Kavinien KARUPUDAYYAN
Born in 1966, Perumal Murugan is the star of contemporary Tamil Literature. An acclaimed writer and (voluntarily) retired Tamil Professor, he moved from his native home in the Tamil Nadu town, Namakkal, to the capital city, Chennai, in 2015. This move resulted from the controversy surrounding his novel Madhorubagan written in 2010 (One Part Woman, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan in 2013) in order to make his voice better heard. His novels have been translated in English and several other European and Indian languages. Murugan’s novel Pookoozhi, originally published in 2013 and translated in English by Vasudevan in 2016 under the title Pyre is the first Tamil Book to be longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize.
When I went to India in 2018, something struck me on the ride from the Chennai airport moving through the hilly villages on our way to the holy town of Tiruvannamalai: the horning sounds made by the rickshaws. One horn strike meant that the vehicle in front had to hasten its pace, two meant that the latter needed to move away and several repeated horn strikes implied that the driver was really annoyed by the way the one in front was driving.
That episode came to my mind when I was with Perumal Murugan for a literary discussion alongside Kormathi Munisami at the recent Festival du Livre de Trou d’Eau Douce initiated by Barlen Pyamootoo. His knack for details particularly transpired during our conversation. Especially when he evoked the different cries a goat has referring to his novel Poonachi originally published in Tamil in 2016 or The Story of a Goat with a translation by N.Kalyana Raman in 2018. Hailing from a family of farmers, Murugan has always been surrounded by animals and namely goats which he tended to till his 20s. He highlights the fact that there are various ways in which goats express their needs. For example, there is a cry when they are hungry, a different one when the scorching sun is too hot to bear, only to mention these few. Murugan’s attention to details echoes Nabokovian statement that while writing, one has to caress the details, the “divine details” as the latter would put it.
I have to admit that I was both excited and at the same time nervous before the conversation with Murugan given that I had never met him before. When I was finally introduced to Murugan through Rama Poonoosamy, it was like meeting an old friend. The conversations revolved around books, the Tamil Country, Tamil Language and our shared love for Literature. This is one of the beauties of the Festival du Livre de Trou d’Eau Douce. Even though it might be quite far for us from Souillac, the sheer joy of meeting renowned local and international authors from various parts of the world and listen to them dissipates the fatigue of travel. In fact, the journey to Trou d’Eau Douce which has now become a yearly pilgrimage for lovers of the written and spoken word is an invitation to discover the country as well. It depends if one is travelling along the coast whereby villages, which are rarely pronounced suddenly, come alive: Ecroignard, La Laura, Caroline, Ernest Florent and Pointe aux Feuilles only to mention these few. Or going through Quartier Militaire where one has to go through Wooton, Belle Rive, Camp de Masque, St Julien d’Hotman… During the season of harvest, the sugarcane fields offer a magnificent spectacle to the eyes.
Murugan’s writing is imbued with a rare Chekhovian clarity. He paints with words and sheds light on themes and places which are otherwise marginalized. He says that while it is important to have a thorough knowledge of the classical Sangam literature, it is essential to delve into the deep and rich well of contemporary Tamil Literature as well as enrich it. Wearing his green shirt and veshti at the Festival du Livre on Sunday, people who came to see and listen to Murugan were amazed at his sheer simplicity. Murugan is a chronicler of the ordinary and this is his forte. He wields his pen to give a voice to the voiceless and his corpus falls in the category called ‘protest literature’. This finds an echo in Siven Chinien and Bam Cuttayen’s repertoire. Apart from penning down novels and poems, Murugan also writes kirthanais (carnatic composition) departing from the classic theme of bakthi which characterize this genre to touch upon contemporary themes like caste, violence, women’s rights, nature, night and day, the five elements, manual scavenging among others. The songs composed in Murugan’s Kongu Nadu dialect have been set to music by T. M. Krishna, a renowned carnatic singer and social activist. He was the one who requested Perumal Murugan to pen down kirthanais after they met during a book launch.
Even though the controversy surrounding his novel One part Woman is long behind, it took Murugan a long time to heal. Set during the days of British Raj in a small village in Tamil Nadu, the novel puts into scene a couple who are childless after a decade of marriage and denounces the old age rigid rules of caste and tradition towering over people.
Extract:
In the matter of offering prayers, Kali and Ponna left no stone unturned. They did not discriminate between small and big temples. They promised an offering to every god they encountered. For the forest gods, it was a goat sacrifice. For the temple gods, it was pongal. For some gods, the promises even doubled. If a child were indeed born, the rest of their lives would be spent in fulfilling these promises. Kali, in fact, was ready to forgo his cattle and all that he had saved with his incredible frugality, if only their prayers would bear fruit. But no god seemed to pay heed.
(One Part Woman, 2013)
The repeated attacks and menaces received from right-wing groups following the publication of the book pushed him to declare on his Facebook page that “Perumal Murugan, the Writer is dead”. It was the Madras High Court Judgment in July 2016 which gave him the required impetus and recreated that urge to write and especially to publish. The final line of the judgment came as a command to Murugan: “Let the author be resurrected to what he is best at. Write.” The judgment acts as a severe mise en garde against all forms of violence against artists especially writers in this case and also took a strong position in favour of the freedom of expression. In Fact, Murugan never stopped writing but he stopped publishing. For him, criticisms should exist but it should be based only on the writings of an author and nothing else. It took a while for him to restart publishing his texts for fear of reprisal. His collection of poems entitled Kozhaiyin Paadalgal(2016) translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan as Songs of a Coward(2017) portrays this dilemma of the writer who is faced with this question: To write or not to write? And most specifically, what should he write about? Following the pandemonium surrounding One Part Woman, Murugan said that there is a hidden censor sitting in him now.
Listening to the conversation with Perumal Murugan on Sunday, a man shouted: “Mo pa pe konpran sa langaz-la”. He looked straight like a personnage from Murugan’s novel and was referring to the Tamil language, the language in which Murugan writes and talks. The guy who was visibly a bit high after several attempts to make himself heard sat down to listen to the conversation. The question of language is particularly interesting. Murugan says that even though he can understand English, the choice to speak in Tamil is voluntary and is largely due to the fact that it is the language in which he is most comfortable with. Growing up, he said there were few opportunities to learn English and it is his mother Tamil which sustained him. At the end of the conversation, a Teacher of Tamil voiced her appreciation of Murugan’s thoughts. This is one of the intentions of the Festival du Livre, that is to build bridges between readers and writers or like Rama Poonoosamy puts it, “rapros liv ek lepep”.
On our way home on that day going through the old village of Fuel, my wife observed that the sun was a little brighter going down the horizon to set. As darkness set in, I was reminded of Murugan’s poem on dusk:
Darkness arrives
like a mass
of rain-bearing clouds
It scrapes clean
the dense cavities of light
removes shades of difference
smears an ashen hue
and sits looking around
Then
it grows a wondrous paintbrush
and creates dark-coloured trees
Insects, birds
and other little creatures
turn into pieces of darkness
blend and dissolve
I leap out and leave
through the bars in the window
There is a rustle
in the dusk’s painting of shadows
