An Aesthetics of Isolation: How Pudumaippittan Gave Pre-Eminence to the Tamil Short Story

Abstract

The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorise the relationship between literature and society in the late colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke the wider debates about tradition and modernity that these female types commonly represented without affirming the social reformist positions to which they were linked. Through the short story, Pudumaippittan dislodged his portrayals of the Indian woman from existing gender norms, prompting a shift from social realism to modernist realism within the Tamil literary sphere.

Keywords:

• Character type
• emotion
• genre
• Indian woman
• modernism
• novel
• short story
• social realism
• Tamil literature
• Tamil nationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For overviews of Pudumaippittan’s life and some of his works, see Lakshmi Holmström, ‘Making It New: Pudumaippittan and the Tamil Short Story, 1934–1948’, in Lakshmi Holmström (ed.), Pudumaippittan: Fictions (New Delhi: Katha, 2002), pp. 230–51; A.R. Venkatachalapathy, In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006), pp. 73–85; L. Bychihina, ‘Social Realism in Putumaippittan’s Short Stories’, in Journal of the Institute of Asian Studies, Vol. 3, no. 1 (1985), pp. 147–55; E. Visswanathan, ‘Puthumaippiththan’s Contribution to Modern Tamil Literature’, in Second International Tamil Conference Seminar (Madras: International Association of Tamil Research, 1968), pp. 122–9; and T.M.C. Rangunathan, Putumaippittan Varalāṟu (Pudumaippittan: A Biography), A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2015 [1951]).

2. See, for example, Pudumaippittan, ‘Kataikaḷ (Short Stories)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaipittaṉ Kaṭṭuraikal (Pudumaippittan’s Essays) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1934]), pp. 112–4.

3. For further discussion, see, for example, Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature, 1911–1956: Struggle for Freedom: Triumph and Tragedy (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1995); and Rajul Sogani, The Hindu Widow in Indian Literature (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. xiv–xvii.

4. Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 7. See also Meenakshi Mukherjee, ‘Introduction’, in Meenakshi Mukherjee (ed.), Early Novels in India (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2002), pp. xiv–xvii.

5. It could be argued that strains of modernist individualism may be found in the earlier work of V.V.S. Iyer (1881–1925), who is considered the father of the Tamil short story. For example, Iyer’s first short story collection, Maṅkaiyarkkaraciyiṉ Kātal Mutaliya Kataikal (Mankaiyarkkaraci’s Love and Other Stories), published in 1917, focuses on unrequited or tragic love between men and women, featuring the inner workings and process of self-discovery of the anti-hero. See Richard Kennedy, ‘Public Voices, Private Voices: Manikkoti, Nationalism, and the Development of the Tamil Short Story, 1914–1947’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California, USA, 1980, pp. 65–94. However, I would also add that the social realist novel remained the pre-eminent form in modern Tamil literature until the concerted efforts of Pudumaippittan and some of his contemporaries to develop the short story during the 1930s. Their work on the short story produced an unprecedented literary preference for the aesthetic exploration of individual turmoil rather than the overtly social reformist agendas advanced in social realist fiction. For discussion of the early Tamil novel, see Sascha Ebeling, Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in Nineteenth-Century South India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), pp. 205–46. For discussion of the rise of popular novels in Tamil, see A.R. Venkatachalapathy, The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012), pp. 76–98. For discussion of the development of the short story in modern Tamil, see P.G. Sundararajan and Cho. Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai: Varalāṛum Vaḷarcciyum (The Tamil Short Story: History and Development) (Chennai: Crea, 1989).

6. Pudumaippittan, ‘Ilakkiyattiṉ Uṭpirivukaḷ (Literary Genres)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kaṭṭuraikaḷ (Pudumaippittan’s Essays) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1934]), pp. 122–4.

7. Pudumaippittan, ‘Ilakkiyattiṉ Irakaciyam (The Secret of Literature)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kaṭṭuraikaḷ (Pudumaippittan’s Essays) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1934]), pp. 118–9. All translations in this essay are mine.

8. Pudumaippittan, ‘Uṅkaḷ Katai (Your Story)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kaṭṭuraikaḷ (Pudumaippittan’s Essays) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1946]), pp. 223–4.

9. Pudumaippittan, ‘Ciṉṉa Viṣayam (A Small Matter)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kaṭṭuraikaḷ (Pudumaippittan’s Essays) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1934]), p. 109.

10. Pudumaippittan, ‘Kataikaḷ’, p. 114.

11. Pudumaippittan, ‘Uṇarcci Vēkamum Naṭai Nayamum (The Rush of Emotions and the Subtlety of Style)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kaṭṭuraikaḷ (Pudumaippittan’s Essays) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1934]), p. 129.

12. Holmström (ed.), Pudumaippittan, p. 246.

13. Venkatachalapathy, In Those Days There Was No Coffee, p. 76.

14. Pudumaippittan, ‘Eṉ Kataikaḷum Nāṉum (My Stories and I)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kaṭṭuraikaḷ (Pudumaippittan’s Essays) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1942]), pp. 177–8.

15. For more on Pudumaippittan’s positions on literary and popular writing and Tamil scholarship and language politics, see Preetha Mani, ‘Literary and Popular Fiction in Late Colonial Tamil Nadu’, in Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity (eds), Indian Genre Fictions: Pasts and Future Histories (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 17–37.

16. Pudumaippittan, ‘Eccarikkai! (Warning!)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kataikaḷ (The Complete Short Stories of Pudumaippittan) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2000 [1943]), p. 779.

17. Pudumaippittan, ‘Eṉ Kataikaḷ Nāṉum’.

18. Pudumaippittan, ‘Uṇarcci Vēkamum Naṭai Nayamum’, p. 128.

19. For example, Pudumaippittan and B.S. Ramaiah—who worked for the journal Maṇikkoṭi—each decided to create a short story about a young woman they encountered together on a street corner in a remote Madras neighbourhood. Their short stories represented two different—yet ‘true’—depictions of everyday reality. See Sundararajan and Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, pp. 184–6.

20. Pudumaippittan’s short story, ‘Ciṟpiyiṉ Narakam’, published in Maṇikkoṭi in 1935, offers one example of this argument. Pudumaippittan, ‘Ciṟpiyiṉ Narakam (The Sculptor’s Hell)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Pudumaippittaṉ Kataikaḷ (The Short Stories of Pudumaippittan) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu Pathippakam, 2000 [1935]), pp. 325–30.).

21. For more on these debates, see Mytheli Sreenivas, Wives, Widows, Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

22. I am grateful to George Hart for our discussions of representations of taṉmai in premodern Tamil literature. He offered me great insight into how jolting Pudumaippittan’s theorisations of loneliness and isolation must have been to his contemporary Tamil readers with a strong sense of Tamil community.

23. Pudumaippittan, ‘Ciṟukatai (The Short Story)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kaṭṭuraikaḷ (Pudumaippittan’s Essays) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1935]), p. 142. Pudumaippittan’s was the first in a series of essays by various writers published in the influential little magazine, Maṇikkoṭi. Beginning in 1935, the magazine defined itself as exclusively focused on short story writing. Pudumaippittan published essays and stories regularly in Maṇikkoṭi, and he played a key role in developing its reputation as a harbinger of short story writing and modernism in Tamil. For more on this, see Mani, ‘Literary and Popular Fiction in Late Colonial Tamil Nadu’.

24. Bakhtin viewed heteroglossia—the representation of diverse speech genres and social and historical forces—as the pre-eminent feature of the novel. Rather than defining the generic boundaries of the novel, however, Bakhtin was interested in documenting the ‘novelization’ of literary forms, which renewed language and made it dialogic. In his framework, the short story and other modern genres also participated in the novelisation process. Necessarily circumscribed, the short story does not have the capacity for the extensive representation of heteroglossia that the novel does. Nonetheless, as I will demonstrate below, the short story epitomises the parody and irony so central to novelistic discourses. Pudumaippittan’s short stories are full of the parodic stylisation that Bakhtin associated with the novel. Parody, I argue, is an integral element of the short story’s citational structure. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (trans.) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

25. For Pudumaippittan’s collected poetry, see Pudumaippittan, Cellum Vaḻi Iruṭṭu: Putumaippittaṉ Kavitaikaḷ (The Path I Travel is Dark: Pudumaippittan’s Poems) (Chennai: Pudhumaippiththan Pathippagam, 2002).

26. Pudumaippittan, ‘Kataikaḷ’, p. 112.

27. Pudumaippittan, ‘Ciṟukatai’, pp. 142–3.

28. Pudumaippittan, ‘Ciṛukatai: Maṛumalarccik Kālam (The Short Story: The Era of Renaissance)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kaṭṭuraikaḷ (Pudumaippittan’s Essays) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1946]), p. 235.

29. Ibid., pp. 237–8.

30. Charles May, ‘I Am Your Brother’: Short Story Studies (North Charleston, SC: CreatSpace Independent Publishing, 2013), p. 53.

31. Charles May, ‘Reality in the Modern Short Story’, in Style, Vol. 27, no. 3 (1993), pp. 369–79.

32. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Jane E. Lewin (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [1987]), pp. 55–103.

33. It could be argued that short story titles function similarly to chapter titles or section headings, which Genette considered to be kinds of paratext. However, Genette was primarily interested in the book form and argued that paratexts work together with the main text to construct the impression of a comprehensive whole. I would suggest that short stories—as well as other genres—published in journals and magazines operate differently in that they can also be (and often are) read separately, rather than as components of a larger whole. For this reason, short story titles—like the titles of poems, essays and columns—are more closely linked to the content they announce than the titles of books or chapters and sections within books.

34. These stories are collected in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kataikaḷ (The Complete Short Stories of Pudumaippittan) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2000).

35. Pudumaippittan, ‘Poṉṉakaram (The Golden City)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kataikaḷ (The Complete Short Stories of Pudumaippittan) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2000 [1934]), p. 68.

36. E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1927), pp. 103–4.

37. Ibid., p. 118.

38. See Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, Anna Bostock (trans.) (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1971 [1920]); and Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (trans.) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962).

39. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 133.

40. Toral Gajarawala, Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), p. 45.

41. A.K. Ramanujan, ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’, in Vinay Dharwadker (ed.), The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 135. Ramanujan’s translation of this passage is from the Sanskrit poet Valmiki’s text.

42. See Das, Struggle for Freedom, p. 134; and Sundararajan and Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, pp. 185–6, for an overview of some of the Ahalya retellings.

43. Sundararajan and Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, pp. 184–6.

44. Pudumaippittan, ‘Ahalyai (Ahalya)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kataikaḷ (The Complete Short Stories of Pudumaippittan) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2000 [1934]), p. 133.

45. For a summary of the evolution of the Ahalya myth from its earliest appearance in the Rāmāyaṇa, see Renate Söhnen-Thieme, ‘The Ahalyā Story through the Ages’, in Julia Leslie (ed.), Myth and Mythmaking: Continuous Evolution in the Indian Tradition (New York: Curzon, 1996).

46. Pudumaippittan, ‘Ahalyai’, p. 132.

47. Ibid., p. 133.

48. Ibid., p. 134.

49. Ibid., p. 135.

50. Pudumaippittan, ‘Kañcaṉai (Kanchanai)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapthy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kataikaḷ (The Complete Short Stories of Pudumaippittan) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2000 [1943]), pp. 507–16.

51. Pudumaippittan, ‘Cellammāḷ (Chellammal)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kataikaḷ (The Complete Short Stories of Pudumaippittan) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2000 [1943]), pp. 517–34.

52. Pudumaippittan, ‘Cāpa Vimōcaṉam (Deliverance from the Curse)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy, Putumaippittaṉ Kataikaḷ (The Complete Short Stories of Pudumaippittan) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2000 [1943]), p. 535.

53. Ibid., pp. 538–9.

54. Ibid., pp. 539–40.

55. Ibid., p. 544.

56. Ibid., p. 547.

57. A.R. Venkatachalapathy recounts that ‘C. Rajagopalachari, the self-appointed custodian of Indian (Hindu) culture…wrote a veiled rejoinder in the form of a re-telling of the Agaligai story from the Ur-text of Valmiki’ immediately following Pudumaippittan’s publication of ‘Cāpa Vimōcaṉam’. See Venkatachalapathy, In Those Days There Was No Coffee, p. 81. Rajagopalachari’s position on the Ahalya myth represented the Hindu viewpoint of the Indian National Congress—the leading political party across the subcontinent. Pudumaippittan’s Ahalya also offered a different position on heterosexual relations than the reformed marriage practices that the Self-Respect Movement advanced, which emphasised equality and free will as opposed to kinship and tradition.

58. Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, in New Left Review, no. 1 (2000), p. 58.

59. Pudumaippittan, ‘Ilakkiyattin Irakaciyam (The Secret of Literature)’, in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.), Putumaippittaṉ Kaṭṭuraikaḷ (Pudumaippittan’s Essays) (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1934]), pp. 118–9.