Madhorubagan: A Review

When a book is the target of moral police the reaction is often just opposite of what theself-appointed guardians of propriety expect. It only generates curiosity about the work and often propels it to the best seller lists. This is what happened to Salman Rusdie’s Satanic Verses. Thanks to the Fatwa by the Iranian ayatollahs against the author a book that would have sunk into oblivion (That was in my view, Rushdie at his worst) became a rage.

When I was in my teens, I stumbled across a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses,. The back cover blurb informed me that the book had been banned in many countries For a teenager in whose school, steamy Tamil booklets purporting to be first person confessions of top Tamil film actresses sex life were a must if forbidden read..

I must confess that I wouldn’t have heard of Madhorubagan or its English translation One Part women but for the worthy people who protested against it, burnt its copies and bullied the author into submission with a little help from a passive state machinery. The author Perumal Murugan got so traumatized that he swore never to write any more and asked the publishers to withdraw his works from the market.

But for these honourable ladies and gentlemen, who thought the work insulted their Kongu vellalar or Gounder community, the work would not have excited curiosity at the national level and remained confined to the small circle of lovers of good literature . But five years after its publication someone got the enlightenment that the book was offensive and voila!!!!! Everyone , including yours truly, got curious about it.

Unable to get the book in Delhi I unloaded its pdf freely circulating on the internet and read it to have a real mind-blowing experience. I thank the naughty book burners of Namakkal for that.

Please if you know Tamil do read it in the original. Even though the Kongu patois often goes over one’s head with a little effort one can understand everything by context.. Lot is lost in translation. Remember, the book is set in an extremely rustic rural milieu in the 1930s and 40s.The way the people speak using coarse expressions sounds perfectly okay in Tamil but when translated into a language alien .to the rural Kongunadu region of Tamil Nadu it sounds crude. After all the book is about a farming and shepherding community and not about middle class or upper middle class people.

Madhorubagan is a moving story of how the weight of tradition wrecks the marriage of a childless couple. Kali and Ponna are deeply in love but are childless for nearly 12 years after marriage The images of the blooming Poovarasan tree (couldn’t find the English word for it), a symbol of fertility here with which the book opens and ends reinforces the pathos of the couple. In a society where having an offspring is everything to leave one’s property and to find salvation in the next world (towards the end of the book Perumal Murugan says how some childless people seeking someone to perform their last rites face hard bargains, forcing them even to bequeath their property to someone who undertakes to do that).this is particularly tortuous and the couple face open and subtle slights at every turn.

The couple undertakes pilgrimages, prayers at various temples.B ut Kali’s grandmother tells him that the family is under the curse of Pavatha a tribal gloddess who was angered by the rape and murder of a Tribal girl by some youths belonging to Kali’s gounder community. According to the curse men of the families linked to the guilty youths would either have a short lifespan or be childless, the grandmother tells Kali.

Here Perumal Muruggan brings up the secondary theme of the book---the conflict between tie traditional society of hunters and gathers living in forests and the farmers who cut down forests for cultivable fields. This not only adversely affects the livelihood of the forest dwelling tribals but also results in their culture and religious beliefs being subsumed by the culture of the advancing agricultural society.

In this context, the priest at the Shiva Ardhanariswara temple of Tiruchengode town tells Kali, that there is no separate goddess called Pavatha and that is only a name of Ardhanariswara, who is part Shiva and part Parvathi He is Madhorubagan or One Part Woman.

But has the tribal culture been fully subsumed? Kali and his brother in law Muthu during wanderings in the forest find a statue of Pavatha where some remnants of the tribal society are offering prayers to the goddess,. Now the members the agriculturist family try to appease the tribal goddess . “But Pavatha’s anger didn’t subside” says the author and Ponna remains childless.

Now here comes the controversial part. As a last desperate measure, Kali’s mother and Ponna’s family conspires (with the best of intentions, of course) to take Ponna to Tiruchengode for the annual festival of the Shiva temple.on its last day when childless women can cohabit with any man for a child .as all men coming to that day of the festival are considered manifestations of Shiva. The child born from such a union is called “Sami Pillai” or God’s child and is accepted by the society.

Now, here the author touches on another theme: How lack of adequate communication can ruin a marriage. Kali is not for Ponna having “sami pillai” but does not explicitly tell her so. And she is given to understand by her mother and brother that while Kali is not really happy about it, he has agreed for Ponna’s sake. At the temple festival she finds her “sami” after rejecting a couple of men while Kali unaware of this indulges in a nightlong boozing session with his brother –in-law.

When Kali totters to his in-laws home in the morning, he finds the house locked and realizes that Ponna had gone to the festival on the free love day. In a rage he rushes to his own home drinks heavily, abuses the wife whom he had loved so far dearly as a whore and collapses. The book ends with the image with which it began, that of the Poovarssan tree.

I think what raised the hackles of those slamming the book is this practice of childless women coupling with strangers for a child and that too at a temple festival. But let us not forget that the community about which the book deals was originally a Kshatriya clan that came down the caste ladder to become a farming community. The practice of Niyoga, or a childless Kshatriya woman sleeping with a man other than her husband to beget a child is not unfamiliar. In fact the entire Mahabharata could be read as tragic consequences of this practice.

Many communities have practices that they would like to keep under wraps to avoid embarrassment. Perumal Murugan a gounder himself .came to know of the practice only few years ago while researching on Tiruchengode on a research grant provided by the Tatas.

The protestors contend that the Kongu vellalar community is divided into several sub-castes and that makes the practice impossible.. But remember according to the tradition on which the practice is based, every male coming to the festival at Tiruchengode Madhorubagan temple was considered Shiva’s manifestation regardless of caste or subcaste.

In all a moving book that left me stunned for sometime after finishing it and then made me angry at pointless traditions. Do read it if you are lucky enough to find a copy and the publishers have ignored Murugan’s appeal to withdraw it. If you can’t pdf is on the internet.

I thank again all those cattiest worthies who made the author their target. But for them my appetite for good contemporary Tamil literature might not have been whetted..

You Might Find These Useful:

Madhorubagan: A Review