Violence through Religious Rituals: The Critical Analysis of Perumal Murugan' s One Part Woman
Jaspal Singh, Arvind Khanna, Parveen Kaur Khanna
The paper attempts to investigate that patriarchy makes itself evident through religion. It manages to authorise religion to wreak violence on individuals who do not confirm. It is through ethics that such a stifling situation marks the beginning of our perpetual oppression because ethics have the power to legitimise violence that comes out of religious practices. The paper investigates how the central female protagonist Ponna is caught in the vortex of violence that promises her maternal bliss, the bliss that can even transcend the crude forms of violence to make her a ‘complete woman’. The novel in the final analysis attempts to reveal how she finds herself in “a theatre of the absurd†situation where in this world of absurdist bandwagon, the idea of sustaining hope seems to be a utopian reality. Does belief in religious practices provide her the necessary oxygen? Does she manage to survive or come out of the situation in which she has landed?