Who Killed Perumal Murugan

(Penguin Petit)

Select Preferred Format

Ebooks

Amazon Google

Writer Perumal Murugan is dead,’ said an update on the author’s own Facebook page.

For a country that’s moving towards a brighter, more developed, digital future in the twenty-first century, India’s people seem to be regressing in a strange direction. From attacking writers for their work without understanding it – to a point that the writer has to claim that he is ‘dead’ – to forcing anyone who questions the ruling party’s ideas to conform, India is slowly but surely moving away from the very ideas that formed its identity: a culturally diverse democracy.

While A.R. Venkatachalapathy examines what led a venerated writer like Perumal Murugan to commit ‘suicide’ in ‘Who Killed Perumal Murugan?’, Manash Bhattacharjee, in his essay ‘The Force of Dissent’, talks about why dissent is not only important but also necessary in a democracy as big and diverse as India.