Kalki

R. Krishnamurthy, who wrote as Kalki, was one of the giants of the Tamil press during the turbulent years of the nationalist movement. He was a versatile, prolific writer whose fiction took up the urgent concerns of his time.

This collection gathers the best of his short stories, which feature some of his most colourful and lasting characters and the themes of Tamil popular fiction in the nineteen thirties and forties. The stories carry the heady urgency of the freedom struggle, the sly humour of parodied Tamil gothic and sharp social satire.

Gowri Ramnarayan's sensitive translations preserve the nuances of the gently mordant wit that made Kalki's stories the highlight of the magazines where they first appeared. They won a devoted following that continues today.

The volume coincides with the centenary of Kalki's birth and pays tribute to a writer whose breadth of vision imagined and served a new India.