THE INTOLERANCE DEBATE AND NOVELIZING LEXICOGRAPHY IN

PERUMAL MURUGANS MAADHORUBAAGAN

In January 2015 the Tamil language author Perumal Murugan wrote on Facebook, Perumal

Murugan the author is dead. The poignant confession of literary suicide followed after he

agreed at a meeting convened by the Namakkal district administration to withdraw his 2010-

Tamil novel, Mathorubhagan, following street protests called by caste-based groups. The

protesters, mainly drawn from the Kongu Vellala Gounder community, had demanded that

he offer an unconditional apology, delete the controversial portions, take back unsold

copies and stop writing on "controversial subjects that hurt the sentiments of the people".

Influential intermediate caste dominant in western Tamil Nadu, have been on the warpath

since December, alleging that Murugans novel has insulted the women of the community and

degraded a Hindu deity. In December 2014, the right-wing Hindu nationalist group

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteers' Organisation) burnt copies of the

book,. A local Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh functionary was in the forefront of the

assembly that burnt the book. After the state leadership disowned responsibility, Hindu

outfits are now working from behind the scenes. Over the last few weeks, thousands of the

supposedly offending pages, ripped out of context, have been reprinted and distributed to

devotees. The authors publisher Kannan Sundaram explained the grounds for intolerance.

They have said no writer who dares to touch the so-called Hindu sentiment will be able to

live in Tamil Nadu.

 Intolerance is not only opposed to history but also to critical philology. What I am

concerned with in the present essay is to track a certain philological project, the interception of

this project and the short circuiting of that project through censorship with one damaging

consequence being that readers and critics attention is turned away from the philological work

performed by the novel. Mathorubhagan is neither an attack nor defense of Saivite Hindu

religion or the religious practice at the chariot festival in the temple of Ardhanareeswara in

Thiruchengode. It is about subaltern histories embedded in the Tamil lexicon of the

Kongunaadu region of Tamilnadu. By invoking the universalist abstractions of Hindu religion,

Hindu sentiment, Hindu women the discourse of intolerance draws attention away from the

fact that Perumal Murugan the author is fascinated and obsessed with words this is not only

his point of departure, words are not only the philological level at which he examines the

language of belief. Attention to religion at the level of words are also for Perumal Murugan the

marker dividing those who approach belief as essentialist identity that is extra-linguistic and

ahistorical and reified abstraction and those for whom belief is first and foremost a historical

formation available to us not simply as a set of recuperate beliefs or theological doctrines or

even as intuition of the transcendental but as a historically mutable lexicon of words whose

meaning alter, fall into disuse, suffer reification and are endowed with new meaning.

In an Authors Note appended to the novel Murugan outlines his method as holding on

to this opening thread of two words people referred to as Ardhnari ( half woman) or as Sami

Pillai ( god given child) sami kodutha pillai (god-given children) in spoken utterances in the

villages around Tiruchengode. This form of naming opened up for Murugan the connection

between the temple festival and gods children that gave him historical information that he
was unable to find in written histories of the region, words constituted a linguistic source that

he calls one of its secret springs. This thread and this hidden spring is made possible,

Murugan implies, by his attention to lexicography. It is not simply as a historian that Murugan

approaches words. For him words unlock the literary imagination incidents and scenes

developed in my mind and trigger the writers historical imagination I was able to move to

towards seeing familiar places they were seventy or eighty years ago. Words then are a lexical

way of seeing into the historical past, names are a thread to follow through the maze of the

past, a secret spring in the forest. This way of narrating the imaginative beginnings of literary

creation becomes intelligible when we learn that the author spent a decade compiling a

lexicography of Tamil words from the Kongunaadu region. In 1983, a 17-year-old student of

Chikkaiah Naicker College, Erode, inspired by a dictionary of the Karisal (black cotton soil)

region of southern Tamil Nadu, resolved to prepare a similar lexicon for the Kongu region.

He collected dialect words from friends and relatives, and from oral traditions Perumal

Murugan has been a professor of Tamil for the past 17 years, during which time he has

developed considerable expertise in three different areas: building a lexicon of words,

idioms and phrases special to Kongunadu; researching Kongu folklore, especially the

ballads on Annamar Sami, a pair of folk deities; and publishing authoritative editions of

classical Tamil texts. - See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/why-

perumal-murugans-one-part-woman-significant-debate-freedom-expression-

india#sthash.7bejzd70.dpuf

Words however lose their power to function as a thread or as secret spring when their

historical energies are blocked and contained in the conceptual totality of labels like Saivite
religion. Murugan dramatizes this in the authors note by recounting his friends response to a

word that seized the authors imagination and by his own admission enchanted my inner

world. The word in question is the Tamil word Mathorubaagan. It is an untranslatable word

because in translation it devolves into an elite appropriation of the word to signify androgyny or

an Indologists abstract appropriation of a non-Western religion and its fables to explain male

and female principle. Murugan is not concerned with celebrating belief systems selectively or

in the Orientalist opposition between a glorious golden age of ancient Hindu beliefs versus its

modern degeneracy. He is not immune to these perspectives, but he sidesteps them through

the simple and yet powerful artistic device of allowing he himself to be enchanted Tamil word

Mathorubaagan.

tHumanist and subaltern, multiple and contestatory, the alienated subaltern modern who

experiences modernity as the most intimate robbing.

Perumal Murugan is a lexicographer novelist who is writing sub-regional literature

or vattara ilakkiyam. In this novel he explores how historical change in the Kondu region

occurs in gender relations. It is important to realize that neither tradition nor modernity

are pre-given, static or singular in a society that has undergone colonization. Traditions are

invented, that is why scholars talk about the invention of the Hindu past in the colonial

period. By the same logic the ways modernity is perceived, resisted or accepted by

subaltern characters in vattara ilakkiyam is also not the same as the ways modernity

occurred for the metropolitan elites. Is there any character, situation, plot contrivance,
social conflict that is recognizably modern in your chapters? What is the language of the

modern or potentially modern for the subaltern characters in this novel? And does Perumal

Murugan's study of language in the Kondunaddu region provide insights into the ways

historical change occurs in this society?

T.M. Scanlons now classic essay, The Difficulty of Tolerance,