It was poetry that healed me: Perumal Murugan on his resurrection

A cautious and confident Perumal Murugan hopes to start his next novel in January

December 10, 2016 04:23 pm | Updated December 11, 2016 02:52 am IST

From buying books on the sly to a celebrated author: Perumal Murugan

From buying books on the sly to a celebrated author: Perumal Murugan

I w alk into the coffee shop five minutes late for our 4 p.m. meeting on a lazy Sunday afternoon to find Perumal Murugan already waiting. Neat, trim, unobtrusive but with a smile that lights up his face. We retreat to a corner seat, order two cappuccinos, and request the music to be turned down. We start carefully, skirting the thorny political ground he has been forced to tread the last two years.

Ironically, it is the controversy that might be giving his works a fresh lease of life and the rightful attention they deserve outside Tamil Nadu. “Two of my earlier books are shortly to be reprinted by Penguin,” he says, sipping his coffee. Seasons of the Palm and Current Show were translated by V. Geetha, with the former short-listed for the Kiriyama Prize in 2005. Murugan’s oeuvre is considerable — nine novels, four short story collections, four poetry anthologies, and six books on language and literature.

Then, like a tongue nudging a loose tooth, I begin the inevitable tentatively. Was his self-confidence hurt badly? “Enough to make me stop writing,” he says gruffly. Surely he will find his muse again? “Well, I have published that new book of poems, haven’t I?” he counters. Is he confident of writing with the same power as before? He pauses, and sets his cup down. “I cannot tell,” he says. “I will find out only when I start writing. Because the thought that something I write might again stir up controversy… that thought does keep intruding. I don’t know how to keep that thought away. I feel afraid that there might be some sort of self-censor sitting inside me.” It is an oddly moving moment, and I feel a little ribbon of anger flutter inside at the Kafkaesque terrors our administrators and moralists are so casually capable of inflicting.

January is when Murugan plans to start his next novel. “Until then, I won’t know if my work will continue in the same strain, or if it will change form. I will find out…” And will he still write about Kongunadu, the farms and fields and flowers of the region? “I have to. I don’t know any other life. But…” he pauses and adds with a smile, “I don’t know what identifiers to use.”

That is because Murugan has already started to revise One Part Woman. “I am removing place names and caste names…” But won’t that take away the book’s beauty, its grounding? “The story has a value of its own, doesn’t it? Beyond place, beyond caste, beyond setting, the story has a strength; and I think it will stand on that. The characters’ feelings are beyond place and caste. I strongly believe the story will reach readers even with these changes.”

We both fall quiet. The café’s music gets loud, then abates. Spoons clink in cups. A soft, persistent cough punctuates Murugan’s sentences. I ask how hard it was to not write for two years. “For three months, I didn’t write anything. I could not even read anything. Not even newspapers. Then, slowly, I started to read. Then, without volition, I found myself writing poems. Poetry is the genre most beloved to me. In my 25 years of writing, I have written some 150 poems. But in this last year, I have written more than 200.” Poetry was his redemption, the outlet for his creative energy. “It was through poetry that I was able to heal. I didn’t think of publishing; I wrote because they gave me relief. Then, when the court ruling came, I decided I wanted to publish them.”

What was the first thing Murugan wrote? “My brother and I were the first in my family to go to school. Anna stopped with Class 9; I went on to get a degree. I was only eight or nine when I started to write. I loved the radio; Tiruchi station would air a programme every Sunday called ‘Mani Malar’ where children could write in with poems and stories. I sent in a poem and they read it out.” He smiles at the memory of how excited he was. School had no storybooks, only class texts. He read Bharathiyar and Bharathidasan, and a poem he wrote won first prize at an inter-school Bharathiyar centenary function. It was in college in Erode, while studying Tamil Literature, that Murugan discovered other books, writers, translations.

He started to write for magazines like Kanaiyazhi, and remembers how happy he was to get an acceptance note from writer Ashokamitran, the then editor, praising a piece he had sent.

How would an agricultural family react to a son taking to literature? Murugan talks of how his mother was rather proud that he was in college. “But,” he says, “she scolded me if I bought books; she thought it was a waste! She bred goats and cows; that’s how she ran the family… I would buy books on the sly…”

Till he became a college lecturer, Murugan was part of the hard farming life on the dry maanavari lands around Namakkal. They bred cattle; they grew one rain-fed crop a year. This is the land and the life he writes about with such lyrical ease. His deep love for the soil, the language, the people and plants pours off his words. It is hard to imagine him uprooted from here. But, of course, that is what has happened. He lives now in Athur, not far from home but not home either.

There is violence in that thought. Violence in how we reacted to a story about strange, beautiful, long-ago mores. “This contradiction is inherent in our society. We do a lot of things but we cannot talk about them. They are hidden. I was reading recently about how Marquez’s compatriots identify themselves from his books. ‘This is my city, that is me,’ they claim proudly. We haven’t got there yet.”

Murugan doesn’t sound angry, just acquiescent.

Catch Perumal Murugan in conversation at The Hindu Lit for Life 2017 on January 14,15,16. For registration, visit www.thehindulfl.com

vaishna.r@thehindu.co.in

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