PERUMALMURUGAN
Born 1966
Perumal Murugan (1966), Principal of Anna college in Namakkal, is the author of eleven novels and five collections of short stories, poems and memoir as well as ten books of nonfiction. He is the Winner of ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman 2015. His ‘One Part Woman’ was Long listed for the ‘2018 National Book Awards’ for Translated Literature and ‘Pyre’ short listed for the JCB Prize and Atta Galatta – BLF award in 2018 for Translated Literature. His ‘Seasons of the Palm’ was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize.
WORKS PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH
Novels: One Part Woman (PRH - 2013), Pyre (PRH - 2016), Seasons of the Palm (PRH - 2017), Current Show (PRH - 2017), Poonachi (Westland, 2017), Trial by Silence (PRH, 2018), A Lonely Harvest (PRH, 2018), Rising heat (2020), Estuary (Westland, 2020), Resolve (PRH- 2021)
Short stories: The Goat Thief (2017), Four Strokes of Luck (Juggernaut, 2021)
Memoirs: Amma (Westland, 2019)
Poem: Songs of A Coward (PRH, 2017)
List of International Publications:
One Part Woman: Grove Atlantic (USA, UK), Draupadi Verlag (German), Dedalus Kitap (Turkish), Cankarjeva Zalozba Zaloznistvo (Slovenian), Verzone (Czech) and French rights sold to Gallimard.
Pyre: Grove Atlantic (USA), Editions Stephane Marsan (French)
Poonachi: Beijing White House Publishing (Chinese), Dedalus Kitap (Turkish), Grove Atlantic (USA, UK), Utopia Editore srl (Italian), IW Book (Korean)
NOVELS
ONE PART WOMEN (Novel) (Mathorupagan)
Number of pages: 248
Kali and Ponna’s efforts to conceive a child have been in vain. Hounded by the taunts and insinuations of others, all their hopes come to converge on the chariot festival in the temple of Ardhanareeswara, the half-female god. Everything hinges on the one night when rules are relaxed and consensual union between any man and woman is sanctioned. This night could end the couple’s suffering and humiliation. But it will also put their marriage to the ultimate test.
Praise for the Book
“One Part Woman contains the sweetest, most substantial portrait of an Indian marriage in recent fiction. A touching and original novel.”
“Murugan’s writing is locally-grown literature, not a canned object sold on a supermarket bookshelf. It is rare to come across a writer who enjoys such intimacy with a land and those who live in close contact with it. One Part Woman is so rooted in the soil of tradition that its rebellion against it is all the more unexpected and moving.”
“A captivating story of love and desire. Works such as these have the power to subject contemporary value systems to intense introspection, it is for the same reason they are met with resistance. This work of art by Perumal Murugan can be acclaimed as modern mythology for its unusual access to cultural memories of the land and language, and the extraordinary courage with which it is dealt.”
“Perumal Murugan’s Tamil is vivid and terse, an instrument he uses with great care and precision to cut through the dense meshes of rural Tamil social life. The result, in this novel, is a brutally elegant examination of caste, family, and sex in South India.”
PYRE (Novel) (Pookkuzhi)
Number of Pages: 208
Saroja and Kumaresan are in love. After a hasty wedding, they arrive in Kumaresan's village, harbouring the dangerous secret that theirs is an inter-caste marriage, likely to anger the villagers should they learn of it. Kumaresan is confident that all will be well. He naively believes that after the initial round of curious questions, the inquiries will die down and the couple will be left alone. But nothing is further from the truth. The villagers strongly suspect that Saroja must belong to a different caste. It is only a matter of time before their suspicions harden into certainty and, outraged, they set about exacting their revenge.
With spare, powerful prose, Murugan masterfully conjures a terrifying vision of intolerance in this devastating tale of innocent young love pitted against chilling savagery.SEASONS OF THE PALM (Koolamaathari)
Number of Pages: 332
Shortly, a young untouchable farmhand, is in bondage to a paternal yet powerful landlord. He spends his days herding sheep and tilling the fields, caught between the rigours of an unforgiving life and the solace he finds in nature and the company of his friends. He struggles to keep a fragile happiness, but endless work and a stubborn hunger gnaw away at his spirited innocence. And before long, shortly must confront the unyielding reality of his situation.
Poignant and powerful, Seasons of the Palm is lyrical in its evocation of the grace with which the oppressed come to terms with their dark fate.
‘A powerful novel . . . [Murugan] recounts the everyday brutality of caste society in relentless detail’ – The Hindu
Shortlisted for the Kiriyama Award (2005 fiction finalist).
CURRENT SHOW (Nizhal Muttram)
Number of Pages: 186
Set in a small highway town in South India, Current Show revolves around Sathi, a young soda-seller in a run-down theatre. This is life lived on the margins of the film world, far beyond glitz and glitter of Tamil cinema.
Ill-paid and always tired, Sathi finds relief from the tedium of the everyday in marijuana. His company of friends is all vulnerable, desperate young men, who work around the theatre and alternately bully and support each other. An intense and tender friendship with one of the men sustains Sathi, until a train of events throw his days and nights into disarray.
POONACHI (Poonachi Allathu Oru vellaattin Kathai)
Number of pages: 174
An old man is watching the sunset over his village one quiet evening when a mysterious stranger turns up with the gift of a day-old goat kid. Thus begins the story of Poonachi, the little black goat whose fragility and fecundity become cause for wonderment to all those around her.
From the eagle that swoops down on her to the wildcat that attempts to snatch her away within days of her arrival, the old man and his wife struggle to keep their tiny miracle alive. Before they know it, Poonachi has become the centre of their meagre world and the old woman and she are inseparable.
Life is not easy for any of them - farmers, goatherds or goats. The rains play truant, the gods claim their sacrifices, and the forest waits to lure unwary creatures into its embrace
. Wrought by the imagination of a skilful storyteller, this delicate yet complex story of the animal world is about life and death and all that breathes in between. It is also a commentary on our times, on the unequal hierarchies of class and colour, and the increasing vulnerability of individuals who choose to speak up rather than submit to the vagaries of an ambitious if incompetent state.
Short listed for the JCB Prize for Literature 2018 and AttaGalatta – BLF award in 2018
TRAIL BY SILENCE (Arthanaari)
Number of pages: 248
At the end of Perumal Murugan’s trailblazing novel One Part Woman, readers are left on a cliffhanger as Kali and Ponna’s intense love for each other is torn to shreds. What is going to happen next to this beloved couple?
In Trial by Silence-one of the two inventive sequels that picks up the story right where One Part Woman ends-Kali is determined to punish Ponna for what he believes in an absolute betrayal. But Ponna is equally upset at being forced to atone for something that was not her fault. In the wake of the temple festival, both must now confront harsh new uncertainties in their once idyllic life together.
In Murugan’s magical hands, this story reaches a surprising and dramatic conclusion.
‘The most accomplished of his generation of Tamil writers’ - Caravan.
‘[An] extraordinary writer’ - The Hindu
Short listed for THE JCB PRIZE LITERATURE – 2019
A LONELY HARVEST (Novel) (Aalavaayan)
Number of pages: 250
At the end of Perumal Murugan’s trailblazing novel One Part Woman, readers are left on a cliffhanger as Kali and Ponna’s intense love for each other is torn to shreds. What is going to happen next to this beloved couple?
In A Lonely Harvest-one of two inventive sequels that pick up the story right where One Part Woman ends-Ponna returns from the temple festival to find that Kali has killed himself in despair. Devastated that he would punish her so cruelly, but constantly haunted by memories of the happiness she once shared with Kali, Ponna must now learn to face the world alone.
With poignancy and compassion, Murugan weaves a powerful tale of female solidarity and second chances.
‘The most accomplished of his generation of Tamil writers’ - Caravan.
‘[An] extraordinary writer’ - The Hindu.
ESTUARY (Kazhimugam)
Number of pages: 244
On answering the phone, Meghas would say, ‘Solluppa’-tell me, Appa-his only world through the entire call. On some days, he said it fast; on others, he said it gently; on still others, he barked it out; and there were days when he seemed to speak it with hate and resentment. A single word could be a storehouse of emotions, each utterance stirring a different one. It could unleash a torrent, a flash flood, a stream, a wave. Kumarasurar would instantly guess Meghas’s mood from his intonation and fortify himself to counter it.
RISING HEAT (Eru Veyyil)
Number of pages: 230
‘Versatile, sensitive to history and conscious of his responsibilities as a writer, Murugan is […] the most accomplished of his generation of Tamil writers’ - CARAVAN
‘His fiction scrupulously documents South India’s trees, its seasons, the behaviour not only of people but even of animals’ - NEW YORKER
‘Murugan works his themes with a light hand; they always emanate from his characters, who are endowed with enough contradiction and mystery to keep from devolving into mouthpieces […] I’m hoping for a whole shelf of books from this writer’ - NEW YORK TIMES
RESOLVE (Novel) (Kanganam)
Number of pages: 396
It might be a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good forutune, or at least a piece of land, must be in want of a wife, by Marimuthu’s path to marriage is strewn with obstacles big and small. Inward-looking, painfully awkward, desperately lonely and deeply earnest, Marimuthu is fuelled by constant rejection into an unforgettable and transformative matrimonial quest. Enter a series of marriage brokers, horoscopes, infatuations, refusals and ‘bride-seeing’ expeditions gone awry, which lead Marimuthu to a constant re-evaluation of his marital prospects.
But this is no comedy of manners, and before long we find ourselves reckoning with questions of agricultural change, hierarchies of caste, the values of older generations and the grim antecedents of Marimuthu’s poor prospects, as decades of sex-selective abortion have destroyed the fabric of his community and its demographics.
Perumal Murugan’s Resolve is both a cultural critique and a personal journey: in his hands, the question of marriage turns into a social contract, deeply impacted by the ripple effects of partriarchy, inequality and changing relationships to land and community. In this deceptively comic tale that savagely pierces the very heart of the matter, translated with deft moments of lightness and pathos by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Perumal Murugan has given us a novel for the ages.
‘Murugan works his themes with a light hand; they always emanate from his characters, who are endowed with enough contradiction and mystery to keep from devolving into mouthpieces’ – New York Times
‘Murugan’s unsurpassed ability to capture Tamil speech lays bare the complec organism of the society he adeptly portrays.’ – Guardian
‘Versatile, sensitive to history and conscious of his responsibilities as a writer, Murugan is […] the most accomplished of his generation of Tamil writers.’ – Caravan
‘[Murugan’s] fiction scrupulously documents South India’s trees, its seasons, the begaviour not only of people but even of animals.’ – New Yorker
FIRE BIRD (Novel) Aalandapatchi
Words in Tamil: 44269
Aalandapatchi, a novel by author Perumal Murugan, chronicles the relentless pursuit of the elusive state of permanence by the novel’s protagonist Muthu.
Muthu’s life, which revolved around his parents and the house that he grew up in with his loving brothers and their families, begins to unravel when his father abruptly decides to divide up the family land leaving practically nothing for Muthu and ultimately breaks the family apart. Things take a turn to the worse with the unscrupulous actions of the eldest brother, whom Muthu revered and loved unconditionally – irreparably damaging his faith on his family. Muthu is forced to separate from his once perfect world and seek a new one for the sake of his wife and the future of his children.
Murugan draws inspirations from his own disquieting life experiences of being constantly on the move ever since his family was displaced from their ancestral lands when he was a mere boy twelve years of age. Aalandapatchi is lush with the real and lived-in moments drawn from the author’s own life journey through a myriad of places and lands, his rendezvous with various people, characters and complexities, all with a yearning to anchor himself and find that tenuous sense of stillness. Through this novel, the author examines the fundamental, yet futile, attraction to permanence and the relentless efforts that go into the mirage of attaining it.
Aalandapatchi was first published in 2012, immediately after Murugan authored ‘Madhorubagan’, the book that embroiled him in controversy for several years, dragging him through the corridors of the highest courts for basing it on the practices followed by real people in real places. Possibly as a challenge to himself, Murugan, who until then wrote in context and never shied away from adding specifics about a community or caste he wrote about, shifted from his usual approach to storytelling in Aalandapatchi. From the all-too real Madhorubagan, this book is fictional; he makes no reference to any specific peoples, persons, practices or places.
While Murugan has taken out references to actual people and places, the realness and the richness of his descriptions in his writing remain unaffected. In his signature style of simple yet effective use of the language, he portrays the people in the novel vividly in their characters with both strengths and flaws, making them relatable and human. Whether it is about the power play by Muthu’s mother, the squabbles of his unwavering yet loving wife, the pain and anger Muthu suffers when his brother fails him or Muthu’s reaction to the unexpected companionship he gains in Kuppan, the fine subtilties in the details narrated immerse the reader in Muthu’s life.
Much like the journey that Murugan has set forth on, the story does not end; it simply stops to pause.
SHORT STORIES
THE GOAT THIEF (Short stories) Perumal Murugan selected his best stories
Number of Pages: 208
Perumal Murugan is one of the best Indian writers today. He trains his unsentimental eye on men and women who live in the margins of our society. He tells their stories with deep sympathy and calm clarity. A lonely night watchman falls in love with the ghost of a rape victim. A terrified young goat thief finds himself surrounded by a mob baying for his blood. An old peasant exhausted by a lifetime of labour is consumed by jealousy and driven to an act of total destruction. Set in the arid Kongu landscape of rural Tamil Nadu, these tales illuminate the extraordinary acts that make up everyday lives.
FOUR STROKES OF LUCK (Perumal murugan selected short stories)
Number of Pages: 216
Amma is unable to live without Seematti, her beloved buffalo. Kumaresu has found success in business, but he has never been able to overcome rejection by his childhood sweetheart. Every day, Murugesu hides in a neem thicket, where he extorts money from young couples. Mocked all her life for her dark skin, Saraswati is kept going by her burning private passion for a movie star.
From one of India’s most acclaimed and beloved modern writers. Four Strokes of Luck is a collection that will delight every admirer of Perumal Murugan, and introduce new readers to his hallmark empathy, humanity and humour. These stories of lives on the margins, of loners and outcasts seeking meaning and happiness, are tender, heartbreaking and always surprising.
‘The most accomplished Tamil writer of generation.’ – Caravan
‘Murugan’s unsurpassed ability to capture Tamil speech lays bare the complex organism of society he adeptly portrays.’ – Meena Kandasamy, Guardian.
‘Murugan’s willingness to look into the dark well of prejudice and see his society’s face reflected there . . . [gives] his writing its power.’ ‘Here is a hero we need . . . Perumal Murugan’s short stories hold the depth of his novels but with and added touch of lightness.’ – scroll.in
MEMOIRS
AMMA (Essays of Memoirs) (Thontra Thunai)
Number of Pages: 192
Perumal Murugan’s tender yet truthful essays capture the life of a strong, independent and extraordinary woman: his mother. She raised her children with the income from just a few acres of land that she managed on her own, tending to the cattle and crops with maternal concern, all the while minding her unruly husband. Every obligation met, all accounts squared up, each meal cooked to satiate the tongue and heart-Amma never rested, not even when bedridden with Parkinson’s. She lived a farmer’s life and died a farmer’s death.
Amma is ahomage to way of life and values-simplicity, honesty and hard work-lost to us today. Peppered with undentimental nostalgia and delightful humour, and vividly documenting village and farming life in the Kongu region, Amma tugs at generational memory. Murugan’s non-fiction writing, his first to appear in English, is as deeply affecting as his fiction
POEM
SONGS OF A COWARD (Kozhaiyin Paadalgal)
Number of Pages: 292
A haunting and luminous collection of poems by one of India’s most incandescent writers.
A king decrees that all humans be skinned alive. A man runs from words that hound him like a pack of wolves. A legion of white snakes sweeps across a land blighted by drought. A beleaguered soul laments the loss of a homeland.
By turns passionate, elegiac, angry, tender, nightmarish and courageous, the poems in Songs of a Coward weave an exquisite tapestry of rich images and turbulent emotions. Written during a period of immense personal turmoil. These verses, an enduring testament to the resilience of an imagination under siege, show how poetry came to Murugan’s rescue in his darkest moments.
This edition also includes ‘Growing Out of the Cocoon’, Murugan’s powerful and moving statement, delivered in 2016, announcing his return to writing and describing the profound impact of poetry on his life.
The ‘Death’ and ‘resurrection’ of Perumal Murugan
“Author Perumal Murugan has died,” the Tamil writer and professor posted on Monday. “He is no god, so he is not going to resurrect himself. Nor does he believe in reincarnation. From now on, Perumal Murugan will survive merely as the teacher he has been.”
This public letter followed recent outcry from caste-based and Hindu groups about a book Murugan wrote in 2010. ‘Madhorubagan’ (One Part Woman) is set about a century ago near the author's native town of Tiruchengode in southern India. In the book, a childless couple from the land-owning Gounder caste contemplate participating in a local temple festival ritual - during which a childless woman has sex with a man other than her husband in order to conceive a child. Last month, unexpectedly, local groups led protests about the book - they said the ‘fictitious’ extramarital sex ritual at the centre of the plot insulted the town, its temple and its women. Copies of the novel were burnt, residents shut down shops, and a petition sought the arrest of the author.
The story of the latest victim of censorship by intimidation in India, the Tamil-language author Perumal Murugan, was taken up by the Madras High Court on Tuesday. Earlier this month, Mr. Murugan posted a poignant statement on his Facebook page: “Perumal Murugan, the writer is dead.” This was after he had been hounded by right-wing Hindu groups, had met with local authorities and had agreed to withdraw copies of his novel from sale. The author’s plight has provoked an outpouring of support from readers and writers in India.
Hometown rage tests Indian novelist
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.
‘A Censor Is Seated Inside Me Now’: Hometown Wrath Tests a Novelist
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 returned 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.”
In India, a Spirited Defense of Writers
The Madras High Court in Chennai, India, delivered a decision on Tuesday that was remarkable for its eloquence on the right to freedom of expression, on the centrality of this right to India’s democracy and on the state’s duty to protect it.
The decision was written by Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul in a case involving the Tamil-language author Perumal Murugan, who last January declared literary suicide, announcing: “Perumal Murugan, the writer is dead.” He had received threats from people who objected to his writings. His novel was publicly burned. He was also forced by local officials to write a humiliating apology after local caste groups and activists associated with the governing Bharatiya Janata Party and its right-wing affiliate, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, charged that the book offended and demanded it be banned.
Mr. Murugan’s novel, published in English translation in 2014 as “One Part Woman,” tells the story of a woman who plans to take part in a local religious ritual in which childless women have sex with strangers in order to conceive. Justice Kaul dismissed the idea that Mr. Murugan’s book be censored: “All writings, unpalatable for one section of the society, cannot be labeled as obscene, vulgar, depraving, prurient and immoral.” He underscored that, “One of the most cherished rights under our Constitution is to speak one’s mind and write what one thinks.” Finally, he chided the book’s detractors with simple advice: “If you do not like a book, throw it away.”
Justice Kaul concluded with this message: “Let the author be resurrected to what he is best at. Write.” A buoyed Mr. Murugan vowed, “I will get up.”
This decision sends a strong message at a time when freedom of expression is under threat from government attempts to muzzle dissent, and from self-appointed morality enforcers affiliated with conservative groups. In May, Human Rights Watch issued a scathing report on the many threats to free speech in India, including vaguely worded laws that criminalize speech on grounds of sedition or defamation, the use of the police to arrest people for free-speech offenses - rather than to protect citizens’ right to freedom of expression - and an alarming official tolerance for mob violence in pursuit of censorship.
The decision belongs at the top of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reading list. Perhaps it will inspire him to remind officials and the police of their duty to protect citizens’ rights and to amend or repeal laws that are routinely used to stifle speech.
Silencing Authors in India
The story of the latest victim of censorship by intimidation in India, the Tamil-language author Perumal Murugan, was taken up by the Madras High Court on Tuesday. Earlier this month, Mr. Murugan posted a poignant statement on his Facebook page: “Perumal Murugan, the writer is dead.” This was after he had been hounded by right-wing Hindu groups, had met with local authorities and had agreed to withdraw copies of his novel from sale. The author’s plight has provoked an outpouring of support from readers and writers in India.
Activists affiliated with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the Hindu right-wing group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh had called for the book to be banned because it offended them. Weeks of threatening phone calls to Mr. Murugan culminated in late December with a mob burning copies of the novel in the town where it is set.
The main source of the mob’s ire were passages that evoke an ancient temple ritual that Mr. Murugan, who grew up in the area, does believe occurred in the past. It involves consensual sex between anonymous men and married women who had failed to conceive.
This is hardly the first time in India that groups expressing their outrage have acted as cultural vigilantes by trying to silence authors with threats. In 2012, an organizer of the Jaipur Literature Festival, William Dalrymple, was forced to cancel a planned program by video with the author Salman Rushdie - who had already canceled a personal appearance - after outraged Muslim activists threatened violence.
The Madras High Court has wisely asked the group that filed the Murugan case, the Tamil Nadu Progressive Writers and Artists Association, to broaden its petition to the larger issue of violent threats to freedom of expression. The court said: “Our largest concern is extrajudicial groups wielding power to decide what is right and what is not right, and asking authors what to write and what not to write.”
This is refreshing language from an Indian court on the issue of free speech.
Perumal Murugan Statement issued in Jan 12, 2015
This is P. Murugan writing for the person called Perumal Murugan.
Writer Perumal Murugan is dead. He is no god. So he will not rise from the dead. Nor does he believe in resurrection. Hereafter only the lowly teacher P. Murugan will live. Thanks to all the magazines, organizations, readers, friends, writers and people who supported Perumal Murugan, and fought for his freedom of expression.
The controversy is not going to end with Madhorubhagan. Other organizations and individuals too may take issue with any of his other writings. Perumal Murugan has therefore taken the following decision. He announces firmly that:
All books - novels, short stories, essays, poems and other writings - by Perumal Murugan, except those compiled and edited by him, now stand withdrawn. His books will no more be available for sale. All those who have bought his books are free to burn them. If anyone claims that they have suffered any loss they may approach him and they will be compensated. Perumal Murugan requests that he be not invited to any literary events. As all his books stand withdrawn he requests organizations based on caste, religion or party not to indulge in any further agitation.
Leave him alone. My thanks to everyone.
From the text of Judgment of the High Court of Judicature at Madras
Delivered on: 05.07.2016
The author Prof. Perumal Murugan should not be under fear. He should be able to write and advance the canvass of his writings. His writings would be a literary contribution, even if there were others who may differ with the material and style of his expression. The answer cannot be that it was his own decision to call himself dead as a writer. It was not a free decision, but a result of a situation which was created. Time is a great healer and we are sure, that would hold true for Perumal Murugan as well as his opponents; both would have learnt to get along with their lives, we hope by now, in their own fields, and bury this issue in the hatchet as citizens of an advancing and vibrant democracy. We hope our judgment gives a quietus to the issue with introspection on all sides. Time also teaches us to forget and forgive and see beyond the damage. If we give time its space to work itself out, it would take us to beautiful avenues. We conclude by observing this – “Let the author be resurrected to what he is best at. Write.”