Spotlight on Tamil with the International Booker nod to Perumal Murugan’s Pyre, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan

Murugan effortlessly delivers a modern Dickensian world-view with a distinct regional flair

If a society’s pathological obsession with child bearing rends a loving family and sets a couple against each other in Tamil writer Perumal Murugan’s  Madhorubagan (translated as  One Part Woman), in his  Pookuzhi ( Pyre), a community’s pathological compulsion with caste leaves us shaking and speechless at the violence of intent and action of humans. 

Riveting in its chronicling, Pyre drags the reader through the rollercoaster of emotions that Kumaresan and Saroja go through after the couple, from different castes, elope and marry. It is easy to see how the forcefulness of the slender novel impelled the International Booker Prize panel of judges to put the book on its famed longlist. 

The International Booker Prize is chosen from a shortlist of six books, derived from a longlist of 13, and this year, the jury chose the ‘Booker Dozen’ from a total of 134 submissions (published in the U.K. or Ireland between May 2022 and April 2023). Murugan’s  Pyre, originally published in 2016 and brought out in a new edition by Pushkin Press in August 2022, is the first Tamil translation to enter the list. 

Pyre is translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan who began a fine job rendering the Kongu region’s earthiness and dialect with his first translation of the author’s  Madhorubagan ( One Part Woman, 2013). Here, he carries on, this time acknowledging in his note that the dialogue in the book was challenging to translate — “the specificity of language use resists translatability”. 

Reading the Tamil works of Murugan, an author who effortlessly uses a certain dialect and descriptive narrative style to document not only the humdrum and the quotidian, but also a rather modern Dickensian world-view of society, reveals the niche his body of work occupies, and the challenge any translator would have. 

No doubt then that despite his protestations, Vasudevan has done justice; in his translation, the conversations, endearments, hopelessness, villainy and anger don’t sound alien. The smell of the earth is intact, packaged in a language that familiarises something distantly familiar, renders it perceivable and yet, unique. 

“Perumal Murugan is a great anatomist of power and, in particular, of the deep, deforming rot of caste hatred and violence. With flashes of fable, his novel tells a story specific and universal: how flammable are fear and the distrust of others,” the jury records on the Booker website.