Headline October 20, 2016/ ''' INDIAN NOVELIST -PERUMAL MURUGAN'S- *TOWNS* '''

''' INDIAN NOVELIST -PERUMAL 

MURUGAN'S- *TOWNS* '''

*NEW DELHI* :   MASTER WRITER  Perumal Murugan's  towns  -are full of deadly and quiet menace,  protected with violence-

And this growing, and growing  *HomeTown*  rage, that came with his great insights and writings, has ever since, been testing this sterling Indian novelist.

Perumal Murugan,  who was celebrated all over  recently, as a major Indian writer, looked more than a bit miserable in this big city.

The son of an illiterate  soda-pop vendor from small-town South India, he had limited his visit to the capital to 48 hours, and this appeared to be 46 hours too long.

He prefers to sleep on a rope cot, under the stars, the way they do in the village, and has never owned a pair of shoes that were not sandals. 

Leaving an interview with the talk show host   Barkha Dutt, -who is Oprah Winfrey League famous in India, he turned to the man escorting him, and asked, politely, who she was. 

Mr. Murugan had come to declare his return as a writer following a long spell of darkness. 

After undergoing a  vicious attack  by caste leaders in his home state of Tamil Nadu, his novel, *One Part Woman*   was the subject of landmark court decision- 

Defending the rights of artists to critically depict their own communities.  

Recent interest in Murugan's work has exploded, with five novels coming out, translated into English from the original Tamil.

But Mr. Murugan seems unsure of what kind of writer he will be now. He remains so horrified by the *collective punishment*   meted out to him in his hometown over  ''One Part Woman''  that he barely speaks about it even to friends.

He doubts he will ever again write about small towns with the same unblinking realism.

''A sensor is seated inside me now,'' he said that week at a book signing organized by Penguin India

. 

''He is testing every word that is born within me. His constant caution that a word may be misunderstood so, or it may be interpreted, is a real bother. But I'm unable to shake him off.''

*Mr. Murugan's  fictional villages  are places full of quiet menace, where cast boundaries  are  protected  with violence  and social exclusion*

In  ''PYRE''  published  in English by Penguin Books, in April, a well-loved young man brings a wife of different caste to live among the relatives, hoping they will eventually accept her.

As the lovers, hopeful and distracted  overlook clues  that the people around them are drifting into a  consensus  in favour of  murder, Mr. Murugan slows the pace, meandering on into exact, detailed descriptions of village life.

It's so tense that it leaves you gasping for air.

Equally dark currents run through  ''One Part Woman'', which Penguin published in English in 2013.

Kali and Puma, a couple who are erotically wrapped up in each other, withstand waves of derision because they have not conceived a child after a decade of marriage.

But social pressure eats into them,  first sporadically and then conspiratorially, as Ponna is pushed, as if by hundred hands, into participating in a religious ritual for  childless women. 

But as the Hometown rage tests this great Indian novelist. it is all bound to affect him in many, many ways:

 ''There was a certain purity to him that won't be there now, I think.''   

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