08-05-2025
Review of Tamil: The Best Stories of Our Times edited by Perundevi
In Tamil: The Best Stories of Our Times, editor Perundevi has curated an arresting anthology that captures the pulse of Tamil society — its aspirations, agonies, transitions, and triumphs — over the last 30 years.
This volume gathers 22 stories from some of Tamil literature's most acclaimed voices, including Jeyamohan, Perumal Murugan, Ambai, S. Ramakrishnan, and Charu Nivedita. Brought into English by a team of six skilled translators — N. Kalyan Raman, G.J.V. Prasad, Suchitra Ramachandran, Nandini Krishnan, Janani Kannan, and Yashasvi Arunkumar — the stories unfold with an elegance that preserves the soul of the original while making them accessible to a wider audience.
What's striking is not just the literary strength of each story (some of them are vignettes), but the sheer range of voices and experiences they encapsulate. There is absurdity and anguish, quiet humour and explosive pain, wistfulness and rebellion. The characters, shaped by rural and urban Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka as much as by the dislocations of the diaspora (Canada and Paris), navigate their shifting worlds with a blend of stoicism, defiance, and vulnerability. These are not just stories from Tamil Nadu — they are stories from the Tamil mind, echoing across geographies and generations.
Challenging boundaries
Perundevi, a distinguished poet and academic, brings both rigour and intimacy to this volume. Her editorial vision stems from a deeply felt curiosity about how literature intersects with lived experience. As she states, the stories were chosen to highlight how the modern animates contemporary Tamil life — how globalisation, technology, urbanisation, and political churn leave their imprints not only on bodies and cities but also on minds, relationships, and language itself.
Indeed, the 'modern' here is not a distant or abstract force but a deeply felt, frequently disruptive presence. In the hands of Jeyamohan, it becomes a question of moral depth and human limitation as an elderly fragile man is sought by a family to offer deliverance from the curse of his incarceration. Perumal Murugan's story, as always, is suffused with emotional intelligence, capturing the embarrassment over the blouse-less breasts of the family's matriarch.
Aravindan's ironical take on the ambivalence of public decency and private desires, and the testicular trauma in Shobasakthi's story as a metaphor for political asylum and erasure of human empathy, are as political as they are poetic. Charu Nivedita's voice remains provocative, challenging the very boundaries of form and dignity, while S. Ramakrishnan offers stories rooted in landscape.
The translators, each with their own linguistic sensibility, manage the challenging task of staying faithful to tone and cadence while crafting fluent prose in English. N. Kalyan Raman, perhaps the most recognised name in Tamil-to-English translation today, brings a particular deftness to rendering idiom and silence. G.J.V. Prasad and Suchitra Ramachandran lend a literary confidence to their selections, while younger voices like Janani Kannan and Yashasvi Arunkumar ensure that the next generation of Tamil translators is in good hands.
Power of regional literature
What emerges from this confluence of writer, translator, and editor is a rare thing — a collection that is at once deeply local and profoundly universal. Whether it is a woman reflecting on her fractured marriage and rape, a migrant confronting alienation in a foreign land, or a child struggling with inherited humiliation and hunger, these stories feel uncannily familiar, even to readers far removed from Tamil culture. And therein lies their strength: the power to transcend place and dialect, and to map, as Perundevi puts it, 'important contours of the human condition'.
For readers new to Tamil literature, this book is a generous and exhilarating introduction. For those already familiar with its literary legacy, the volume affirms what they have long known — that some of the finest fiction being written in India today comes from its regional languages, offering respect for India's literary multiplicity.
In the Indian publishing landscape, short stories written originally in Indian English often struggle to find acceptance, despite the form's global resurgence. However, a notable exception emerges when short fiction is translated from regional languages. The bhasha counterparts — via translation — are positioned as literary artefacts worthy of preservation and wider dissemination. In the end, Tamil: The Best Stories of Our Times reminds us of a fundamental truth: that the best stories, regardless of language, illuminate the shared spaces of our lives.
The reviewer is the author of Temple Tales and translator of Hungry Humans.
Tamil: The Best Stories of Our Times Ed. Perundevi Harper Perennial ₹399
