Abstract:

My talk is based on my newly published book Beyond Desire: Sexuality in Modern Tamil Literature (OUP, October 2016). Drawing on the writings of seven male Tamil writers whose writings span the twentieth century my book explores the aesthetic interpenetrations of eroticism with artistic creativity, labour, religion and spirituality and social reformation. The book traces a literary lineage from one of the earliest Tamil writers of eroticism, K.P. Rajagopalan (1902-1944), to his literary disciples who wrote across the latter decades of the twentieth century. I focus on the sensual possibilities of desire through a spectrum of male-female intimacies that attempt to blur caste and sexual hierarchies. If my first four writers are engaged with the reorientation of desire in ideal love, religion and spirituality, my last two writers imagine the possibility of sublimating desire, albeit unsuccessfully, in social reform and labour as ways of validating marginalized (female) subjects. As the texts I discuss are about disappointed and betrayed desires that are neither exhausted by nor limited to the sexual act, there are no narrative closures to these texts. They remain open-ended meditations on the nature of desire as a productive and creative agent that enable the possibility of individual and
collective forms of transformation and self-realization.


About the Speaker:

Kiran Keshavamurthy is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Centre for Studies in Social Sciences. His interests include caste and sexuality studies and modern Indian literatures. His book is entitled Beyond Desire: Sexuality in Modern Tamil Literature (October, 2016, OUP).