Akshay Pathak of the German Book Office New Delhi was the person who introduced me to Blaft as one of the most exciting new publishing ventures in India. (supposedly named as such because that’s the sound a 20kg weight makes when dropped on a pomegranate) is a relatively new house that specializes in publishing an interesting range of Tamil texts translated into English. The first Blaft book was a collection of Tamil Pulp Fiction which quickly sold out its first printing and is available outside of India through Amazon.com.

Chad W. Post: What prompted you and your two partners to start Blaft?

Rakesh Kumar: It kind of started with the first book, The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction. Tamil pulp novels have these wild-looking covers on them . . . photoshopped images of Christina Aguilera with vampire fangs, or people getting eaten alive by giant kittens (we included a selection of cover art in the book). My Tamil is pretty lousy but I can read well enough to make out the titles, which are typically things like “Super Horror Bumper Detective Novel”. I’m a night owl and I kept finding myself standing at the tea kadai at four o’clock in the morning with a cigarette and a coffee in my hand looking at these covers thinking What the Fuck, I absolutely have to know what’s in these things. Our friend Pritham [Chakravarthy, translator] had been a big Tamil pulp afficionado in her youth, and she enthusiastically launched into the process of selection and translation, and travelling around with me to sign everybody up.

In the process, we just realized there were a lot of books like that, books we’d like to see on the shelves of bookstores that we weren’t seeing. So we decided to start a company to make the books ourselves and put them there.

None of the three partners, Rashmi, Kaveri and myself, read any language fluently other than English. My excuse is, I’m only half-Indian and was raised in California; my wife Rashmi is Tamilian, but was mostly raised in the Hindi-speaking North; Kaveri is a Sindhi who was raised in the Tamil-speaking South. There are more and more Indians with mixed-up backgrounds like ours all the time, who default to reading English. Also, I think a lot of English-speaking Indians are finally getting over the colonial hangover and getting more interested in what’s going on in the regional language literatures.

CWP: How long have you been around, and what editorial plans do you have for the future?

RK: We launched with our first three books in May 2008; the Tamil Pulp Fiction book, Zero Degree, and a book of drawings by a local artist named Natesh. We came out with a fourth in July, a book of short stories by Kuzhali Manickavel (she writes in English), and we have at least two more coming out before the end of the year: a book of Tamil folktales, and a translation of a Hindi pulp novel.

We want to do more pulp translations from different Indian regional languages, and also try to bring out some graphic novels. I would love to bring out some good science writing, especially on environment and ecology, subjects which don’t get nearly enough attention here.

CWP: Distribution is a huge issue/problem for small American presses—how are your books distributed in India and abroad?

RK: It’s a big problem here too, though we don’t have the kind of chain-bookstore monopolies you have in the US. We were lucky to get picked up by a major distributor . . . they are not so great about paying on time, though.

CWP: The decision to publish Tamil works in English translation sounds very odd and daring to a foreigner, especially one living in a country that publishes less than 400 works of literature in translation every year. Is this common in India? What are the reasons behind this decision?

RK: I’m not aware of figures, but yes, there are lots of Indian presses publishing translations—mostly into English or from English (I have read several articles recently lamenting the lack of translation between Indian languages). I suppose it’s natural since we’re a much more linguistically diverse society with a lot of polyglots. There’s actually an amazing variety of stuff translated into Tamil and Malayalam, especially; I got shocked on my first trip into a Tamil bookstore, they had Hans Christian Andersen, Isaac Asimov, Charles Bukowski, Kerouac, Calvino, Marquez, you name it. As for the translations to English, some of it is government-sponsored, like the Sahitya Akademi publications.

There are a couple of problems with what’s out there, as I see it; there is a tendency to focus on the most “respectable,” “literary” stuff, which is also the hardest to translate and often comes across kind of boring in English. Also, I think many Indian presses don’t put enough emphasis on careful editing.

CWP: What is your impression of the Indian book market at this time? Things are horrible—almost catastrophically so—in America, but it sounds like the situation in India is very, very different.

We’re all completely new to the business so we don’t have much to compare with. It seems to be thriving!

CWP: Outside of India, the Indian authors that are most well-known are the writers who originally write in English and frequently live abroad, such as Rushdie, Ghosh, Mistry, etc. For someone promoting Tamil writers, how do you feel about this situation? Do you feel like writers working in Tamil (or any other Indian language) are at a disadvantage and more often overlooked than their English-writing counterparts?

RK: Well unfortunately when outsiders think of “Indian writing” it is the names that you mentioned—Rushdie / Ghosh / Mistry—that come to mind. But what is the majority of India reading? Books written in regional languages. Just going by the numbers, these authors—and I don’t just mean Tamil authors, but Hindi / Marathi / Malayalam / Bengali etc.—sell in hundreds of thousands. Yet, these books are not even considered when one talks about contemporary Indian writing. But are they at a disadvantage? I don’t think so. They have such a huge readership and loyal following. But yes, it is disheartening to see that this writing is not given the importance, acknowledgment and recognition it deserves. And we hope to change that.

I have to admit that until reading Rakesh Khanna’s comment on an earlier post, I had never heard of but I really like their mission statement:

Blaft Publications is a new independent publishing house based in Chennai, India. Our releases so far include an anthology of Tamil pulp fiction, a translation of an experimental Tamil novel, a book of drawings, and a book of English short stories.

However, in the future, Blaft has much wider goals. We are planning to eventually branch out into translations of fiction from other regional languages of South Asia, English fiction, comic books, graphic novels, children’s books, non-fiction, textbooks, how-to-manuals, encyclopedias, and kitchen appliances.

All of their titles are available in America, but apparently only through Amazon.com, which is unfortunate. After reading the first half of Zero Degree, I’m pretty sure there are a number of booksellers out there who would be into this book—it’s the first Tamil title I’ve encountered that includes a dedication to Kathy Acker and a reference to the Oulipo. . . . Rather than summarize the book—I plan on writing a full review in the near future—I thought I’d share the translator’s introduction:

We would like to let Zero Degree speak for itself, after taking just a moment to disavow our personal support for any political agenda that this book or its characters may have, and also to point out two idiosyncratic difficulties the book posed for the translator.

First, in keeping with the numerological theme of Zero Degree, the only numbers expressed in either words or symbols are numerologically equivalent to nine (with the exception of two chapters). This Oulipian ban includes the very common Tamil word å¼, one, used very much like the English one (“one day”, “one of them”, etc.). The way Charu Nivedita works around this constraint in Tamil is a notable feature of the original text. However, Tamil has some better substitutes for this word than English does. For instance, there are two pronouns each for he and she: Üõ¡/Üõoe [Ed. Note: I can’t figure out how to get the script to appear correctly online—sorry about that.] (roughly “that man”/“that woman”) and Þõ¡/Þõoe (“this man”/“this woman”). The lack of single-word English equivalents sometimes results in less graceful constructions than Tamil makes possible. We have done our best to make these sentences easily readable without using the forbidden numbers.

Secondly, many sections of the book are written entirely without punctuation, or using only periods. This reminds the Tamil reader of an ancient style of writing, before Western punctuation marks were adopted into the script. However, in English, omitting punctuation, besides being confusing, would fail to give this effect. Therefore, we have inserted punctuation marks in many chapters, except where it seemed important to the meaning of the text to leave them out.

Zero Degree was first published in Chennai in 1998. It is the author’s second novel, and features many of the same characters that appeared in his first, Existentialism and Fancy Banyan. It did well enough for a second and third edition, and was also translated into Malayalam by Balasubramaniam and P. M. Girish. In Kerala, the book generated a great deal of . . .

[The remainder of the translators’ note was destroyed by a computer virus.]

Pritham K. Chakravarthy
Rakesh Khanna