The lack of offspring is a sore in their conjugal life. Although married for over 12 years and deeply in love, to the point of being sexually obsessed, with each other, they remain childless. One Part Woman tells the story of a couple, Kali and Ponna, living in a village in Tamil Nadu. In 2014, Murugan published two sequels, recently translated as A Lonely Harvest and Trial By Silence (Penguin Random House, ₹ 399 each), also by Vasudevan, which deepen our understanding of the characters in the original and their moral universe. The novel, however, outlived the mob outrage. For a while, he dwelled in fear, hounded out of Namakkal, where he had lived for over 15 years, by right-wing outfits and caste groups, until the petitions against him were dismissed by the Madras high court in 2016. The controversy that erupted over Murugan’s depiction of a temple fertility ritual in Tamil Nadu, involving consensual sex outside marriage, landed him in court in 2014. The real-life sequel to Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman (published in Tamil in 2010 and translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan in 2013) is well known.
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