It is heartening that people who cannot afford a Rs15 novel are still willing to put down Rs2 to read, and Kumar takes no little pride in that fact. “It was us writers who made sure that there were books hanging from shop ceilings instead of shampoo sachets,” he says. We led people to read, he preens —and he more than others, considering his staggering output. Even in the Rajesh Kumar Yugam, other authors were less staggeringly productive but did just as well. Ramani Chandran, a homemaker, wrote 125 novels in 30 years. “But I type with two fingers, you know,” she says, and even those two fingers are beset by carpal tunnel syndrome. “If I’d been able to type faster, I might have published a novel a month.”
Suresh and Balakrishnan, the two authors writing jointly under the pen name Suba, held full-time bank jobs until 1999, wrote their novels every day till 1am, and sold 70,000-100,000 copies of each of their 40-odd novels per year. “It was all possible—we just had to cut down on our quota of sleep,” Balakrishnan says.
Promised land
But even as they bemoan losing many readers to television megaserials, Suresh and Balakrishnan have themselves migrated to the promised land of screenplay writing. “Film directors approached us even earlier, but we didn’t want to begin until we’d retired from our banks, simply for stability’s sake,” Suresh says. “Now, we don’t have the time to write fresh stories. We manage maybe six or seven novels a year.”
As authors such as Suba have moved on, they have left huge shoes that are yet to be filled. “It’s very sad that no new writers have come into this field,” Suresh says. “Either they’re not enthusiastic, or they’re lazy—they don’t want to work hard, but they want to see their names on the teashop racks immediately.”
The solution to this sudden drought, on the part of the 10-12 serious pulp publishers who are still in the game, has been to issue reprints of old novels. S.P. Ramu, who publishes Suba and Ramani Chandran under the Super Novels imprint, understands his authors’ dilemma, even if it’s depriving him of fresh fiction.
“It’s human nature—people go where the pay is better,” Ramu says. An author can retain copyright of his work and still earn up to Rs30,000 per monthly novel; a marquee author such as Kumar makes even more, although his publisher, G. Asokan, won’t reveal exactly how much that is. “It was four figures back then. It’s five figures now,” is all he’ll say. But it’s still small change in the face of a screenplay pay cheque for a few lakhs.
“You know, even today, when we print new novels, the sales are good—60,000 or so. It shows there’s still a hunger for that kind of literature,” Ramu says. The reprints sell only 10,000-20,000 copies each. “It’s a profitable business, but there needs to be a revolution in style, in content, in presentation. Otherwise, it’ll just keep getting duller.”
Kumar’s pace of writing, too, has slowed, but only by his steroidal standards. Even today, in a spartan room on the terrace of his large house, he writes 10-12 pages of a new story every day, in perfectly lettered Tamil longhand. “At this pace, I do a novel a month, and some short stories and some serialized stories.”
Every Kumar tale passes through an in-house censor: His wife. “I give her all but the last six pages or so, and ask her to guess the ending,” he says, smiling. “If she gets it wrong, it means the story is a success. Sometimes she even reminds me if I’ve used a particular strategy or plot twist before.”