For exiled authors, the ink never dries
For writers such as Perumal Murugan, Taslima Nasrin and Sharmila Seyyid, continuing to write shapes their creative process and response to persecution
Protesters burn an effigy of author Taslima Nasrin in Kolkata in 2004 Image: Jayanta Shaw/Retuers
Nineteen months of being “a walking corpse” changed Perumal Murugan as a writer.
The ordeal of his exile, as he calls it, ended when the Madras High Court, in July 2016, ruled that the Tamil author must be “resurrected to what he is best at: Write”. According to Murugan, those words comforted a “heart that had shrunk itself and wilted”, as they upheld his freedom of expression against violent caste groups that had claimed his novel Madhorubhagan (One Part Woman) hurt religious and social sentiments. The protestors, with support of the local administration in his hometown Tiruchengode, had extracted a written apology from the writer, forced him to delete controversial portions of his book and withdraw it from stores. Murugan and his wife Ezhilarasi, both professors of Tamil literature at the Government Arts College in Namakkal at the time, had to abandon their home of 17 years and relocate to Chennai along with their two children.
So while the court ruling did more than just bring Murugan out of exile—it gave the 53-year-old author a new lease of life and career success—the persecution has drastically altered his creative process. “I think twice, and restrict myself before writing about caste now. It wasn’t the case before, when I wrote frankly, without fear,” says Murugan, on the sidelines of the Kerala Literature Festival in Kozhikode in January, where he was speaking about Amma, his first nonfiction work translated into English. The book is a collection of essays that pay tribute to his late mother Perumaayi, while giving a glimpse of agrarian life in Tamil Nadu.
“Even if I do write about caste, I wonder if the writing should be more subtle, and the message more indirect,” says the author of 11 novels, five collections of short stories and five anthologies of poetry. Most of these works were deeply political and offered searing commentaries on class divides and caste hierarchies of rural India. Murugan does not like reminiscing about the period when he had declared his ‘death’ as a writer, or the events that led to it, but admits it was a time when he had become numb to the world around him, and could not manage to write anything for the first three months.
Kannan Sundaram, the publisher of Murugan’s Tamil works who stood by the writer through his tribulations, believes that the exile caused a dramatic turnaround in Murugan’s writing. “He tells me that he wants to write about asuras [demons] and not human beings. His next novel is based on an urban middle-class family and, for the first time, does not have a rural context,” says Sundaram, managing director of Kalachuvadu Publications. “Murugan will continue to take on social concerns, but he wants to employ different literary tactics like humour and sarcasm to sidestep controversy.”
For instance, in Poonachi, Murugan writes about a black goat having to get its ears pierced as a marker of identification, when authorities start making a register of goats. Doesn’t it seem eerily similar to the ongoing National Registry of Citizens? “It is a work of fiction, but at times, there are many chances of a writer’s imagination turning into reality,” he smiles. “I do not write with the plan of creating social awareness, but my writings are born out of life experiences with caste and other hierarchies, and the people it affects will always react to it.”
Image courtsey: Kalachuvadu Publications
Image: Rashmy Ahamed
Image: Amal KS/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
(This story appears in the 13 March, 2020 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
