Ashokamitran photo

Global February nonfiction: Six recently published titles that probe urgent questions of our world. Ashokamitran, who died on Thursday in Chennai at the age of 85, was a colossus among Indian writers of his time. Comprising a prolific output of over short stories, eight novels and 20 novellas, along with several volumes of essays, reviews and articles over a period of 60 years, his contribution to the world of Tamil letters will not be easily matched in the years to come.

But it is through his fiction that he managed to touch the hearts and minds of countless readers within the country and abroad.

Character sketch of ashokamitran

Ashokamitran spent his childhood in Secunderabad, where his father was an employee of the railways. After independence, he moved along with his family to Madras, where he lived out the rest of his life. Given this exclusively urban background, free of the weight of tradition, Ashokamitran forged a kind of existential modernism as the source of his art.

The work of mid-century American writers like Faulkner, Hemingway and Dos Passos appear to have provided the inspiration behind his choice. In this way, Ashokamitran was unique among Indian writers in placing the experiential reality of individuals at the centre of his fiction. Through the sixty years of his fiction, Ashokamitran has covered such a wide range of people and contexts that it is easy for his readers to recognise themselves and their world around them in his stories.

His wry, detached voice, often inflected with absurdist humour — for who can resist laughing at the foibles and strange ways of this all-too-human world? As a true modernist, Ashokamitran wrote mostly about the oppressed and the powerless — women, children, office and industrial workers, and the forsaken ranks of the urban poor. His stories were largely set in the three milieus where he spent most of his life: Secunderabad of his childhood years, the film industry where he found shelter during the first fifteen years of his working life, and a city like Madras whose inhabitants were constantly besieged by the pressures of urban existence.

In the last two decades of his life he had also explored the migratory experience of poor Brahmin families in the Cauvery delta during the first half of the last century. Ashokamitran invented a unique language and style — sharp, nuanced and unornamented — that could embed silences and subtexts in the flow of his prose fictional narratives as powerful aids to his project of illumination.