(A review of 'Pyre', a novel by Perumal Murugan
Translated from Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan
Long-listed for International Booker Prize 2023
⭐⭐⭐⭐★)
The author declared himself dead as an author in a Facebook post after he received threats on his and his family's lives from Hindu right-wing idiots.
Pyre concerns itself with casteism which is supposed to be banned in the country, and follows the fate of an inter-caste couple in a village still stuck in medieval times. The incidences of lynching and honor killings are still visible in India. Most of the matrimony apps ask your caste when you set your profile. Yet, if you listen to upper-class critics of the reservation system, you would believe there is no casteism in the country.
If this book was written in English, I bet there would be criticism it was meant for the western gaze, given all the evils of society it mentions. Apart from casteism, there is sexism -Kumarsen's mother spends her life as a widow after her husband died (in that traditional cruel way which marginalizes widows and denies them simple luxuries) when she was only twenty (or thereabouts). At the same time, people advise him to just leave Saroja in town and get another wife of his own caste. The objectification in this advice too is something a lot people here (including women) won't be conscious of. It might also result from the fact that women, especially young married women in traditional households, are not expected or allowed to work for a living. That is not the only case of this objectification either - Saroja's family just disowns her while Kumarsen's family doesn't for the same mistake. Saroja is called a cow (among other objectifying words) bought home by Kumarsen. Then even murdering her too comes easy to villagers exactly because she is denied humanity.
It is also noteworthy that Kumarsen's mother should be only about forty yet the way she talks so much to herself might make her seem senile. That is the result of combined forces of loneliness, deprivation, and poverty.
There is also racism (if the word can be applied in the sense of discrimination based on skin color), Saroja's fair skin color is eroticized and envied by villagers because fair skin is considered a mark of beauty, especially in women.
Apart from that, the couple's marriage might also have suffered from the rural-urban divide, which creates several problems for Saroja.
That said, the story is written in Tamil, so it probably wasn't meant for foreign eyes.
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| Perumal Murugan |
I don't think a lot of Indian-language novels had got translated into English except in last couple of years when they started receiving international interest. That said, I don't know what the book will read like to someone not from India. The social encroachment into personal lives may read like that nightmarish story 'The Lottery' by Shirley Jackson, but it is very realistic.
The story itself is so familiar and simple that I would only have given it three stars but the fourth star as I haven't read a lot of stories in recent set in India's rural societies and concerning its relatively uneducated people.
- Sidharth Vardhan (March 25, 2023)
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