The anthology has a larger pedagogic purpose and is part of the Tamil Nadu Textbook and Educational Services Corporation’s initiative to identify and translate Tamil literary works into English to ‘enhance the reach of Tamil antiquity, tradition and contemporaneity and enrich world literature’.
The novel’s frame story unfolds as a personal investigation: did the narrator’s mother commit suicide by jumping into a lake in Kodaikanal as the police inquiry had concluded, or was she killed? If so, by whom and why? The main story is complex and compressed.
The narrative of Black Soil builds on the idea of the recognizability of lives and establishes its referentiality to the social and political atrocities of young, Independent India.
C N Annadurai (1909-1969), popularly known as ‘Anna’ (elder brother), is one of Tamil Nadu’s greatest icons. His charisma and ideology resonate in Tamil politics even today.
In the Author’s Preface, Parthasarathy presents his play as exploring the ‘theme of mutually contradictory dispositions of the various characters’ going beyond ‘a mere narration of historical events’.
The first piece in the present collection of articles on Chennai was written in 1998 and the compilation in Tamil, Oru Parvaiyil Chennai Nagaram (‘Chennai at a Glance’) took shape gradually over the years.