Tamil Writer Who Fabricated Obscene Temple Rituals In Novel Walks Hand-In-Hand With Rahul Gandhi

Rahul Gandhi held hands with Tamil writer Perumal Murugan while walking in his 'Bharat Jodo Yatra'. Not in Tamil Nadu, but in Jammu.

'Who is Perumal Murugan?', those from northern India may ask.

In 2014, four years after the publication of his libellous novel targeting the Hindus of a famous sacred temple town Thiruchengodu, protests suddenly flared up in that Tamil Nadu town.

The reason was the novel. The novel had depicted that issue-less Hindu women of Thiruchengodu and surrounding regions, indulged in a ritualistic sex orgy that happened in the temple one night, wherein the women might get impregnated by unknown men.

The ritual, it was suggested, was at the basis of the popular expression in Tamil - 'children given by God'. Now, had this been written purely as work of fiction, however demeaning and perverted, it should be considered as the freedom of imagination of the author.

But that wasn't the purpose of Murugan's novel.

The ‘novel’ was actually a report - in the form of fiction - of a project undertaken with a grant from India Foundation for the Arts (IFA). The NGO, according to its website, is “a national, not-for-profit, grant-making organisation that supports practice, research and education in the arts in India”. And the project for Murugan reads:

Now this took the form of the description of the orgy-ritual and was presented as a statement of fact whose veracity is contested by elders of various communities of the town.

No report of such ritual anywhere in the temple figures in the reports of either the British collectors or the missionaries. So Murugan has much to answer for inventing this fake ritual.

Moreover, the outrage over the novel itself could have been more manufactured than real. How the entire event was probably stage-managed as an early toolkit operation is described here in a 2015 article of Swarajya.

Now both Perumal Murugan, who fabricated an orgy-event associated with Thiruchengodu temple and the publisher, Sundaram Kannan, whose magazine wrote obscenely about Kanchi Shankaracharya during his arrest, join Rahul Gandhi in his Bharat Jodo Yatra.

This was no accident but a carefully planned show of support. This much should be clear from the fact that this notorious duo did not join the Yatra in Tamil Nadu where they would have invited a strong counter-reaction.

That Rahul Gandhi has conducted an all India Yatra - starting with hate-speech making Catholic priest, walking with Kamal Haasan who has nothing but disrespect for Hindu Deities, then penultimately holding hands with a writer who invents cheap falsehood against Hindu temples and a publisher who published even worse obscene remarks against Shankaracharya - all suggest one thing.

That Rahul Gandhi is to Hindus what Constantine was to Roman Pagans.