It is with a sense of inevitable
resignation, the gradual beginning of fatalism and with all the deep outrage
that I can muster that I pick up this metaphorical pen and let bleed these
words on the page. I feel a tad pretentious too, I force myself to admit that,
though I would rather not have to, of course. I wish I had known the writings
of Perumal Murugan before yesterday afternoon, beyond the extracts that
magazines and websites, defiantly, have been republishing on their blogs. He
has given up writing, he said, in a very poignant message posted on Facebook.
His words hurt deeply, because as writers, as artists, as people who create
things in reaction and recognition of what our many worlds feel like to touch,
some of us understand the pain behind this declaration. Dissent is the default
reaction in the face of oppression for the artist. It must have taken a lot for
Murugan to say he would never write again, that the writer was dead and would
not be reborn, for he was no God. It is hard to even repeat his words; how
could I give up breathe? From saying that writing was his life and teaching was
his livelihood to these words of desperation, it has been a swift volte face
we, this 21st century globalized Indian society, have forced Murugan to make. A
round of applause to us then.
I sat up late last night and read One Part Woman, the English translation
of Madhorubhagan, the Tamil novel he
wrote in 2010. For reasons that remain slightly mysterious, it was only
recently that some organizations began to have problems with this book. At its
centre, One Part Woman is a beautiful
love story. Kali and Ponna can't keep their hands off each other, even after 12
years of being married. They remain childless though, despite endless rituals,
prayers and penances to appease the gods. The pressures from society to
procreate, for there must be a child to inherit the land, to lend support in
old age, to ensure societal acceptance, threatens to rip the couple apart. The
only solution left, that the families, his and hers, find is to send her on the
fourteenth day to the temple festival at Thiruchengode where every male is a
god, where norms are loosened to accommodate any consensual couple to have sex.
A child, if it ensues, is a 'gift of god'. Kali refuses to even think of his
Ponna's still firm sensual body being blemished by a fragrance other than his,
for her body was his and his alone. Yet, fate and various degrees of deception
and belief come together and Ponna finds herself at the festival on that night,
with fresh flowers in her hair and new bangles on her wrists. What happens next
destroys the fragile threads that had, for so long, helped Kali and Ponna keep
their relationship fresh as new in an increasingly hostile environment. In
doing so, it holds a mirror to a society that will not tolerate any veering from
convention, even at the cost of individual lives. That was unfortunate
collateral damage, inevitable then, a hundred years ago, and inevitable even
today.
This tradition of consensual sex outside of
marriage is what ruffled the feathers of the great custodians of Indian
culture, those Hindutva organizations that banned and burnt his books.
Apparently, the book insults Shiva, Hindu women, tradition, or some such. Of
course, like in all such cases, it is a preposterous idea that a god, any god
from any religion would fall down from a pedestal of faith established over
thousands of years just because of a book. You would want to laugh at the
absurdity of the limited minds these habitually offended must possess, if it
weren't an entirely serious matter. You have to wonder why the RSS shakhas don't deliver discourses on sex
in ancient India, along with their lessons in flying machines and long range
missiles. If they did, they would know of the very Indian practice of niyoga, where the wife was allowed to be
impregnated by a man other than her husband, with blessings from everyone and
their uncle. A form of this ancient niyoga dharma is what Murugan writes
about. But then, of course, the khaki-clad pracharaks
wouldn't talk of the birds and bees. "Indians don't have sex." We
just wrote a bloody explicit book on it, eons ago and then went into denial
about something so natural and necessary.
It is of course not about One Part Woman alone. There will be many
Wendy Donigers and Perumal Murugans, more so I imagine in the present political
years of this country. There will be Ma.Mu.Kannan and Durai Guna, two other
Tamil writers whose books were banned and families ostracized recently. A lot
of them won't trend on Twitter. Slivers of hope for the freedom of expression
in my country will spill from those that, I will include myself here, rush to
buy these burning books, their motives behind doing so intellectual,
pretensions or otherwise.
I want to think that we will all be Charlies
and Murugans even after the hashtags lose their sex appeal. That their
creations will be shared and read and laughed with, even if mostly by the
pontificating thinkers and liberals. At least by them. I want to desperately
hope that it will be ok for me, a woman writing in English in a large
modern-ish country, to say that I like sex and write so.
I have sex. I like sex. I love sex. There, I
said it. Will they burn me now? It isn't about my body anymore. It is about my
words, my words that will talk about what I do with my mind and my body. If
they cannot own my body, they will control my words, won't they?
In defiance, I beg you to read Perumal
Murugan. Defy his own words, don't consign to flames your copies. There will
certainly be more like him, like them. We will write variations of these words
again, with tears, with some resignation but never in defeat. They cannot win.
But if the writer dies and will not be
resurrected, do we use the writer's words to weave a shroud and bury him under? What if there are no more books that can be
banned and burnt? What if no one gets offended anymore?
In fervent hope that Murugan allows us more
of his words.
In solidarity.
Suffixed with hashtags FOE, PerumalMurugan,
JeSuis..., etc.
1 comment:
I must say that I have read the entire book yet. But I already read till chapter 6, yet I am not gripped by this book. My personal experience if I am reading till chapter 6, by now I should be raring to finish the complete book. This feeling is not there for this book.
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