Must Read: One Part Woman — A poignant tale of society’s toxic obsession with procreation

Can a society’s toxic obsession with procreation break apart two people immensely in love?

***No Spoilers***

Perumal Murugan’s One part woman tells us such a story. It is the story of Kali and Ponna, a farmer couple married for 12 yrs sans a child.

Set sometime in the pre-independence era, in a quaint village in the southern part of India, the couple suffers through years of ostracism. From not being invited to social events like marriages and baby showers to being excluded from group sowings during plantations for fear of withering anything they touch with their barrenness. Just as the villagers leave no stone unturned in showing their disdain towards the couple, the couple leaves no stone unturned in performing rituals to appease the gods to bless them with a child.

Madhorubagan — One part woman as referred to by the villagers, is the deity they worship for the want of a progeny

Things take a turn for the worse when families on both sides suggest the couple resort to an ancient yet unorthodox route to parenthood in an otherwise orthodox society. Every year on the eighteenth day of the grand Madhorubagan festival, married women without children engaged in consensual extramarital sex to get pregnant. It was a society-sanctioned deviation and children born out of such unions were called God’s children

Ponna’s dilemma on embracing this tradition and Kali’s growing animosity towards Ponna for even so much as giving it a thought forms the rest of the story

The book stayed with me long after I flipped the last page because it made me ponder over a few philosophical questions

Does the locus of one’s purpose lie in the life he/she creates?

There is no doubt that just like our fellow primates we too have an instinct to procreate. However, infertile primates don’t subject themselves to suffering just to be able to reproduce. Because unlike us, they don’t concern themselves with burdensome concepts like identity and purpose, concepts that we have somehow managed to inextricably associate with procreation. Now exploiting this perennial existential crisis that mankind has a habit of living in, several factions of powerful people have used it to further their own agenda. Religious leaders wanted more babies to whom they could pass on their motherlode of questionable ideas, kings wanted more babies whom they could train to fight like mindless baboons on battlefields, and genius businessmen like Musk want more babies so they could hire them at breakfast, use them to jack up the stock prices and fire them by lunch. And that’s the story of how we ended up with such an obsessively pronatalist society that loves babies but also loves to incessantly shit over the very same gender that gives birth to those babies. So yes, for most of us who will never achieve anything remarkable enough to have Wikipedia pages, books written, or movies made about us, having a child and raising it will end up becoming the locus of our life’s purpose.

Is love enough to sustain a marriage?

We all know that one couple that doesn’t seem to get enough of each other. We envy them and secretly wish we were them. Perumal Murugan’s Kali and Ponna are one such couple who evoke the kind of jealousy which makes people around them comment, that perhaps seeing how content they were with each other god decided they were better off childless. As farmers, Kali and Ponna spend every waking moment of their lives aiding nature with reproduction. They can’t help but start to see every living thing around them, right from a tree that bears fruit to a chicken that lays eggs and a cow that gives birth to a calf, as a mockery of their own inability to have an offspring.

The novel beautifully reflects on how even a relationship that strong gradually succumbs to the weight of childlessness.

The concept of Madhorubaagan

The original name of the novel comes from the word ‘Madhorubaagan,’ the Tamil name for the androgynous form of Lord Shiva in Hindu mythology. Being a Hindu myself, I was never truly able to grapple with the meaning of Lord Shiva’s representation as half man, half woman. However, Perumal Murugan’s rendition of this representation added a new dimension of meaning, at least to me.

A quote from the book

It is only when we give half of ourselves -both body and mind to the woman that we can be good husbands. Even though we are born male, we also have feminine qualities within us. Considering all this, elders have called him Maadhorubaagan

Each one of us is half man and half woman — Yin and Yang, right and left. Every individual is a mix of masculine and feminine qualities, both in hormonal composition and mental state. To me, a balanced, non-toxic individual is someone who knows when to invoke the masculine side and when to invoke the feminine side based on the need of the hour

Controversy — Did this practice truly exist?

The book was met with protests from several communities in and around the area where the story is set, claiming it maligned their women and their deity. I am no historian, so I am not here to debate the historical accuracy of this practice. However, in my opinion, the possibility of this practice having existed is not completely null. In an agrarian society, a man’s social standing is proportional to the number of offspring he has, especially sons. Having no offspring loosely translates to one’s land being up for grabs. Let’s face it, humans have a track record of stooping to all-time lows when it comes to acquiring and retaining wealth. This practice, for one, doesn’t even come close to featuring in that list of lows.

Regardless of one’s stance on the morality of this practice or one’s stance on natalism, One part woman is a book truly worth every bibliophile’s time.