Interrogating the Theme of Incarnation and ‘Ardhanarisvara’ in Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman and Poonachi

Abstract

Stories of various incarnations or the embodiments of spiritual figures are widely discussed in
the texts like Vishnu-Purana, Rig Veda and Upanishad. These stories tell about the important
role of incarnations, which are either in animal or human forms, in regenerating the
degenerating societies at different periods of time. Perumal Murugan, the contemporary Tamil
writer of One Part Woman and Poonachi or the Story of a Black Goat, narrates about the ordeal
of a woman and a female goat in the texts respectively, and also he narrates about the miracle
of the female goat in order to rejuvenate the society. These two texts are not sequel but they
are complementary in many ways. If the human protagonists struggle to find happiness in one
text, the nonhuman protagonists have to deal with same fate in a morally unscrupulous
surrounding. To what extent the condition of woman and animal is same is a point that the
paper has tried to establish. The alteration of characters from human to nonhuman serves
poignantly to dispose hypocrisy in human society. Another important aspect is that the author
narrates about the nature of animal without trying to anthropomorphize the nonhuman
characters to tella different story or many different stories. Also, how the role of nonhuman in
the texts can be compared to incarnation and how the theme of ‘ardhanarisvara’ is apt, are
some other objectives of this paper.