The deceptively simple Perumal Murugan | Review of ‘Fire Bird’ and ‘Sandalwood Soap’

Perumal Murugan's two books, Fire Bird and Sandalwood Soap, launched within a month of each other, reflect the global appetite for local, earthy stories that transcend particularities. His protagonists, like Muthu and Velatha, are Everyman figures, and readers cheer them on. Murugan's mastery of craft and regional sensibility make his work immersive and universal. His stories explore caste, discrimination, class, gender, and the meaning of life. Translators must be crafty wordsmiths to capture his world in another tongue and these able translations make his work an achievement, a neat acrobatic feat.

It speaks to the prolificity of Perumal Murgan and the burgeoning global appetite for his work that two of his books were launched within a month of each other: Fire Bird (translated by Janani Kannan), followed by Sandalwood Soap and Other Stories (translated by Kavitha Muralidharan). Incidentally, Fire Bird also finds itself in the shortlist of The JCB Prize for Literature, the winner of which will be announced later this month.

There is a perceptible and growing hankering for local, earthy stories that transcend, through sleight of word, the particularities they are set in. Invariably, the hero while still entangled in the process of making a living, unexpectedly rises to be an Everyman, appealingly simple, and yet, universal. Quite like Muthu, in Fire Bird, forced out of comfort by his family, striking out like a pioneer of sorts, marking new territories and lands, displaced and trying to blend in, in a new land. Or, even Velatha, the oracle of sorts, in the short story ‘Magamuni’ that features in Sandalwood Soap. At some point, the readers are cheering the protagonists on, willing them to succeed, vanquishing the evil or pettiness that tries to cow them down.

Undoubtedly, it’s Murugan’s sheer mastery over his craft, though camouflaged by a deceptively simple tone, that makes the reader experience immersive. In fact, it is this that links the two books though they are couched in different genres — Fire Bird is a novel and Sandalwood Soap, a collection of short stories. They convey a Perumal Murugan voice, a quintessential western Tamil Nadu sensibility, both recognisable anywhere, without any introduction, but time and again, content transcends form, and the quotidian rises to be universal. 

For instance, the story ‘Loser’ in Sandalwood Soap is about the relationship between a regular office-goer and an extraordinary talking cat, and stunningly Kafkaesque in its conclusion. Muthu’s trials that arise out of deliberate alienation by his family, in Fire Bird, are definitely universal, and in his determination to make it, he could well be Pearl S. Buck’s Wang Lung (The Good Earth) who struggles against the malevolence and schadenfreude of his family and the vicissitudes of nature to survive.

The situation of Muthu’s wife Peruma’s abuse might be quite different from the mother who wears no blouse (‘The Last Cloth’), and thus is an object of shame for her family; and their reactions are different, but it is undeniable that their experience emerges from a patriarchal world order. While Peruma’s truculence gets her the title ‘Aalanda Patchi’ (fire bird), the mother literally fades away in bewilderment. In ‘Hunger’, Murugesh’s wife who lives away from her husband is embarrassed at his insistence in getting relatives at a wedding to book a separate room for the couple. Her shame is different from the one that the mother’s family exhibits, and yet in someways, it arises from the same social constructs and gendered expectations. 

Murugan’s elevated sentience is where he derives his earthiness from: the scent of the dry earth; the smells of the marketplace; the fragrance of cooking ‘kali’ and rice; even the nose-wrinkling odours of the public toilets in the titular story in Sandalwood Soap lift off like hot, swirling vapour from the pages of the book, contextualising his world for the reader. 

If sentience blesses his work with the regional context, then his sharp consciousness gives it the larger, metaphysical frame. Ingrained in his work are the concepts of caste, discrimination, class, the gender question, and the meaning of life.