Embers to wildfire

Lead review

In a rural setting, love takes the place on the pyre made of hatred, tension and violence caused by caste issues, writes Janaky Sreedharan of ‘Pyre’, the translation of Perumal Murugan’s novel, ‘Pookuzhi’

Pyre is true to its name and spirit, and could not be more timely than this moment to make its entry into the Indian public discourse. But then, is there ever a wrong moment for a caste-crossed love story in this subcontinent? It leaves you scorched. You can feel the fire of caste singeing your being in all its vengeful heat. Love is blind, caste is not.

Perumal Murugan’s Pookuzhi, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan into English as Pyre, is a harrowing read more for its menacing mood than for the romance it is built around. Somewhere down the narrative, romance and cavorting of early love pall, and, in a sundry village in Tamil Nadu, things spill out of control.

The frail love affair of Kumaresan and Saroja is delightfully built up through its naive charm and enticing warmth. It seems most natural for the lovebirds to walk into the sunset hand in hand, ignoring the big bad world around them. But the world is within their homes, not without.

Set in a rustic outback, plotted around a sweltering place called Rock, this enervating read leaves you crushed. There is nothing new about the story. Innumerable newspaper reports and TV clippings have anaesthetised us to such tangible caste violence in our lives. Kumaresan and Saroja throw caste to the winds and decide to live together. The boy meets her in her village, Tholur, and wants, as it is all good-old patriarchies, to take her back to his village, to his home, to his mother, kith and kin. There lies the rub. He is pathetically unprepared for the viciousness and the hate his people are capable of. How caste fanaticism overpowers all pretensions to love! Affinity and bonding form the crux of this torrid tome.

It is an everyday gory story told in fewer than 200 pages by Murugan with compelling tenderness. The prose is as bare and sharp as the pitiless countryside, and is a must-read for every Indian who still believes in the purity and innocence of village life. Caste is savage and anonymous in urban spaces; it is perhaps deadlier, with no escape route in the tightly knit village communities.

If the soul of India is in its villages, that soul is brutal, nasty and resistant to change. Murugan’s pen scrapes off the monotony of village life to reveal the seething drama in those insignificant lives. Such intense feelings, such spite surge through ordinary men and women even as they draw water, wash vessels, cook food, till the land, celebrate, and pray. Simplicity of style is in itself a narrative strategy to heighten the banality and the violence of caste — how it corrodes from within, how sinister and insidious its workings are on the village psyche, how it divides the family and makes enemies out of mother and son.

All love dissipates as the caste thresholds collapse. Rules of oppression are triggered from within much more zealously than from outside. Murugan’s sensitive imagination is heart-rending as he moves through different time zones through Saroja’s memories of her natal family. Even more venal is the poverty these communities are mired in.

In a plain, unadorned style, Pyre is also a story of survival and struggle. You will be struck by the fraught relationship that is drawn out between Marayi, the mother-in-law, and Saroja, the new bride. One can sense the dark imprints of patriarchy on a young widow in Marayi’s insecurity and resentment. Her bitterness is systemic, and she is the cause, catalyst and effect of this system.

I was painfully reminded of the autobiography of Baby Kamble, where the mother-in-law, drying one half of her saree in the river with the wet half tied around her, becomes a graphic picture of the interlocked contexts of caste and penury. It’s a vicious cycle from which an escape seems almost impossible. The gendered politics of love is amply hinted at in the way Saroja becomes the ultimate target of the village ire.

As this brief narrative crescendoes into a petrifying climax, we collapse in a shiver of terror, revulsion and shame. It’s when the end teeters between a nightmare and a dream, and we, like Saroja, crane our necks to spot Kumaresan’s cycle down the street, that we come face-to-face with the ‘chamber of horrors’ we inhabit.

From its flaming cover page to its warm and sensitive translator’s note, down to the text, glossary and the final delightful piece on the typeface Bembo and its distinct calligraphic appeal, the care and attention to detail are enviable. Anirudhhan Vasudevan deserves gratitude and appreciation for this graceful, flowing translation, although he is candid about the translator’s blocks in transferring the variations in caste dialects into English.

Like Bama, Murugan tries to engage with intra-caste violence and its complex modes of vindication. Published by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin, this text only goes on to show why Murugan is one writer who we cannot do away with.

Pyre
Perumal Murugan,
Translated by  Anirudhhan Vasudevan, 
Penguin,  2016,
pp 399, Rs. 200