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Sand and Other Stories
This book is a translated collection of 3 novellas, spanning three decades of Ashokamitran s work. The stories are about women trapped by an almost absolute lack of resources (financial, intellectual and emotional). The narrative in all three novellas moves in a series of short scenes, building tension with a relentless layering of detail. The exploitation of these women and their daily struggle against it is exposed in all its terrifying ordinariness. The stories have all the identifiable characteristics of Ashokamitran s writing irony, interiority, sensitivity.
Today
Ashokamitran's Today - translated from his Tamil novel Indru is anavant garde departure from traditional forms of writing. The novelstrings together a number of genres such as narrative fiction, poetry,lectures and a newspaper interview to produce a rare amalgam of fictionand recent history.The condition of freedom fighters in free India, social evils like dowry,corruption and crass commercialism, institutions like marriage andpolitics are highlighted as problems that occupy centre stage today. Theperiod chosen for such delineation is immediately before and after theimposition of a national emergency by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.Anger, persecution, lack of compassion and tolerance find theircounterpoint in a father figure perhaps a veiled reference to the Fatherof the Nation whose dreams lie shattered in the present.Today is also for all time. Its concerns are universal, its people are offlesh and blood. It raises serious questions about the validity of the valuesystems governing our lives increasingly complex world. It is withoutdoubt a trailblazer in post modern Tamil literature.
The Eighteenth Parallel
As he negotiates friendships with Tamils like himself, Muslims, Anglo-Indians and girls, and struggles to make sense of peaceful Hyderabad's violent accession to the Indian Union, the horrors wreaked by the Nizam's Razakars, the communal riots, and World War II.
The Ghosts of Meenambakkam
One dark and stormy night, Dalpathado unexpectedly crosses paths with the narrator at Meenambakkam airport. The faceless, middle-aged man from Dalpathado’s past is there mourning the unexpected death of his daughter in a plane crash. After they spend a dangerous night in each other’s company, lashed by rain and reminiscence, neither man remains the same. Ghosts of Meenamkbakkam is a meditation on the violence that detonates human lives and the idea of love that endures all mayhem, even in death.
Fourteen Years with Boss
Reminiscing of a time long lost, Fourteen Years with Boss gives a delightful insight into the workings of the Gemini Studios of Madras—one of the most influential film-producing organizations in India—and its founder, the brilliant and multifaceted S. S. Vasan. Filled with vivid sketches of actors, extras, directors and the ‘boss’, Ashokamitran recreates life at the studio so that it materializes in the reader’s mind with the perfect balance of humour and nostalgia.
Mole!
The fictional events narrated in Mole! an English translation of Otran, a novel by Ashokamitran take place within a period of seven months, nearly all of them in the American Midwest. The narrator, a culturally rooted writer from Chennai, is transplanted amidst a motley group of fellow-writers from distant parts of the world, all of them as dangerously dislocated as him. Deprived of the language that has brought them fulfillment and distinction, these writers struggle to retain their place of precarious honour in a strange, unfamiliar and sometimes hostile environment. And in the background looms the endearing, if exasperating, landscape of twentieth-century America. Kalyan Raman s English translation illumines the subtle, spare strength of Ashokamitran s prose.
My Years with Boss at Gemini Studios
For nearly thirty years from 1940, the Gemini Studios of Madras was the most influential film-producing organization of India and its founder, the brilliant multi-faceted entrepreneur S. S. Vasan lent substance and quality to the rather fragile and unpredictable movie business. Sahitya Akademi award-winning Tamil writer Ashokamitran worked for the Gemini Studios from 1952 to 1966. A full twenty years after Ashokamitran renounced films, poet-editor Pritish Nandy persuaded him to record his reminiscences and the result was a series of articles making up My Years with Boss.
Unseasonable
As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the distribution of beach trash in Chennai, chronicling disruptions in seasonal winds and currents along the Bay of Bengal. An essayist in the northeastern United States observes that maple sap flows earlier now, prompting him to reflect on gender and seasons of transition. Poets affiliated with small island nations arrive in Paris for the United Nations climate summit, revamping the occasional poem to attest to intensifying storm seasons across the Pacific. In Unseasonable, Sarah Dimick links these accounts of shifting seasons across the globe, tra...
The Politics of Modern Indian Language Literature
Indian literature is produced in a wealth of languages but there is an asymmetry in the exposure the writing gets, which owes partly to the politics of translation into English. This book represents the first comprehensive political scrutiny of the concerns and attitudes of Indian language literature after 1947 to cover such a wide range, including voices from the cultural margins of the nation like Kashmiri and Manipuri, that of women alongside those of minority and marginalised communities. In examining the politics of the writing especially in relation to concerns like nationhood, caste, tradition and modernity, postcoloniality, gender issues and religious conflict, the book goes beyond the declared ideology of each writer to get at covert significations pointing to widely shared but often unacknowledged biases. The book is deeply analytical but lucid and jargon-free and, to those unfamiliar with the writers, it introduces a new keenness into Indian literary criticism to make its objects exciting.
