Perumal Murugan Books in Order

Kali and Ponna’s loving marriage comes under pressure when they cannot conceive a child. Relatives place their hopes in a temple festival where ordinary sexual rules are suspended, offering a possible solution that threatens the couple’s bond.

Newly married Saroja and Kumaresan arrive in his village hoping for a peaceful future. But their concealed difference in caste draws scrutiny and hostility, turning family life into a struggle against prejudice and the threat of violence.

Thirty-two contributors recount how caste shapes everyday life, from childhood meals and friendships to marriage and death. Edited by Perumal Murugan, these personal accounts reveal discrimination embedded in ordinary routines, family expectations, and supposedly private choices.

Written amid personal upheaval, these poems confront fear, exile, persecution, and the struggle to keep speaking. Images of threatened bodies, pursuing words, and drought-stricken landscapes trace an imagination resisting silence and searching for freedom through language.

A goat thief faces a furious crowd, a lonely watchman encounters a ghost, and an exhausted peasant succumbs to jealousy. These stories explore the desires, fears, and unexpected acts of people living on rural Tamil Nadu’s margins.

A mysterious stranger gives an elderly farmer a frail black goat, and the couple struggle to keep her alive. As Poonachi grows, drought, predators, and unequal power turn her rural world into a test of survival.

Perumal Murugan remembers his mother through essays about farming, family, and the relentless work that sustained their household. Her independence, practicality, and care for animals illuminate a rural life whose values endure even as its circumstances change.

A late-night request from his teenage son unsettles Kumarasurar’s carefully ordered life. As he worries about money, technology, and parental responsibility, old insecurities deepen the distance within his family and expose the loneliness beneath middle-class routine.

After his family sells their ancestral land for a housing development, young Selvan watches their world contract and change. Displacement strains relationships, while greed and jealousy complicate the promises of prosperity attached to the vanished landscape.

A normally contented child begins crying inconsolably one night, alarming the family. As the adults consider illness, hunger, and other explanations, two indistinct words send them searching for the object that might finally satisfy the child’s demand.

A woman cannot bear losing her buffalo, a businessman remains haunted by rejection, and a dark-skinned woman finds refuge in movie-star devotion. These stories follow outsiders seeking affection, dignity, and happiness amid the pressures of everyday life.

A deeply unequal division of family land leaves Muthu with little security and fractures his trust in his eldest brother. Forced to leave, he searches for a place where his wife and children can begin again.

People in rural and small-town Tamil Nadu confront caste, shame, work, and shifting expectations. A boy trapped in toilet-cleaning labor, a mother pressured to wear a blouse, and a mocked woman expose the cruelty within familiar routines.

In an alternative continuation of One Part Woman, Ponna must rebuild her life after a devastating loss. Memories of her marriage pull against the demands of surviving alone, while other women offer solidarity and the possibility of renewal.

Sathi sells soda at a shabby cinema, finding relief from exhausting work in marijuana and friendship. Among the young men who labor around the theater, affection and exploitation intertwine until events threaten the fragile companionship sustaining him.

A young Dalit boy works in bondage for a powerful landowner, herding sheep and tending fields. Friendship and the natural world offer moments of freedom, but hunger, humiliation, and relentless labor keep exposing the limits of his childhood.

After the temple festival, Kali believes Ponna has betrayed him and seeks to punish her. She refuses to accept blame for choices forced upon her, leaving their damaged marriage caught between resentment, love, and uncertain possibilities.