Solitary Sprout: Selected Stories

Virginia Woolf once described modernist fiction as “a thing you could ruffle with your breath, and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses”. That precisely captures R. Chudamani’s art and craft as a short story writer. A major twentieth-century writer, Raghavan Chudamani (1931–2010) has often been identified as an early feminist among Tamil writers. Subtly radical in her approach to human relations and social issues, her critique of entrenched social institutions and attendant attitudes is sharp and revelatory. She challenges the way society perceives human beings, conditioned and constituted as they are by family, community, education and religion. Her stories traverse psychological, existential and socio-economic issues as also ordinary everyday human experience; encompassing both the universal and the particular, they reveal an empathy and insight that are profoundly human.