Caste |

February 1, 2018
by Sucharita Dutta-Asane Leave a comment

Translator of Perumal Murugan’s ‘One Part Woman’ declines Sahitya Akademi Award

Aniruddhan Vasudevan, the critically acclaimed translator of ‘One Part Woman’, has declined the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize 2016.

‘One Part Woman’ is a translation of ‘Madhorubagan’, a Tamil novel by award-winning author Perumal Murugan.

‘Madhorubagan’ – the tale of a couple from Tiruchengode, who face societal discrimination due to their inability to conceive a child – sparked uproar in 2014, with Hindu caste and religious groups holding protests.

The furore died down, but reared its ugly head again in 2017 when the Sahitya Akademi awards were announced and Aniruddhan’s name featured on the list. The agitators filed a petition in the Madras High Court against the book receiving the award.

In December 2017, the Madras High Court asked the Akademi to go ahead with their award ceremony as scheduled while ordering a stay on the English translation prize until further notice.

On Monday, the translator wrote to the Akademi and declined the award.

Kannan Sundaram, of Kalachuvadu Publications, which published ‘Madhorubagan’, told TNM, “He does not want to fight a legal battle to get the award. He also does not want eminent writers like Githa Hariharan, K Satchidanandan and others being scrutinized. He sees this (the fact that the case is still going on) as part of the ongoing problem of hounding Perumal Murugan, and does not want to be part of it.”

The controversy

In 2014, four years after Perumal Murugan’s much-acclaimed ‘Madhorubagan’ released, the Kongu Vellala Gounder community began protesting against the book. The caste, which has a stronghold over the Kongu region in Tamil Nadu, claimed that the book insulted the women of their community, in addition to disrespecting Hindu deities. A police-mediated ‘peace talk’ between Perumal Murugan and the caste-Hindu right-wing groups resulted in the writer tendering an unconditional apology.

Soon after this, Perumal Murugan announced his decision to stop writing in a post on Facebook, which said the author in him was dead. Following multiple criminal complaints, in 2016, the Madras High Court finally quashed all proceedings against the book and the writer.

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On a wing and a prayer: Tamil Dalit writer Bama on 25 years of Karukku

December 2017 marked 25 years of the publication of Karukku, the first autobiography in Tamil by a Dalit. Do you remember the person you were when you wrote it?
When I wrote Karukku, I was completely broken. After seven years of being in a convent as a nun, I had quit. I found that I had lost everything — a job as a teacher, a house, enough to eat and drink. I had lost my confidence, I shrank from meeting people. In that state, I began to think of my childhood, and the things that I had lost. A friend advised me to write, and I did. I wasn’t thinking of writing a book at all.
Looking back, in these 25 years, I have grown tremendously, I have become so free…25 years of Karukku has also meant learning to live alone, as a single woman. I ended Karukku by saying that I was a bird with broken wings. Now, as I have said before, I am a falcon, flying high in the sky.

You wrote in a Tamil that was different from the literary language of the time. What was the reaction?
In Tamil literary circles, they questioned me a lot about the language. They said, ‘She is an educated lady. Why has she written in dialect? Why do her characters speak in abusive, filthy language?’ That made me furious. Because who are they to judge my language? The Brahminical language is used everywhere — they accept it. They are proud to speak in their language. Then why not I then? My language and that of my people is beautiful to me. So I deliberately used it in all my novels after that.

How do you conceive of Dalit feminism?
I have talked more about Dalit feminism in my novels, Sangati, and Manushi, which is the second part of Karukku in some sense. I have written five-six stories about feminism. There is one story, called ‘Konnu Tai’. It was a very controversial story, even women did not like it. It was about a woman, a mother of four children, who leaves her drunkard husband and goes to her mother’s place. She also leaves behind an infant, who she was breastfeeding. Everybody condemned her. But she was stubborn. She said, ‘Let him know what it is to have a child. They are his children too.’ Her mother says, ‘If your husband remarries, your life is finished.’ She says, ‘No my life starts then’. She takes off her thali, sells it and starts a shop on the street. One famous male writer wrote a letter to me. ‘As a woman writer, you should have feeling for a mother. You should have ended the story like this: At night, she thought of her youngest child and wept.’ (laughs)
I have written stories about how men abandon their wives only to remarry, about a woman who, after a hard day’s work, would pretend that she has been possessed by a goddess so that the husband would stop bothering her for sex. In these very small ways, I have expressed the feelings of women in general, not just Dalit women.

How to Tell the Dalit Story

Moving beyond the narratives of victimhood and survival, Sujatha Gidla’s book on caste, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family And The Making Of Modern India, has come out at a time when more Dalits in India are asserting their rights, and more non-Dalits are speaking up against the discrimination towards the community. Gidla’s book, published in the US in July and in India this month, is the story of the country through the eyes of the “untouchables”. India has completed 70 years of its independence, but caste still exists and discrimination based on it manifests itself in different forms. At 26, Gidla, a Dalit from Andhra Pradesh, moved to the US, where she worked as an app designer at the Bank of New York. She was laid off during the recession in 2009, and has since been working as a conductor with the New York City Subway.

In a phone interview, Gidla, 54, speaks about her book, writing, her raw anger, and caste in India. Edited excerpts:

How do you describe yourself? Which identity precedes the other?

A Dalit, someone who is left-leaning, then I guess…a conductor. Caste is first because we are made aware of it all the time. If I go to India, I know it based on how we are treated. And since I wrote this book, caste has become my first identity here as well. In fact, my basic identity even now is that of a Dalit more than a writer. It is more like a conductor who became a writer rather than a writer who is also a conductor. I am more caste- and class-conscious than anything else. When I was young, I would say I am a Naxalite or a Communist first. I think I started becoming conscious of my Dalit identity in 1985, after the Karamchedu massacre in Andhra Pradesh, where an entire settlement of untouchables was attacked by a mob of high-castes. It really jolted me and many of us out of our oblivion.

You started out trying to figure your story. At what point, on interviewing your family, did you realize you needed to write a book?

Initially, the phone calls were about finding out where I came from, but very quickly it became clear to me that it constitutes a book. I was shocked to realize that very few generations ago we were actually living in the forests and living off of the forests, and how we came to settle to doing agriculture—which is basically the point of civilization. My family was a part of that huge transition—from hunter-gatherers to agriculture. Unlike, say, places like Germany, where it took several centuries, these huge transitions took place in a very small duration of time for my family—from forests to plains, from tribals to civilized people, from tribals to untouchables, from worshipping totems to practising Christianity. Also, I realized how one becomes an untouchable. It’s not like some people randomly got assigned untouchability, some Brahminism. There is a material basis for this segregation. That caste and its evolution can be explained was fascinating to me.

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