The Tamil Realist Novel in South and Southeast Asia examines the realist novel as a distinctive literary form that emerged across Tamil-speaking regions from the 1940s to the 1980s. Rather than approaching realism as a fixed aesthetic or passive reflection of social life, the book argues that Tamil writers used the novel form to actively shape perception, imagine collective futures, and negotiate the demands of modernity. Through close readings of authors such as Kaa. Naa. Subramanyam, Kalki Krishnamoorthy, C.N. Annadurai, Puthumaipithan, P. Singaram, Poomani, T.M.C. Raghunathan, K. Daniel, and Sundara Ramasamy, the study shows how these writers reworked the novel’s formal capacities—plot, narration, character, temporality to articulate Tamil ethnic identity in the wake of colonialism and across sites of diaspora. 

 

The Tamil Realist Novel in South and Southeast Asia  contends that the Tamil realist novel is not a neutral medium of representation but a formal and political intervention, shaped by the narrative ecologies of its time—serialized fiction, popular magazines, cinema, and political oratory. These overlapping media environments informed how the real was imagined, structured, and made legible through novelistic form.  Reframing Tamil literature as a transregional formation across Madurai, Jaffna, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore, this book challenges South Asian literary histories that center Anglophone, Hindi-Urdu, and Bengali traditions. It repositions the Tamil realist novel as a mobile and generative form—one shaped by displacement, caste reform, socialist aesthetics, and political struggle, and one that calls for a rethinking of the novel’s place within global postcolonial studies.

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This research project has been supported by several competitive fellowships and grants, including the Humanities Research Fund (HRF), the Hellmann Award, the Townsend Humanities Fellowship, a senior research fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), and the Bruce R. Pray Grant.