Unlike most acknowledgements that begin by thanking friends and colleagues and then close friends and family, I choose to begin with the latter. After all, one cannot isolate the intellectual production from one's emotional life. I cannot be more grateful to my parents for not forcing me or my brother to study commerce or engineering. and for supporting our passion for literature and the humanities. Although I never studied Tamil formally in school (which probably explains my current interest in Tamil literature), I have my grand- mother and great-aunt to thank for helping me learn the language from newspapers and popular magazines. Thier limitless warmth and generosity over the three bleak years I spent in Bengaluru studying commerce were a blessing. I thank them for their limitless warmth and kindness.
I am very lucky to have a literary scholar for a brother. My sincere thanks to Prashant for inspiring my interest in literature, for helping and guiding me at critical junctures of my life, and for all his invaluable comments and suggestions. I owe my professional success to you. Words cannot express my love. Heartfelt thanks to my sister Veena Rathnam for the years of love and support that have made the miles that separate us bearable. I also wish to thank my other sister, Divya Saravanabhavan, whose spontaneous love and generosity have always warmed my heart.
I would like to thank Nikhil Govind and Aniruddhan Vasudevan, two of my closest friends, for their love and companionship. I am grateful to Nikhil for his patient willingness to listen to me talk about my work, and for his insightful comments that are a reflection of his literary sensibility. I cherish our stimulating conversations about modern Indian literature. Your companionship during those long lonely years of PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, was a tremendous source of comfort. As for Aniruddhan, I cannot thank you enough for loving me and for reassuring my intellectual and emotional insecurities. I will always treasure your cooking and the times we read Tamil poetry to each other or listened to Carnatic music Watching you dance has been and will always be a great source of pride and admiration. I thank you for inspiring me with your ability to write in lucid and elegant Tamil.
A special thanks to Ryan Nelson Parker for her warmth and generosity, and for giving me a sense of home in Berkeley.
I am thankful to Bhavani Raman and Aparna Balachandran for helping me get around Chennai when I first began studying Tamil. I will fondly remember our times together.
I am very grateful to M. Kannan for introducing me to some of the finest modern writers in Tamil. This book would not have been possible without your help and support. I thank you and your wife for your generosity and hospitality during my visits to the French Institute of Pondicherry and your lovely home.
This book offers an interpretation of shifting scenarios of (largely) male desire in modern Tamil literature across the twentieth century. In exploring modern literary discourses of desire in the Tamil context. my aim is twofold-first, to trace shifting notions of the sexual, and, second, to complicate and unsettle normative structures of under- standing the body, gender, and sexuality. The early precursors of the Tamil novel and short story, informed by anti-colonial, nationalist debates, reformed certain sexual bodies like those of the (upper-caste) widow, the prostitute, and even the promiscuous man through a socially arranged marriage. The writings that concern me suggest an anxiety with the institution of marriage itself, where desire, no longer contained by marriage, threatens the normative form of the joint and conjugal family. This may not imply a consummation of desire in the sexual act, but is evident in the very admission of desire without marriage, where the mind or imagination rather than the body becomes the site where sexual norms are both established and transgressed. This, then, contradicts and complicates legal or even scholarly reductions of infidelity to an embodied sexual act. I thus foreground an uneasy correlation between desire and the body, where desire may not end in intercourse, but evokes bodily presence through senses of proximity like touch and senses of distance like sight, smell, and sound. Even in scenarios where desire is consummated in the body, it only results in disillusionment and the redirection of desire in spirituality or artistic creativity. This book thus resists the reduction of desire to intercourse and explores the sensual possibilities that include a whole range of intimacies not reducible to the sexual act. What emerges from a reading of these texts is a set of conflicted and fragile protagonists whose eroticism interpenetrates other modes of sensuality like spirituality, altruism, and creativity. Through a literary understanding of the sensual, I hope to show that the desiring subject is not reducible to her sexual body or even to her desire. The sensual, I argue, is a larger category with an existential and ontological significance, which constantly reconfigures the relationality between the embodied self and the other.
In this book, I trace a shift from early articulations of desire in the novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where desire is reformed and operates within the confines of an arranged marriage, to a later scenario of desire where illicit desire becomes inseparable from its potential as a social force that reconfigures and binds marginalized subjects. The book analyses the writings of seven writers that are mostly focalized through men and their sexuality. My choice of these writers is determined by the fact that most of these writers formed part of a literary group that was partly influenced by one of the earliest writers of sexuality in Tamil, K.P. Rajagopalan (1902-1944). These writers shared thematic concerns and were also affected by one another's writings, as can be seen in their fiction and essays. Additionally, a reading of their texts reveals the productive possibilities of desire that undercuts the notion of a stable self to reconfigure male subjectivity. The men in these texts are embattled and vulnerable as they oscillate between longing and an unsuccessful transmutation of their desires in spirituality, altruism, or creativity. Although these texts fail to undo sexual difference, they imagine certain non-dominant forms of masculinity that are characterized by vulnerability and empathy. There is an attempt to consider the possibility of a form of masculinity and male sexuality that is not reducible to violence and oppression. Some of these literary thinkers also explore the role men could play in the everyday lives of women to enable them to participate in the project of female empowerment.
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