Coimbatore: With his all-polyester clothes, huge half-tinted glasses, and a rising plume of hair, Rajesh Kumar, a short man approaching 60, looks like he wishes the 1980s had never ended—and not just for its rad fashions.
In that decade, an extended purple patch for Tamil pulp fiction, Kumar held a full-time job and still wrote five novels a month, selling more than 100,000 copies of each. “Somebody called it the Rajesh Kumar Yugam —the era of Rajesh Kumar,” he explains, with the matter-of-factness of a man who is arguably the most prolific novelist in the world.
Lurid craft: Tamil pulp fiction author Rajesh Kumar with a collection of his published works at his house in Coimbatore. Samanth Subramanian/Mint
The era of Rajesh Kumar began with a casual college prank. In 1968, when he was studying for his degree in botany, Kumar’s class was asked for fiction contributions for their college magazine. “I had never written a thing in my life, and I didn’t plan to,” he says. “But the boy next to me shouted out and volunteered my name. At the time, I could have murdered him.”
The short story that he submitted reluctantly the next day was the first of more than 2,000 he would go on to write, in addition to more than 1,500 novels. Kumar is, one of his fellow authors says, “the superstar of the Tamil pulp fiction industry”.
In the present age, as original novels begin to dry up and authors direct their talents to the lucrative field of screenplay writing for television and cinema, Kumar is also at the head of a pack of writers that stays faithful to its lurid craft.
The classic Tamil pulp novel runs between 100 pages and 150 pages and is printed on cheap paper as a monthly magazine. In 1987, a novel cost Rs2; it now costs around Rs25, still a price that can call out to browsers at the corner teashop, retirees, homemakers, train passengers and other devoted readers. The flavours of this genre are uniformly sensational but otherwise eclectic. They can include the science-fiction thrillers—more fiction than science—of Kumar, the romances of Ramani Chandran, the detective knockabouts of Pattukottai Prabhakar and Suba, the religious tales of Indira Soundara Rajan and the social dramas of Pushpa Thangadorai.
Allergic to cinema
“But many authors have, of late, shifted to writing for films and television,” Kumar says. “Not me, though. I’m allergic to cinema, and I don’t want to move to Chennai. Plus, I find these movie producers highly immoral people.”
His allergies have worked well for his readers, who can still amble down to the teashop or bus station every few weeks to find a new Kumar novel. For those treading water financially, a teashop will even act as an informal lending library, charging Rs2 to take a book home for a day or two.