Review: The Greatest Tamil Stories Ever Told, Selected and edited by Sujatha Vijayaraghavan and Mini Krishnan

A few years ago, bilingual writer, musician, and dance scholar Sujatha Vijayaraghavan embarked on an ambitious journey to read hundreds of classic Tamil stories. That way we can demonstrate even better to them that our whole house is in deep grief.” Co author Sujatha Vijayaraghavan Kalki Krishnamurthy’s The Governor’s Visit, one of the oldest stories in the book, is a tongue-in-cheek account of how local dignitaries in small towns appeased colonial rulers in pre-Independent India. In her introduction, Vasantha Surya points out that two features bind these nuanced stories: one, they are heirs to “the only language of contemporary India which is recognisably continuous with a classical past”, and, two, the part writers “play in nurturing a literary aesthetic premised on a no-holds-barred ethic of doubt and questioning”. It doesn’t matter if others take you for a madman but my wife mustn’t take me for one.” Vijayaraghavan states that Pudumaipittan’s story is “one of the earliest examples of magic realism, written decades before the term was coined”. Prisoner Number 623 isn’t celebrating his impending freedom, which is only hours away, but is worried about the hundreds of doors being shut on him when the prison door “vomits him out” into the world.