Certainly the book has much to recommend it, such as a robust writing style that competently mirrors the vigour of the Punjab landscape where it is set, and a deft feeling for the nuances of relationships and situations. But these details do not a novel make. A rambling structure and an enormous and random cast of eccentric, exaggerated and unidimensional characters contribute to the sense of chaos and confusion that marks the book. The occasional and rather arbitrary epistolary style that punctuates the novel illustrates yet another intrinsic difficulty in rendering local colour in another language. I personally could not, for example, understand why the mother's letter to Tarlochan, she of the four names, were couched in such a heavy-handed, would-be humorous style.
The plot of the novel runs something like this. Tarlochan, the narrator, is married off as a young girl to the pious and sanctimonious Pratap, who spends his time ministering to the poor and the sick in what we are led to suspect as a voyeuristic and perverted form of chastity. His neglected and childless wife Tarlochan stumbles into a relationship with the hard-drinking, loud-talking and immensely virile Jagtar, husband of Tarlochan's childhood friend Piya. After many vicissitudes and dead-end side-plots, Tarlochan emerges as a schoolteacher. One presumes that this transformation is meant to convey her personal growth as representative of the symbolic coming of age of the Indian women, but as a resolution it lacks imagination, courage or even conviction.
The sad part is that the book contained the promise of a fully crafted tapestry woven into the warp and woof of a historical and sociological tableau. The author failed in her intentions because she could not manage to maintain control over her unruly and heartfelt material. Had Mina Singh exercised more grip and ruthlessness, or had she even exercised more editorial ruthlessness, this novel could have emerged as a fine and fitting piece of emotive and social documentation.
English as written in the subcontinent has variously assimilated itself into the diverse mainstream literary cultures of the different linguistic clusters. In this sense, A Partial Woman does successfully manage to maintain the particularity of dialect and to some extent remain truthful in its transliteration of dialogue. The landscape, the sounds and smells of Punjab do manage to infiltrate the text, to assimilate themselves into the wordscape.
Every novel is in some way a primary search for roots, be they psychological or geographical. In this context, A Partial Woman is a valid and commendable evocation of emotional landscape and interior and exterior territory. The texture of this past is marred by the all-too-familiar mindset of both author and publisher—the commodification of the formula feminist novel has begun to pall. A novel is something "always new". The experience of reading this book is all too pat, too easy—there is no sensation of seeing things afresh, for the first time. A Partial Woman remains, therefore, a partial book. One hopes that, in Mina Singh's next foray into fiction, she will choose to venture further from habit and convention than she does in this first paean to Punjabiyat.
