Pigs are central to the special events in their lives: funerals are incomplete without pork, pigs are given as dowry. In addition to doing sanitation work, the Kuravars in the novel raise, butcher and sell pigs for a living. It would take another 15 years to bring out the revised edition, edited by M Kannan and V Prakash, which was published early this year by Thadagam. That first edition, published by the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-affiliated Bharathi Puthakalayam, was riddled with errors and barely readable. Though some of Tamil literature’s most eminent publishers showed interest – Kalachuvadu and Cre-a, for instance – the novel only saw the light of day in 2008, more than a decade after it was written. It only took him six or seven months to finish. Pandiyakannan wrote his first novel, Salavaan, when he was 27 years old. This was the story Pandiyakannan, the Kuravar community’s only novelist, told me. Yet today the latter punishment, no longer restricted to prisons and enforced not just by the state but also by its citizens, is the lot of only a few communities, all of them belonging to the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes. In prison, as part of their sentences, Kuravars were forced to clean toilets, tanks and drains with their bare hands – the work we now refer to as “manual scavenging.” Nearly every community in what was then Madras Presidency faced imprisonment under the Criminal Tribes Act and forced manual scavenging at some point. Resisting encroachment landed them on the government’s list of “criminal tribes” and behind the bars of its multiplying prisons. The Kuravars, like many other indigenous communities, were displaced and made nomads, living off any work they could get. The British colonial government razed vast swathes of forest in the hills to make way for plantations, railways and towns. The 19th century brought seismic changes. The description of Kuravars in the classic Tamil poem Kuttrala Kuravanci – made popular through modern-day versions by the Dravidian leader M Karunanidhi and the Bharatanatyam dancer Rukmini Devi Arundale – shows some consistency with descriptions of them from the Sangam age, suggesting that the Kuravars were engaged in their traditional vocations as late as the 18th century, when the Kuravanci was written. The earliest Sangam poems describe the men as hunters of honey and game and the women as soothsayers. The Kuravars are the indigenous people of kurinci land. In the earliest known Tamil poems, each landscape, along with its attendant gods, people, flora and fauna, is associated with a different stage of love: the hills, for example, are for clandestine union, while the coast is for anxious waiting. The five landscapes into which the Tamil country has been classified since the Sangam age are common knowledge: kurinci (hills), mullai (forest), marutam (fields), neytal (coast) and palai (wasteland).

First edition dostoevsky