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The Sunday Story: Where the writer died

Perumal Murugan based most of his novels on Tiruchengode, the town which now boasts of Namakkal’s trucking business and ‘super’ schools.

perumal murugan, tamil nadu, tiruchengode A view of the Tiruchengode town spread on the foothills of Sengundram hill. (Source: Express Photo by Arun Janardhanan)

Perumal Murugan based most of his novels on Tiruchengode, the Tamil Nadu town earlier known for its temples, and now reaping the windfall of Namakkal’s successful trucking business and its ‘super’ schools. But then rightist groups entered the picture.

From a distance, Sengundram hill looks like a giant, red elephant in repose. A winding road lies like a snake curled upon it, taking devotees up the hill to the historic Ardhanareeswara temple. By all accounts, it’s the more famous temple of Tiruchengode town in Tamil Nadu’s Namakkal district. At the foothills, faintly visible from up there, lies the Kailasanathar temple. A spacious structure, this Shiva temple is notable for its 76-ft rajagopuram.

 

Since last month, the two temples have come to be at the heart of the vicious attack on Tamil writer Perumal Murugan for his book Madhorubhagan (One Part Woman). Last fortnight, Perumal declared he would not write any more and announced the withdrawal of all his novels, short stories and poems.

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Defined by its two temples, the small town of Tiruchengode nestles on the foothills of Sengundram (meaning red hill). Namakkal, Murugan’s hometown, is just 36 km away, while both Erode, the home of the ideologue of Dravidian movement Periyar E V Ramasamy, who spoke against caste and social dogmas, and Salem, the birthplace of Tamil poet Avvaiyar, are only 20 km away.

Murugan, a professor at an arts college near Namakkal, who began writing in 1988, has based most of his novels on Tiruchengode’s myths and culture, as well as on the region’s peasant life.

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Lately though, Namakkal and Tiruchengode are more known for the change sweeping through them.

Five decades after trucking and rig business came here, Namakkal is now possibly the district with the maximum number of truck operators in the country apart from being dubbed the ‘Borewell Hub of India’. Its residents own over 10,000 trucks and over 3,000 rig operators, which get borewell drilling contracts as far as Rajasthan and South Africa.

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Tiruchengode has also taken another, diverse route. The town that first saw flourishing of English-medium schools, drawing parents from across the state, is now seeing a boom in engineering and medical colleges.

There has been another, more invisible change. While the AIADMK usually wins elections here, and the DMK too has a strong support base, the RSS and BJP have been making their presence felt. “They have their own ways. Maybe this controversy is one example,” says a teacher at a government school.

tamil-women Devotees at the Ardhanareeswara temple where Murugan based his book. (Source: Express Photo by Arun Janardhanan)

 

Ardhanareeswara represents the union of Lord Shiva and goddess Parvathi in one human form. Goddess Baham Priyal Ammai is believed to have performed puja at Tiruchengode’s Ardhanareeswara temple and become the half part of Shiva.

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Many also believe that Kannagi, the legendary woman from Tamil epic Silapathikaran, had been taken by ‘Pushpak Viman’ to heaven from the Tiruchengode hill.

Dating back more than 1,000 years, the temple gets a constant stream of visitors, with men in dhotis and white shirts, and women in colourful saris, climbing up the 1,206 steps to offer prayers. The maximum crowds are during the Tamil month of “Margazhi” and the temple’s annual festival in June.

It is also a favourite haunt of couples, who come looking for privacy and for Sengundram hill’s beautiful sunsets.

Kailasanathar, in comparison, gets few visitors.

Set in the early years of the 20th century, Murugan’s Madhorubhagan talks about a childless woman being cajoled by her family into attending a ritual at Kailasanathar temple that lets her beget a child through sex with a stranger.

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While there is no record of such a practice, the general belief is that childless couples who offer prayers at the temple are blessed with a child. It is also believed that women offering prayers at the temple can find a husband soon.

A giggling group of girls, their hair adorned with fresh flowers, are here at Ardhanareeswara from a village near Erode. They say they are regular visitors to the temple, and haven’t heard of the Murugan controversy.

tamil-trucks To the world, Tiruchengode is ‘the town of lorries and lorry drivers’. (Source: Express Photo by Arun Janardhanan)

 

Located in the rain shadow of Sengundram hill, Tiruchengode survives on the mercy of Cauvery river, itself the subject of an inter-state dispute.

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Sometime in the late ’50s or early ’60s, after water scarcity had killed the region’s agriculture, O Palaniappan, popularly known as “OP”, purchased Tiruchengode’s first lorry. It was OP who sowed the idea of the new profession, and now Tiruchengode is known as the ‘town of lorries and lorry drivers’.

N P Velu alias Anitha Velu, owner of Anitha Transports, owns more than a dozen lorries and heads Tiruchengode’s lorry owners’ association. Lorries from Tiruchengode go to all parts of the country, he says. “They carry cotton, wood, non-perishable food products and almost anything that needs to be sent from one part of the country to another.”

Thousands of crores are at stake. A lorry costs Rs 27-30 lakh and carries 16 to 26 tonnes, says Velu.

During the protests against Murugan’s book, which began in the last week of December 2014 — four years after it had been published — Velu is alleged to have been one of the persons behind the printing of over 10,000 “notices” with excerpts from Madhorubhagan. These were distributed around Tiruchengode and at the Ardhanareeswara temple. A handful of members of various Hindu fringe groups then publicly burnt copies of the book.

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Velu, who evades all questions regarding the “notices”, says Murugan’s withdrawal of Madhorubhagan showed he had realised his mistake. “We worship our temple deity. You cannot write anything you want and say it was fiction. Suppose, I write a novel about The Indian Express portraying it in bad light… I will be sued,” says Velu.

Unlike the other protesters, he claims to have read Madhorubhagan.

Ramkumar is one of the drillers in the other ubiquitous vehicle at Tiruchengode: the rig operator. Just 27, he has a repertoire of stories on his experiences digging borewells in Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, Kerala and Delhi.

“Each truck-mounted rig costs Rs 70 lakh and earns not less than Rs 85,000 a day,” Ramkumar says.

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Rig operators in Tiruchengode also supply services to countries such as Canada, South Africa, Kenya, Malaysia and Singapore, for sinking borewells.

At any given point of time, says Kurinji Murugesan, the president of the Tiruchengode Rig Owners’ Association, at least 3,000 rig operators belonging to Tiruchengode are plying in the country. “We have more than 1,500 rig owners.”

Murugesan traces the emergence of rig business in Tiruchengode to the early 1970s. “The main advantage of this town is the number of people who can afford to buy rig vehicles as well as its large number of workers,” he says.

Now migrant workers have started coming, from Bihar, Orissa and Bengal.

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It’s ironical that a town that mostly reels under scarcity of water is a pioneer in rig business. But few comment on it.

tamil--market At the marketplace, where few people know about the Murugan row. (Source: Express Photo by Arun Janardhanan)

 

It’s rare for youths like Ramkumar here to not be the product of Namakkal’s “super school” system. The district has the most number of English-medium schools in Tamil Nadu, which have perfected the art of ensuring “100 per cent pass percentage”. Aspiring parents, seeking a Namakkal tag, come from across the state to put their children in schools here, renting homes nearby.

G Shankar, an IT professional from Tiruchengode, completed his schooling and engineering at the district. Trying to give an idea of what Namakkal has spawned, Shankar says, “Lessons for Class X start in IXth itself and the same applies to Class XII. Nobody reads the lessons of Class XI. Teachers never teach. They make us write assignments from textbooks as many as 20 times in two years. Repeated tests follow. You ask a student what he has written in the third paragraph on the 25th page of a textbook, and he will give you the right answer, just like a computer. He would take longer to answer a casual question.”

But few are bothered as long as the “results” are good. Says a government school teacher who earlier worked with private schools in Namakkal, “Check those who top the Class X and XII exams, all of them would be from Namakkal. We teachers are supervisors here, only to churn out ‘toppers’. The monotonous regularity gives our schools factory status.” To measure up, students, who mostly live in hostels, work 4 am to 10 pm.

In his writings, Murugan criticised such rote learning. One of his recent articles in a leading Tamil daily talked about the rising suicide rates in Namakkal schools. He also wrote how students, denied any kind of entertainment or sports, had devised secret class-room games, especially ‘hand cricket’ using fingers.

Earlier, Murugan had edited a volume where his students talked of their experience of caste in schools.

Not too far away, on the outskirts of the town, a Gandhi ashram still cherishes the memories of Mahatma Gandhi’s visit here in 1925. People remember leaders born locally such as C Rajagopalachari, the former chief minister of the Madras State, E V R Periyar, who wrote against caste, and Congress stalwart and DMK co-founder E V K Sampath.

There have been no leaders of such stature recently. The Namakkal MP is from the AIADMK, while the Tiruchengode MLA is from Vijayakanth’s DMDK, which was earlier an AIADMK ally.

The RSS is a powerful pressure group, as are several other caste-based outfits. If the Kongu Vellala Gounders, the most powerful caste, control the rig industry and finance, the writ of the Senguntha Mudaliyars runs in the textile industries. Murugan belongs to the Kongu Vellala Gounder caste.

Murugan had angered many with the stand he and his students took against communalism, and with some of the discussions against Hindu fringe groups on the campus. The Kongu Nadu Makkal Desiya Katchi, Sengunthar Mahajana Sangam, Arulmigu Ardhanareeswarar Girivala Nala Sangam, Kongu Vellalar Sangam and Morur Kannan Kulam Kongu Nattu Vellalar Sangam were among the organisations who joined the protests against the book.

The threatening calls to Murugan began in the second week of December. The callers accused him of portraying the Kailasanathar temple and its women devotees in a bad light.

Namakkal district revenue officer V R Subbulakshmi, who organised a “peace meeting”, says they were “forced” to get Murugan to meet protesters as they wanted to end the agitation.

Within three weeks, succumbing to the pressure, Murugan wrote on his Facebook wall: “Perumal Murugan, the writer is dead. As he is no God, he is not going to resurrect himself… An ordinary teacher, he will live as P. Murugan. Leave him alone.”

The writer, barely known to travel outside Namakkal, has since slipped back into the shadows. He refuses to talk any more about the controversy.

Venkatesh, who is part of the Ardhanareeswara temple administration, calls the whole thing sad. “The problem is that he (Murugan) wrote in a familiar language,” Venkatesh says, noting that classical Tamil books, which few read, talked about such practices too.

Venkatesh also says they had “never heard of the RSS or BJP in the area until this controversy”. “It’s a larger game. After seeing TV and newspaper reports, people here started asking who threatened the writer. Then came up names of organisations we had never heard of. Maybe that’s what they wanted.”

Venkatesh, who has read excerpts of the novel, adds that there was a conscious effort to portray it as against the Kongu Vellala Gounders. “They succeeded as they are politically influential and seven ministers of the state belong to the caste. Murugan was made a victim.”

First uploaded on: 25-01-2015 at 00:00 IST
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