“It boils down to the very question of our survival and if we remained silent now, there wouldn’t be anyone to speak out for us in future,” said writer and former civil servant N. S. Madhavan at speaking at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale’s ‘History Now’ series on Saturday on the efforts to silence writer Perumal Murugan.
“Mass reading of Perumal Murugan’s novel attracted good crowd at Biennale. There was fear & hope in the air. Thanks Kochi, for taking lead!” Mr Madhavan tweeted after a session at the Biennale on freedom of creative expression in the context of the communal groups’ resistance to Mr. Murugan’s fictional work Madhorubhagan [One Part Woman] and the writer’s eventual announcement, under duress, of the ‘death’ of the writer in him.
If Walter Benjamin had committed suicide under an oppressive Nazi regime in 1945, Mr. Murugan — a committed writer, researcher of his region Namakkal and a Kongu dialect lexicographer — had now been forced to figuratively end his life as Dravidian political formulations in Tamil Nadu chose to maintain silence on the issue… Exile is what writers under attack had opted for in the past, but Mr. Murugan would have to live in [his] native land, Mr Mdhavan said, announcing solidarity with the ‘defeated writer.’
“The danger [of fascism] is not near, it is with us,” said CPI(M) leader and writer Simon Britto. “In today’s world, and in secular India, a writer has his head on the block and his assassin is waiting at the tip of his pen,” he said.
Filmmaker Kamal called Mr. Murugan a symbol of the crisis facing creative people. “We are all staring at a future where we would have to resort to creative suicide.”
Lyricist Shibu Chakravarthy said the future held no hopes if prevalent customs were not allowed to be questioned.
Composer-singer Shahabas Aman said while voices of protest rose from all quarters, especially the youth, against the forces that sought to silence Mr. Murugan, writer Madhavikutty a.k.a Kamala Suraiyya had to leave the State when creative people looked the other way when she came under attack.
The speakers and the audience then read aloud a portion of the novel in English.
