Description
- Pub Date : April 2022
- Author : Karichan Kunju; Sudha G. Tilak (Tr.)
- Publisher : Viking
- Category : Fiction
- Binding Type : Hardback
- NO. OF PAGES : 288
- Mrp : 499
ABOUT THE BOOK
Ganesan returns, after four decades, to the town of his childhood,
filled with memories of love and loneliness, of youthful beauty and
the ravages of age and misfortune, of the promise of talent and its
slow destruction. Seeking treatment for leprosy, he must also come to
terms with his past: his exploitation at the hands of older men, his
growing consciousness of desire and his own sexual identity, his steady
disavowal of Brahminical morality and his slowly degenerating body. He
longs for liberation-sexual, social and spiritual-but finally finds peace
only in self-acceptance.
This translation of the groundbreaking Tamil novel Pasitha Manidam, first
published in 1978, offers deep insight into the conservative and casteconscious
temple town of Kumbakonam, viewed here with
dispassionately cold clarity as a society that utterly fails its own. Sudha G.
Tilak deftly builds upon Karichan Kunju's prose to expose this world, raw,
real, without frills or artifice. The themes of masculinity, desire and
sexuality, caged within caste and repression, all combine to give readers
front-row seats to the many acts we put on for and as a community.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
R. Narayanaswami (1919-1992), popularly known by his pen name
Karichan Kunju, was a Tamil short-story writer and novelist who wrote
mainly on historical themes. Kunju has an oeuvre of over hundred short
stories. He also released ten short-story volumes, two novellas and
dramas each, and essays titled Bharati's Search and Discovery (1982) and
Ku Pa Ra (1990). Pasitha Manidam (1978) was his only novel. He
translated important works from English, Sanskrit and Hindi into Tamil,
besides translating works of Tamil into other languages. He has
contributed richly to Tamil literature and culture by exposing the vicious
hierarchies of ancient temple towns.
