TIRUNELVELI/COIMBATORE:Fazed by protests, Perumal Murugan has given up on defending his novel Madhorubhagan but the literary world is not backing off.
Defending the portrayal of begetting a child through strangers in the novel, Sahitya Akademi award winner Nanjil Nadan pointed out that even during the days of Tolkapiyam such issues were highlighted.
Quoting the 147th sutra from Tolkappiyam, he said, “Tolkappiyar has hinted at how sexual relationships existed even in his days by saying that the ‘definition’ of marriage was formulated only after falsehood and wickedness existed among the loving couples.”
Folklorist A K Perumal pointed out that Draupadi, who in Mahabharata lived with the five Pandava brothers, was being worshipped as Goddess even here.
Tamil literature has also dealt with ‘obscenity’ in detail. “Arunagirinathar’s poems would seem obscene now,” argued writer Sivasubramanian. Many researchers have documented a ritual practice in Kerala where Kannaki, the Goddess at Kotungallur Bhagavathy temple is worshipped amidst the chanting of a text called Therippattu which means ‘song of obscenity’. “The text containing about 412 couplets elaborately describes the attempt of the male devotee to have a sexual relationship with the Goddess. I documented this ritual when it was enacted during the Meenam Parani last summer. A large number of women devotees had also attended this and none objected to the performance,” said Perumal.
This tradition of describing the body of the Goddess follows the historical tradition of Yamana Tantra.
“As per oral historical sources, a different kind of practice existed in the past in a few villages in northern Tamil Nadu. Whenever a husband saw a pair of footwear outside his house while returning home, he would not enter the house. The footwear symbolically communicated that the wife is in the company of another man,” said N Ramachandran, Head of Department of Folklore at St Xavier’s College, Palayamkottai.
“In his famous novel, Karisal, writer Ponneelan documented another old custom in which a child would marry a woman of adult age, following which the father of the child will have a sexual relationship with the daughter-in law,” he noted.
Academics say that attacking authors for penning such themes would have undesirable repercussions. “If similar attacks are orchestrated against cultural practices, we cannot study disciplines such as Folklore and Anthropology,” concluded Manonmanian Sundaranar University Tamil Professor G Stephen.