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Rise of the phoenix

Perumal Murugan resurrects in a different form after the One Part Woman controversy

66-Perumal-Murugan Perumal Murugan

In Perumal Murugan’s book One Part Woman, everything begins with a portia tree. As a newly-married man, the protagonist Kali plants it in the front yard of his father-in-law’s house. Twelve years later, the tree is gigantic. In its shade, the story slowly unfolds—the inability of Kali’s wife, Ponna, to conceive; the slights the couple face in their village because of this; the strain it puts on their marriage; and finally, Ponna’s decision to attend the final day of the nine-day chariot festival in their village when sexual rules are relaxed, and any consenting man and woman can sleep together. The last scene is of Kali, broken by Ponna’s betrayal, looking up at the branches of the portia tree silhouetted against the sky, a noose tightening around his neck.

There is an element of censorship to what i write now. I am saying what i want to say in a different way, using different styles, instead of the straightforward way. - Perumal Murugan

It was a fitting ending, redolent with unspoken meanings. When he wrote it, did Murugan foresee that the portia tree would spell doom—for Kali and for him? Although the book was first published in 2010, it became highly controversial in 2014, when local, caste-based groups alleged that Murugan was hurting community sentiments with his portrayal of some characters and scenes in the book. Murugan, 53, the author of six novels, four collections of short stories, and four anthologies of poetry in Tamil, had to leave Namakkal in Tamil Nadu, his home of 17 years, and come to work in Chennai. It made him write his own “literary obituary” and declare that the writer in him was dead. He would never take up the pen again.

When I ask him about those days, he reiterates they were highly traumatic. “Looking back,” he says, “I don’t know how I survived them.” He says it in the placid tone of someone who has been asked this question dozens of times, giving the impression of distance without disinterest. Murugan answers my questions with sincerity, yet holds something back. Perhaps it is a guardedness that is natural to him.

His prose is very controlled, and the author hardly intrudes into the world of his characters, although it is a world with which he is intimately familiar. Almost all his stories are set in Kongu Nadu, a region in western Tamil Nadu. They are full of snapshots of life in the region—clearing fields of millet stalks in the moonlight, drinking arrack at the bottom of an empty well, the wailing of coconut fronds, waking up in a hay barn as the mist rolls off the earth at dawn….

Now, he is out with the English translation of his first novel after the controversy—Poonachi: Or the Story of a Black Goat. “There is an element of censorship to what I write now,” he says. “Now, I am saying what I want to say in a different way, using different styles, instead of the straightforward way.”

The protagonist in Poonachi is a black goat, who comes into the family of an elderly couple. The story follows her life as she matures from a helpless babe to her sexual awakening and, later, motherhood. Her suffering—the death of her lover, the sale of her children, her exploitation—is described vividly. But she does not let anything break her spirit. She refuses to bow her head because, as she says, “Unless we look up, how can we see the sky?”

The words are an echo of Murugan’s own sentiments. As a child, he grew up in a thatched hut in which he hardly spent any time. “We went in only when it rained,” he says. His days were lived roaming in open spaces, bronzed by the noonday sun, with the sky above and the wind on his face. “My wife tells me that the first thing I did when I went to my father-in-law’s house was to open all the windows to let in the light,” he says with a laugh.

Observing the women of his childhood—his mother, grandmother and aunt—gave him a deep understanding of the working class, agricultural woman of rural Tamil Nadu. Like Ponna in One Part Woman. One of the two sequels to the book, A Lonely Harvest, begins with Ponna refusing to fell the portia tree on which Kali hung himself. Ponna’s determination to keep the tree alive might almost be an allegory for the storyteller refusing to let his stories die. So many of them, just like Murugan’s life, are about resilience. After all, unless we look up, how can we see the sky?

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