London: A novel by Perumal Murugan, the Tamil author of controversial ‘One Part Woman’, has been long-listed for the International Booker prize.
The novel ‘Pyre’, published in 2013 and translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, makes to the list becoming the first for the Tamil language spoken by 100 million people in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore, The Guardian reports.
The novel is set in at Tamil Nadu village of 1980s, which tells the story of a couple from two different castes falling in love and eloping, causing violence in their wake.
“Perumal Murugan is a great anatomist of power and, in particular, of the deep, deforming rot of caste hatred and violence,” the Booker judges reportedly said.
The novel’s entry into the coveted list is ‘not just a recognition of literary merit, but of a language to which he is deeply attached.’
Responding to The Guardian by email Murugan said that he is delighted, adding that ‘it is an acknowledgement of Tamil literature’.
The 56-year-old author of 10 novels, five collections of short stories and four anthologies of poetry discusses in his works ‘poverty, caste and the subordinate status of females’.
Four years after ‘ One Part Woman’ came out in 2010, a controversy erupted with the right wing Hindu groups accusing him of insulting temple, tradition and local women, as the novel tells the story of ‘a childless woman who is desperate to conceive’.
The author describes how during a festival happening for one night a year taboos around sex are discarded and women can have sex with strangers to conceive.
Protests erupted even outside his home, demanding punishment to the author and he was compelled to apologise after police intervention.
In 2015 Murugan announced on his Facebook page that ‘ Perumal Murguan the writer is dead’, causing widespread outrage in India.
In 2016 a court order trashed the petitions against the author by Hindu groups and Perumal Murugan emerged from self –imposed exile.
Murugan, who is the son of an illiterate farmer, later told a gathering in Delhi that a ‘censor is seated inside me now’, according to The Guardian report.