ABSTRACT
Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman is a Tamil novel set among the Gounders, a family of small landowners around 1945. It deals with a childless couple Kali and Ponnayi (or Ponna) who have to put up with familial insinuations. There is a belief that in cases of childlessness the woman having sex with another man at the annual festival with produces an offspring and Ponnayi is tricked into it by her brother, also Kali’s friend. But more interesting from my perspective than this story is how the class is represented, as people with plenty of leisure and with wherewithal, which makes the novel seem like a nostalgic account of a time when the author’s people (he is a Gounder) had land, subsequently subdivided. Murugan’s father had a shop in a cinema hall selling soda to augment his farm income and there was a rationale behind such nostalgia. While caste divisions are noted, the invisibility of lower caste workers suggests complete submission by them to the landowners. This political side becomes clearer if the novel is placed alongside Bama’s Karukku, about the exploitation of Dalits by the landed castes.
