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See Jayakanthan: 1.
Jayakanthan's opportunity to present a character's actions in the unfolding realm of new possibilities came with the huge controversy erupting with the publication of his short story Agnipravesam in Ananda Vikatan in 1968. On a rainy day, a rich young man picks up a hapless college girl in his car, seduces her and drops her in her street. On realising her daughter's plight, the girl's mother pours a bucketful of water on her head saying that she has been purified by this acti as if she had taken the test by fire. The mother asks her daughter to forget the incident and get on with life. The story challenged the dominant cultural norms of woman's chastity, and many culturally acceptable closures to the story were suggested. In response to the suggestions, Jayakanthan wrote the same story with a different ending and expanded it into a novel, Sila Nerangalil Sila Manithargal, which explored the destiny of the girl, now named Ganga. In the novel, unlike in the short story, the mother does not purify the girl but condemns her for yielding to seduction. Ganga leads the life of a single, office-going woman, constantly being touched and harassed in the bus, daunted by an elderly uncle, and haunted by the memory of the fateful rainy evening. Ganga and her mother happen to read Agnipravesam where the fictional mother dealt with the situation differently. Ganga's reflection over the shorty story unconsciously prompts her to search for her seducer and to seek a meeting with him after a gap of 12 years. When Ganga meets her seducer Prabhu, she finds him to be leading an empty life. An unusual friendship develops between Ganga and Prabhu. The novel ends with Ganga becoming an alcoholic like Prabhu. Again, in Jayakanthan's world of fiction, nobody is entirely bad and nobody is entirely good. Ganga in Sila Nerangalil Sila Manithargal emerges as a woman with motherly love and compassion, but she ruins herself in the process. The novel won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1972. In 1978, 10 years after the publication of Agnipravesam, Jayakanthan wrote a sequel to Sila Nerangalil Sila Manithargal.
In Gangai Enge Pogiral, the elderly Ganga becomes a refuge for the older Prabhu, and they decide to go to Varanasi. On the banks the [sic] Ganga, they stay in a mutt. Ganga leaves the sleeping Prabhu at the break of dawn and drowns herself in the river. Before flowing with the river, Ganga reflects for a while: "How is the water from the pot less holy than the flowing river?" Ganga finding inner peace after a turbulent life is the culmination of Jayakanthan's oeuvre.
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