International Booker longlist | Why Perumal Murugan’s Pyre is poised to set the world on fire

Perumal Murugan; and Pyre is a delicate love story set against the giant frame of caste and honour. (Photos courtesy Penguin Random House)

The news that Perumal Murugan’s book Pyre has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize, so close on the heels of Geetanjali Shree’s win last year, is welcome for many happy reasons.

As authors go, no one will dispute that Murugan deserves a wide audience, the wider the better. His books have taken up themes that are dark, compelling, intense and raw – penned in ways that pierce through language and words. His writings continue to reconstruct the conscience of a world that would rather go with the flow, dabble in surfaces, and remain blissfully unaware of the darker, grimmer social realities that ail us as a whole.

Published in Tamil 2013 as Pookkuzhi, and translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan in 2016, the novel was longlisted for the DSC Prize in 2017. And while Shree’s win for Ret Samadhi, translated from Hindi into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, was a historic one, Murugan’s novel being in Tamil is an added dimension for the language being South Indian, sometimes missing from the national psyche as an Indian language at all.

A feverish read, where tragedy is knocking at the door almost from the first page, an inevitable end against which the reader keeps his fingers crossed, Pyre is a delicate love story set against the giant frame of caste and honour. Dedicated to R. Ilavarasan, the Dalit man found dead on a railway track following his inter-caste wedding, it is a book that unflinchingly looks at the caste narrative in the present days.

As Vasudevan, who has also translated Murugan’s One Part Woman, says in the translator’s note of the book, ‘Translating Pookkuzhi has been a somewhat different experience. In some ways, it has been more challenging despite the fact that this novel’s storyline is more contemporary than that of Maadhorubaagan (One Part Woman), and it does not dwell so much on mythical and temple narratives. I think the difficulty is because there is more direct speech involved in Pookkuzhi; the characters speak a lot and their streams of thought too bear the distinct mark of regional speech patterns.’

A nervous Saroja follows her new husband Kumaresan as they step off a bus towards Kattuppatti because he has told her, ‘I am everything for you.’ Very soon into the walk, he tells her not to cover her head the way she has because ‘in these parts, covering the head is a mark of mourning’. But his uncle who cycles by and is the first from his family to see his bride asks, ‘This is not a face from our caste, Mapillai. Does a face that wanders over fields and rocks look like this? This is the face of someone who hasn’t toiled, a body that hasn’t suffered summer’s heat. All right, tell me the truth – whatever it is… Is she from our caste?’

The fact that Pyre may be a personal favourite among all of Murugan’s books for many like me adds to the general joy of seeing this book join such a prestigious global longlist – and find its moment of hot glory.