Ashokamitran, the writer who held a mirror to the Tamil middle class

As a talent scout for writers, movie mogul SS Vasan was undoubtedly one of the best. A writer himself (though much of his writing was plagiarised from western novels as he once even admitted in a court), Vasan chose some of the best wordsmiths to fuel his magazine and movies — Kalki, Kothamangalam Subbu, Devan and the redoubtable RK Narayan himself. The story team was the most respected in the overstaffed Gemini studio. They moved around like demigods and had their dinners with the boss himself. A host of employees in Gemini studio hoped against hope that they would one day be added to this ensemble of valued writers.

But then Vasan is known to have tripped sometimes on his choices and his famous tripping was Shivaji Ganesan whom he rejected for a small role in Chandralekha. He advised the actor that he had no future in the cinema and asked him to stick to the theatre. Another tripping, though not well known, was in the case of a friend’s son whom Vasan employed in his public relations and archive department. The 20-year-old Thyagarajan was a son of Vasan’s friend working in Hyderabad Nizam’s railways who died prematurely. The family was struggling and Thyagarajan was taking tuitions to support the family.

Vasan employed the youngster and gave him the job of showing important visitors around the studio and cutting out relevant articles from newspapers. Soon were added the responsibilities of maintaining the fleet of vehicles and the petrol bunk (yes, Gemini studio had one within). In the meantime, he was also getting his short stories published.

Finally, it was too much for the creative individual within and after 14 years, a frustrated Thyagarajan confronted the boss himself. He told Vasan that he was a published writer too and was asked to show his writings. The boss was impressed but if Thyagarajan had expected a place in the writer’s unit, he was sorely disappointed. The monolith of Gemini studio was already being traumatised by a quirky Tamil audience. Flops were outnumbering the mega hits. The boss was clear in his words, “If you had been a writer you should not have been doing all these chores for so long”.

Thyagarajan resigned from the studio the next day and became a full-time writer and began his prolific literary career. He continued writing under the pseudonym of Ashokamitran (a friend of Ashoka) which he chose after a character in a friend’s play which was the name of a king who secretly joins a terrorist plot directed at himself.

But then without the Gemini salary in the first week, life was a struggle (he would confess in an interview that perhaps he did know how to get another job.)

He was lucky on two counts. A very supportive family which tightened its belts to let him follow his dreams. The other was a slew of excellent translators who took his books to corners of the literary world. But Ashokamitran firmly stuck to his career of putting words on paper and his family soldiered on some of his editorial stints and royalties.

A prolific writer, Ashokamitran did250 short stories, two dozen novels andinnumerable columns and essays. Perhaps his best column was My Years with Boss on his futile years in Gemini studio for Khushwant Singh’s Illustrated Weekly of India.The series remains one of the important documents for film historians on the studio culture of Tamil cinema.

But his creative writing is what readers would speak of in awe for decades to come. His novel Karainta nizhalgal (dissolving shadows) onthe struggle of cinema’ssupporting actors and his short story on a starving street ‘Puliattam’ artiste who dressed up as a tiger are considered masterpieces.

His works were lucid portrayals spiced with down to earth minimalism, mostly about characters picked out of the cityscape. In short, he depicted the common man and his tribulations with a subtle nuance of humour.

However, Ashokamitran never stuck to one canvas. He is one of the very few people to record on fiction the turbulent days of India’s annexation of the Hyderabad state in 1948, a historical event to which he was a witness in 18-vadhu Atchakkodu (The Eighteenth Parallel).

But soon, in great contrast to his unrecognised years at Gemini, Ashokamitran was lauded in the literary field. Honour came knocking on the door and The University of Iowa invited him over for a Creative Writing Fellowship. Award after award honoured him and the peak was the Sahitya Akademi award which coincidentally was for a story collection My father’s friend.

Ashokamitran created a trend in Tamil social history by portraying the middle class effectively. His books inspired a slew of writers and film directors to choose their heroes and heroines from this unsung section of society in their offerings which in turn serve history as mirrors to the Tamil middle class.