Angammal

In a remote, rustic mid-90s village in Tamil Nadu, a city educated young man feels awkward because his mother is blouseless. This is how she has always dressed. But as he tries to find a solution before his prospective in-laws arrive, a simple problem spirals out of control. Teasing the boundaries of the known and the unknown, the acceptable and the unacceptable, the desirable and the undesirable, Perumal Murugan’s writings force his readers to the edge of their convictions and the settled images of the world. Based on Murugan’s short story, Angammal finds in its lead a woman who can majestically turn her back to what is considered propriety and progress. It presents a matriarch who resists the linearity of history, not by invoking tradition but by making the body and the force of its practices present to the world. This figure and her insistence on crafting a desiring subject in herself open up a larger world of desire… in her sons, her neighbours, and friends, and in all of us.