Inevitable Lives: Connecting Animals, Caste, Gender, and the Environment in Perumal Murugan’s The Story of a Goat

Abstract

Perumal Murugan’s The Story of a Goat is a nuanced story of a small, black, female goat who endures life and the inevitability of death amongst struggling farmers in Tamil Nadu. Naisargi Dave’s concept of inevitability frames this article, and I explore how Murugan’s novel responds to her question “does that which is inevitable cease to matter?” I argue that the novel resists the inevitability of Poonachi’s death by creating a story of her life that foregrounds her animalness, draws connections between her experience of the world and caste and gender-based oppressions, and presents the natural world as both abundant and a homecoming for Poonachi, as well as dangerous because of the impending drought that looms over the narrative. The Story of a Goat situates animals as beings who are subjects of and subjected to human politics, are made vulnerable to human geopolitics, and have complex stories and histories of their own. The novel offers a compassionate, insightful glimpse into the life of a farmed animal in South India while also tethering her to caste, gender, and the environment.

Keywords:

• Tamil Nadu
• goats
• caste
• gender
• environment

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Until recently, the field of animal studies has been discursively colonized, focusing largely on Western religions and philosophy.

2 The intersections of caste and gender present a rich area to explore in The Story of a Goat. There is so much work to be done to explore the representations of gender and caste, from the experiences of male goats being castrated and eventually (or inevitably) slaughtered for meat and sacrifice to the lives of the older mother goats who bear kids and witness their lives and deaths.

3 See Anway Mukhopadhyay’s (2018) book The Goddess in Hindu-Tantric Traditions: Devi as Corpse for more information on the goddess as corpse figuration.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nandini Thiyagarajan

Nandini Thiyagarajan is an Assistant Professor at Acadia University, starting in July 2021. Her current book project is a multi-disciplinary exploration of the relationship between migration, race, and animals. Situated in the environmental humanities, animal studies, Asian Diasporic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race studies, her work articulates what is shared between human and animal migration, and how in the Anthropocene the growing precariousness of home and habitat impacts both humans and animals. Her dissertation examined animals in Asian Diasporic literature, arguing that animals are intimately tied to belonging, identity, and history. She has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, The Palgrave Handbook of Animals in Literature, and Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature.