Literary Feud in Modern Madras: Kalki, Pudumaipittan and the Magazines of the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract

This article is an analysis of the brief feud between two modern Tamil prose writers— Kalki and Pudumaipittan—who were deeply embroiled in the economies of modernity such as the magazine, short story, novel and film in the 1930s and 1940s in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. This culturally relevant literary feud facilitates an examination of two of the divergent strands of modern Tamil literary culture of the 1940s—a popular strand that produced past-based narratives that relied on the proliferation of identity-based regionalist politics at that time, and a self-consciously modernist strand that aimed at realism and innovation. The article is divided into two sections—one focusing on the historical transformations of Tamil modernity that shaped the two prose writers under study and the other section focusing on the contrasting literary legacies of these two writers in order to highlight the tensions that existed with the trends of modernity in Tamil Nadu. This examination of the feud foregrounds some of the major concerns of Tamil modernity such as the impact of new forms of media, the construction of competing literary canons, Western influence in regional writing, and the evolution of modern Tamil identity. The public feud between Kalki and Pudumaipittan brings into focus the impact of nationalist discourse, regionalism, emerging rationalism and literary modernism on the creation of a post- independence Tamil literary culture.