It was the tragic destiny of the great language of Tiruvalluvar — the divine and classic Tamil — to force one of its best writers to his knees and make him declare himself dead. I doubt if any Tamil writer before him has been crushed so brutally. When I read Perumal Murugan’s heartrending statement, I was reminded of the horrifying media images of hostages on their knees in the white desert with the IS butcher next to them, knife ready. Perhaps no Indian writer in any language has been crushed with such venomous public insouciance, the state brazenly joining hands with communal goons to humiliate, hound and subdue literature and freedom of expression. It is the rule of the thumb of Indian politics that power must side with the mob, not with the individual. And the mob has always been the monstrous, murderous heart of fascism.
Perhaps writers have been crushed like this before in Indian states and we never knew because they suffered in silence, helpless to face the odds stacked so heavily against them. When Perumal Murugan declared that he, the writer, no more lived, that all his books must be scrapped, that he would never write again, to me it appeared like the birth of a fearsome supernova, a terrible augury of the arrival of the dark era of the silence of the lambs. I am glad Perumal Murugan did not go down silently. In his agony, perhaps without intending so, he spoke for all writers and free individuals everywhere. Faced with physical elimination, a writer, like any other human being, has a right to choose to live — not just he, but his family too. Life is a one-time happening and it is a valid enough reason to choose to stay alive. You may be silenced, but no one can stop you from being free inside of yourself. I think Perumal Murugan chose that freedom.
At a TV discussion on this subject, I was asked by the presenter, a young man brimming over with idealism, why Perumal Murugan gave in. Shouldn’t he have fought back tooth and nail? I said we are asking too much of writers. Martyrdom of Perumal Murugan and his family would have merely invited scorn from the powerful, a short burst of calibrated outrage from the media, a few courteous obituaries and a few drops of tears from those who loved them. We certainly do not live in a society where writers’ martyrdoms will solve our poisonous problems. Literature has only incidental value. Power overrides all. As Elias Canetti wrote, “The threat of death is the coin of power.”
The tragically spectacular surrender of Perumal Murugan is in effect a disgraceful comment on the Indian republic’s avowed commitment to the democratic way of life. For an individual who is not the protégé of a religion, caste or political party, irrespective of whether he is a writer or not, to trust the Indian state to protect you against a vote-bank mob of any hue is equal to jumping off a cliff hoping angels will catch you. It applies to all Indian politics across the board, at the centre or in the states, and ideology is irrelevant.
The Left Democratic Front led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was in power in Kerala when, in 2010, a college professor, T.J. Joseph, was persecuted for ‘hurting’ Islamic sentiments while setting a question paper for an internal examination. The Catholic Church mercilessly threw him out of his job; he was forced to go into hiding to save his life, then hunted down and arrested and his young son tortured. He was an active member of the CPM-led union of college teachers, yet the union did not lift a little finger in his support. The Marxist-led government went into an overdrive to prove its loyalty to the fundamentalist mob. Later, a group attacked him before the eyes of his mother and sister and chopped his right palm off. A few lackadaisical arrests were made and the case just vanished; the real culprits are said to be living happily right here in our midst. The professor’s wife committed suicide last year, suffering from depression.
Perumal Murugan’s announcement of his death as a writer points to much more than one writer’s agony. It is an ominous portent of the sinister developments under way in today’s India. Hitler could be smiling again. There is more at stake here than the freedom to write. The very fundamental freedoms that underpin the Indian republic are under attack.
