Bengaluru: The arrival of Rahul Dravid at the Bangalore Literature Festival threw visitors into a tizzy, as was to be expected. He was ushered into the authors' lounge, flanked by a battery of security personnel, as a tidal wave of fans swelled outside. Luckily, Perumal Murugan, a self confessed man of reticence, was ensconced safely within, away from the growing melee. He approaches Dravid at once, politely handing his phone over to his companions for a photograph. Murugan was greeted with reverence in equal measure, which appeared lost on him.
His appearance at the Bengaluru Literature Festival was widely anticipated – his panel discussion on Saturday morning was packed to the brim. Kannan Sundaram, founder of publishing house Kalachuvadu, attended admirably to his duties as translator to Murugan's beautiful Tamil, although the audience seemed fairly well-versed in his tongue. There, he propounded the ills of the caste system, many of which are so nuanced that they skirt past all but the most avid observers. "This subtlety is lost on the media," he said, flipping through the newspapers at the Lalit Ashok on Sunday morning, as Day 2 of the Bangalore Literature Festival rolled to a start outside.
To his readers, Murugan is something of a God although this adulation is met with a marked diffidence. “I am a writer and a very reserved person,” he agrees. “Public events make me nervous, really." He does, however, settles into a quiet corner with a cup of filter coffee and prepares himself for candour. Today, his name is synonymous with the battle against caste, another attribution he dismisses in favour of his art: his literary journey began with poetry, back when he was a schoolboy growing up in a small village in Namakkal.
There, Murugan grew up unquestioningly amidst the caste system, which infiltrated every aspect of the villagers' lives. "You're born with it, you die with it and it dictates everything in between," he remarks. The effects of caste were well pronounced: Dalits lived on separate streets and took their dead to burial grounds of their own. They were served their coffee in coconut husks instead of the glasses their more privileged counterparts used. Men weren't allowed to cover their chests and Dalits, many of them made their living as cobblers, were prohibited from wearing footwear. "Our lives were confined to these villages, we were born and raised here, we worked here and died here. It never occurred to anybody to question it or speak out against the oppression they were caused."
That changed in the 1990s, when liberalisation threw open the economy and urban centres began to boom. People came in droves to make their fortune in the burgeoning cities, taking back with them in turn, a wider, far less oppressive world view. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's 100th birthday also unleashed a surge of literature and awareness, awakening the subdued classes to the ills they were being made to face. Murugan's own enlightenment, however, began at home. "My father started a soda shop outside a movie theatre and had children working for him. They would come home with food for us and slowly, the caste lines began to blur." Murugan's writing had already become prolific, with several of his short stories published in the Tamil journal, Manavosai, between 1988 and 1991. Three years later, 10 of these stories were collected for an anthology, Thiruchengodu. "That brought the caste struggle out into the open," he recalls. "The dominant classes were exposed and angry. We all try to project ourselves as personalities who don't care about things like caste, but when it comes to our personal lives, these sentiments resurface, sometimes subconsciously."
Trouble began in 2014, four years after the publication of Madhorubagan (One Part Woman), a novel based on the ancient cultural practice among the people of Tiruchengode, a poignant tale of a childless couple. Four years later, local caste-based and Hindu groups stirred up a controversy, resulting in a series of litigations and suits before the Madras High Court. Utterly dejected, Perumal Murugan announced on his Facebook page that he had given up writing. He refuses to discuss his days in exile, saying simply that the memories are too painful. The court ruled in his favour, declaring, "Let the writer do what he does best - write." To Murugan, this was a message from the Universe – and write he did. His latest anthology of stories, The Goat Thief, will be out on November 2.
Much has been said about Murugan's work against caste discrimination, perhaps all too little about the writer within. “I’m not an activist. I don’t go around looking for issues to address,” he says. At the heart of his work is Koodu, a ritual of rooftop meetings that bring litterateurs together each month. “Everything starts there. I am a professor and a writer, my compulsions belong to literature.”
