Hello Jeymohan sir,
So often, literature feels like it must be something grand. So many of the stories we consider meaningful in the modern age cover a vast cast of characters, or push forth an intricate moral conclusion to be drawn from their complexity. These stories are oftentimes fascinating to read and thrilling to experience. What Chandra does, however, is neatly undercut this intricacy in order to create nuanced, thoughtful, but much smaller-scale stories. The characters in her stories do not feel quite fictional; instead, they feel like real people. In her story A House Without Cats, the winner of the 2022 Mozhi Prize, Chandra exemplifies this feeling. The story is simple—a boy, growing up with his family along with a family of cats. As each child moves out of the house, the mother of the family feels a sense of loss, which is mirrored by the loss of the cats. The story is not some extravagant, philosophical architectural construction. Instead, the text is more similar to a pane of stained glass, filtering raw human experience through carefully chosen language, not for glory’s sake, but just so the observer can see the light for all the beauty it can be. Her other stories—Dreaming Woods, which details a girl’s first love, and Rain Long Due, a snapshot story following a man as he recounts his past and takes accountability in the present, have a similar sense of reality to them. Chandra’s talent is taking something small—a person, an experience, a moment—and making it something worthwhile. Even when her stories integrate supernatural elements in them, they still maintain their grounded nature. The way Chandra integrates the magic into her stories is elegant and unique; there are few overtly fantastical elements in her stories. Instead, there are whispers; whispers of ghosts, like in The Comet, or whispers of curses, good and evil that silhouettes the characters and their very real experiences instead of shadowing over them.
The meaning that her literature has on feminism is understated. A common feminist criticism of literature is the objectification of women in stories. This objectification can go in several directions; women can either be villainized, portrayed purely as sex objects; dehumanized, and made to be flat, inconsequential characters; or excessively glorified, elevated to the status of a godhead: someone who can do no wrong. None of these portrayals are inherently negative, but because they have been systematically executed across all literary genres, Tamil and otherwise, they feel overplayed and overdone. What Chandra does, by making her female characters nuanced, complex people, who can do rights and wrongs, is humanize them, where so many other prolific authors have failed, such as the main character of The Loneliness That Entered the Room. By refusing to disconnect her characters from their inherent humanity, Chandra creates people that anyone can empathize with and relate to, regardless of how much one actually agrees with their ideals. This is truly feminist writing; not pedestaling women, which is just a stifled iteration of objectification, but truly exploring them as people.
In the end, the only way that this depth is able to be conveyed is through the skill of Chandra’s writing. Her prose transports the reader to the location, particularly when she’s writing about natural settings, and her metaphorical descriptions of emotion, never sparing on the details, pulls directly at the reader’s heart. With her luminous writing, Chandra Thangaraj pulls the beautiful from the mundane, and polishes the gem of humanity to a fine luster.
