Hi, everyone, welcome to Susurrus, the books podcast on Fountain Ink. I’m your host, Nandini Krishnan, and today I thought I’d speak about an author who shot to national and then international fame in 2015, when a controversy led to his announcing his literary suicide, only to emerge quite like the phoenix and fly higher than ever before. I’m talking about Perumal Murugan, and I should perhaps start with full disclosure–I have myself translated two of his books, a novel and an anthology of stories, and have worked closely with him. Which is also why I wanted to do this episode–because I do find that the controversy over his novel Mathorubagan has coloured the way in which people see his writing, and they often look for his activism in his books, and miss the craft

My acquaintance with Perumal Murugan began about six years before I was commissioned to translate him. I read all his novels in Tamil to do a feature on him for Open magazine. And one of the things that struck me most about his writing was his subversiveness. He rarely calls a spade a spade, but if we are keeping to metaphors, I’d say he speaks about gardening in such a way that you’re left with the image of a spade although the word has never been used.

Let me start with what might be his most-read book because of the controversy–Mathorubagan. So, the controversy was about his reference to a particular ritual at the Tiruchengode temple, where on a particular day of the temple festival, it is believed the gods come down and possess the bodies of ordinary men, and women who are struggling to get pregnant could be impregnated by these so-called gods in human guise. The novel is named for the deity of the temple. And it is about a couple, Kali and Ponna, who live perfectly happy lives and whose bodies constantly crave each other, but who are under pressure from their families to produce a child. The story ends with Ponna at the temple on the day of the ritual, and planning to allow a particular god to … shall we say, fertilise … her? 

And sometime between the release of the translation in English and the controversy, he wrote two sequels, titled Aalavaayan and Ardhanari, each of which accommodates a particular turn of events following the union. These have been translated into English as Trial by Silence and A Lonely Harvest respectively. Now, what is most interesting to me here is the tacit acknowledgement of male infertility that has led to this particular ritual, where it is the women who are sent alone to the temple, to mate with men other than their husbands in the hope that they will get pregnant and produce heirs. While the controversy focused on how the writer had purportedly insulted the temple and the religion, I don’t think this aspect was discussed much. In a culture–and when I speak of this, I’m speaking not so much of Tamil culture as of South Asian culture–where women are routinely blamed for failing to produce male heirs, and when it is not uncommon for men to be married multiple times if their wives haven’t produced the said heirs, look at how Perumal Murugan slips in this notion, of the men being at fault. And it makes you wonder how the ritual came about, how it was considered permissible, and to what this acknowledgement of male sterility is due.

His next novel, which was released shortly before the controversy broke out was Pookkuzhi, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan–who also did the Mathorubagan trilogy–as Pyre, and eventually longlisted for the Booker Prize. At the outset, it is a story about an inter-caste couple, where the woman is Dalit. But then, it also delves deeper, into how her appearance and sophistication lead people to think she is an upper caste woman, and how her demeanour stands in contrast to that of the land-owning caste into which she has married, where people walk about in loincloths and swear and spit all over the place, really. There is yet another layer, and this is Perumal Murugan’s exploration of the human psyche. One feels the woman’s fear as her husbands’ relatives become increasingly hostile, as threat after threat is made. And yet, the husband believes everything will be all right. Because he is not the one under threat. And therefore, through this book, we see how the same incidents can translate into completely different experiences.

Now, before I move on to his post-controversy writing, I’m going to talk a little bit about the books he wrote in his younger days, starting with his debut Eru Veyil, translated as Rising Heat, and Nizhal Mutram, translated as Current Show. So, most of his early writing was based on his own life, growing up in an agricultural family and working at the cinema in his village, for instance. And although the writer’s youth and inexperience are evident, there is a certain quality to the writing that makes his characters come alive. And the economy of language, the writer’s uncanny ability to trigger a particular feeling in the reader by his framing of a scene or by his creating a particular atmosphere to date back to this time.

The first novel he wrote after the dismissal of the case against him by the Madras High Court in 2016 was Poonachi, translated into English by Kalyan Raman with the title unchanged. It is the story of a goat, and clearly an allegorical one. But then, just the story itself, what happens to the goat itself, is heartbreaking for those of us who have problems with commercial farming and what it is doing to our animals, ecosystems and planet, all for the benefit of humans. I think it is one of his best works, for its searing narrative, for the way in which he gets into the head of this main character, this goat, even as this comedy of manners plays out in the early chapters and slowly grows sinister. Now, the author’s wry humour is evident in his foreword, where he speaks about how he has decided that it is dangerous to write about humans and extremely dangerous to write about gods, and has therefore decided to write about animals. Among animals, it would be dangerous to write about cows and pigs, he says. And this stands testament to the subversiveness of his writing that I spoke of earlier. Just a little over a year after announcing his literary suicide, he was able to get tongue-in-cheek about the controversy.

Among my favourite novels of his is the one I got to translate, Kazhimugham, but I think many readers struggled to place it because it is not overtly political. It is, to me, something along the lines of A House for Mr. Biswas. While it does explore various themes, at the centre of it all is the story of a man whose hopes and dreams dissolve into an ordinary life, perhaps even a sub-par life. 

I’m afraid we don’t have much time left on this podcast, so I’m going to stop by speaking briefly about his Aalanda Patchi, which has been translated into English by Janani Kannan as Fire Bird  and won the JCB award this year. So, the Aalanda Patchi is a mythical bird of enormous dimensions and the symbolism of the bird will become evident once you read the novel, so I’m not going to give much away. But then, this is one of his more overtly political novels, which looks at how caste dynamics play into the human search for permanence and ownership–of land, of a life, of even one’s self.

I’m going to sign off here, and I’ll be back in a couple of weeks, with a new episode of Susurrus. Let me wish you happy reading in the meantime, and if you have any suggestions or feedback, do write in to us at f-e-e-d-b-a-c-k at fountainink.in. Bye for now.