The flowering out of Pushpa

journals in any language in India, and Rajesh Kumar’s Tamil novels sold in their millions. Some of the short stories and novellas in this anthology include Hurricane Vaij by Subha (pen name for two writers, Suresh and Balakrishnan) Sweetheart, Please Die! by Pattukkottai Prabhakar. If you are after romance, Dim Lights, Blazing Hearts by Ramanichandran is for you. For those of a more lurid bent of mind, My Name is , a massively popular novel about prostitutes in Delhi should be up your alley. Pritham Chakravarthy’s translations are spot on and capture the ambience of the original works. The publication is impeccable with excellent author introductions, attractive drawings and good paper to boot, making it almost a collectors’ item.

Perumal Murugan’s Seasons of the is on the other end of the Tamil literary spectrum: it is a serious, thought provoking, confronting novel of a young Dalit farm hand and the brutality he experiences every day. There is a growing corpus of works in ‘Dalit literature’ – which is characterised by protest, resistance and subversion. Although Perumal Murugan is not a Dalit himself (he comes from a dominant caste), he writes movingly about the inhumanity around which the Dalits are surrounded. In this novel, a young teen is caught between an oppressive life on the one hand, and a happy fantasy-world on the other. It is beautifully written, and V Geetha’s translation is superlative.