About Charu Comments from Vivek Narayanan

There’s a great deal of writing both by and about Charu Nivedita on the internet; most of it is in Tamil. Nivedita also has a translator who is on hand to instantly translate the articles that he writes regularly for the Malayalam press! In English, alas, there are only one or two scattered things, including the first chapter of Zero Degree, his only translated novel. Readers should keep in mind that ZD is only one—the second—of four novels that he has written, and that the novels are all quite different.


Existentialism and Fancy Banyan, his first, appears to be a coming of age story; Raasa Leela, his third book, is an intricately plotted political fable; Kamaroopa Kadhaigal—his most recent book, considered by some to be his best—is a troubled love story. Kamaroopa Kadhaigal, by the way, was first published in serial form on his blog. We’re excited to hear that for his slot on the evening of March 20, Nivedita will be reading new, unpublished translations by Pritham Chakravarthy from this book.

Zero Degree—an intense and seemingly anarchic pastiche of crude pornography, violence, conversations, letters, heartbreak, Oulipian omissions, possibly autobiographical snippets, multiple narrators, theory, numerology, classical Tamil, mytho-political histories, translations, melancholy, lyrical poetry, name dropping and whatever else—must have been quite a surprise when it first appeared in Tamil in 1999; yet, the fact is that there is no book remotely like it on the Indian English landscape either. Thus, just as the Tamil original has gathered a huge cult following over time, the English translation too is now finding many admirers in India and probably elsewhere as well. In world literature, the writer that comes most immediately to mind as a comparison is Kathy Acker, who partly extends the techniques of William Burroughs. The English translation is dedicated to Acker; Nivedita is indeed a serious reader of Acker, although it should be noted that he began to read her only after the publication of Zero Degree.

The English success owes a lot, obviously, to the quality of the translation, done by Pritham Chakravarthy with Rakesh Khanna: it conjures a truly organic speaking voice in Indian English, something many writers working originally in the language seem to struggle with! Moreover, the translation is also wise about what it chooses to leave out, what it does not attempt to find an equivalence for. I have begun to find my way into the Tamil; one of its special features is how it runs and collides an incredibly wide range of languages and registers together, going from classical Tamil to the medieval Tamil of the poet-saint Andal to the jaggedly eloquent swearing of the Madras street or fragments of pop-scientific language, officialese, flashes of Hindi and, certainly, plenty of English, used un-self-consciously in unexpected ways and places.

For all its feints and hijinks, what is striking about Zero Degree is its emergent seriousness of purpose, its truth of feeling, its search for a sense of completeness. At one point early on, it is claimed even that the chapters have been shuffled in random order; however, there is a very telling and ultimately transformative emotional arc if you read the book from beginning to end.


I think we should take it not just as a playful, ironic “postmodern” novel but as a novel of oppositions and contradictions: a deeply autobiographical novel where the self has been scattered, an ironic pastiche novel that speaks to raw experience, a defiantly cosmopolitan novel than nonetheless pins a very particular kind of schizophrenic rage that perhaps—I could be wrong—any Tamilian will immediately recognise.

Nivedita was born and brought up in a Tamilnadu village very near the border of the formerly French union territory of Karaikal. On this side, he told me, Tamilnadu was under prohibition; on the other side, booze and Western classical music. He lived in Delhi for twelve years, where he worked for the rations office, picked up excellent Hindi, gave himself an education in literature, music and world cinema and witnessed the 1984 riots first hand.

Now, living in Chennai with his wife and two very large dogs, he writes full time. His link to the world is partly through a very active presence on the internet, continually writing film reviews, political commentary and the like. Loyal Tamil readers located all around the world purchase and post him all the obscure books he requests; his special interest at the moment is Arabic literature in translation. “In Tamilnadu people get very sentimental when it comes to writers, actors and politicians,” he told me, chuckling. “At a book signing by an Indian English author you will see people quietly queuing up. At my readings and signings, they sometimes break down crying.”