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A review by shreyas1599
One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan
4.0
This was the first of a kind I've read.
Set in the British Rule (?) of India, it deals with the social stigmatism of a couple not being able to have children and the various struggles and taunts they have to go through. Their entire life revolves around being able to conceive children by going through countless prayers, superstitions, and offerings to various gods. Every few paragraphs, one is met with one kind of taunt or the other that the couple have to face for their inability to have children and it's meant to drive home the point of how hard it is, after a point to not care about what others think about you, especially when you grow up in a culture and environment where you aren't able to do the one thing that everything else in your culture is able to, and you are repeatedly reminded of your inability to do it at every point and instance of your existence.
For an outsider, who has not lived in the environment where the story is set, it might be easy to pass judgments and comments to stop thinking about what everyone else is saying. The author touches upon this subject too, through one of the characters. But most people crave acceptance from their culture and it's close to impossible to go the other route when all you have around you are examples of people conforming to the culture's norms.
The couple is not trying to have children to force happiness in their otherwise unhappy married life, as is also the case with many families. The couple is happy with each other but the societal construct of children as being the ultimate goal of a family, and children being the centre of everything that their lives should be governed by is what drives them to covet it as much as they do.
It goes to the extent of a child being portrayed as a prized possession that one needs to "win" in life. Most people in the story who do have children, should in reality not be having children. This may be an easy comment to pass on for a person from a different generation and different cultural upbringing where the idea of children is more seen as a choice rather than a necessity of life, but nevertheless, I had to make this observation here.
The text also touches upon the caste system and how reluctant the couple is to adopt a child from a different caste. There is no shying away from the matter that even in the present generation, much of this has not changed and the writer is not trying to hide the reality of things.
There is no happy ending either when Kali is struck with the realization that everyone around him betrays him. When he realises that just to have children, the extent to which everyone around him conspired and made his wife conceive children through a random individual through the pretext of it being God's work, it just became too much to bear.
All in all, the book touches a very sensitive subject with a no holds barred approach.
Set in the British Rule (?) of India, it deals with the social stigmatism of a couple not being able to have children and the various struggles and taunts they have to go through. Their entire life revolves around being able to conceive children by going through countless prayers, superstitions, and offerings to various gods. Every few paragraphs, one is met with one kind of taunt or the other that the couple have to face for their inability to have children and it's meant to drive home the point of how hard it is, after a point to not care about what others think about you, especially when you grow up in a culture and environment where you aren't able to do the one thing that everything else in your culture is able to, and you are repeatedly reminded of your inability to do it at every point and instance of your existence.
For an outsider, who has not lived in the environment where the story is set, it might be easy to pass judgments and comments to stop thinking about what everyone else is saying. The author touches upon this subject too, through one of the characters. But most people crave acceptance from their culture and it's close to impossible to go the other route when all you have around you are examples of people conforming to the culture's norms.
The couple is not trying to have children to force happiness in their otherwise unhappy married life, as is also the case with many families. The couple is happy with each other but the societal construct of children as being the ultimate goal of a family, and children being the centre of everything that their lives should be governed by is what drives them to covet it as much as they do.
It goes to the extent of a child being portrayed as a prized possession that one needs to "win" in life. Most people in the story who do have children, should in reality not be having children. This may be an easy comment to pass on for a person from a different generation and different cultural upbringing where the idea of children is more seen as a choice rather than a necessity of life, but nevertheless, I had to make this observation here.
The text also touches upon the caste system and how reluctant the couple is to adopt a child from a different caste. There is no shying away from the matter that even in the present generation, much of this has not changed and the writer is not trying to hide the reality of things.
There is no happy ending either when Kali is struck with the realization that everyone around him betrays him. When he realises that just to have children, the extent to which everyone around him conspired and made his wife conceive children through a random individual through the pretext of it being God's work, it just became too much to bear.
All in all, the book touches a very sensitive subject with a no holds barred approach.