'Pyre' review | Caste in bold: Perumal Murugan's International Booker longlisted novel is a reality check

Representational image, a still from the Marathi film 'Sairat' (2016), an inter-caste love tragedy.

(Spoilers ahead)

A few days ago, the news broke: Perumal Murugan’s tale of caste-crossed lovers, Pyre, was placed in the longlist for the International Booker Prize, 2023. This prize, likely the greatest honour for a work translated into English, is awarded for books published in the UK and Ireland. The nomination is significant for India. Last year, the prize was won by Indian writer Geetanjali Shree for Ret Samadhi, a Hindi novel translated by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand. The nomination of Pyre sets up a tantalising probability of a one-two and reconfirms that the ecosystem of top prizes for works of art is having a series of "India moments".

In the wake of the longlisting of Pyre, it's a good time to revisit the book which was written in Tamil as Pookuzhi in 2013 and translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan in 2017. The fictional Pyre draws from real life to narrate the tragedy of Saroja and Kumaresan. The Tamil original was dedicated to the memory of R Ilavarasan, a Dalit youth who was found dead on a railway track, according to The New Indian Express, “after his marriage to a dominant caste woman saw him being targetted and eventually, the woman (was) forced to abandon him.”

Given that Murugan has been a cause célèbre in India, chances are that even before reading Pyre, you know how it ends. Murugan, in any case, uses foreshadowing liberally to create tension in the reader’s mind about the looming, tragic ending. But suspense or no suspense, it is how the narrative draws you in and makes you identify with the characters that leaves you feeling utterly bereaved when they meet their end.

Youthful Kumaresan moves from his village home to a town, where, as happens in urban areas, caste rules are a bit relaxed. There he begins to run a soda-bottling shop, which incidentally is in the neighbourhood where Saroja’s family lives. Sections dedicated to their falling in love is written movingly, evoking the sringara rasa, and, at times, humorously.

The story trope isn't new, the skeleton of how caste combusts young love is a story older than time in a country like India. The couple knows them belonging to different castes will be a bone of contention between their families. But where could they elope to? Back to his home village. In the hope that the scandal wouldn't shadow the two, and the community might be accepted.

But acceptance is not in their fate. The gatekeeper of this community, and from whom comes the very first rejection, is the person Kumaresan least expected it to be: his own mother. But Murugan doesn't sketch a black and white world. He adroitly shows the reader where the mother is coming from, too. Her verbal harassment of the young couple stems from her own insecurities and trauma. Murugan shows us Marayi’s predicament as a widow rendered largely powerless by her community, conditioned to turn against her son and daughter-in-law. In just a few pages, Murugan distills the bind of the cornered Marayi, who enables the hunting down of Kumaresan and Saroja.

Kumaresan’s family, including his mother, is totally excommunicated. In a single stroke, their rights to livelihood, access to places of religion, and the basic need for social interaction are nipped in the bud, as is the possibility for nourishment, having been barred from local shops. The excommunication will last as long as Saroja’s presence makes the village "impure".

One by one, Kumaresan’s extended family shuns them, and in a foreshadowing of what is to follow, a relative roughs him up. The noose tightens around them, slowly but surely, there are violations of privacy and verbal abuse, and a palpable tension of the impending violence.

The villagers are the perfect foil to any hopes of the couple to seek a safe haven in a distant town. Personal affairs and decisions are a public matter here, to be dealt with by the collective.

In Murugan’s One Part Woman (Madhorubhagan, 2010), the community verbally humiliates and mentally harasses the couple for being unable to conceive; in Pyre, the community is out baying for their blood. In both, Murugan skillfully depicts the love and pain in a marriage being warped under community pressure.

Murugan's writing, language, is readily accessible, welcoming any and every reader into its world-creation, and the credit for that also goes to his translator, for these two books in particular, Aniruddhan Vasudevan. Both the stories are riveting, powerful, moving tragedies. Sometimes, there is a lot to be said for the writer staying out of the way of his story, which happens here.

Murugan is a great storyteller, smoothly segueing between subplots, scenes and the protagonists’ dilemmas and predicaments. Pyre artfully brings home to us privileged readers what it is to be isolated and targetted on account of caste, particularly when one is a woman with scant power and resources, and how community power dehumanises her first, so as to destroy her. Of special note is how superbly Murugan succeeds in putting you in the shoes of his characters, Saroja in particular, making you empathise with them, imagine what drives them, what they’re feeling and how they are suffering.

To convey a sense of experience in the way Pyre does is to reaffirm the power of stories that transport you into a world far removed from yours, expanding your sense of that which Thich Nhat Hanh called "interbeing". To wish Pyre gets the International Booker is to hope that caste discrimination — being reinforced in a culturally regressing India while being comfortably entrenched among the upper-caste Indians overseas — is shown the mirror on an international level, that the West, the White man, gets a glimpse of the concept they can hardly wrap their heads around: caste.