Pyre
Author- Perumal Murugan
Publisher- Penguin, Rs499
In Perumal Murugan’s literary finesse and Aniruddhan Vasudevan’s poetic translation lies Wordsworth’s gripping query: What man has made of man, writes ANANYA BORGOHAIN
In January last year, one of Tamil literature’s prominent voices, Perumal Murugan, wrote on his Facebook wall, “Author Perumal Murugan is dead. He is no God. Hence, he will not resurrect. Hereafter, only P Murugan, a teacher, will live.”
He thanked all those who supported his freedom of expression and announced the withdrawal of all of his works. In fact, he advised the readers to burn his books and the publishers not to sell the copies, offering to compensate their losses. Finally, he asked his vocal critics, the self-proclaimed custodians of caste and religious rights, to end their protests against him.
This benumbed announcement came after Murugan was asked to withdraw his 2010 novel, Mathorubhagan, after a series of protests called by the Kongu Vellala Gounder, a powerful caste dominant community in western Tamil Nadu. This community believed that the novel was offensive towards the women of the community and also disgraced a Hindu deity.
What set Murugan apart is that he didn’t subscribe to the conformism that his community had marked for him. While that did indeed land him in trouble, he also managed to soar over regressed forces of subservience and uniformity. He had the courage to face the wrath of his community many years ago also, when he decided to marry a woman who did not belong to his community. His village decided to ostracise him but fortunately, because of support lent by his progressive friends, it didn’t happen. Although, censorship had yet to take a toll on his literary artistry.
His novellaPyre, translated from the original titled Pookkuzhi (2013) by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, is based on the same theme of an inter-caste love story.Pookkuzhi was dedicated to Ilavarasan, the Dalit boy who had married an upper-caste girl, and whose body was later found on a culvert adjoining a railway track in northern Tamil Nadu.
Pyre revolves around Saroja and Kumaresan, who eloped and decided to visit Kumaresan’s village, pretending to belong to the same caste. little did they know that they were headed towards an enraged community with infinite hatred in its confines which wouldn’t hesitate to reduce both of them to dust.
Aniruddhan Vasudevan’s perceptive and sentimental translation renders the book a befitting honesty. As in Murugan’s moving and famous work Maadhorubaagan (One Part Woman), this book too grips the heart at the core and unsettles it. When Kumaresan takes Saroja to his grandparents’ house — one place where he thinks they will be forgiven and treated with kindness — and they are met with brutal abomination, the moment of heartbreaking disillusionment resonates with force.
Within a minimalistic plot in a simplistic setting, the novella is filled with flat characters. It needs a writer as superior as Murugan to elicit strong emotions from the readers. That he achieves it effortlessly bears testimony to his vivid imagination, further highlighted by the compact descriptions of the village and the mundane communal life in it. How the routine can turn disastrous is what enriches the narrative style of the novella.
The basic set of the plot is simple: Village and villagers, amidst organic markers of a rural life like fetching water from the shared village well, folding a saree at the back so as ‘not to look like a prostitute’, the biting dust and killing heat, the shade of the trees etc. And yet, within this arrangement, the profound shadow of death lurks around the corner. Readers can never predict if the village will realise the affection between the two lovers or their saga will take the most fatal turn.
Murugan is grotesque and passionately sentimental at the same time and that is no mean feat: “At first glance, this village looked like it was made of a few houses surrounded by a large expanse of land, and that anything could easily enter and get around. But that was an illusion. In truth, not even the wind from elsewhere could enter this space. The air in these parts had circulated within the confines of this place and had turned poisonous. The space would not allow anything to enter.”
Kumaresan’s mother Marayi is unapologetically conformist; she irretrievably hates Saroja and believes that survival in the village depends on merging with the crowd. She is the reflection of society’s collaborative failure in cultivating a conscience. At the same time, it is unavoidable to be empathetic towards her nemesis Saroja, a victim of the decadence of human values.
In Murugan’s thought provoking art, lies the question William Wordsworth had asked centuries back: What man has made of manIJ If this is the dominant rhetoric even in 2016, this is only the emergence of a patriarchal, feudal society that will doom the essence of human existence.
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