One Part Woman 🌸 .
.
“There is no female without the male, and no male without the female. The world goes on only when they come together”. - Perumal Murugan. .
.
Don't we all love a controversial book? It’s a significant quality that a reader will have in abundance. That’s what made me choose this book and I had my ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’ moments till the end. This novel created an uproar in the society because it pointed several issues with masculanity, rituals and gender.
.
.
Perumal talks about a couple (Kali and Ponna) who struggle with fertility issues. They hail from a village where it’s a woman’s duty to give birth to a child in their first year of marriage and when this doesn’t happen to them, they are shunned by the community. The couple then start praying to every known God with tremendous hope. They make sacrifices, offer food, climb mountains and even think of other shocking solutions.Their families force Ponna to head out to the festivities of Vaisaki Temple where as part of a ritual, any childless woman can have consesual sex with an unknown man to become pregnant. This story is so natural probably because of the fact that it refers to the author’s native. Or merely because of the wonderful skills of Perumal. Living in this era, we might not know the atrocities and struggles that the villagers put themselves through even today. This book was an eye opener.
.
.
I would rate it 4.5/5. I would have really loved to read the original script but it’s unfortunate that I cannot read Tamil. .