Latest revision as of 13:10, 22 March 2023

[edit] A backgrounder

Arushi Bhaskar, Mar 17, 2023: The Indian Express

The nomination for 'Pyre' comes at a time when Indian-language works are gaining more recognition through English translation. In 2022, Geetanjali Shree became the first Hindi novelist to win an International Booker Prize for 'Ret Samadhi’.

Tamil writer Perumal Murugan’s novel ‘Pookkuzhi’, translated as ‘Pyre’ in English by Anirudh Vasudevan, has made it to the International Booker Prize 2023 longlist, becoming the first Tamil novel to be nominated for the Bookers. The list was announced earlier this week on March 14.

Set in rural Tamil Nadu in the 1980s, the book explores caste-based violence through the elopement of a young inter-caste couple. Talking about Murugan’s book, the judges of the prize said, “Perumal Murugan is a great anatomist of power and, in particular, of the deep, deforming rot of caste hatred and violence. With flashes of fable, his novel tells a story specific and universal: how flammable are fear and the distrust of others.”

In total, 13 novels have made it to the longlist this year. Apart from Tamil, Bulgarian and Catalan languages have made their debut this year. ‘Time Shelter’ by Georgi Gospodinov is the Bulgarian novel, translated by Angela Rodel, while Eva Baltasar’s ‘Boulder’ is the Catalan representation, translated by Julia Sanches.

The prize, worth £50,000 (Rs 50 lakh), is awarded annually for a novel or short story collection written in any language, translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. The prize money is split equally between the author and translator of the winning book. The shortlist of six books will be announced on April 18 and the winner on May 23.

Who is Perumal Murugan?

Murugan is a novelist and professor of Tamil literature, who has written 10 novels (many of which have been translated into English), five collections each of short stories and poems and 10 non-fiction books relating to language and literature, in addition to editing several fiction and non-fiction anthologies. He has also written a memoir titled ‘Nizhal Mutrattu Ninaivugal’ (2013).

His work chronicles the everyday lives of Tamil rural folk, their traditions and social hierarchies. In particular, several of his books critique the caste system and how it operates through oppression and violence, such as his third novel, ‘Koolamadari’ (2000), translated into English as ‘Seasons of the Palm’ (2004) by V Geetha. It dealt with bonded labour and exploitation of so-called ‘lower-caste’ people by the so-called ‘upper-castes’.

Apart from fiction, his scholarly work has focused on the literature of the Kongu Nadu region, which comprises parts of western Tamil Nadu, southeastern Karnataka and eastern Kerala. Most notably, he has done extensive research on Kongu folklore, especially the ballads on Annamar Sami – a pair of folk deities. His documentation efforts have also extended to republishing various Kongu literature texts.

He has also collaborated with Carnatic musician T M Krishna. Murugan wrote a poem for him on the topic of manual scavengers, an issue unheard of in the traditional Carnatic music sphere at the time.

Talking to The Indian Express, Murugan said, “Krishna asked me to write something about the community for him to sing. This took me about six months because I didn’t know which angle to approach this from, since this was an issue which was very much a part of the social consciousness. Eventually, I decided to go with ‘hands’ as the focus of the keerthanai, because hands were usually regarded as something with which to perform uyirvana vishayangal (higher tasks). How can the same hands be expected to lift excrement?”

The ‘Murugan is dead’ controversy

The nature of Murugan’s work has often invited backlash from conservative sections of society, including right-wing groups like the R S S. In a 2014 Facebook post, Murugan wrote, “Author Perumal Murugan is dead. He is no God. Hence, he will not be resurrected. Hereafter, only P Murugan, the teacher, will live.”

This came as a result of protests over his novel ‘Mathorubhagan’ (2010), translated into English as ‘One Part Woman’ by Vasudevan. The Kongu Vellala Gounder community, an influential intermediate caste in western Tamil Nadu, had in particular accused him of insulting their women and degrading a Hindu deity in the novel. Senior R S S ideologues also justified the attacks on Murugan.

A ‘peace meeting’ brokered by the Namakkal district administration resulted in the Facebook post, as well as an agreement by Murugan to withdraw his novel. Another consequence of the protest was that Murugan was forced to leave his job as a professor at the Government Arts College in Namakkal, and relocate first to Chennai and then to Attur. However, the Madras High Court in July 2016 ruled that the ‘peace meeting’ was illegal, and dismissed all criminal cases filed against the author by caste groups. “Let the author be resurrected to what he is best at. Write,” the court said. In 2017, ‘One Part Woman’ won the Sahitya Akademi’s Translation prize.

In an interview with The Indian Express, Murugan said he did not “fight back” as he didn’t know whom to testify against. “If the role of the state were to be looked at, I would say it had to prioritise law and order over anything else, as they do elsewhere. I didn’t take offence at the caste-communal groups either as I seriously doubt their concerns about God and faith,” he said.

Murugan added, “When my students planned protests, I asked them whether we should use the same language as they had used against my works. Once Buddha was asked why he was not reacting to repeated insults hurled at him by someone. He replied he hadn’t received those insults, so they remained in the possession of those who had hurled them.”

Why is the longlisting significant?

The nomination comes at a time when Indian-language works are gaining more institutional recognition as well as popular favour through English translation. In 2022, Geetanjali Shree became the first Hindi novelist to win an International Booker for ‘Ret Samadhi’, translated into English as ‘Tomb of Sand’ by Daisy Rockwell.

Talking about ‘Pyre’ being longlisted, Murugan said, “This is the first time a Tamil novel has made it to the long list. It is very important for the language. It is significant not because it is my novel but because the selection is an acknowledgement of the literature in Tamil, in India.”

“English and Hindi are spoken as Indian languages whereas the others are classified as regional tongues. That is wrong. That sort of perception will change when books from our languages — southern languages as well as non-Hindi languages from the North — make it to international award lists,” he added.

Further, the very subject matter of Murugan’s work is noteworthy. The portrayal of caste and caste-based atrocities in art forms like literature, cinema, etc. to date invites backlash and censure, despite there emerging a bigger and more receptive audience for them in recent years. Cases of honour killing continually make the news. The longlisting of ‘Pyre’ assumes even more importance in this context.

[edit] PERUMAL MURUGAN is...

PERUMAL MURUGAN is a well-known contemporary Tamil writer and poet. He was written six novels, four collections of short stories and four anthologies of poetry. Two of his novels have been translated into English to wide acclaim: Seasons of the Palm, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Kiriyama Award in 2005, and Current Show. He has received awards from the Tamil Nadu government as well as from Katha Books.

[edit] Madhorubagan and its sequels

The lost labour of Perumal Murugan Not the theme of difficult love, the Tamil author’s novel may be under attack for his disregard of caste

C.S. Lakshmi (Live Mint)

C.S. Lakshmi is a Tamil author who writes under the pseudonym Ambai, and founder of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women).

Madhorubagan

What is it about Madhorubagan that it became an easy target for this pent-up anger? The novel speaks about a custom that existed many years ago when a woman who was childless, maybe because her husband was infertile, could go to a temple festival on the last day. On that day, the god himself was supposed to descend in the form of all men gathered there and she could choose to be with any man of her choice; maybe a pregnancy would follow. The child would be accepted by the family as god’s child and given legitimacy.

One of the major reasons for the present protest and humiliation of Murugan could be all the pent-up anger against his disregard of caste and his attitude towards the caste system and its discriminatory ways. Sometime back, he had published a book of articles on the caste experiences of Dalits. One can surmise that the anger of these forces was not just aimed at the book, but at his person and the life choices he had made. The opportune moment for letting out this anger is now, when the axe of “hurting sentiments” can fall on anybody’s neck.

Sequels

Perumal Murugan has written two sequels to Madhorubagan (One Part Woman)—Aalavayan and Ardhanari, which I released on 3 January 2015 in Chennai. When I first read the sequels before release, I wrote to him saying that what he was doing was just not right; how can he keep on writing good novels? If he writes just one good novel, people like me can feel a bit jealous and let it go. Must he keep on writing good novels? If he continued this way, I would come all the way there and hit him, I said. He wrote back saying, “Ambai, I want to be hit by you many times.”

In one of the sequels, Kali meets a man who is thrilled with his girl child and insists on carrying her on his shoulder; he tells Kali that she is god’s child. Kali asks him if he minded this. The man says he did not mind it at all for it fulfilled his wife’s desire to be a mother. Kali has to face snide remarks about not being able to father a child, and confines himself to his land, refusing to go out and meet anyone. Which one of them is infertile has not been tested, but both face humiliation.

There are graphic descriptions about how passionate they feel about each other only to emphasize that if Ponna still decides to go to the festival, it is because she wants her husband to be happy as much as she wants to be a mother. What irks people who believe in the purity of blood relations is the possibility of a woman deciding to go with a man of a lower caste. Kali himself fears this when he tells his friend and Ponna’s brother, Muthu, that all kinds of people come to the festival. Kali is not a great hero. He is a person with his own limitations since he belongs to a community. But it is his community, especially his mother, mother-in-law and Muthu, who point to a way out of this situation, a way provided by a custom. They cheat Ponna into believing that her husband wants her to go. And Ponna goes, a little afraid perhaps, but not unwilling. She also wants to feel her womb swell and hold a child in her hands.

Two different endings for Madhorubagan

Little did I know that the good novel, for which he wrote two different sequels, would land him in so much trouble four years after its publication and two years after its translation into English. In fact, Madhorubagan had elicited many appreciative responses and many of them were angry responses saying that Kali, the male protagonist, must not commit suicide. Murugan had suggested this as a possibility at the end of the novel. His readers loved Kali so much that they felt he must not commit suicide. One person had even told him angrily: “Why should Kali die? Ponna must die.” Ponna is Kali’s wife and they are passionately in love.

Murugan says that this is what made him think of two different endings for Madhorubagan and write two sequels, one that describes Ponna’s life, her pregnancy and her giving birth to a boy after Kali’s suicide, and another with Kali living to see his wife pregnant, being unable to accept it, and then finally accepting her.

[edit] The 2015 controversy

Tamil author Perumal Murugan announces his ‘death’ on Facebook over lack of freedom of speech

Amrith Lal | January 14, 2015 Indian Express

Perumal Murugan: The author

Murugan, was born in Thiruchengode in a peasant family, grew up working in the small soda shop his father ran outside a cinema hall. This experience provided him the material to write his second novel, Nizhal Mutram (Current Show in English). After studying in a local school, he did his PhD from Madras University in Tamil and started teaching in a college. He was influenced by Marxism in his formative years, which made him write about his land and people with a sense of history and deep empathy.

His six novels, numerous short stories and other writings, classified as regional fiction, evoke the senses and sounds of peasant life in Kongu Nadu (western Tamil Nadu).

2015: His self-proclaimed ‘death’

On his Facebook wall, Perumal Murugan (born 1966) has a post which reads like a suicide note. It is by P Murugan on behalf of Perumal Murugan. “Author Perumal Murugan is dead. He is no God. Hence, he will not resurrect. Hereafter, only P Murugan, a teacher, will live,” it reads.

The note thanks everyone who supported the author and upheld the freedom of expression, and announces the withdrawal of all his novels, short stories and poems. It calls on his publishers not to sell his books and promises to compensate their losses. The readers have been advised to burn their copies of his books. The note ends with an appeal to caste, religious, political and other groups to end their protests and leave the writer alone since he has withdrawn all his books.

Murugan, a much-admired Tamil writer, posted the note on Monday night soon after he agreed at a meeting convened by the Namakkal district administration to withdraw his 2010-Tamil novel, Mathorubhagan, following street protests called by caste-based groups. The protesters, mainly drawn from the Kongu Vellala Gounder community, an influential intermediate caste dominant in western Tamil Nadu, have been on the warpath since December, alleging that Murugan’s novel has insulted the women of the community and degraded a Hindu deity.

The protests, originally launched by leaders linked to local Hindutva groups, took a turn for the worse after a bandh was called in Namakkal, Murugan’s hometownin Jan 2015 forcing the author to issue a clarification that he would remove all references to the place where events in the novel take place. When that didn’t cool frayed tempers, he attended a meeting presided over by Namakkal district revenue officer V R Subbulakshmi and agreed to withdraw the book itself.

Mathorubhagan

Mathorubhagan (Other Part Woman, the English translation, came out in 2014) is a sensitive portrait of the disappointment of a childless peasant couple set in Thiruchengode, a town near Namakkal and close to Erode — the home of the ideologue of Dravidian movement Periyar E V Ramasamy, who spoke and wrote against caste and social dogmas in harsh language. Set in the early years of the 20th century, the novel discusses how the wife is cajoled and convinced by her family to attend a temple ritual that allows a woman to beget a child by entering into sexual union with a stranger. The child born of this union is called sami pillai or God’s child, since the stranger is perceived as a representative of God.

A few people from the Gounder community — to which Murugan too belongs — have claimed that the reference to the ritual has demeaned the women in their community.

Subbulakshmi, the official who chaired the “peace” meeting on Monday, says the administration was forced to get the author to meet the protesters since they wanted to put “a full stop to the protests”. “We tried our best to convince the protesters to end their opposition. It was not just a few people from some groups who were protesting, a large cross-section of the local population was demanding that the book be banned,” she says.

She adds that nearly 10,000 copies of the controversial portions of the novel were distributed by the protesters in houses and among women to mobilise people against the book. She says Murugan’s statement on quitting writing hurt her deeply and that she couldn’t sleep after reading his Facebook post.

Murugan’s supporters too were taken by surprise. His publisher, Kannan Sundaram of Kalachuvadu, had refused to back down when demands to withdraw the book were raised and mobilised public opinion against the protesters. On Monday, a statement was issued defending Murugan, which was signed by politicians including former CPI state secretary R Nallakkanu and VCK leader Thol Thirumavalavan and writers like Su Venkatesan, Baama, K Satchidanandan, Paul Zacharia, Gopalakrishna Gandhi and Ramachandra Guha.

Sundaram points out that the people who wanted to ban Murugan’s novel have declared this is not the end but the beginning. “They have said no writer who dares to touch the so-called Hindu sentiment will be able to live in Tamil Nadu. I see it as a sign of the danger facing the freedom of expression. Like Gujarat, Thiruchengode is emerging as a laboratory of casteist and religious fundamentalists,” he says. “Writers, artists and publishers must get together now and send out a clear message that we will not take this lying down,” he says.

“I would take the state to task for letting this happen and facilitating the mobilisation of people against freedoms guaranteed by Articles 14-17 of the Constitution,” says V Geetha, activist-writer, who has also translated two of Murugan’s novels into English.

“Murugan has contributed a lot to the region, language and his own community,” says D Ravikumar, writer and a former MLA of VCK. Ravikumar points out that the protests were initiated by politically motivated groups — state leaders of the BJP had disassociated with the protests — and wants the state government to act. “These are people coming together in the name of caste and community and turning democracy into mobocracy,” says Ravikumar.

Caste-centric mobilisations in TN

Caste-centric mobilisations have been a feature of western Tamil Nadu and the Gounder community had in the last decade formed its own political groups to assert their demands. M Vijayabaskar of Madras Institute of Development Studies says right-wing groups have been working among the Gounders for a while.

“The Hindu Munnani has been organising people in Tirupur and other parts (close to Namakkal). Campaigns have been organised to fight cases filed against Gounders and other intermediate castes under the SC/ST Atrocities Act. Hindu Munnani is using this opportunity to gain further foothold in the region and in the community,” he says.

Vijayabaskar says the resurgence of the caste identity has a lot to do with the changing political economy in the region. Distress among peasants is acute in the region, which has led to a social crisis. Intermediate castes, he says, are deeply fragmented and those people who have failed to advance economically have been forced to depend on caste and kinship alliances to survive. Caste groups, he adds, have been building histories of their “glorious past”, essentially to strengthen community pride and survive the social churn.

Ironically, Namakkal, the centre of the controversy, is home to a large number of boarding schools that churn out rank holders in the state board exams. The small built and soft-spoken Murugan, who has written critically about the rote learning promoted in Namakkal schools and even edited a volume of his students’ experiences of caste in schools, may have angered quite a few in this arid town.

[edit] 2023: Booker long list

March 15, 2023: The Times of India

Tamil author Perumal Murugan's novel ‘Pyre' is among 13 books from across Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America to make it to the longlist of the International Booker Prize 2023, announced by the Booker Foundation. 
Murugan, 56, makes it to the list with his 2016 book ‘Pyre’, translated from Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan,becoming the first Tamil writer to make it to the longlist. 


‘Pyre’, tells the tale of an intercaste couple who elope, setting in motion a story of terrifying foreboding.


“I am very happy, and this is a great acceptance of my writing. ‘Pyre’ deals with honour killing. Honour killing is a big problem in our country. I hope more people get to know about this issueafter this recognition,” the author told PTI.


“Perumal Murugan is a great anatomist of power and, in particular, of the deep, deforming rot of caste hatred and violence. With flashes of fable, his novel tells a story specific and universal: how flammable are fear and the distrust of others,” Booker's prize judging panel noted. 
PTI

[edit] Persecuted for his views

Who killed Perumal?

N Kalyan Raman The Times of India Jan 18 2015

Writer Perumal Murugan paid the price for taking on the caste system

The harassment and finally , the silencing of leading Tamil writer Perumal Murugan for his controversial 2010 novel, Mathorupaagan, was an assault on the freedom of expression. But, it is the social and political realities of contemporary Tamil Nadu that allow such assaults on constitutional guarantees to continue.

In Mathorupaagan, Murugan makes reference to a custom that was reportedly in vogue until the first half of the last century. It is said that at the annual festival of the Shiva temple in Thiruchengode, childless women sought sex with strangers -interpreted as `divine figures' -so that they could conceive. Four years after the original Tamil novel was published, and one year after an English translation (One Part Woman) was published to critical acclaim, certain caste organizations in the Kongu region (western districts of Tamil Nadu) launched a campaign against Murugan. The protests became so vicious that five days ago he declared himself `dead'.

Reports so far have blamed the situation on Hindu religious bodies, omitting all reference to caste organisations that actually drove the campaign. There are two reasons for this.

First, the Dravidian parties have never acknowledged, leave alone addressed, the oppression perpetrated by dominant non-brahmin castes.

Second: the R.S.S. and BJP are trying hard to gain a foothold in the state, and it is convenient to blame Hindu fundamentalism for the attacks on Perumal. The author and his supporters have openly spoken about the caste factor at work in the case but hardly anyone who has written on the subject has stressed on it. Four days after Murugan's startling statement, DMK treasurer MK Stalin is sued a vague statement of support saying that the author “is targeted by fundamentalists whose aim is to create a rift among the peace and freedom loving people of Tamil Nadu.“

How did local caste groups, in this case the Kongu Vellalars, become powerful enough to intimidate men like Perumal? (See Konga Vellāla

Over three decades, a handful of numerically strong caste groups, loosely referred to as “intermediate castes“, have acquired enough political clout to exercise control over several state agencies and institutions, including educational institutions. This is very similar to the post-Mandal rise of the numerically strong Other Backward Castes (OBCs) in north India. Such groups use myth-making and muscle-flexing in the name of caste pride to exert their influence in the public sphere. Cinema and literature are fields where they do this often.

Tamil Nadu has witnessed several such incidents in the recent past. An incumbent chief minister was forced to back down in the face of prolonged caste riots over the naming of a state road corporation after a dalit leader. A brahmin author was forced to discontinue a serialized novel in a weekly magazine at the insistence of a caste group which felt slighted by its contents. In 2012, a rioting caste mob vandalized a dalit village because a boy who lived there married a girl from the community . He was later found dead under suspicious circumstances. The assault on Murugan can be seen as a similar act of resentment.

Murugan has had leftist associations since his youth, and he has focussed on the social reality of the Kongu region, which is also his home. In his novels, he has dealt with several aspects of its social problems -the disenfranchisement of communities caused by modernization, the exploitation of children from depressed castes and the complexity of the man-woman relationship in working class environments.

Pookkuzhi (2013), his seventh novel, is about an inter-caste marriage that ends in tragedy precipitated by a hostile world. It is dedicated to Ilavarasan, a dalit boy who married an upper caste girl in Dharmapuri, and paid for it with his life in 2013. Two years ago, Murugan edited and published an anthology of first-person accounts of those who have witnessed caste discrimination — as perpetrators, victims and onlookers. His work lifts the anti-caste discourse in Tamil Nadu from abstract polemics to a more nuanced awareness.

But Murugan is an artist, not a sociologist or historian. The predicaments and frailties of the people around him are at the core of his fiction. That these frailties are beyond constructs like caste is his assertion in many books, particularly Mathorupaagan. Murugan paid the price for pointing out the inhumanity of the caste system.

Raman is a translator of Tamil fiction