The Hindu Business Line : The three Blafteers

Their independent publishing house in Chennai willingly embraces what others may shun as bizarre or risky prose — home-grown eclectic writing that few English readers know about..

Their word: The Blaft team(from left) Kaveri Lalchand, Rashmi Ruth Devadasan and Rakesh Kumar Khanna.

Sumithra Thangavelu

The publishing fraternity got a quirky new member this May as three 30-somethings launched Blaft Publications in Chennai with translations of two Tamil novels and one book of drawings. They hoped that the melange of mad scientists, murderous robots, hard-boiled detectives snooping around for happy endings, and the collage of love and scandal with “compulsive namedropping of Latin American intellectuals” will show readers there’s plenty to look for in regi onal writing.

Rakesh Kumar Khanna, his wife Rashmi Ruth Devadasan and Kaveri Lalchand wanted their independent publishing house to showcase the literary and artistic voices that otherwise remain unheard by the English readership simply because they are in a different language, or too “small” to be heard or just not “normal” or profitable for a publisher.

“Indian writing in English can be classified as immigrant, written by the NRIs, and niche, for those who understand western literature. But there’s eclectic writing right here that just blows your mind away and which few English readers know about. We wanted to showcase that,” says Rashmi.

Variety works

Their experiment seems to be paying off, going by numbers. The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, featuring stories from 10 best-selling authors across genres such as science fiction and crime, has sold the initial print run of 2,000 copies; another 5,000 is out.

Charu Nivedita’s “freaky, scary” transgressive fiction titled Zero Degree, which “unflinchingly probes the deepest psychic wounds of humanity”, had to be published for its sheer difference, the trio felt. Likewise the book of 73 ink drawings by Natesh, an installation artist and painter. Pointing to the sketches, Kaveri asks, “What do you make of them?” The convoluted lines don’t make sense at first but on looking closely you see human-animal combinations coming into focus, with trees and eagles, hands and tigers. “What you see may be different from what I see. That’s why we didn’t want to caption them... to let the imagination work,” she adds.

And the title? When This Key Sketch Gets Real Tongue Is Fork Hen Is Cock When This Key Sketch Gets Real My Baby Eagle’s Dream Comes True.

The team is as imaginative as that title. They willingly embrace what others may shun as bizarre or risky prose. “Why not?” they ask all the time.

Their fourth release — Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them have Wings — is a collection of 35 short stories in English by Canadian-born-Chidambaram-bred Kuzhali Manickavel, who Khanna discovered on the Internet.

The 30-year-old writer says she could have written with the NRI tone but didn’t want to. Her confident voice has won her applauds online and off it.

How it all began

Blaft’s story began in 1998 with Khanna sipping tea outside IIT-Chennai, where he was studying Mathematics after a course at the University of California, Berkeley. Not knowing Tamil, he would wonder about the Rs 10 pulp novels displayed at the stall, their covers showing strange images such as a well-muscled man with the head of an eagle and a python wrapped around his shoulders, or a skull smoking a cigarette. Years later, interacting with Rashmi and Kaveri over their common interest in theatre and writing, his initial curiosity resurfaced and led to much discussion among them. Eventually, it led to their decision to publish such popular fiction for a wider audience.

“There’s such crazy literature out there that we don’t know about. We wanted them to be seen. Bridging the language divide is like trying to get two sides of the country together...” says Khanna.

The trio found an able support in theatre artiste Pritham K. Chakravarthy, who was also a common friend and had experience in translating Tamil fiction.

“Where are the stories about our kind of lives,” they found themselves asking often.

“We read stories set in King’s Cross and Buckingham Palace and assume it’s perfect. But is King’s Cross a place, or a concept, or what? Stories set in Perambur or South Bombay are so much more identifiable,” says Pritham. She also points out that Charles Dickens and Jane Austen wrote for middle-class readers first before their works went on to become literary classics.

New beginnings

In the past, translations from Tamil largely centred around books on social issues, traditional lives or the classics. The Blaft team didn’t want to do that. “We are taking non-mainstream books not to be different or cool. There’s lots of writing in regional languages… If these stories came from the West, there will be a scramble for it, I’m sure,” says Kaveri.

And today’s youth, they feel, won’t blindly turn down new literature. “It’s great to see a Chetan Bhagat being read. There’s a lot of chick-lit. There’s a need to branch out of the grandfather-type of literature and that’s happening,” says Rashmi, still getting over the embarrassment “of living right next to these Tamil works and not knowing about them”.

Though Khanna grew up abroad, “he is more Tamil than us,” say his team-mates. In fact, he has taught himself to read and write the language. “When we call him for a pasta outing, he would rather go for saapad (south Indian meal),” teases Rashmi. Kaveri joins in. He is the podalanga (snake gourd), rasam type, they laugh.

Besides Tamil, the group plans translation of fiction from other regional languages in India and South Asia including Hindi, Urdu, Assamese, Malay, Vietnamese and Indonesian; they hope to venture into genres ranging from comic books to textbooks and how-to manuals.

Currently, they are working on a second edition of pulp fiction. Several manuscripts are coming in from first-time authors, they say. Meanwhile, the team is networking through the Internet, friends and other sources to find more stories and fresh perspectives.

By the way, Blaft is a word they coined, and identified with. Their logo resembles a cuddly alien with a big smile and antennas. What does it mean? Whatever you want it to. “Take a 20 kg weight and drop it on a pomegranate. What you hear is ‘blaft’,” is Khanna’s version.

That’s as ‘blafty’ as this team can get.

Beyond books

Blaft sees itself getting into film production, radio shows and "we don’t know what". For now, their other creative line — T-shirts and bags with creative captions — are available online at www.blaft.com. The team members pursue varied interests.

Kaveri is an established fashion designer who now wants to move away from her garment manufacturing-exporting job of 10 years and focus on designs by setting up a fashion outlet. She wants to get back to her Kathakali training while also dabbling in yoga, culinary arts and love for old buildings.

Rashmi is a film buff who has worked with Tamil film director Gautham Menon since his first film Minnale. She plans to work on her own film sometime soon.

Besides "topological graph theory, communications among arthropods and banging on things to see what they sound like", Khanna can play drums though he is partial towards the thavil. "It’s really hard," he says.

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