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Myth and Reality

t the heart of Tamil writer Perumal

Murugans One Part Woman is a young,
childless couple, Kali and Ponna, whose union
has produced no progeny even after ten years
of marriage. Kali and Ponna are still very much
in love with each other and in a perpetual state
of sexual enchantment. The absence of a child
in their lives is hurtful, but their mutual love
and affection far outweighs the grief of such
deprivation. Yet, they remain vulnerable to
the world around them.
In our country, childlessness is seen as
nothing less than a calamity. According to one
of our ancient scriptures, the childless shall
go to a special kind of hell. Agrarian societies,
One Part Woman by Perumal
such as the Kongu Vellalar community to Murugan, Translated by
which Kali and Ponna belong, have always Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Penstigmatized childlessness. To them, children guin Books India: 2013, Pp.240,
are an essential link in the continuation of Rs.399
property ownership and caste-based vocations, so essential for maintaining
social equilibrium. The pervasiveness of the stigma faced by Kali and
Ponna is a central thread of the narrative. They encounter its corrosive
presence all the time, from family and friends, enemies and strangers,
in all situations. The only relative who reassures them that a childless
life is indeed worth living and can actually be a cause of celebration,
is Kalis uncle Nallupaiyan, a social maverick who believes neither in filial
piety nor in the ephemeral pleasures afforded by children. Kali and Ponna,
engaged far more deeply withtheir family and community, cannot so
easily escape the constant pressure on them to produce a child.
Living in the decades just prior to independence, the couple does
not have the benefit of medical knowledge and techniques that can detect

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the cause of childlessness and attempt to find resolution. Typically, they

are led to believe that childlessness is the result of a curse on Kalis lineage
by a tribal girl from the nearby forest who was raped and murdered by
a gang of four which had included one of Kalis ancestors. No girl child
will ever be born in their families. Even the male children shall grow
up to be impotent and die young. The couple perform elaborate rituals
to Pavatha, a female deity in the forest on Thiruchengode hill, to be
reprieved of the curse, but to no avail. Ponna makes many attempts to
appease the gods, going around varadikkal, the barren womans rock,
at great risk to her life; gulping down bitter need extract; and undertaking
severe vows at nearby temples, if she would only be granted the boon
of a child.
At each instance of disappointment and on every occasion of cruelty
inflicted on them by the community, Kali and Ponna stand by each other
and re-affirm the mutual bond of love and understanding between them.
Though tempted sometimes, Kali is steadfast in his refusal to marry again
in the hope of begetting a child. They are indeed the human embodiment
of Mathorupagan, One Part Woman, presiding deity at the Thiruchengode
temple, who has given the left part of his body to his female consort
and is therefore Ardhanaari, or a half-woman.
The marriage is beset by a crisis when Ponnas mother and motherin-law confer among themselves and decide that Ponna must take recourse
to an age-old practice that occurs on the fourteenth day of the annual
festival of Thiruchengode temple. On the afternoon of the fourteenth
day, a childless woman can sleep with any man she chooses from among
the crowd there in order to conceive a child. The man so chosen is
considered as God himself, and the child conceived of such a union is
often names Sami Pillai or Gods child. Both Kali and Ponna are horrified
at the suggestion but by a combination of persuasion and deceit, Ponna
is brought to the temple on the appointed day and left alone in the
festival crowd. Kali is deftly removed from the scene and does not find
out about it until it is too late.
Perumal Murugans sixth novel, One Part Woman is that rare thing
in modern Indian literature, a full-fledged psychological portrait of a
marriage under pressure, beset by traditional practices and outdated
societal attitudes that contrive to destroy the union of a loving couple.
Perumal Murugan, an eminent literary figure on the Tamil literary scene,
has emerged as the most humane chronicler of life in northern Kongunadu,
especially the area around Namakkal, the region he hails from.
Perumal Murugans narratives are full-bodied in the sense that they
include vivid descriptions of the landscape and terrain, the daily labour

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Kalyan Raman

of various people in the fields and pasturelands, houses and barnyards,

and the nuances and crudities of social relations in a casteist society.
It is at once an attempt to explore human predicament with sympathy
through focussing on the individual, while at the same time situating
him or her concretely in the social and natural worlds. In this way, he
makes his protagonists intelligible not through isolating them but by
weaving them into a vividly woven narrative of the larger world.
In One Part Woman, too, the different aspects of rural life family,
occupation, landscape, culture and community combine in many ways
to give us a rich narrative. Here is childless maverick, Uncle Nallupaiyan,
advising Kali:
You keep saying that we need an heir to what wealth we save,
dont you? But whats the use of having a child? Even those parents
who have four or five children have been left to take care of themselves.
They all die alone. But I wont die that way....The other day, I said,
just for the sake of it, that since I didnt know who was going to
take care of me, I was planning to write my property off to
Sengottayan and Pavatha temples and then go die in a monastery
somewhere. Since then, I am sent a big portion of whatever is cooked
in my brothers homes! Do people who have children get treated
this way? Dont worry. In the future, you will get all this attention,
too. Saying this, he cheered Kali up.(p. 237)

The description of Ponnas transformation as she is left alone in the

festival crowd, free to make a sexual choice for the first time in her
life, is extraordinarily vivid:
Ponna felt that she could watch forever the way the topknots of
the dancing men bounced up and fell back on their napes; each of
the men had tightly combed back his hair, fastening it into a knot
at the nape. She liked the way they worked their sticks, sometimes
separated as two teams, and at other times as one, but always leaving
enough space for the sticks to clash, always doing it without the
least discordance. It felt like the clank of the sticks was hitting open
the knots in her mind. This dance was not just about sticks clashing.
It was not just mere combat. It was the play of magic wands which
cracked open facades to bring out hidden secrets. (p. 204-5)

Here is the pivotal moment when Ponna chooses her man:

When she felt something touching her earlobes, she reached back
and wiped herself. It felt as though someone was blowing gently on
her nape. She turned around and saw a pair of eyes to her side. She
knew it was the touch of those eyes which had bothered her. Those

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eyes pierced the glow of the burning torches, and touched and teased
her. The folded dhoti and the tower that was around his neck and fell
over his chest made him look like no one she knew. His hair had been
combed carelessly, and it looked like he had not even started shaving.
It occurred to her that this as her god. (p.223)
Perumal Murugans excellence in the craft of storytelling is perfectly matched by the skills that the translator, Aniruddhan Vasudevan
brings to the text. Always elegant and precise, and in harmony with the
flowing rhythm of the narrative, this translation is simply one of the
best that this reviewer has come across in the Indian milieu. Even where
the sentence construction is unusual for the host language, it can be
read very clearly and precisely. The translators language assimilates the
landscape, community, food and people and makes them belong to it,
which is a considerable feat for any translator of Indian language fiction.
Finally, One Part Woman is an absorbing tale, rendered in elegant
and readable prose that draws the reader into the fascinating yet poignant
lives of its protagonists, Kali and Ponna, and into their time, place and
community. Its arrival will certainly enrich the corpus of Indian fiction
in English translation and introduce the reader to the oeuvre of a humane
and sensitive writer of our times.

Kalyan Raman