‘Tamil: The Best Stories of Our Times': Tamil modernity, a field of tensions between past and future

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6 days ago

In Tamil: The Best Stories of Our Times, editor and scholar Perundevi brings together 22 short stories by some of the most acclaimed voices in contemporary Tamil literature, including Jeyamohan, Perumal Murugan, Salma, and Imayam. The stories carry the sediment of caste, class, gender, and postcolonial legacies in their syntax, their silences, and their small rebellions.
The editor's introduction traces the Tamil short story's genealogy from its Manikodi-era roots in the 1930s to the hyper-realistic, genre-bending work of the present day. She invokes Pudumaippithan's idea of suchumangal – the 'subtler aspects of life' –and sets the tone for the stories to follow. What I've always liked about Tamil fiction is how they're not outright wrapped in moral clarity and, instead, find their meaning in the more minor contradictions of society, family, and life. They refuse to be indulgent character studies and instead are very matter-of-fact in asking the numerous, seemingly heavy-handed questions they do. How does a woman's worth become entangled in her womb? How is a tailor's pride interwoven with a worn-down sewing machine? More importantly, they all seem to ask the same question of how identity – ethnic, religious, and gendered – splinters in the echo chamber of diaspora and memory.
Confronting social forces
The variety of narratives that Perundevi has chosen reflects the editor's disinterest in sticking to only one particular undertone within a social subject. It's not just a woman's distress; it's also class and caste that come into play. Many of these stories confront large social forces – patriarchy, religious orthodoxy, and neoliberalism. But they're not overly didactic, and they couldn't afford to be, since they stirred up masses and had a significant impact on readers.
A favourite of mine was JP Sanakya's 'The Rules of the Game' in Janani Kannan's translation. Its opening is visceral, and plays out as a scene from a film: a woman, pregnant from gang rape, becomes a figure of familial shame rather than sympathy. What the editor also comments on, in the introduction, is that the story refuses to follow the traditional victim arc and instead overturns the trope on its head with the protagonist quietly resolving to shove her elbows to crawl from her own societal, protective bubble. However, we see the trope handled in a sensitive way in Imayam's 'Heartbreak', also translated by Kannan, with the protagonist constantly giving the benefit of the doubt to her husband when he starts misbehaving with her after their time together as a married couple violently progresses ahead without a child.
Another quietly explosive story is Devibharathi's 'The Tool of His Trade', translated by N Kalyan Raman, which is very similar to the Marathi film Lathe Joshi, directed by Mangesh Joshi. Like Joshi, the protagonist here is rendered obsolete by changing times. His tailoring tool is not just a physical object; it is the crux of his dignity, his history, and his self-worth. The story echoes a broader theme whose vein runs through the anthology, along with others: how technological, social, and political changes subtly displace the working class, often without offering anything to replace what is lost.
What I also appreciated about the collection is how the stories balance realism with allegory, even magic realism, without losing political urgency. In Keeranur Jakirraja's 'The Saga of Butchery', translated by Raman) a man sacrifices a camel on Bakr-Id to stand out, only to be haunted – literally – by its severed head. 'Hussain knew that the weapon of last resort was always money and that it had no substitute,' the narrator remarks, a line that captures the tragic comedy of class aspiration. The translator effectively brings out the stink of camel meat, which, quite poetically, could be taken to reflect the stink of class aspirations that haunt the protagonist, much like the camel. The writer merges the grotesque with the satirical and gives us a story about masculine pride and performance (or performance pressure) in the face of 'giving your word' to society.
Elsewhere, magic realism turns poetic. In Perumal Murugan's 'The Blouse', translated by Raman, an elderly village woman refuses to wear a blouse at her son's wedding, despite her family's attempts to civilise her into 'respectability.' The moment she relents, a blouse-induced cyst grows under her armpit 'as big as a newborn's head.' 'She imagined the blouse as a hacksaw that would cut off all the fingers of her daily activities,' Murugan writes.
Like 'The Saga of Butchery', several stories examine the fragility of male identity within modern structures of power. In Aravindan's 'Screening', translated by Yashasvi Arunkumar, a man's polite, self-effacing demeanour hides an internal crisis that erupts when he voices a desire considered too crude for public discussion. 'Whether it was anger or desire, he had long learnt to lock it away inside himself. After so many years of such discipline, what kind of disgrace was this?' the protagonist wonders. The story unfolds like a psychological thriller, using silence and suggestion to critique a social order that rewards restraint but punishes emotional honesty.
The eyes of the beholder
At their heart, many of these stories return to questions of how we are seen and how that gaze reshapes the self. Latha's 'Cheenalatchumi's Queue', translated by Kannan, is set in Singapore, and reclaims diasporic Tamil womanhood from both Western racial hierarchies and intra-community casteism. The protagonist rejects the derogatory name 'Cheena Latchumi' and insists on being seen on her own terms.
The translations throughout the collection are on the whole excellent. Raman's translations stand out for their clarity and precision, while Kannan captures the inner rhythm of women's emotional landscapes with restraint and empathy. As a collective effort, I think the translations maintain fidelity to Tamil idioms and cadence without overwhelming the English narrative with excessive gloss. However, I would've liked a tiny glossary at the end to better understand the lesser-known Tamil terms. As somebody who is entirely unfamiliar with the language, some of the specific references were a little opaque to me, especially sensitive terms like yov.
Finally, I'd like to add I find it refreshing that Preundevi's anthology does not aim to represent Tamil identity in any fixed or homogeneous way. Instead, it offers something more valuable: a recognition of Tamil modernity as a field of tensions between past and future, caste and class, men and women, language and silence. The anthology, like the literary tradition it emerges from, offers no easy resolutions.