[Mr. Murugan had come to declare his return
as a writer following a long spell of darkness. After undergoing a vicious
attack by caste leaders in his home state of Tamil Nadu, his novel “One Part
Woman” last month was the subject of a landmark court decision defending the
right of artists to critically depict their own communities. Recent interest in
Mr. Murugan’s work has exploded, with five novels coming out, translated into
English from the original Tamil.]
By Ellen Barry
 |
|
The writer Perumal
Murugan in New Delhi. Five of his novels are soon to be
released, and they have been
translated into English from the original Tamil.
Credit Vivek Singh for
The New York Times
|
NEW
DELHI — Perumal Murugan, who
was celebrated here on Monday as a major Indian writer, looked a bit miserable
in the big city.
The son of an illiterate soda-pop vendor from
small-town South India, he had limited his visit to the capital to 48 hours,
and this appeared to be 46 hours too long. He prefers to sleep on a rope cot,
under the stars, the way they do in the village, and has never owned a pair of
shoes that were not sandals. Leaving an interview with the talk show host
Barkha Dutt, who is Oprah Winfrey-league famous in India, he turned to the man
escorting him and asked, politely, who she was.
Mr. Murugan had come to declare his return as
a writer following a long spell of darkness. After undergoing a vicious attack
by caste leaders in his home state of Tamil Nadu, his novel “One Part Woman”
last month was the subject of a landmark court decision defending the right of
artists to critically depict their own communities. Recent interest in Mr.
Murugan’s work has exploded, with five novels coming out, translated into English
from the original Tamil.
But Mr. Murugan seems unsure of what kind of
writer he will be now. He remains so horrified by the collective punishment
meted out to him in his hometown over “One Part Woman” that he barely speaks
about it, even to friends. He doubts he will ever again write about small towns
with the same unblinking realism.
“A censor is seated inside me now,” he said
on Monday, at a book-signing organized by Penguin India. “He is testing every
word that is born within me. His constant caution that a word may be
misunderstood so, or it may be interpreted thus, is a real bother. But I’m
unable to shake him off.”
Mr. Murugan’s fictional villages are places
full of quiet menace, where caste boundaries are protected with violence and
social exclusion.
In “Pyre,” published in English by Penguin
Books in April, a well-loved young man brings a wife of a different caste to
live among his relatives, hoping they will eventually accept her. As the
lovers, hopeful and distracted, overlook clues that the people around them are
drifting into a consensus in favor of murder, Mr. Murugan slows the pace,
meandering off into exact, detailed descriptions of village life. It’s so tense
it leaves you gasping for air.
Equally dark currents run through “One Part
Woman,” which Penguin published in English in 2013. Kali and Ponna, a couple
who are erotically wrapped up in each other, withstand waves of derision
because they have not conceived a child after a decade of marriage. But social
pressure eats into them, first sporadically and then conspiratorially, as Ponna
is pushed, as if by a hundred hands, into participating in a religious ritual
in which childless women have sex with young strangers.
When describing the farming communities of
South India, Mr. Murugan is neither sentimental nor harsh; he describes it the
way an entomologist might describe an insect.
As a Ph.D. student, Mr. Murugan married a
woman from a caste of potters, rather than his own higher landowning caste, the
Gounders. His mother refused to attend the marriage, softening only when his
wife bore her first child and moved to the village for six months. Two decades
later, Mr. Murugan’s relatives still remind him, in subtle ways, that his wife
will never be accepted.
It is notable that Mr. Murugan does not write
with the expectation that his work will change anything.
“I never had such big hopes,” he said in an
interview, glancing down and smiling. Collective punishment, he said, “is part
of the narrative. My primary purpose is to explore the experience of the person
who undergoes that humiliation.”
Mr. Murugan barely spoke as a child, which
gave him time to observe. His older brother was withdrawn from school after the
ninth grade so he could help his father with the soda business, and became
addicted to bootleg liquor sold in the same bottles. He killed himself at 42.
Mr. Murugan became a writer, with a small but
passionate following among Tamil intellectuals. At night he would go to sleep
beside his young son at 8 p.m. and then rise at midnight and write for two to
three hours during the quietest hours of the night. Many of his colleagues at
the government college, where he taught Tamil, were unaware that he wrote
fiction, he said on Monday.
In clean, clear prose, he had produced five
novels in the space of three years – “almost flawless novels,” said R.
Sivapriya, senior editor at the digital publishing house Juggernaut, which
commissioned English translations of three of Mr. Murugan’s short stories this
year. “He would train a microscope on one detail and tell that one story, and
see the world through that one story,” she said. “There was a certain purity to
him that won’t be there now, I think. I think it will be a different writer.”
In December 2014, he returned from a writer’s
retreat to his family’s home in Namakkal to discover that he was the target of
a well-organized campaign. Strangers called repeatedly to accuse him of
slandering the Gounder caste in “One Part Woman,” which had been released in an
English translation, and he tried earnestly to explain his motivation. The
aggression built, culminating in a book burning and a citywide strike.
When a local official, the district revenue
officer, summoned the author to a “peace meeting” in January 2015, Mr. Murugan’s
editor tried to dissuade him from attending. By the time Mr. Murugan emerged
from the meeting, he had signed a document agreeing to withdraw all unsold
copies of his books and delete the passages considered offensive. During the
meeting, the lawyer wrote later in The Hindu, a daily newspaper, “I could see
Perumal Murugan literally crumbling from within.”
Mr. Murugan retuned to his home under police
escort and posted a message on Facebook: “Perumal Murugan the writer is dead.
As he is not god, he is not going to resurrect himself. He also has no faith in
rebirth. An ordinary teacher, he will live as P. Murugan. Leave him alone.”
On Monday here in New Delhi, Mr. Murugan
described a deep depression that followed, during which he neither read nor
wrote. It ended, he said, in 2015, when he found himself at a friend’s house,
locked in a room stacked with books.
“With nothing to do I lay dazed night and
day,” he said. “But as I ruminated over my existence, there came a certain
instant when the sluice gates were breached. I began to write. I chronicled the
moment when I felt like a rat, dazzled by the light, burrowing itself into its
hole.” The result was a book of poetry that went on sale on Monday, titled
“Kozhayin Paadalkal,” or “Songs of a Coward.”