In support of Perumal Murugan
In another shocking and serious blow to the freedom of expression, Perumal Murugan, an influential Tamil writer at the peak of his creative powers, has been bullied, blackmailed and harassed by anonymous vested religious elements led by the Hindutva right, in collusion with the police and the state administration of Tamil Nadu, into helpless submission – so much so that he has, in pain and frustration, announced that he is giving up writing altogether. Perumal Murugan’s sensitive and distinctive novel, Madhorubagan, was published as far back as 2010 in Tamil and has run into many editions. An English translation of the book was published in 2013 under the title One Part Woman and also went into more than one edition. As if on cue to an orchestrated campaign initiated by the RSS and the BJP in the state, the work has, over the last few weeks, suddenly come under attack for allegedly being offensive to the local dominant caste of Tiruchengode (near Erode in Tamil Nadu), where the story is set some time in the early part of the twentieth century.
This motivated retrospective and retroactive literary witch hunt and inquisition of the novelist has been abetted by the police and the district administration in the form of a so-called ‘peace meeting’ to which Perumal Murugan was summoned on January 12. The proceedings of the meeting, as reported by the lawyer friend who accompanied him, resembled that of an arbitrary katta panchayat (khap panchayat), brow-beating the writer into a humiliating unconditional apology for what he had written, and into promising to retract whatever supposedly gave offence. All that the police could or would do to protect Perumal Murugan was to advise him to stay away from Tiruchengode for his own safety. The author is now in effective exile from his home, where he and his wife lived and worked, and has been reduced to pleading with his publishers not to sell or reprint any of his books and promising to compensate the loss they incurred on account of this.
Can we allow a set of unidentified rabid and fascistic forces to kill the soul of a writer thus? We call upon the state government of Tamil Nadu to protect the writer, his constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression and his creative integrity from such extra-constitutional cultural censors. We call upon artists, writers, intellectuals, readers and the concerned public at large to rise to the defence of democracy imperilled by this unwarranted and vile abrogation of an author’s right to write. |
Irfan Habib
M.K.Raina
Ram Rahman
Prabhat Patnaik
Mihir Bhattacharya
Saeed Mirza
C.P.Chandrasekhar
Malini Bhattacharya
Jayati Ghosh
Geeta Kapur
Venktesh Athreya
Madangopal Singh
Vivan Sundaram
Parthiv Shah
Sohail Hashmi
Anil Bhatti
Teesta setalvad
Zahoor Siddiqui
Archana Prasad
Nilima Sheikh
Veer Munshi
Anil Sadgopal
Vishwamohan Jha
Arjun Dev
Indu Chandrasekhar
Amar Farooqui
Atluri Murali
B.P.Sahu
Badri Raina
Biswamoy Pati
D.N.Jha
Praveen Jha
Indira Arjun Dev
K.M.Shrimali
Lata Singh
Prabhat Shukla
Rahul Verma
Rakhshanda Jalil
Sashi Kumar
Antara Dev Sen
Kumkum Sangari
Dinesh Abrol
Shehla Hashmi Grewal
Jagdish Lal Dawar
Asad Zaidi
Kanishka Prasad
Sheba Chhachhi
Chanchal Chauhan
Navdeep Kumar
Charu Gupta
Abdul Mabood
Kaushlendra Pandey
Girsh Shrivastava
Abhilasha Kumari
Harendra Singh
Raja Jaikrishna
Gopalakrishna Nair
Puneet Sharma
R. Ramachandran
Nina Rao
Ayesha Kidwai
Imrana Qadeer
Vandana Rag
Prabhu Ghate Ataullah
Harbans Mukhia
Saba Hasan
Jawarimal Parakh |