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".
The Tamil writer Perumal Murugan thus posted on his Facebook wall immediately after he was forced by religious bigots to sign an 'unconditional apology' for certain passages in his novel 'One Part Woman' (2010) and an undertaking to withdraw unsold copies of the book. The writer's 'death-note' touched many a raw nerves among the intelligentsia and upset a large number of right-thinking people.
The 'dead writer' resurrected himself though, after the Madras High Court ruled, in a series of litigation and suits concerning the novel, that his written undertaking didn't obligate him to apologise for his writing or to withdraw copies of the book. Following this judgement, Murugan returned to his literary career and Poonachi became the first novel after his self-exile had ended. The book was shortlisted for the 2018 JCB Prize for Literature.
The book is a coming-of-age fable of a goat named Poonachi. Just a day old, the little kid is gifted to an old villager by a mysterious man. The villager's wife happily adopts the little one. The old couple does everything to keep the young and undernourished doe alive. Under their constant vigil, it manages to survive an encounter with a wildcat, an eagle, and getting lost in the jungle.
Poonachi slowly grows into a strong animal. The book captures most vividly all her dreams, her failures, and her struggles to survive in a goat world that is squarely male-dominated. The goat's predicament at times looks like that of our own women.
N. Kalyan Raman, the book's translator, notes that the reader might as well find Poonachi to be an intensely political novel like George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' (1945). To me, however, the political side of the novel appears more akin to Orwell's 1949 dystopian classic 'Nineteen Eighty Four'. The regime envisioned by Murugan, for example, has prescribed stringent procedures for registration of all new-born, humans as well as pet animals, by getting their ears pierced. The eerie scenes at the government ear-piercing office would starkly remind the reader of Orwell's super-state that was controlled by Thought Police intending to persecute individuality and independent thinking.
Sample this chatter among citizens standing in endless queues for getting ears of their wards pierced:
'Speak softly, sir. The regime has ears on all sides'.
'There's an old saying that the regime is deaf'.
'It's deaf only when we speak about our problems. When we talk about the regime, its ears are quite sharp'.
Every citizen under the regime was "well versed in how they were expected to behave towards the regime. They had mouths only to keep shut, hands only to make obeisance, knees only to bend and kneel, backs only to bend, and bodies only to shrink before the authorities".
Perumal Murugan has done a tremendous job here of creating a narrative that takes a feeble goat through a range of urges and emotions which are strikingly similar to our own desires and longings.
The way Poonachi scuttles the sexual advances of the loutish male goat Kaduvayan, or develops a great liking for Poovan, the genteel buck, are all less animalistic and far more human. N. Kalyan Raman rightly says: 'As we track the destiny of Poonachi, the orphan goat, we realise that the author's real theme is our own fears and longings, primordial urges and survival tactics. Murugan makes us reflect on our own responses to hegemony and enslavement, selflessness and appetite, resistance and resignation, living and dying'.
Poonachi isn't merely the author's exploration of the life journey of a goat, it's a commentary of our times, of the unequal hierarchies of class and colour, of power and abuse, of government apathy and overreach, and of the increasing vulnerability of individuals to an all-powerful State. The book is worth a read.
(The review has been done by Ajay K Singh, who is a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand. Singh is a bibliophile having a voracious appetite for reading)