The Southasia Review of Books is a monthly newsletter that threads together our latest reviews and literary essays, curated reading suggestions on all things books-related from Himal’s extensive archive, as well as interviews with select writers and their reading recommendations. You’ll receive installments of this newsletter on the last Sunday of each month. Please write to us to share your thoughts and feedback.
Hello reader
Welcome to another edition of the Southasia Review of Books. First, a huge thank you for the kind words in response to the debut edition of this newsletter last month. We appreciate your support and hope you will continue to write in and help us build out SARB!
Ashik Kahina’s essay introduces us to the Tamil writer Pandiyakannan, the first novelist from the Kuravar community, and his novel Salavaan—an intimate portrait of the lives of manual scavengers and their relationship to the state. “As much as Pandiyakannan’s novel documents a community and a place,” Kahina writes, “it also documents how a political movement that offered hope to the marginalised betrayed them.”
Take a look below for a special interview with Kavitha discussing the pioneering feminist voices of the Sangam era, classical Tamil literature in translation, plus reading recommendations.
Tanya Matthan takes a deep look at Distress in the Fields, a collection of essays on Indian agricultural policy since the 1990s, and unpacks how neoliberalism arrived at the Indian farm. Matthan argues that the agrarian crisis faced by Indian farmers today was quite literally sowed by the introduction of neoliberal reforms, deepening existing caste and class inequalities.
On the heels of Ashik Kahina’s essay on Pandiyakannan, we spoke to them both.
Shwetha Srikanthan: Salavaan was published in 2008, nearly a decade after you first wrote it, and it took another 15 years to bring out a revised edition. What has your experience been of the publishing industry in Tamil Nadu?
Pandiyakannan: Works that portray and protest systems of exploitation are often suppressed by those in power to prevent the spread of any resistance. In recognition of this, Kannan Muthukrishnan, a scholar of modern Tamil literature at the French Research Institute of Pondicherry, made the publication of Salavaan possible and helped bring out the new edition through Thadagam Publications. This came as a blow to those who wanted to stop the publication of this book. The truth never sleeps.
SS: The Kuruvar community’s experiences of manual scavenging are a major part of Salavaan. Are there other works you think are important in depicting the realities of manual scavenging, and the realities of the communities who do this work?
P: In the world of Tamil publications, Salavaan is the first and only work to express the misery of manual scavenging.
SS: You eschew any Tamil literary influences. You say in the piece, “It’s because Tamil culture, whether it’s cinema or literature, is very fanciful. It lacks realism entirely.” Can you tell us more about how you, as a reader and a writer, understand the corpus of Tamil literature?
P: Tamil literature often presents stories of celebration. Cinema stories based on epics and histories are also written and produced in certain ways. But real life is not like that. To write about lived reality is one thing and fiction is another.
SS: About your next novel, the piece says only that it will look at the mass teachers’ strike in Tamil Nadu in 2003. Can you tell us something more about it?
P: Never before in the history of workers’ unions has a single signature dismissed over a million workers who were on strike. I hope to create a historical record of this fight for workers’ rights in 2003. 6000 of those workers were imprisoned and dismissed from work for 6 months. Then there was regime change initiated, and I am one of those protesters’ who later returned to work. I’m writing this to serve as a reminder for future government employees and teachers that the benefits they are reaping now are rooted in the hardships we suffered in the past. Through this novel, called Kalam, I wish to highlight that nothing can be achieved without struggle or protest.
Shwetha Srikanthan: In the essay, you write that the works of communities engaged in manual scavenging are not included in anthologies of Dalit literature, and they are not discussed at literary festivals. Are there particular writers and works you think deserve more attention, both in Tamil and in other languages?
Ashik Kahina: There aren’t many such writers from those communities. Pandiyakannan is the only one from his. What I was hinting at in the piece is that there is a certain irony in constructing a “marginal literature” that excludes the marginalised if they don’t fit its norms. I wanted to ask why we do that and why a book like this gets neglected. My instinct is to say that straying too far from writing—from the simple encounter with words when we read—poses a danger to our ability to notice and recognise.
In Tamil, I feel some notion of writing or literature as something whose existence is its own justification. The discourse of politics or the discourse of life/fact/reality is lacking. If we had that, our way of recognising and noticing would change. In the essay, I tried to see Pandiyakannan as a writer. Not as the revelation of some previously concealed domain or the representative of some historical trend.
SS: What motivates your work as a translator, and how do you pick which works and writers to translate? How does translation, especially into English, change the audience and reception of Dalit writing in particular?
AK: I choose whichever writers I want to learn from and get closer to, writers who feel to me like ancestors. Sometimes I don’t choose. Others ask me. I feel like translation is practice for my own work. When you write your own poems or stories there are very few limits. With translation, the text imposes these restrictions. It makes you feel like a musician doing drills so you can improvise later on.
Ideally, translation broadens the movement against the caste system, which has taken on international dimensions. It should lay some kind of groundwork for the various movements to unify or at least understand each other better. It’s also easier to do translations into regional languages from English translations. A lot more Tamil writers know English than Gujarati.
SS: A common trend in Indian Dalit literature seems to be that because most works are written in regional languages, only those that become available in English get wider attention across India, Southasia or the globe. But have there also been efforts to translate across regional languages, and how have any such efforts fared?
AK: I wish there were more in Tamil. From other Dravidian languages especially. I read some of the Kannada Dalit writer Siddalingaiah in Tamil translation after reading the literary critic D R Nagaraj’s essays. Not much more is available, sadly. I met someone recently who said she is translating the Kannada literary figure Devanoora Mahadeva’s works. Very exciting.
SS: Even though Dalit writing is not read anywhere near widely enough, there seems to be something like a popular canon of Dalit literature in India (Daya Pawar’s Baluta, Bama’s Karukku, Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan, to name just a few examples). One trend is that many of the most popular works are autobiographical; another that there seems a paucity of works from beyond Indian borders. Are there any writers or works you’d recommend that buck these trends?
AK: There’s that whole set of Eelam Dalit writers from the 1960s and 1970s. K Daniel, S Ponnadurai, Dominic Jeeva, and so on. All card-carrying Communists and influenced by writers like Gorky. I’m translating Daniel’s first novel Panchamar at the moment. It’s about the anti-caste struggles in Jaffna in the 1960s (in which Daniel himself was an important leader). It has a dizzying array of characters and is very centrifugal in that it’s more about a movement radiating outward than any one person. It’s a classic. Very different from the autobiographical literature that has become normative.
SS: In a November 2021 article for Himal, you explored the writings of Ki Rajanarayanan, the father of Karisal literature. There, you write about the relative neglect of folklore in Tamil literature, and also its exclusion of works from the Karisal region. Do you see common patterns there and in how Pandiyakanna’s work has been received?
AK: Although the systematic study of folklore eludes us, folklore and regional literature and dialects have all become very popular. But we don’t see new forms or language fashioned from folklore as we do with the literature of the West.
N D Rajkumar, a Dalit poet from Kanyakumari and author of Otakku, is one writer who does a lot with folklore/dialect. Henry Dumas’ Play Ebony Play Ivory is another example of the heights a poet can take folklore/dialect/music to in their work.
பஞ்சமர் [Panchamar] by K Daniel. Adaiyalam Publications (2008)
ஊரும் சேரியும் [Urum Ceriyum] by Siddalingaiah. Kalachuvadu (2014)
Play Ebony Play Ivory by Henry Dumas. Random House, New York (1974)
From Himal’s editing desk, a few things especially caught our eye this month. The journalist and author Abhishek Choudhary has delivered Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right, the first of a two-volume biography of Atal Behari Vajpayee, India’s first prime minister from the Bharatiya Janata Party. The former prime minister occupies a significant position in the imagination of the Hindu Right and there continues to be a contest of narratives over who Vajpayee really was—with some trying to paint him as a kind of Hindu moderate, a generally palatable icon in a Hindutva pantheon that is lacking such figures. In a forthcoming review essay, we hope to weigh in on these often competing portrayals of Vajpayee—the images of him presented by the BJP, the Sangh, the Indian media, and also numerous recent books on the man.
The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, edited by Tenzin Dickie, is another title that got us very curious. This new anthology is a significant contribution to Tibetan writing, covering many aspects of modern Tibetan life. In her introductory essay, Dickie writes: “Writings from Tibet still need to be deciphered and interpreted. Because there is so much they can’t say, so little that can be said—truth-telling is not a safe pastime in authoritarian regimes—we need to pay close attention to subtext. Meanwhile, in exile, sometimes it can feel as if we say too much; we are always trying to shout, trying to underscore our exile, our oppression.” We’re aiming at a review in the near future looking closely at this book as well.
And finally, we are thrilled to announce our very first Himal Fiction Festival! We’ll be bringing together six exceptional emerging writers from around the region, and presenting short stories from them across two weeks from 12 to 23 June. We’ll also have special readings and panel discussions online with the writers as well as renowned Southasian authors and publishers. Keep an eye on our website and social-media channels in the coming weeks to get a taste of the next generation of Southasian voices in fiction. You don’t want to miss this!
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Assistant Editor, Himal Southasian