Lakshmi, a Traveler, a memoir
Lakshmi, a Traveler, a memoir
Read more →Excerpt: A Woman Of No Consequence
A spirited Tamil woman's lifelong reckoning with truth, tradition, and the quiet cost of being born a woman — told through her own words, a century later, by her granddaughter.
This autobiography is not to glorify me nor justify my actions, but it is to lay bare truth, the great merciless Truth which kept relentlessly pursuing me till very unwillingly I did learn what was required. (From the Foreword section of the book)
For Pankajam, the world of school friends, sports and games ended in 1927 when her father withdrew her from school, despite her protests and entreaties that she be allowed to call herself ‘Pankajam, S.S.L.C, by staying in school for ‘just two more years’ as she pleaded with him. The Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) would have marked the successful completion of school life at the end of class eleven during Pankajam’s school years. (Page No. 57)
Sivaraman was probably concerned that Pankajam’s relative affluence might make her unsuited or unwilling to do what was expected of her as a wife. ‘What do you know of the old ways? There is much more to learn’, says Subbu to Meena. But what of Pankajam’s expectations? And how does Pankajam’s sense of herself as a young girl of marriageable age in the late 1920s compare with the models of womanhood that prevailed among the educated, urban middles classes from the last decades of the nineteenth century? (Page No. 113)
Excerpted with permission from A Woman Of No Consequence by Kalpana Karunakaran published by Context, Westland Books 2025
Kalpana Karunakaran
Kalpana Karunakaran is an Associate Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Madras. Kalpana’s research and writings lie in the domain of gender, development, labour and collective action/ social movements. Kalpana writes in Tamil and English. Her books include ‘Women, Microfinance, and the State in Neo-liberal India’ (Routledge, 2017) and a memoir, Comrade Amma: Magal Parvaiyil Mythily Sivaraman (Comrade Mother: A daughter’s portrait of Mythily Sivaraman) published in 2018.