Kalachuvadu: Footprints
of Time

Little Magazines is a monthly column where we bring short compilations about different independent, regional language magazines from across India. Each edition offers a curated look at a different publication — highlighting the literary culture, politics, and histories of the languages they are published in. This column is an exercise in understanding how these magazines evolve, the challenges they face in publishing, and the unique, niche and sometimes peculiar editorial style they showcase. 

In 1987, “Kalachuvadu”(Footprints of Time), started off as a little magazine in Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu. Founder and prominent Tamil novelist, poet and translator Sundara Ramasamy intended it to be a magazine of political, cultural and social importance for the Tamil reader. As he wrote in one of the magazine’s early editorials, Kalachuvadu’s primary aim was to “deepen Tamil thought.”

The initial issues of the quarterly featured a wide range of literary content — from short stories, poems, literary criticism, to even Tamil translations of Kafka and Faiz. However, “Kalachuvadu” took a brief pause in 1992. The number of issues each year began to dwindle, and the pressures of running a magazine took over, with Ramasamy eventually deciding to shut shop.

Two years later, post-liberalisation, Ramasamy’s son, Kannan Sundaram revived the magazine, and gave it a new sensibility, making it much more than a little magazine. Positioning “Kalachuvadu” as an “alternative serious magazine”, he says, “Unlike little magazines that are confined to the inner circle and seek to influence the larger population through its scholarly set of readers, we are prepared to print even a lakh copies should there be a demand.”

In an interview, Sundaram reflects on why his father eventually let the magazine lapse. “Kalachuvadu” had been conceived as a space that would bring together writers who shared Sundara Ramasamy's literary vision, but the response never matched his expectations. The magazine was also taking time away from his writings. Coupled with the broader decline of little magazines during the 1980s — when, in Sundaram’s words, “almost all the small literary magazines that were being published wound up”— these factors led him to close “Kalachuvadu” after just eight issues.

When Sundaram revived “Kalachuvadu”, Sundara Ramasamy chose not to shape its new direction despite remaining an influential figure in Tamil literary circles. Instead, he ensured that the magazine would belong to the next generation. Sundara Ramasamy legally transferred ownership of the magazine to Sundaram and “distanced himself from the magazine to allow me to run it as I wished.” That gesture of trust gave the revived “Kalachuvadu” the editorial freedom to develop its own identity while remaining rooted in the literary ethos that had first inspired it.

By 2003, “Kalachuvadu” had become a monthly from a quarterly. It took on issues such as the death sentence, secularism, Gujarat 2002, Sri Lankan ethnic war, interlinking rivers, religious fundamentalism, Tamil cuisine, Periyar 125, globalisation, and Tamil publishing history. 

Despite its broader literary and cultural ambitions, “Kalachuvadu” has remained deeply political. In the early 2000s, when Tamil women poets faced intense backlash from conservative groups for writing about their lives and female sexuality, the magazine emerged as a prominent defender of their right to free expression. In 2008, “Kalachuvadu” itself was banned from public libraries in Tamil Nadu after it criticised the then DMK-led state government. The magazine successfully challenged the ban in the High Court, which ruled in its favour. Later, in 2014, “Kalachuvadu”stood firmly behind author Perumal Murugan when Hindutva groups protested against his novel “Madhorubagan” (“One Part Woman”), once again defending literary freedom in the face of censorship.

While little magazines and literary institutions in Tamil often struggled to sustain themselves over the long term, “Kalachuvadu” gradually evolved into a lasting institution without abandoning its editorial commitments. As Sundaram puts it, “There are two major things in every institution that came up to promote cultural writing in Tamil, either they wound up or they slowed down. You can’t think of a single institution that actually grew over 35 years of time. That happened for the first time for Kalachuvadu.”

This feature was compiled by Sangamitra Baskar.