International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

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Bearing the Blame: Infertility, Patriarchy, and the Female Body in Mala Mahesh's Padma and Perumal Murugan's One Part Woman

Author(s) Ms. Divya J, Prof. Dr. R Geetha
Country India
Abstract This paper undertakes a comparative reading of Mala Mahesh's Padma (2022) and Perumal Murugan's One Part Woman (Tamil Madhorubagan, 2010; trans. Aniruddhan Vasudevan, 2013), two novels separated by language, region, and a century of setting, yet united by an identical structural premise: a loving married couple, a diagnosis of childlessness, and the systematic transfer of blame, shame, and corrective intervention onto the wife's body. Reading the two texts alongside feminist body theory, Adrienne Rich's distinction between motherhood as patriarchal institution and motherhood as lived experience, Martha Nussbaum's theory of objectification, and the sociology of assisted reproduction and commercial surrogacy in India, this paper argues that both novels expose infertility not as a private medical condition but as a socially manufactured crisis of female legitimacy. Padma's dual timeline, Kerala in 1900 and Mumbai in the present, stages the transition from ritual and second marriage to IVF and surrogacy as the sanctioned "solutions" to childlessness, while One Part Woman locates an equivalent, though historically distinct, negotiation in a colonial-era Tamil Nadu temple festival that permits a childless woman ritual union with a stranger. Despite their differing solutions, both texts reveal that the underlying logic, blame assigned to the woman, her body treated as a site of familial and communal investment, and other women recruited as instruments of patriarchal continuity, remains remarkably stable across a century of ostensible progress. The paper concludes that both novels function as critiques of compulsory motherhood and of the persistence of patriarchal control over reproduction even as its technological and ritual vocabulary changes.
Keywords infertility, patriarchy, motherhood, feminist body theory, surrogacy, Perumal Murugan, Mala Mahesh, Indian women's fiction
Published In Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On 2026-07-07
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CrossRef DOI prefix of IJFMR is 10.36948/ijfmr

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