[This is part of my translation of her autobiography titled The Wayfarer and the Wayside Lamps, forthcoming from Zubaan, Delhi]
1.
For around thirty years now, I have researched and written about ‘the first-generation Malayali feminists’ — the outspoken and daring women who received a modern education in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century years and sought to clear their own unique paths in life. This was a generation which struggled to break free of the traditional order and seek out their unique place in the world on the one hand. On the other hand, they struggled against becoming mere adornments to bourgeois households, modernised caste-communities, or indeed, the newly- regional and national entities emergent in those times.
This generation had been almost wiped out of regional and national historical memory – we had hardly heard of them in school. It was as if the great vehicles of social change of the twentieth century had refused to preserve their memory. They were nearly absent from, or marginal to, the histories of nationalism, of regional identity, of the celebrated struggles for social justice that had significantly democratized social life here in the early twentieth century. At best, they were remembered as ‘achievers’ – the first woman to gain a college degree or enter the medical profession, and so on – or at worst, with a tinge of derision, as ‘bourgeois social uplift ladies’. But never as a force of change worth remembering.
I have thought long about why such injustice towards them felt so normal to those who celebrated the twentieth-century ‘awakening’ of Maayali society. It strikes me now that this was perhaps to be expected. For these women were often not merely distant to masculinist nationalism and modern community-building; they often radiated a certain longing that probably militated against them. In other words, the first-generation feminists often did not let themselves dissolve into or be absorbed by the great binaries that nationalism or communism evoked. Even when they were staunchly nationalist, there was something about them that always pointed to beyond nationalism.
This complexity, which was probably both perplexing and repelling to nationalists and communists of the early twentieth century when it manifested in men, was even more so when it appeared in women – and so the first-generation feminists often found themselves ejected and silenced with great violence. Violence that was so pronounced that it nearly erased these voices from history.
2.
Kochattil Kalyanikkutty Amma (1908-1997) was born in an affluent upper-caste –Nair — family in the town of Thrissur in the Native State of Cochin. Her father, Moothedathu Krishna Menon, was a prominent medical doctor, a leading member of the elite there; her mother, Kochattil Kochukutty Amma, was progressive and determined to educate her daughters. Her natal family was modern, based on conjugal marriage with her parents as its fulcrum. In other words, her parents had built for themselves a home away from their natal matrilineal joint family homesteads. Kalyanikkutty Amma and her siblings were well-educated, outside Thrissur, and found gainful professional employment. She herself went to college in the colonial metropolis of Madras, where she was exposed to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Theosophical Society at Adyar. In her recollection of college days, she recounts how she came to reject colonial misrepresentations of India, while at the same time, her interaction with the Theosophists and exposure to such cosmopolitan intellectuals as Tagore protected her from a violent and exclusionary version of Indian nationalism. Kalyanikkutty Amma then returned to Thrissur and took up employment as a science teacher in a government school, devoting herself also to nationalist social and cultural activism which often disturbed the local caste-elite society of Thrissur to which she belonged. She later married C Kuttan Nair, a leading political and social activist known for radical protest actions and views, and was persecuted by a hostile state for her husband’s activism. However, what strikes the reader of her autobiography is the discernible mental distance she seems to have maintained with nationalism, a refusal to be absorbed fully into its terms – an attitude which seems to have lasted all her life. Indeed, this seems evident from the title of this autobiography that she wrote in her advanced years, when her memory was clearly beginning to dim, though not fail, perhaps. The title evokes a lonely traveller who recounts the many lights that brightened her path. Kalyanikkutty Amma was known in the modern Malayalam literary public as a travel-writer who published accounts of her tour of Europe in English and Malayalam, but she ultimately complicates the genre considerably. If the analytical intelligence focused on colonial difference which moves back and forth between the land visited and home that animates Njaan Kanda Europe (The Europe I Saw) and A Peep At Europe complicates the genre of travel-writing, the autobiography Pathikayum Vazhiyorathe Manideepangalum complicates the genre of autobiography by presenting a self that travels through life imagined as a series of meetings with people completely different from the self.
Perhaps the best way to describe Kalyanikkutty Amma’s openness to the world and her refusal to slip easily into a bland and one-dimensional nationalist self is offered by the scholar Leela Gandhi who studies affective connections in colonial times. Studying figures such as C F Andrews, she points to “the ethical-political practice of a desiring self inexorably drawn towards difference.” These are selves which sought open friendships, not closed communities. As her autobiography suggests, Kalyanikkutty Amma’s life was in large measure a relentless search for such friendship which was not narrowly instrumental, and did not demand fusion between the sharers. She shunned the narrowness of provincial life even as she continued to be an active and transformative presence in local life, scandalising local elites, often (by participating in anti-caste public feasts, for example); she constantly sought to renew the ties of friendship with people she met in distant lands whose lives were completely different from hers. Indeed, when she was bereaved and struggled to come to terms with the death of her two little sons, neither relatives nor her own religious beliefs could comfort her. It was the writings of Romain Rolland that brought her a measure of consolation – and thus her travel in Europe, as she herself puts it, was mainly driven by the desire for a ‘pilgrimage’ to Villeneuve in Geneva to meet him. In other words, her travel in Europe was driven by what Leela Gandhi calls ‘affective cosmopolitanism’, which allowed for a “sharing of singularities”— for Kalyanikkutty Amma, seeking out the other through travel in distant lands seems to have been the balm to all the wounds inflicted on her by those nearer to her.
Kalyanikkutty Amma’s parents were not both short-lived, but she lost all her siblings before her mother’s death. Nevertheless, in her account, the greatest trial she faced was the loss of her family home which she had inherited after her mother’s death – and this was not a simple loss. According to her, a close relative, a Communist Party activist, refused to vacate the house that she had allowed him to use for a short while, and then, using the clout of the Left in Kerala during the 1950s, trapped her unfairly in a disciplinary action by the government, and cheated her of the house, buying it cheap in an auction. This stately home became the property of the Communist Party; it was later demolished and a memorial building dedicated to a leading local communist leader was erected in its place. This is likely to be the most controversial part of her autobiography, but the Malayalam version which was published in 1991 was largely met with silence. If true, it gives us a not just a glimpse of the ruthlessness with which communists could stamp out the lives and the dignity of ‘bourgeois individuals’, ostensibly in the interests of the working classes, but also the intense vulnerability of a woman born to economic and social privilege if she ended up lacking in family, community, social, and political networks. Kalyanikkutty Amma’s account of the vicious manner in which several respectable communist leaders (whose political stature lay well-beyond the confines of the small town of Thrissur) colluded directly or indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly, to deprive her of her family home, and the sordid way in which disciplinary action was initiated against her just to make sure that she would not be able to contest the planned usurpation of her home is indeed a stinging slap on the face of the progressive claims of the Left in Kerala. It is hard not to notice that the shocking betrayal that she relates happen in the heyday of the Communist Party in Kerala, during the years of the idealistic first Communist Ministry in the late 1950s.
For the claims about Kerala’s social development and women’s education in Kerala are most often projected as the legacy of the Left, especially in the recent discourse of ‘Keraleeya Navodhaanam’ or Kerala Renaissance – but Kalyanikkutty Amma’s story seems to indicate that even the tallest figures of the Left were quite unconcerned about subjecting someone who was indeed the perfect ‘Renaissance Woman’ – educated, empowered from within, self-respecting and dignified, free of narrow caste or community pride, open to socialist ideals, articulate, accomplished, fearless, cosmopolitan in outlook – to the most unthinkable levels of humiliation. It needs to be stressed that Kalyanikkutty Amma was no simple opponent of communism – on the contrary, her warmest affective connections were with Romain Rolland, a supporter of the USSR who was openly admiring of Stalin and V K Krishna Menon in India. It appears from her account that her pride did not allow her to seek help from relatives and friends who may have helped her. She comes across as a proud woman who knew that she was being punished for her choices. She married unconventionally, and then later, she decided to separate unconventionally from her husband sharing their son and without rancour. She lived alone, letting her husband raise their son, and relied solely on the fruits of her labour. She travelled extensively, almost constantly, with or without resources. She wrote about her travels in Europe and her presence (along with the group of women she was part of) in this account was so compelling that it was no ordinary travel narrative. This provoked the well-known humourist and literary critic of those times, the conservative ‘Sanjayan’ (pseudonym of M R Nair) to make the sneering, if apposite, remark that the title of her work Njaan Kanda Europe (The Europe I Saw) needed to be changed to Europe Kanda Njaan (I Who Saw Europe). She engaged Gandhi in debate on birth-control with extraordinary confidence (the version of that conversation published in the newspaper at that time is appended here). It is interesting that while very respectful of Gandhi, she betrays no worshipful submission at all and indeed, turns down his offer to stay on in Delhi; and this is only one instance of Kalyanikkutty Amma’s unbowed sense of individuality that was always filled with great curiosity for the other and a desire to connect with it, but never ready to fuse with it or submit to its terms entirely. One sees this again and again in this work – for example, when, in her recollection of her meeting with the Satya Sai Baba in Puttaparthy who she met in her worst times.
About the betrayal and persecution that she protests against, there is of course the fact that we have only her account of these. She notes that the communist stalwarts who she claims to have been involved in the usurpation met all her complaints, requests, and entreaties with calm silence. Her autobiography which was published in 1991 and won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award – and thus was discussed in the Malayali public – was met with the same tranquillity by those against who she raised serious accusations. The foreword to the Malayalam version was written by a respected Gandhian activist and Congress leader, V R Krishnan Ezhuthachan, and it confirmed the account and the torments that she was made to suffer. Many of the accused persons were alive at the time this account was published, but no one made an effort to refute her accusations.
Nevertheless, even if this account is an exaggerated one, there is much that one may learn from it, about the trials that feminist cosmopolitans of her generation may have endured. For example, her near-obsession with her family home is certainly no evidence of her submission to family and community respectability. Rather, her protest is much more about the grievous loss of ‘a home of one’s own’, a place where a woman would be shielded from the scrutiny and demands of neighbourhood life shaped by family ties and the extended caste-community. One is reminded of the struggles of her contemporary, the inimitable K Saraswati Amma, a pioneer of feminist writing in Malayalam. The same pall of gloom hangs over her autobiographical writings as well , as also the intense desire for an own home, the effort to escape the constant violence inflicted on the self by one’s relatives, and the struggle to live by one’s own labour. Death and loss of loved ones seem to be the constant companion at every stage in both lives; no wonder, then, that one may sense closely the emotional toll extracted on society from non-conforming women. Kalyanikkutty Amma describes, for example, experience that seems to closely trauma-induced dissociation which she claims, helped her cope with the days of terrible humiliation and privation.
Reading this as a feminist intellectual following a more or less lone path in these early decades of the twentieth century, I was struck by the persistence of the punitive patriarchal mechanisms that such women have to deal with. If one were to summarise the agonizing life that Kalyanikkutty Amma had to lead, one could say: she asked for solitude, but was handed loneliness as a punishment. One of the most striking things that she says in this book is about how loneliness is neither tranquillity nor solitude; rather it describes a situation in which one is ostracised from the social mainstream and one’s protests against unfair treatment remain completely unheard. I wonder how Kalyanikkutty Amma would have coped with these challenges, had she been a young woman of our times. Would she have sought out therapy? Or tried to join the feminist movement? But then, have we been ever able to build affective ties imbued by a feminism that respects singularities?
Swatantryavaadini 