The point is not whether a temple festival sanctioned a permissive night, or whether women wanting to conceive took advantage of this night.
But the point is not whether the novel is award-winning, or even good. Madhorubhagan has been described by Tamil critics as an imaginative effort to map the lore and ethos of the place Murugan comes from to people it with characters who long for a reliable livelihood, marriage, children, and acceptance by the community. I am trying to prop myself up holding onto the light of the last lines of the judgment: ‘Let the author be resurrected to do what he is best at. Murugan the writer has accepted this offer of a second life: “It comforts a heart that had shrunk and wilted. The Madras High Court told him he could come back to life, think and imagine again, pick up his pen. In July 2016, the writer was resurrected. This recognition, bestowed on my language at an unfortunate moment, will, I hope, be a shining gem rather than an unsightly wart.” With heartbreaking logic, the ghost said, “The Samanvay Award for Madhorubhagan is a modern recognition given to Tamil, a classical language with a long and unbroken literary tradition. But there was a statement from the writer’s “ghost”. His “shadow”, the publisher, came to Delhi to receive the award. In October 2015, he got an award from the Samanvay Bhasha Samman. He then took to Facebook to announce his death as a writer.īetween last January and this July, the writer floated, dead and alive, in a menacing purgatory. He was hounded into signing an apology and “withdrawing” his novel. The writer was summoned for “peace talks”. Instead of ignoring the thought police as aberrant haters of idea, imagination and word, the real police took them seriously. Used to conflating history and fiction, the self-appointed censors put on their police uniforms.
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(It also destroys free speech and cultural well-being, but that can be passed off as nationalism.) The BJP-RSS, on the lookout for allies, pulled out its familiar script: Mob censorship can divide people division can court vote banks. Four years after Murugan’s novel was published, caste-based groups, slow readers all, claimed the book “hurt” their religious sentiments, and “defamed” women, the region and the community.