ABSTRACT
Ashokamitran is a Tamil writer who was born Brahmin and the chapter examines a collection of his short stories. The best stories in the collection are autobiographical and deal with his experiences as a white-collar employee in the film industry or a small firm, usually related in the first person. While the writer emerges from the stories as a person with no authority because of his relatively low position in the employer’s hierarchy, there is also the sense that the people he interacts with are willing to talk to him and take his advice. When the story relates the experiences of the narrator as a boy, he is still treated with courtesy and respect and one gets the sense that it is because of the ‘soft power’ he exudes as an educated Brahmin, a class with a colonial education. The fact that the author is attentive to the subjectivity (and foibles) of his protagonists also frees him from the charge of patronising his lower caste characters. He is sensitive to the nuances of caste conduct in local society and this marks him out from other upper-caste writers who deal with caste and social hierarchy more as ‘social problems’ to be eradicated.
