Literature in Chennai

"Although it is generally believed that the modern writing started around late 19th century, like many other languages in India, some experts very strongly feel that it was the Siddhas who brought into Tamil literature a modern, progressive outlook. The face of Sangam literature had the elements of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’, Aham and Puram – and dealt with life in this world. This face changed into worldliness and spirituality, when Alwars and Nayanmars were strong in their principle of not singing in praise of man.

When decay crept in after this due to extremist religious men, it was only the Siddhas who started to think, opposing rituals and superstitions. No one has spoken as deeply about spirituality and philosophy as the Siddhas. They had such progressive views. It can be said that the poems of Ramalinga Swamigal may be the continuation of the thoughts of the Siddhas. He was followed by Bharati. The Siddhas were the first to simplify the highly classical Tamil that was in usage until then. The Tamil language has a living history which is nearly 3000 years old and its literature dates back 2000 years. Tamil literature is continually enriched by writers who use diverse literary forms: novels, short stories, novellas, poetry, prose-verse, self-improvement, spiritual and biographies. Chennaiites were among the first to start blogging in the country, and the city is known as India’s Blogging Capital.The reading habit is strongly engrained and as the over 300 small and large publishing houses in Chennai will testify, people like to buy books. 

The credit for popularising the form into Kavadichindhu and further simplifying Tamil for the common man goes to Bharati. The popularity of prose On the genesis and development of prose writing, three writers can be mentioned as the pioneers of contemporary Tamil writing. The first is Vedanayagam Pillai who wrote the first novel Pratapa Mudaliar Charithram. The second is Rajam Iyer, the author of Kamalambal Charithram and the third is A Madhavayya, who wrote Padmavati Charithram. It is an indisputable fact that these three personalities have laid the foundation and contributed to the growth of the Tamil novel. From Kalki to the present day, many have written with a literary flavour in popular journals, which could be easily understood by the common man. The grand old pioneer of this trend is Vedanayagam Pillai. In the same way Rajam Iyer is the source for writers like Mauni, La Sa Ra, Sundara Ramasamy, Krithika and many more who have created literature dealing mainly with the inner conflicts. Among modern or progressive writers, A Madhavayya laid the foundation for thoughts about human life and its problems."

The writings of Bharati, Va Ve Su Iyer and A Madhavayya can be considered as the early short stories. Bharati also translated Tagore’s short stories. As Tamilians did not have much knowledge of short stories, Va Ve Su Iyer had to provide explanatory footnotes to his story. This period was followed by an era heralded by the writings of Pudumaipitthan, which were on par with the European short stories. This ‘original short story’ period can be divided into three groups: the style of Mauni, the style of N Pichamurthy and Chidambara Subramanian, and the style of Pudumaipitthan. The advent of weekly and monthly magazines gave way to the enormous growth of popular writing, since the middle of 20th century.

To Kalki goes the credit of creating the magazine reading a habit among the general public, particularly the women who were confined to the kitchen. Among the writers who contributed to the literary magazine Manikodi – Pudumaipitthan, Mauni, MV Venkatram, T Janakiraman need special mentioning. Jeeva, Nagarajan, Tho Mu Si Ragunathan, Shanmugasundaram are all well known progressive writers with left leanings. Jayakanthan was a trendsetter in the 60s. Lakshmi, Rajam Krishnan, Ashokamitran, Na Parthasarathy, Akilan, Sujatha, Sivasankari, Vaasanthi, Balakumaran are some of the important writers who not only made valuable contributions to Tamil modern literature during the second half of the 20th century, but were also extremely popular.