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Perumal Murugan (1966) is an Indian author and scholar who writes novels in Tamil. He takes chances , deals with social issues , and doe not turn his back from deep ideas. Almost all of the Murugan's novels display his comic gift , critical social concern , and his art of creating vivid and lively character vibrating with G.B Shaw's "life force".
Works In Biographical And Historical Context
His literary career consists of ten novels, and five collections each of short stories and poems. Several of his novels have been translated into English. Murugan's first novel EruVeyyil ('RisinHeat'), published in 1991, dealt with the problems that a family faced when their land was usurped to make housing colony. His second novel, Nizhal Mutram (1993), translated into English by V. Geetha as Current Show (2004), carried an autobiographical experience of helping his father run a soda stall in a cinema theatre.
Murugan's novels like, Kanganam (Resolve, 2008) dealt with the consequences of sex-selective abortions and female foeticide, and Madhurobhagan (2010) translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan as One Part Woman (2013) dealt with the controversial theme of free sex created havoc.
Amma : Perumal Murugan (Author), Kavitha Muralidharan (Translator), Nandini Murali (Translator).
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Sometimes you need to take a break and hit refresh. It's very refreshing to go away, to clear your head, and just get into something new. Perumal, the best selling author, takes a break from writing novels to write a memoir all about his mother-: AMMA.
It deals with the way of life and values of a family after property settlement. After the division of the family from joint to nuclear, extra responsibilities had to be shared by a conjugal pair. It had been portrayed by the narrator's tender eye yet truthful and in the form of essays.
Appa, a vendor of soda and "colours", or a soft drink at the market, have to do part-time agricultural work to finance his family. It was a high time of irrigation and this was the only responsibility given to Appa. But he constantly drank toddy when he was out in the fields. This overloaded Amma's responsibilities.
Amma had been surrounded by the eyes of the villagers. Around this time, her elder son was five years old and the narrator was only ten months. This put extra pressure on Amma. She had to do extra work also on behalf of Appa. It was the harvest month of Thai, millets had been already harvested and threshed. The only work left was to clean the barren millet stalk before they withered away in the sun. Amma's mother-in-law sarcastic remark,'' The field looks odd. The stalks look like roosters beheaded in a fight" and she was rebuked by her father-in-law," Why don't you hire someone to pull out the stalks, girl?" made Amma depressed.
Amma locked up her husband inside the house, and she walked down the street. There was a dense, thorny patch of the karuvelam tree on both sides of the road. After crossing the road , she reached the millet field. The toddler weighed her down, while the older son walked enthusiastically on his first moonlit outing. It was a long journey for Amma as she bathed in her sweat , following this scene, the elder son said, “I’ll go fetch water, Amma,” and run off before she could even respond. After some time , he came back with a stray dog . It ran ahead of him wagging its tail and circled Amma’s legs.
Murugan showed his craftsmanship in the next scene when the boy was balancing a basket taller than him on his back and a pot of water in his hand. To prevent the basket from touching the ground, he was walking slightly bent over. When Amma rebuked him in anger, “What is this basket for?” he smiled and said, “You can place thambi in this, no?” Thambi was his little brother.
Placing the child in the basket, and leaving the dog and the boy to guard the baby, Amma stepped into the field and completed all works within time. The next day, people were in shock after seeing the empty fields cleaned. Father-in-law told his wife, “An evil spirit has pulled out all the millet stalks in the field overnight!” Unfazed, his wife said, “All right. We have been spared the work.”
Amma is a homage to the simple and honest life of a village, a homage to a way of life and values—simplicity, honesty and hard work , which we are losing today.
Bibliography:
- Wikipedia
- text novel
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