Stranger than fiction: Inside the vibrant world of Gujarati pulp tales
Humans in love with aliens, language-hating robots, a superhero in garba gear... A new Blaft anthology offers a wild ride.
Noormohammed Jusab Golibar, a street vendor who sold sweets, loved comedy, cinema and music. Over the years, he saved up and, driven by this love, on August 15, 1949 — India’s second Independence Day — launched a Gujarati magazine named Chakram (slang for Crazy).
The Ahmedabad-based weekly offered folk tales and humorous fiction. After his death in 1966, his sons took over. One of them, HN Golibar, was only a teenager then. Over time, he took charge as editor and expanded the magazine’s range of content. He included puzzles and the latest news from the world of science, as well as tales of romance and fantasy, horror, the supernatural, crime and science-fiction.
In 1987, he renamed the magazine Chakram Chandan (chandan being sandalwood), because he “wanted the magazine to spread around the world like the fragrance of chandan,” says Mohsin Golibar, his son.
Many of the tales were written by members of the family in these years. HN Golibar wrote under the nickname Atom, and began to receive fan mail addressed to Atom Uncle. The magazine’s chief illustrator, Ghulam Rasul Sandhwani, even started a weekly cartoon strip featuring the entertaining squabbles of Atom Uncle and Fatakadi Aunty (Golibar’s wife, Nazma Yunus Golibar, who wrote under the name Fatakadi, or Firecracker).
At its peak, in 1990, the magazine had 150,000 subscribers. Even after the numbers began to dip around the turn of the century, Chakram Chandan survived. The pandemic, however, acted as a death blow. Publication was halted in 2021.
HN Golibar didn’t know it at the time, but that same year, Vishwambhari S Parmar, a teenager who grew up reading Gujarati fiction, began work on a pulp-fiction anthology for the independent publishing house Blaft.
Blaft, based in Chennai, had brought out three previous anthologies of translated pulp-fiction, all featuring stories originally written in Tamil. Parmar’s fluency in Gujarati opened another door to them. The result: The Blaft Anthology of Gujarati Pulp Fiction, featuring 12 stories by nine of the best-known Gujarati writers in the genre, including Ekta Nirav Doshi, Kalidas Jadav, Bansidhar Shukla, Kanu Bhagdev, Narad, and HN Golibar.
Zine there...
The oldest tale in the anthology dates to 1924 and is a work of science-fiction by Narad titled Akashvani (A Message from the Stars), about a strange love that blooms between a human and an alien.
Also featured is Kalidas Jadav’s 1948 tale Adrishya Shatru (Invisible Enemy), about a chance encounter between a scientist and an extra-terrestrial hermaphrodite.
In Viru Purohit’s Hello (2013), people live in a world in which robots have enslaved humans and destroyed language.
Accessing the right stories was more difficult than the team had anticipated. “The closure of good lending libraries was a key challenge,” says Rakesh Khanna, editor of the anthology and co-founder of Blaft, since few of the magazines and publishing houses had any archives. Parmar and Khanna often had to decide whether to read a story or skip it based on the title and cover image posted online.
“Gujarati books often have no blurb at the back. The blurb is included in the author’s introduction to their work…and those pages are usually not uploaded online. Just the front and back covers are,” Parmar says.
The anthology eventually included eight colour plates showcasing some of the captivating covers they encountered. There is Golibar’s Raatrani (Queen of the Night; 1992), illustrated by N Manwar, with a train zooming out of a tunnel shaped like a skull. Bhagdev’s CID (1998), illustrated by Sandhwani, depicts a snake coiled around a syringe, its forked tongue holding the needle. Men with guns, haunted houses, and unearthly beings are common refrains.
The cover of the anthology stays true to the spirit of these. Illustrated by Nabi H Ali, it depicts a woman, underwater, dressed in a scuba suit with a garba odhana (or dupatta) draped over it, holding two lit flairs crossed like dandiya sticks, and facing off against a jalrakshas or aquatic monster.
The monster is a character from Varunlokma (Varunlok: In the Undersea Realm, 2014) by Bansidhar Shukla, a tale about a team of deep-sea researchers who encounter fantastical creatures such as merfolk and the monster.
While pulp fiction is often considered the literary equivalent of popcorn films, this collection reflects how effectively the genre can hide the familiar behind an alien front, offering the thoughtful reader a new view of their world.
“The stories paint a picture of a more integrated society, of people getting along and working together in the modern world, dealing with ghosts and demons, or going on scientific expeditions under the sea,” says Khanna. “It’s different. It seems healthier.”
(Nalini Ramachandran is a children’s book author and graphic novelist. She can be reached @authornalini on Instagram)
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