PERUMAL MURUGAN RETURNS
PIn July 2016, the Madras High Court quashed the cases against Murugan, encouraging him to write again
enguin Books has reissued two translations of novels by
Perumal Murugan—Current Show (Nizhal Muttram) and Seasons of the Palm (Koolla Madari). The writer, long popular among Tamil readers, became a national figure two years ago after controversy surrounded his novel, One Part Woman. Threats from caste-based groups forced him to apologise, agree to delete portions of his work, withdraw unsold copies, and ultimately, leave his home in Tiruchengode, Tamil Nadu. In despair, Murugan announced that he would give up writing altogether.
But readers and fellow writers rallied in support and in July 2016, the Madras High Court quashed criminal cases against him, explicitly encouraging him to write again. Now, the noise has died down and Murugan’s poetry and novels are out in new editions. “As his official English-language publisher,” says Ashish Mehta of Penguin Random House, “we want to make his entire fictional oeuvre available to readers who are unable to read the original Tamil. When we learned that these two novels had been out of print for quite some time, it made sense to bring them back into circulation.” Murugan’s writing is raw, and you can nearly smell the urine and feel the sticky floors underfoot in Current Show, where street kids are hired ad hoc at a cinema and constantly menaced by their employers. In Seasons of the Palm, children are bonded to work on farms, shackled by their parents’ endless debts. Here they live with the open sky, howling storms and dark-fruited palm trees, but also the brutality of caste oppression.
The uproar over One Part Woman still shadows his writing, Murugan says. “I cannot write the way I used to. I don’t think I can continue with those forms of realism and naturalistic writing.” He is not writing anything at the moment but is seeding ideas for future work. Penguin will also be publishing Murugan’s Songs of a Coward in September 2017, a collection of poems written in the months between his “death” and “resurrection”. n