Highlights
Perumal Murugan’s 'Pyre' was originally written in Tamil, and later translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan. The book has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023, thus becoming the first Tamil novel to make it to the prestigious list.
Set in rural Tamil Nadu of the 1980s, 'Pyre' follows the story of a young couple in love- Kumaresan and Saroja. The story begins with Saroja and Kumaresan, who are just-married, getting down from a bus and walking towards Kumaresan's ancestral village in rural Tamil Nadu. Theirs is an inter-caste marriage. Kumaresan believes that after the initial few curious inquiries about Saroja, people in his village will accept her and leave them alone. But, how naive was he? Seeing Saroja, a fair-skinned girl, the villagers soon suspect that she doesn't belong to the same caste as Kumaresan's and she so, isn't one of them. The couple is treated with derision and hatred, not just by the villagers but also by Kumaresan's old mother and his extended family. The outraged villagers set about to seek revenge from the young-couple for going against the society's norms of castism.
This heart wrenching tale focuses on the social discriminations the couple faces in a casteist society. While the story is set in rural India, Murugan highlights how intolerance and cruelty are universal human nature. At the heart of it, this is also a story of love versus differences in the society.
How critics view the bookEllen Barry writes for The New York Times, "Murugan’s fictional villages are places full of quiet menace, where caste boundaries are protected with violence and social exclusion….(Pyre is) so tense it leaves you gasping for air".
Kirkus Review writes, "A haunting story of forbidden love set in Southern India that illustrates the cruel consequences of societal intolerance."
