Poonachi perumal murugan pdf download

Goats and sheep — the scrappy proletarians of farm life — are of particular importance. The protagonist of his book Seasons In The Palm spends his days herding sheep. They recreate the rhythms and landscapes of marginal farmers and labourers, for whom grain cultivation is a luxury, and rearing livestock a way of life.

In Poonachi , one such unnamed old man brings the smallest goat he has ever seen home to his wife, an unnamed old woman. Beguiled by the strangeness of it all, the old couple assumes custody of this caprine wonder and call her Poonachi.

The world is harsh, even for a miracle kid. A distant, authoritarian government keeps near-paranoid count of all the livestock under its regime. Poonachi must be tagged at an office, where the bureaucracy literally bleeds her out. The landscape is semi-arid from drought and no creature can be assured of a full belly. Male animals are compelled to breed and the females compelled to give birth. They struggle to feed newborns just as their human masters despair of making ends meet. Time typically passes deliberately and routinely in a Murugan novel.

The moment it crosses a limit, we forget everything. No one knew where she was born. The birth of an ordinary life never leaves a trace, does it? They had mouths only to keep shut, hands only to make obeisance, knees only to bend and kneel, backs only to bend, and bodies only to shrink before the authorities. The regime has ears on all sides. When we talk about the regime, its ears are quite sharp. That was only done to the proud goats, who were forced to look at the ground as they walked.

Goats always tried to break free of their shackles. If it was in your nature to bow down, why would anyone shackle you? And yet, they were fortunate, these sheep. They had no inkling that to bow was to be shackled. All of this is, in true Perumal Murugan style, unsentimental and earthily matter- of-fact, drawing attention to the helplessness of the female body and the multiple and violent demands on it, whether by nature, or the community.

However, despite some similarities between the conditions of goats and humans discernible in the story, Poonachi is not primarily allegorical, but accords animalkind the dignity and depth of feelings that they are rarely manifested with in literature. The reader also catches glimpses of such hierarchies that are an integral part of human society. In one extended sequence in the novel, the author describes the mandatory procedure for citizens and their pets to get their ears pierced and slyly slips in a comment on the surveillance state.

Suppose they get a little angry and point them at the regime? Such goats have to be identified, right? At another place, a government official impresses upon the couple that the superpowerdom of a nation depends upon the fecundity of its goats.

This is the closest the text comes to a satire on the human condition, with generous dollops of the absurd. Though such statements are few and far between and may even appear a tad contrived, they still show that the powerless or the silenced should not be mistaken as acquiescing. There is much to be learnt from Poonachi, whether about the transience of life or the deeply entrenched inequalities within humans, or between humans and other creatures, which are too routine to be majestically tragic.

It is also about the briefness of miracles, miracles turning into curses, and the inevitability of suffering, separation, and death. Through its humble cast of characters, the slim novel, as sparse as its setting, explores needs and instincts essential to all living creatures—hunger, safe shelter, affection, or sex. And in that sense it is not just the innocent story of a black goat, but a moving and universal political story of relevance to all of us.

Perumal Murugan brings his previous strengths as a chronicler of the minutiae of rural life and nature, and the sensitive portrayal of female characters, together in this novel and forays into a new direction marked by a refreshing lack of anthropocentrism that is a fitting need in times when human freedoms and desires are so under siege and humans begin to identify with animals.