THE MAGIC IN HIS REALISM
Having won the 2020 Sahitya Akademi Award for Tamil, Imayam explains why he resists all labels
The novelist V. Annamalai (Imayam) wears his Dravidian heritage with pride, but he has also always rebelled against the idea of a Dravidian or Dalit literature. “When you write, it’s literature, but when I write, it’s Dalit literature?” he has famously demanded. Sellatha Panam, the novel for which he won the 2020 Sahitya Akademi Award in Tamil, is about love that turned to hate, and the woman dying in a burns ward because of it. His unflinching novella about honour killing, Pethavan (available in English as The Begetter), was based on the particular case of a woman, or, if you like, on the many cases that occur daily in India whenever two people marry across caste divisions.
Sellatha Panam may have won the prize, but of Imayam’s substantial and controversial body of writing over nearly three decades, his defining work remains his first, Koveru Kazhuthaigal (Beasts of Burden), published in 1994. It tells the story of Arokkyam and her husband, the vannaans (washermen) living on the far edges of the village’s Paraya colony. The label vannaan does not do justice to their services—washing, mending, winnowing grain, building wedding pandals, birthing babies, treating the sick, seeing off the dead and guiding the survivors in the ways of their forefathers.
As Arokkyam toils within the system, what
support she used to find there crumbles under her feet. Imayam wrote Arokkyam from within, always centring her perspective, as he recorded the daily transactions and moving goalposts of caste in rural India. How did he manage all that when he himself was just 19?
“Magic. There’s no other word for it. When I write a story, I am not present. Only the character is there. When I wrote the novel, I dissolved in her story, the way salt dissolves in water. I cannot say that I wrote it this way or that way, that I was an artist, that I was a thinker... I heard a woman cry as I was walking, in the middle of the night. That voice created Arokkyam in my mind.”
Like many litterateurs who write what they know, Imayam must often stop to shake himself free of imposed labels, even while he maintains that literature is inseparable from politics. “I don’t write through the lens of Marxism or feminism, or as a Dalit, or even as a writer, or through any identity or ideology,” he says. “In the ocean there are ships that come and go, like those principles or thoughts. When I write, I’m in the ocean, writing about real life, but when the text is written, you’ll find those thoughts and principles in it.” A character, he says, is a tool with which to criticise society, to raise a question.
And yet that character lives and breathes. At the centre of Koveru Kazhuthaigal is a scene in which a girl, who has gone to pick up a customer’s laundry, is trapped in an inner room of his house. Instead of detailing the violence that follows, the scene dissolves in her pleas.
I’m a woman who will soon be married, saami
My whole family will be ruined, saami...
I touch your feet, ayya
Think of me as the daughter of your own body, ayya...
Such haunting delicacy from a speaker of the harshest truths is not just rare, it’s magic. ■
Even as he maintains that literature and politics are inseparable, Imayam says he doesn’t write through any identity or ideology