In this scenario, Ponna’s family-her mother and brother-as well as Kali’s old mother, conspire to send Ponna alone to the festival to receive the blessing of a child from an anonymous Sami. Meanwhile, both of them endure, in their own way, an endless stream of taunts and insinuations from everyone around them, including strangers hitching a ride with them to the temple. Kali and Ponna offer votive sacrifice at the altar of Pavatha and climb the varadikkal, barren woman’s rock, on the hill of Thiruchengodu, but these efforts do not bear fruit. Kali’s mother tells him that his family is cursed by Pavatha, a ferocious female deity in the jungle, for a past crime against a young girl, and that the males in his family are doomed to remain childless if a child is born to them, it will be short-lived. During those 12 years, in the period immediately preceding the country’s independence, they have run the gamut of prayers to various deities, vows and penances, but to no avail. In Murugan’s One Part Woman, Kali and Ponna, a couple madly in love with each other, remain childless for more than 12 years after marriage.
As a result, childlessness is brutally stigmatised in the Gounder community. In the Gounders’ worldview, the hard work put in by a Gounder male in his adult life is meaningless if there is no son to inherit the fruit of his labours. If the woman got pregnant, the child was considered a gift from god and accepted as such by the family, including her husband.Īs a farming community, the Gounders tend to be unsettled by childlessness, by the lack of male heirs for the family property.
#WHY IS MURUGAN TAMIL GOD FREE#
Each woman was free to couple with a male stranger of her choice, who was considered an incarnation of god. On digging further he found out that till as recently as 50 years ago, on a particular evening of the annual chariot festival in the temple of Ardhanareeswara, childless women would come alone to the area alive with festival revelries.
Murugan was intrigued on encountering several men in the region past the age of 50 who were called Ardhanari (Half-woman) or Sami Pillai (God-given child). It is said that this is the only place where Shiva is sacralised in this mythical form. One of them is the Ardhanareeswarar, an idol of Shiva who has given the left part of his body to his consort, Parvathi. There are many idols on the Thiruchengodu hill, each one capable of giving a specific boon. It was his continuing interest in Kongu folklore that prompted him to apply for and obtain a grant from the India Foundation of the Arts, Bangalore, to undertake research on folklore surrounding the temple town of Thiruchengodu, a town he knew very well from his childhood but, in another sense, did not know at all. Murugan’s output in these areas over the past decade has been substantial. Perumal Murugan has been a professor of Tamil for the past 17 years, during which time he has developed considerable expertise in three different areas: building a lexicon of words, idioms and phrases special to Kongunadu researching Kongu folklore, especially the ballads on Annamar Sami, a pair of folk deities and publishing authoritative editions of classical Tamil texts. In this excerpt from the report, Raman gives us the background and context to the current controversy. In our December 2013 issue, N Kalyan Raman profiled the literary chronicler and wrote about his nuanced understanding of the complex realities of rural India. In the backdrop of animated debates worldwide over the freedom of expression, this instance of a writer's voice being quashed comes as an uncomfortable reminder of where India stands.
Yesterday, in an abrupt conclusion to the eighteen-day protests that had been waged in Tiruchengode in Tamil Nadu by Hindutva outfits against Perumal Murugan for his novel Madhorubagan (One Part Woman), the author announced his decision to give up writing entirely.