Perumal Murugan
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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
