The Goat That Spoke: Posthuman Tamil Realism and Animal Subalternity in Perumal Murugan's Poonachi

This paper places Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi (2018) in the context of Tamil vernacular literary traditions and international animal studies to examine the relationship between animal subalternity and posthuman ethics. Although caste, gender, and agrarian distress have been the main topics of previous criticism of Murugan, his complex interaction with non-human life has received less attention. This study contends that Poonachi bridges the ethical divide between human and non-human suffering by redefining animal agency through the integration of posthuman theory and Tamil realism. This paper analyses how Murugan’s story of a small black goat turns into an ethical reflection on species, empathy, and power using the frameworks of John Berger, Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.