Will Blaft Peter Out? Will Blaft Pan Out?

ALL PUBLISHING HOUSES eventually grow up and face the real world. (Some, indeed, start out sere and yellow.) The longer the youthful enthusiasm lasts, the more interesting the books are going to be. There is always, these days, something called ‘the bottom line’ whose thrall is ineluctable. It grows larger, until it consumes the vision; its basilisk eye, its threat of chill penury, represses the publishers’ noble page, freezes the genial current of their souls. Then they no longer do what they want, but what they think readers want. Then the marketing boys and girls take over, and bye-bye happiness.

Blaft began with a bang two years ago, with an Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction. It was well received, as it deserved to be. For my sins, a quote from my review in the Deccan Herald is among those that proclaim the second volume: “As we draw near the end of 2008, I see this anthology as possibly the most significant contribution to Indian writing this year.”

There are wasted words there, but I hold by it. It is in the hope that not all those words are wasted that I track Blaft’s journey. Two years later, Tamil Pulp Fiction II is on the stands, and it’s a good time to take stock.

There is an essential paradox to Blaft’s translations of the fiction available at tea shops and railway stations. The original products are devoured by literate people, but seldom by those who set a value on literature. Their readers are often those who cheer Rajini and Vijay and ‘Captain’ Vijayakanth and Chiranjivi from the cheap seats. Or they are housewives with little else to do in the long afternoons, or travellers with a couple of hours to kill and no interest in improving their minds. These are stereotypes, but fitting to the subject.

The translations, though, are for an immensely more sophisticated class of reader. These readers are the Anglo types, familiar with British and American pulp writing of the last 75 years, but who do not limit their reading to such fiction. These readers, at best, know Modesty Blaise and Philip Marlowe; think Agatha Christie pap and know Sherlock Holmes to be exquisitely stylish pap. They know there is no pulp in the US or Britain anymore, except for pulp porn. There are no dime novels, no penny shockers. Publishing is too expensive; there’s money in the market. They also perhaps know that John W Campbell, along with the writers he nurtured in the 1930s behind lurid covers of slimy monsters molesting bosomy blondes, produced what are now considered classics of science fiction.

(There is another, more localised brand of reader for the translations, the Kalki-and-Hindu types, who have probably brushed up against Tamil pulp before. Or their parents have. They enjoy the Blaft version differently, for it’s all familiar to them, and evokes a pleasant sense of long ago and far away. I belong, more than a little, to both camps.)

First-generation Indian readers of English do not read Blaft. They’re often in the IT racket, on the fringes of technology and management. It’s difficult enough for them to keep up with textbooks or how-to-do-better books. If they can, they get into Chicken Soup. Chetan Bhagat and his ilk have been a great boon for them: they have access to literature, and it’s cheap.

What the Anglo reader expects from pulp is not entirely what the Tamil reader does. The Tamil reader is, on average, satisfied with thrills. Rajesh Kumar, in an interview in Tamil Pulp I, claimed higher accolades:

What is the message I have in my crime stories? ‘He who sows evil will reap the punishment.’ We are creating awareness among the public here. I seriously think we should be awarded the Gnanapeet and Sahitya Academy Awards’

[Sic—and it’s a measure of how far out of the mainstream the Blaft people are that they used these spellings.]

Alas, medium counts, sometimes for more than message. The consumer of Indian pulp now seeks a certain standard of writing, of technique and of reason: detective work. (Cultural differences, of course, make for variations in writing and technique.) The weak point in Blaft’s project, it seems to me, lies in the last—the part played by reason.

I have a collection of pieces that Raymond Chandler wrote for US pulps in the 1930s. He only published the first of his acclaimed novels in 1939, and he cannibalised many of his shorter pieces for his longer works. The 30s pulps—in both crime and science fiction—were, at the time, generally treated with disdain by literary people. That is, they had much the same place on the scale as Tamil and Hindi pulps have held in the last 30 years. Few saw the quality of Hammett and Chandler—who are as seminal as Hemingway and dos Passos.

Chandler’s stories are full of gore, and sex is just behind the curtains. The same can be said of Tamil and Hindi pulp. Indian pulp, of course, has much religion, religious superstition and tradition. Little of it seeks to be revolutionary in a social context. You could say Hollywood takes the place of religious myth in Chandler’s stories, which are set around Los Angeles. But the chief difference between Anglo and Indian pulp, it seems to me, is the part played by logic, and logical reasoning.

This is seen in our films as well. The worst-made Hollywood B and C films generally stick to some logical pattern. There is a storyline which follows the thread of deduction so dear to post-Renaissance Western man. Our films are very often intuitive, even when they are inductive or deductive. They rely on coincidence, on sentiment; not reason. Thus, it is an axiom in our romances that brothers separated at birth must come together again. In Amar Akbar Anthony they do so by the accident which causes them all to donate blood to their injured mother.

Even in the ‘offbeat’ Bombay films which have won such praise lately, there are often great gaps in plot which could, you’d think, be bridged without strenuous effort by the writer and director. Apparently, they don’t much matter. This is also the mindset of those who write the Tamil pulps, because it’s the attitude of those who consume them.

TAMIL PULP II begins with a long novel (162 pages) by Indra Soundar Rajan, who also had a 40-page story in the first volume. His forté is the myths and folk traditions of the Tamil country, and the earlier story was an improbable, woman-takes-rebirth-for-revenge yarn. This one, ‘The Palace of Kottaipuram,’ is about a royal family whose male heirs all die before the age of 30. The clan had been cursed, a century ago, by a wronged woman. The deaths, however, turn out to be the work of some of the palace servants, oppressed by the rulers for generations.

‘Kottaipuram’ is one of Soundar Rajan’s greatest hits, which is saying something. It first appeared in weekly doses, so it pauses for breath at critical moments. But you’d have to be a Tamil of the Tamils, rooted in the land, to enjoy it—precisely because it loses its magic outside its own medium. And while this 1990 novel is politically correct, standing up for women and Dalits, Soundar Rajan cannot eschew the tricks of his trade: “As her moped bumped over the potholes, her ripe breasts jiggled like a collection box.”

‘She,’ here, is the heroine, whose love for the last heir enables her to foil the dastardly plot. Beginning the volume with this relentlessly involved story was a mistake. We feel no sympathy for either the doomed prince or for the conspirators. It’s an effort to read on.

‘Highway 117,’ a graphic story, is a misnomer. There’s no highway; 117 is the number of a train. Here, Karate Kavitha and an archaeologist, Umesh, solve a case of temple-idol robberies. The story is infantile—“Are you Karate Kavitha?” “How did you know?” “Your bag says so.” —and so is the art. Umesh loses his mustache in one panel, grows it back in the next. There is a cheap tit-show thrown in. Many Blaft readers, I should think, have grown up on Marvel and DC. They’d laugh at this. What worries me, too, about stories like this and ‘Kottaipuram’ is how the police are only there in the final scene, just as in the films. More of that later.

‘The Hidden Hoard in the Cryptic Chamber’ has a cop for a hero, but he’s mostly there to catch the swooning heroine in his arms. Here we have a mad doctor who breeds monsters. The next two stories, ‘Hold on a Minute, I’m in the Middle of a Murder’ and ‘The Bungalow by the River’ play the supernatural card, only ‘sub-natural’ is perhaps more apt. There’s little in them to raise hairs. If there’s no feast of reason, a flow of soul should make up for it, but that’s lacking too.

Rajesh Kumar is in the running for the world’s most published author. He had a clutch of stories in Tamil Pulp I, which were dazzling in their range and inventiveness. His ‘Hello, Good Dead Morning!’ is a proper, well-made detective story with the police doing the detection and the ends neatly tied. The late Resakee’s ‘Sacrilege to Love,’ like his story in the first volume, is a satire on the romantic mores of Tamil society. But these two alone, at the end, cannot quite balance the deadweight of 444 pages out of 511. At 495 rupees, this is a book to be borrowed, not bought; to be snacked on, not swallowed whole.

THE PEOPLE AT BLAFT are good people with interesting minds. Rakesh Khanna edits maths books and educational websites—among other things. Kaveri Lalchand runs a boutique, designs clothes and holds events—among other things. Pritham Chakravarthy, who has translated both volumes, is an activist and a performer—among so many other things. They have a passion for finding the hitherto untrumpeted and publishing it. They’re not in it for the money. But there’s always that bottom line.

Tamil Pulp I sold extremely well. Lalchand says college students bought it. Those interested in pop culture bought it. Those in the US whose grandparents read Tamil magazines bought it. Americans who are not NRIs were also interested, and the Blaft people have a hunch there’s a good market out there. The stories were discussed at New Delhi parties, and no doubt also in Mumbai, Kolkata and Bangalore. And certainly Chennai and Kochi.

So the market is among the sophisticated—the Anglos, as I’ve called them. Tamil Pulp I was a stunner—no one knew it was out there. Readers expected better from the second book, not more—or, rather, less—of the same. The first time you buy it for rarity value. The next time, you are already blasé; you know all about it and lecture your friends. The emphasis in this book is on the mysterious and supernatural, but there, among readers who’ve got over the first shock, you’re competing with The Omen and Stephen King. In crime, you might not get as good as the Swedes have of late, but you should at least outdo Christie. (Give up hope of Chandler.)

Police procedure is what solves most crimes. A crime writer who ignores this fact and makes the cops out to be bumblers is not being true to life. Poe and Conan Doyle created the myth of the gifted amateur. Émile Gaboriau, being a Frenchman, was actually very sound on what the Préfecture does, but the English ignored his model. Chandler said, with tolerant contempt, something like, “I don’t know how the English police put up with these fellows. The boys in my town would give them a bad time.” Unfortunately, Indian writers take their models from Britain instead of from Ed McBain or, what would be better still, Indian crime and the Indian police.

The Anglo readers want logic. They want suspense. When you start out with the premise that a Chennai college student is the reincarnation of a village heroine murdered 18 years earlier, you know she’s going to win. And you have to believe in stuff like that to read it. Even if you’re keen on pop culture, once is quite enough.

For the Blaft people, unless they want to become strabismic from looking at the bottom line all the time…no, they’ll do that anyway. But it’s time to be more discerning—to discriminate, in every sense of the word. What works well in Tamil will only work in English if it suits a certain formula, which publishers have not yet discovered. To adapt a line from a James Bond film, “The first time it’s shock value, the second time it’s mildly ticklish, the third time it’s a yawn.” Readers intrigued by the discovery of what works in Tamil won’t come to the lure again. Blaft’s foray into Hindi pulp ended suddenly, for reasons that aren’t pleasant. They’re still keen on pulp fiction from other languages, but they must be very, very careful.

They have published other genres than pulp fiction, as their catalogue shows. Short stories, a graphic novel, cinema art, folk tales—all offbeat and very much in need of the sophisticated market Blaft gives them. The market, the Indian reader, also badly needs to know these books exist. Most of them haven’t been reviewed in the journals I get up north, and I ordered a raft of them when I visited Chennai. The catalogue shows a dozen books. In two years, that’s not bad going. And their production standards are very high. I must say, though, that Tamil Pulp II had too many editorial lapses.

It’s a tough racket, publishing. That’s why I’ll stick to writing about it. And I’ll cheer Blaft from the sidelines.