend Kaveri Lalchand, an apparel manufacturer and fashion designer. “We are from Chennai and have always found these books at tea stalls fascinating. It was Rakesh who said people should be reading that stuff. But none of us could read Tamil and we would ask our driver to translate the titles,” says Lalchand. “We started it as a project just a year and a half ago.” The person who has finally translated it all for the trio is Pritham K. Chakravarthy, a theatre activist who was translating academic books and was finally pleased to have something fun to work with. It is a funny name. The first half sounds like a Punjabi boy’s name and the other half is reminiscent of a Bengali surname but the person is a south Indian woman. “When we were going through the books, there was so much to choose from as we went all the way back to 1967. We spoke to people who worked on these tales and tried to select stories from different genres,” says Lalchand. In the translator’s note, Chakravarthy says, “As a schoolgirl in mid-sixties Chennai, I grew up on a steady diet of Anandha Vikatan, Kumudham, Dhinamani Kadhir, Thuglaq, Kalaimagal. These magazines were shared and read by all the women at home. There were other publications, less welcome in the traditional household, with more glamourous pictures and lustier stories. These we would regularly purloin from the driver of our schoolbus, who kept a stack of them hidden under the backseat. I doubt he knew the active readership he was sponsoring on those long bus rides.”Though there is a huge Indian audience, there is also a sizeable expat readership interested in books of this kind, says Khanna. In fact, he is looking at the US and Canada. “We are still a young company and are having fights with the distributors about where the book should be available. We already have copies in Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi, but there have been some problems with the books reaching Mumbai. I will be leaving for New York, California and Toronto soon. I hope the Indian readers out there like the book. There is a huge Sri Lankan population in Toronto, maybe they will also love Tamil pulp fiction.”Blaft has plans to translate Urdu and Bengali crime fiction. “Well, we would like to get in touch with some writers of Urdu and Bengali spy novels. I would love to get the rights to the works of the prolific Urdu writer Ibn-e-Safi,” says Khanna. “He was famous 40-50 years ago. He would write about India and all the villains were goras. The Bengali spy novels that we are looking at are from Bangladesh.”But as they search for new languages to translate, there was one case the publishing house had to solve. On page 325 of the anthology, along with the story A Murder and a Few Mysteries by Brajanand V.K., there is a paragraph about the author. And its last line reads, “The editor of this volume encourages the author to come forward and contact the publisher.”On June 6, Brajanand V.K. contacted Blaft. “We were so excited. He is all of 18 years old and has been writing for the last three years. His father corrected us, saying his name is actually Prajanand. The boy lives in Coimbatore and it was his father who used to post his stories to publishing houses! We hope to meet him soon. We are holding a party for all the authors who could not make it to the launch in Chennai.”Blaft has thus solved the case of the unknown author. And as it plans to have translations of writings in south Asian languages, comic books, graphic novels, children’s books, non-fiction, textbooks, how-to manuals, encyclopaedias, and kitchen appliances, all one can say to high-brow, English-literature lovers out there is “Mind it!”
