A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras - Paperback

by Kalpana Karunakaran (Author)

About the Book

A HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF A HOUSEWIFE'S QUEST FOR INTELLECTUAL GROWTH AND HER ABILITY TO RESIST TWENTIETH-CENTURY ORTHODOXIES IN MADRAS VIA WRITING AND READING.

In this intimate, yet simultaneously anthropological, exploration of the life of her maternal grandmother Pankajam (1911-2007), Kalpana Karunakaran achieves the remarkable: capturing the singularity of an exceptional woman, even as it situates her in a social universe shaped by the conventions of Tamil Brahmin orthodoxy. Karunakaran conveys with clarity how the 'utterly ordinary' life of a 'woman of no consequence' (as Pankajam writes of herself), lived out largely within the confines of family and kin, was quite far from ordinary.

The book draws extensively upon letters, glimpses of Pankajam's life narrated through her thinly-disguised semi-autobiographical short stories that allowed her to 'say the unsayable' about love, intimacy and conjugality, and her autobiography, which she began writing in 1949 and kept writing till her last piece in 1995. What comes together is a riveting portrait of heartbreak and violence, yearning and delight, a housewife's quest for intellectual growth and her talent for friendships across cultures and continents.

In the final reckoning, A Woman of No Consequence is about the chequered trajectories of a newly-born nation as seen through the lens of its daughters-restless women forcing home and nation to reckon with their stubborn striving for self-actualisation.

About the Author

Kalpana Karunakaran is Associate Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Madras. Her research and writings are in the intersecting fields of gender, poverty, microcredit, women's work in the informal sector, women's trade unions and collective action in solidarity-based movements. She is currently serving as President of the Indian Association for Women's Studies (IAWS) for a three-year term. Kalpana's interests include writing on women's lives with a focus on the intersections of the personal and the political. She is the author of Women, Microfinance and the State in Neo-liberal India (Routledge, 2017) and the Tamil memoir, Comrade Amma: Magal Parvaiyil Mythily Sivaraman (Comrade Mother: A Daughter's Portrait of Mythily Sivaraman), published in 2018. She is currently working on an English translation of the memoir of Lakshmi Amma, a social and political activist from a small peasant household in Tamil Nadu. A bilingual public speaker and writer in Tamil and English, Kalpana participates actively in campaigns and workshops for gender equality, labour rights and human rights in Tamil Nadu. She has worked extensively as an activist-organiser with People's Science Movements, Right to Health campaigns and women's Self-Help Group federations. Kalpana has been involved in Tamil feminist theatre and hopes to return to it someday.