Symposium in TU discusses importance of Tamil novels

THANJAVUR: Importance of Tamil novels was stressed at a symposium on recent trends in Tamil novel writing organised jointly by Sahitya Akademy and Tamil University here on Thursday.

Delivering the keynote address, Tamilavan, general council member of the Akademy regretted that importance is not given to novels like importance being given to sangam and later literatures. “But novels are extension of these literatures. They are as important as Sangam and other literatures” he said.

Novel literature writing started only in the fag end of the 19th century. “It was a new kind of writing with a story as a centre piece,” he said. “Vedhanayagam wrote the first novel based on folk stories in 1879” he added. Two other novels that followed this work are ‘Kamalambal Charithram’ in 1896 and ‘Padmavathi Charithram’ in 1898. Realism and rationality came in the novels in seventies and eighties.

lG.Balasubramanians, Vice-chancellor, Tamil University said that novels should be analysed and studied based on their local importance. They are being classified on the basis of five types of regions like forest and forest land, sea and coast, desert, hills and hilly regions, cultivation lands etc. Novel literatue in Tamil is 140 years old and it was added to college studies in Chennai University in 1970 only,” he said.  

Writers N. Sivasubramanian spoke on new trends in story telling in novels, G. Kuppusamy on translation novels in Tamil and T. Vishnukumaran on the shadow novels. Chandrasekara Raju of the Akademy welcomed the gathering.