‘World has changed, can’t write about things I would have a few years ago’

In 1967, French literary critic

Roland Barthes

wrote about the death of the author – signifying a changing relation between the writer and the reader. A work, once created, was not static but would take on as many meanings as there were readers. Fifty years later, in a context quite different, Tamil author Perumal Murugan announced his own death as a writer: “Author Perumal Murugan is dead. He is no god. Hence, he shall not resurrect.” But resurrect he did. First, with Poonachi, a novel which looks at the world from the eyes of a goat. And then, two years later, with Amma, a collection of 22 essays about his mother, launched on Day One at the Times litfest.

Amma chronicles Murugan’s journey with his mother with snapshots of their time together. “As a child, I was teased about being a mama’s boy. Now I know that is what gave me insight into a woman’s mind. For all these years, I wrote about many women characters. This time, I wrote about the one who inspired it all,” he said, in the same breath recalling her prudence in putting together a funeral fund for her own death and her outrage that her dear son had married outside his caste.

“I have no qualms talking about the bad parts. It’s usually others who have a problem. People would ask how I could write that my father was an alcoholic or that my brother committed suicide. But that happened. Honesty is more important than anything else,” he said.

But the honesty is now a guarded one. In 2015, right-wing groups launched angry protests about the portrayal of a sex ritual in One Part Woman. Murugan was forced into apologizing and withdrawing copies of the book, after which he went into a self-imposed exile while the case dragged on in court. “It left me confused. None of it made sense,” he said. The Madras high court stood by him: “One section of society’s outrage is not enough to overturn another person’s right to free speech.”

Murugan the writer came back, but as a different man. “My mindset changed. There were many problems, many issues I wanted to write about. But I can’t anymore. Writing those now would be difficult, and not just because of the response. It’s just that I can’t think about those things with a free mind anymore,” he said.

His novels, in response, have turned inward. Poonachi erases the world of people and politics entirely and Amma is a very personal Narayanesque

ode

, confined to the small universe around him. There is no room for offence. “The two years I could not write were spent in a limbo I will never recover from,” Murugan said.