‘A Woman Burnt’: Imayam’s novel is an incisive observation of an unfair, violent society

A major contemporary writer in Tamil, Imayam was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Prize in 2020 for his powerful novel Sellatha Panam. Its title, roughly translated as “Worthless Money”, invites the reader to a trenchant criticism of Tamil society and its deep-rooted caste, class, and gender biases. Published as A Woman Burnt in GJV Prasad’s English translation, the novel is built around the self-immolation of a young upper-caste engineering graduate, Revathi, who has been ostracised by her family because of her (abusive) love marriage to an uneducated, lower-caste auto driver, Ravi. The narrative attempts a nuanced presentation of a range of socio-cultural perspectives on the disaster, laying bare greater and more alarming structures of social apathy and hypocrisy.

There is intense dramatic realism here as ideas and viewpoints sharply engage with, and confront, one another to establish a general consensus on whether Revathi is really a victim (“She has slit our throats, that monster,”). Has she not, some argue, scandalously and outrageously disregarded the honour of her family and brought shame upon them, first, by marrying against their wishes, then by seeking financial help from them in order to survive, and finally by refusing in her testimony to blame her husband for her immolation:

What would happen with the testimony that Revathi had given? How Murugan and Natesan would bully and torture her citing the words that Revathi had used in her statement! What would Arunmozhi think? What would their relatives, neighbours, and people known to them say now? The whole town laughed at them when Revathi married Ravi. Now they would laugh because of Revathi’s testimony.

Shifting the emphasis

Pitted against each other on the weighing scales are far greater things than meet the eye. There is clearly the burnt woman on one side and society on the other. In the original Thamizh title, the girl’s life would appear, simply, to be weighed against money which, in matters of life and death, is, beyond a point, rendered completely useless however much of it one might possess. GJV Prasad’s title for the translated text, by shifting the emphasis from money to the burnt body/personhood of the woman, makes a brilliant lexical move to bring a whole lot of things into focus in literal and metaphorical terms. The title’s syntactic implications, too, are worth noting. “A Burnt Woman” would merely have been a descriptive clause but “A Woman Burnt” is sharply accusative and is haunted by the looming question “by whom” in seeking answers to which there is a radical shattering, both physical and metaphysical.

Imayam does not burden the reader with too many characters or too many incidents. There is a starkness about his storytelling that gathers force from the deep processual nature of his observations. The novel evinces a compression that is rare for its length. Given its minimalistic plot line – one victim, one error, and one crisis, the story is far from being bare in narrative terms and in teeming with details that reveal themselves layer by layer, it manages to keep readers in its stern grip from beginning to end. One is struck with particular admiration for Imayam’s choice of setting and the consistent attention to unity of place through around three hundred pages, leading the plot to gain from strategies of comparison and amplification.

The Burns Centre of JIPMER, Pondicherry, where almost the entire drama of the novel unravels, offers, in spatial terms, substantial food for thought. As an ordered public space that is inevitably the melting pot of thoroughly chaotic and structurally similar private narratives, JIPMER offers a compound glimpse into the regulation of the private by the public through strict codes of behaviour which lend a weird air of pretence, even sham to the people in question, drawing our attention to the necessary absurdism that smooth social functioning involves. There is the hushed-up behaviour of doctors and nurses, their caution in disclosing particulars about the status of patients, and a total refusal, which seems as much emotive as medical, to let the private world impinge on the public:

Each nurse spoke as if they had gained expertise in speaking briefly. Nurses and doctors who replaced each other as their duty hours ended, all seemed as if they had lost their speaking ability. They shouldn’t let what the relatives of the patients spoke fall on their ears. They should not see with their eyes the crying relatives. They should not allow the relatives into the ICU even if the patient was dying, even the security guard were one in thought with the doctors and nurses on this.

Family and parenthood emerge as prominent issues in the thematic canvas of the novel, the woman as daughter, sister, wife and mother, standing at the violent intersection of both. “Why would a girl who was known to be as good as gold when she was in college lose her mind in the month or two that she had spent at home?”

The family has no answers to the question of why Revathi should wish to marry Ravi:

“Has he studied to be a doctor, an engineer, or even a teacher? A tin-shed of a house. No relatives. He doesn’t even have eight annas to call his wealth. Even the auto isn’t his own. He has got it from the seth on a mortgage. Just give me one reason why he is the man for you and I will marry you to him.” 

“I can’t say,” Revathi muttered.

‘How do we account for human beings?’

It is to Imayam’s immense credit as a philosopher, social and otherwise, that he recognises and acknowledges the phenomenon of human helplessness amidst the myriad extant socio-cultural discourses of human agency – “I always replied ‘I don’t know’ then. Even now I say the same thing. I don’t know.” Every character in the novel is plagued by this uncertainty, this myopia, this inability to see and know beyond what is intensely felt at the moment. Revathi says, “In the whole world, there is nothing as debased as shameless as the heart,” a statement that is borne out by almost every character’s inability to process a situation from outside the egotistic locus of the self – “How do we account for human beings? Even cattle and goats live together. A man and a woman cannot stay together.”

In Imayam’s world, men and women are separated not by want of love but because hierarchical social organisation is valued over love. The entire system is mindless and rule-governed and one thinks nothing of blind, almost instinctive obedience to them until the same codes of behaviour in hospitals, streets and police stations become unreasonable and irksome. As the narrative proceeds, there is a gradual escalation of scale. With reactions to the crisis gradually pouring in, connections begin to be made, reflections take place, and as insight manifests, the reader sees the impasse of it all – the civilisational impasse, the inability to reclaim what is lost, and in fact an abysmal want of awareness for that which is truly lost. Between life and society, what holds primacy? Is society meant to nourish life or to negate it? Are social structures intended to be sustaining or annihilating? The novel forces the reader to agonise over such soul-searching questions as it undertakes a brutal excavation and scathing indictment of societal order that clearly contains the genesis of all human/e disorder.

The central conflict in the world of A Woman Burnt is the classic one between individual and society, heart and head, irrationality and logic, passion and prudence, and impulse and order but such a battle, on the very face of it is unjust and doomed to defeat because society and culture, in their essence, stand for everything on the right of the binary. To the right is money, education, social privilege while to the left is only error, victimisation, and destruction. For transgressors like Revathi and Ravi, the latter is their lot and well-deserved as far as social dicta goes.

A Woman Burnt is, therefore, not just about a woman burnt but an entire civilisation torched and flaming. The idea of burning, in this context, engenders connotations of both heat (pain) and light (clarity), immolation and purgation, and destruction and sacrifice. Most importantly, burning is an act of both transgression and transformation, a total change. In the case of this novel, the change is engendered in the reader.

Filial disobedience

Parents, as the novel brings out, are the most well-intentioned, helpless and pathetic creatures on earth, un/willing perpetrators and victims of all the evils that our world encompasses. Of all possible portraits of absurdism, that of the parent would be the most tragically potent – a caricature of a caricature. Imayam brings home this Janus-faced truth in resounding waves of clarity and with all the satire, subtlety, insight and tenderness that a deeply nuanced understanding of the world can command. “Do children kill their parents? Or do parents kill their children?” – the answer would not be easy in a society where the model of parenthood requires parents to produce impeccably obedient children, and in the case of the girl-child, more so:

“Even the females are not blameless. They can be short-tempered bitches.”

“My daughter isn’t like that. Be it in our street, or in our community, no one said a bad thing about her. From a young age, no one ever said that they saw her here or saw her there. no one said she didn’t study well. Of what use, all that? Her fate was written badly,” Amaravathi said and blew her nose.

As long as children obey parents, there is no conflict but in the case of filial disobedience, how are parents to take up the mantle of responsibility? Should they support their children in their decision or abdicate them completely as Natesan did, to preserve social respectability? In the wake of Revathi’s self-immolation, Imayam insists that there are models of parenthood other than what are offered by the parents in this novel, these models surfacing as possibilities of empathy and acceptance should Revathi revive or of that which might have been done if these consequences had been foreseeable.

In A Woman Burnt, there are systematically two visions at work – the immediate vision of the characters affected by the crisis and the vision of the reader watching a crisis within a crisis. In the fire of Revathi’s crisis is a startling revelation of the hollowness of society’s most cherished ideals as the tables are brutally turned on the know-alls of the likes of Murugan and Natesan:

The distance between the house Revathi lived in and his house could not have been even one kilometre. Why had it never struck him to go there even once in those six years? Even though she shifted house many times she always shifted within Burma Nagar into neighbouring houses. How was one kilometre an unwalkable distance?

Imayam wields a surgeon’s fine scalpel in dissecting the social body and revealing its rot to readers, his satire marked with great subtlety as he refuses to draw attention to his satirical incursions through the conspicuity of language. As Imayam weaves satire into the very fabric of his narration, he heightens its impact to reveal the natural absurdism of our times. The motif of the pathological vigorously haunts the narrative. This is a society where everyone is diseased and no genuine diagnosis is forthcoming. It is also, perhaps, a society irremediably beyond healing for the wide chorus of voices heard here is in thorough consensus, offering little scope of intervention. One is fully confident that in the novel’s post-reader world, the same things will continue happening in the same way.

Dense, taut, and with remarkable succulence in dialogues ably retained by the translation, the novel offers a gripping and soul-clawing read. The cultural flavour suffusing the narrative is unmissable as the English language one encounters here with its distinct operation of various linguistic registers, is unmistakably one’s own. For readers unable to read the original language, it would be difficult to estimate what this novel loses in translation but for Indian English, much is gained as the prose effortlessly glides over and assimilates the syntax, inflection, rhythm and motion of Thamizh to offer a cultural reality that is organically Indian, chiefly because the ear has no room for questioning its linguistic authenticity.

To create worlds one is compelled to by the exigencies of one’s mind and imagination is understandable. But to voluntarily immerse oneself in so much pain for the sake of recreating this world in another language is not just a translator’s labour of love. It is equally the labour of empathy, of social responsibility, and of the desire to participate in and perpetuate “whatever shares/ the eternal reciprocity of tears”.

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. She is also a poet. Her books of poems are Inhabiting (Authorspress, 2022), Stitching a Home (Red River, 2021), and Moon in My Teacup (Writer’s Workshop, 2019).

A Woman Burnt, Imayam, translated from the Thamizh by GJV Prasad, Simon and Schuster India.