Marimuthu is an extremely lonely man. If you take nothing else away from Perumal Murugan’s novel Resolve, you will gather this. He doesn’t really have any friends – it’s unclear why, surely it can’t be his dazzling personality – but this doesn’t bother him at all, because what he wants is a wife. The tragedy of the epidemic of female infanticides is that it has left a severe shortage of girls to marry – the other tragedy is the infanticides themselves, of course, but none of the cast drags their feet mourning that. Spilt milk, etc.
No, Marimuthu cares for nothing other than a wife. His loneliness clots into depression, obsession, and various other words from my ninth standard journal – it eats him alive, in short. It is difficult not to feel sorry for him, even if he is slightly irritating.
Single-minded focus
This struggle of Marimuthu seeps through and wraps around a host of other things -–his relationship with some members of his family, a land conflict with other members of his family, a history of animosity with…all the members of his family. There is no one Marimuthu is related to whom he hasn’t fallen out with at least once by the end of the novel, but to his credit, they’re all very fiery people.
The division of the plot of land takes up the most real estate (ha!) in the first half, except Marimuthu has a habit of endless rumination and very little actual action, so much of it is really him thinking about the fights his family has had about the land in the past, discussing how it should be divided with various other characters – none of whom really cares, except his grandmother. We watch him relive old memories – usually grudges he has against other people for old insults or for taking away one of his opportunities to get married.
There is no other type of opportunity that he has a flicker of interest in. The level of his obsession is such that he has come to see his singledom as the cause of any and every dissatisfaction he has with his or person, a trait that is only slightly more forgivable in my college friends. Murugan paints a vivid picture of the way women are viewed here – it is not a one-tone depiction of sexism. It doesn’t feel like a cheesy PSA or, god forbid, an Akshay Kumar ad (a note to whoever it was who wrote that one: cervical cancer would hurt less).
Marimuthu only ever thinks of women as potential partners, it’s true, and any affection he displays for other women is tied directly to their attractiveness, but at the same time, it does seem something like real affection; it lacks in depth but not warmth. Perumal writes him as a shallow person attracted to women on a very superficial level, but (largely) without really objectifying or dehumanising them.
What marriage means
The same cannot be said of every character – over the course of Marimuthu’s ongoing quest, Resolve baldly portrays the politics and negotiations that often go into finalising matches. The appearance of the girl, the income of the boy, the line of work (which is to say, of course, the caste) both families are in, everything is used as pawns and collateral – another important theme that Marimuthu’s various failed alliances serve as a convenient mechanism to explore.
There’s the woman whom Marimuthu’s mother refuses to let him marry because she is dark, the one his father refuses to let him marry because she has been married once before already. (One hopes that Murugan does not intend to portray every axis that women experience sexism on in this way, or his poor protagonist really will die alone.)
We also catch occasional glimpses of other characters grappling with marriage and children – presumably because there are only so many examples that even Murugan can weave into Marimuthu’s life alone – such as Marimuthu’s famrhand Kuppan, who has diagnosed his teenage son with Lazy Fellow and determined that the only cure is to get him hitched to some lucky girl who then gets to whip him into shape, because what brings out the best version of a person better than marriage? Who better to be in stable, long-term, committed relationships than teenagers?
This is obviously not a criticism of Murugan’s writing, I’m just ranting. There’s another friend of Marimuthu’s who, along with his wife, ends up aborting their sixth child and having an operation to stop having children entirely after they find out that it too is a girl, just like their other five. “There’s no guarantee that a son would take care of us in our old age…at least with daughters, we can marry them off and be done with our duties,” he tells Marimuthu.
There are many such illuminating lines of dialogue in the book. Resolve is an extended meditation on the politics of marriage in India, but captured in a cast of compelling characters whom it is difficult not to care about, so you don’t mind, not even in the few places where the line separating fiction from essays runs a little thin.
Family pettiness
The writing has a casual, colloquial feel to it that I enjoyed, one that is enhanced by Murugan’s habit of going off on small tangents here and there, but is hampered slightly by Aniruddh Vasudevan’s translation, which is somewhat awkward. Small is key – the quick asides, usually some memory of Marimuthu’s, are never long enough to actually pull one’s focus away from the point of the paragraph.
Murugan doesn’t get tangled up or lose his way. There are also moments of striking writing – “she was beautiful, like a neem tree that had been allowed to grow without being pruned”. But Murugan’s style is mostly straightforward and concerns itself more with storytelling than with writing itself, with very little poetry.
This novel, being something of a family drama, milks the sheer pettiness and bitterness and shallowness of the entire cast, almost all of whom have a real taste for theatrics. I found that very engaging, because I’m a shameless lover of gossip and drama, but if you don’t like infighting and negotiation, you might think parts of it drag a little, especially the sections focusing on the land dispute.
I would still recommend reading this book, though. It is genuinely a lot of fun, for one thing. Also, when I said that the characters act like real people – and not like characters from the anti-tobacco movie theatre ads, for example – I meant also that Murugan doesn’t hold back in his depictions of their thoughts, or beliefs, or actions, or desires, no matter how harrowing or taboo or morally dubious it might be.
He is, of course, hardly known as a shy or demure writer, and it’s a strength that makes Resolve. Feminist or not – and also regardless of your particular tribe of feminism – read it! It’s discomfiting and raucous and one of the girls looks like a neem tree that has been allowed to grow without being pruned (we don’t see much of her, but still)!
Resolve, Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan.