“A Censor is Sitting in My Head”: The Censorship Trial of Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman

Anushmita Mohanty

Anushmita Mohanty Independent Researcher

Abstract

This paper studies the Madras High Court trial of Perumal Murugan’s novel One Part Woman, focusing on issues of informal and formal censorship this trial invokes. It aims to reconstruct the events and unrest that led to the banning of this novel, and then analyses the rhetoric of the trial itself in order to demonstrate how the judiciary creates distinctions between formal and informal censorship, positing this difference as self-evident. An exploration of both the legal and literary implications of this censorship episode asks crucial questions about ideas of obscenity, literary merit and free speech for contemporary literature in India.

Keywords: Censorship, obscenity, court trial, One Part Woman, Perumal Murugan.

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