The short story format originated from Europe. The Tamil world believes that the short stories in Tamil can be traced back to the seventeenth century to ‘Paramartha Kurunkathai’ a transition from the classical Tamil poetry. V.V.S. Iyer started a new trend in the 1880s giving the short stories its profound form.
Pudumaipithan started the next stage of Tamil short stories and many other writers came out with brilliant stories in Tamil. Pudumaipithan, Ku.Pa. Ra and P.S.Ramaiya and their contemporaries have written many stories that is today popular format with the Tamil literary circles and readers as the short story format.
Pudumaipithan
Pudumaipithan’s stories carried messages for the society. His sincerely expressed his concern for the society and depicted the misery as well as drama in our lives. He wrote about the human relationships, their aspirations and life in general looked at closely. His ‘Ponnagaram’ was considered beyond the grasp of readers. He dealt with a wide array of subjects in his stories while also experimenting with the art of story telling. His writing included sarcasm and wit and the stories appeared natural and realistic. The examples like ‘Kodukkapuli Maram’ and ‘Naasakkaara Gumbal’ bring out the above qualities of his writing. He has deftly used the dialects of Madras or Tirunelveli in his stories as appropriate. His writings reflected the influence of foreign writers like Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others in the western world. He has penned over 150 short stories in Tamil.
T.Janakiraman
T.Janakiraman’s short stories brought the vagaries in the lives of people wonderfully and people could identify them with the characters.
Jayakanthan
Jayakanthan had written many outstanding stories some of which went on to be filmed later on. Most of his stories were published by Ananda Vikatan. While working in the office of ‘Janasakthi’ he developed a liking for Tamil literature and writing in Tamil. His stories were mostly about the people from the people living in the slums or extremely poor people.
N.Pichamoorthy
N.Pichamoorthy is a well known writer of Tamil short stories. ‘Mannasai’ is one of his popular short stories.
Sujatha
Sujatha is the pen name of S.Rangarajan who has written over 100 Tamil novels and 250 short stories in Tamil. His style of writing earned him a wide readership. His science fiction is said to be a pioneering work in Tamil. He could unravel science in his own inimitable simple words that can be understood by all. ‘Aathma’ is a short story which is a thrilling narration of a day in a computer engineer’s life. Suri had made the computer the ability to predict the future giving it a set of rules that can observe the planetary positions. To test its efficacy he gives his birth details and the computer instantly gives the output on the screen. That turns out to be his death sentence, in a way. He was going to die that same night exactly at 23:11:59. So healthy and full of life, he could not believe it and does random checks in hurry. The story ends with the arrival of the inevitable moment. Sujatha’s stories were published in popular Tamil magazines like Kumudam, Ananda Vikatan and Kalki.
