Contemporary Tamil Literature 101
The sun can set as late as 8.26 PM in the Boston summer.
That evening my mind refused to wind down well after the darkness had set in. The pandemic had upended so many lives in so many ways – a slightly disrupted circadian rhythm was the very least of it. Perhaps YouTube would do the needful? A thumbnail with a familiar face appeared in the sidebar: Bharathy Bhaskar. Recognizing the ever smiling, sharp‑tongued debater of Tamil network television, I clicked that link.
What I heard was not the voice of rhetoric flourishes and clever takedowns. In a quieter, but no less authoritative voice, she read a short story by Sujatha Rangarajan, a prolific writer whose name is practically a genre in Tamil. The title of that story was Oru Sikkal Illadha Kadhal (An Uncomplicated Romance). The plot involved two friends, residents of a medical college hostel: one, a confident, good-looking woman; the other, a good student who has not yet developed a sense of self-worth.
Immediately, I was transported to Sarayu, the only ladies’ hostel on campus during my college years in IIT, Madras. The incredulity of the less sought-after girl when the watchman announces that she has a visitor, her loneliness, or the fact that she feels like an orphan simply because she is away from home – all of it felt so real. At the height of her despair — almost at the verge of suicide — the budding physician saves another life even with her limited experience. Immediately, she finds her purpose. She has begun to love herself, which Oscar Wilde would have told her is the beginning of a lifelong romance. Sujatha’s addition is that it is the most uncomplicated romance there is.
Somewhere between the watchman announcing a visitor and the plain-looking protagonist realizing that she really did not need the attention of feckless young men – I understood that something unusual was happening. What had appealed to me was not the bland nostalgia of it. It wasn’t even just the pleasure of hearing, in my mother tongue, a contemporary story I could relate to though yes, there was some of that. Here was the feeling of being read to by someone who took both you and the story seriously.
The Bharathy Bhaskar who appeared in those online storytelling sessions, was quieter, more deliberate, and, to my mind, far more radical than her television debater persona. Then format was deceptively simple. Each session began with a brief author introduction. No long‑winded biography. Just enough context to place the writer in time and space: T. Janakiraman, known as Thi. Ja, English teacher turned All India Radio employee, would have been a hundred that year. R. Chudamani, a pioneering feminist voice, had lived largely as a recluse because of a medical condition. Sujatha Rangarajan, a scriptwriter for Tamil hit films, needed no introduction, but she gave him one anyway, as if to say: even the familiar deserved to be properly seen.
And then she would read. She did not “perform” the story. No exaggerated voices, no theatrical sobs, no winks at the camera. Her laughter was there, but it never drowned out the joke. Her voice tightened at moments of tension, but it did not crack. She refused to compete with the text. Instead, she did something rarer: she trusted the power of literature. That trust was contagious. Listening to her, you began to trust the story too — to stay with it through a meandering opening, to follow it into a small town along the Cauvery, into a second‑class train compartment, into a cramped city hostel. You began to trust yourself as a reader again — even if you could read Tamil prose only haltingly, even though you spoke the language well enough. To me the script itself had become — oh, I will say it — mini jalebis intricate enough to bring on a headache!
Week after week, Bharathy Bhaskar came back with some of the best that Tamil literature had to offer.
One evening, it was Thi. Ja’s Silirpu (Goosebumps) 1953, set in a second‑class compartment on a long‑distance train. A young domestic worker, barely ten, was on her way to Calcutta to care for a judge’s children. The world had not been kind to this girl, a wage earner for her family. But her fellow passengers — strangers bound together for a few hours in that shared space — feel a tug of sympathy. A little boy shyly offers her his prized orange as a parting gift. His father, watching this small act of grace, is moved. When they step off the train, he picks up his son and hugs him close. Listening, I felt my eyes moisten. Didn’t we all, at some level, long for our parents to recognize our hidden — or apparent — good qualities and celebrate us?
Then there was R. Chudamani. The first story of hers that I heard through Bhaskar had all the melodrama of a black‑and‑white Tamil film from the 1960s: two brothers estranged by class, income, and the influence of their wives are reunited by a crisis. Annanin Azhaipu (The older brother’s invite) was a satisfying weepie — the kind of story that leaves you wrung out and oddly cleansed. But the next Chudamani story was something different. Its ending was so out of step with the era in which it was written, I found myself sitting up in bed. In fact, I had to replay the ending a couple of times to make sure I had heard correctly. I was in the presence of a woman who wrote without flinching, and another was unafraid to read a radical story out loud.
What made this a master class in Tamil literary appreciation, for me was this: The woman never told you what to think of a story. Instead, she offered one or two observations — a non‑obvious structural choice, a line of dialogue that revealed more than it said — a quiet act of rebellion tucked into a domestic scene — and then she stepped aside. The story continued to work on you long after the video ended. You found yourself thinking about a ten‑year‑old girl on a train, the contaminated pot of sambar, about two brothers who finally remembered how to be brothers. She was lending her powerful voice to the greats.
Contemporary Tamil literature has sometimes reached the mainstream through cinema. We knew the names of some writers because their stories became films, their dialogues became punchlines, their characters became archetypes. But the work that made them worth adapting to screen or won them invitations to scriptwriting — the short stories, the quiet novels, the experiments that never made it to the screen — could remain scattered, inaccessible, or simply overshadowed. She was leading some of us back to the source. In some cases, like that of Chudamani’s, you do have to wonder why the author’s stories never got a screen adaptation.
For someone like me, whose relationship with Tamil had been shaped by distance — geographical, linguistic, emotional — the reading meant more than I could admit. With Bharathy Bhaskar’s help, I could inhabit Tamil stories as a listener first, and later as a reader. Moved by her reading, I even began my first translation.
Sometimes, I imagined her in the moment before she hit “record”: a stack of books nearby, a story chosen, a few notes scribbled about the author. The stage lights were off. The auditorium and live applause both absent. All she had was a camera lens and the faith that somewhere, on the other side of it, there were people who wanted to be read to in their own language.