Half- Chaste: K Saraswathi Amma

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Translated by J Devika

Half-Chaste

Like every day, she had been walking alone down the Lovers’ Lane in the Museum Gardens at Thiruvananthapuram. She flinched when she saw the person walking towards her smile. Was it a post-meeting ritual, or a pre-meeting overture, she could not make out. She felt that it was best to walk past him with a puzzled look in her eyes as if trying to recall. He made out that trick. With the happiness of someone who had stumbled upon what he had been looking for, he asked, “Don’t you remember me? Did you forget – you sang at a meeting at the Vijaya Tutorial College some days back?”

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My Mother: M Leelavathi

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[M Leelavathi (1927– ) is one of Malayalam’s most brilliant literary scholars of the earlier generation, whose life reads like a series of struggles against misogynies, old, new, and admixed — and of triumph over all these obstacles. She is perhaps the most awarded woman scholar in Malayalam, having won almost every noteworthy prize for criticism in Malayalam and a Padmasri, almost the only one to have scaled such heights of success. Most importantly, she is perhaps the most striking representative we have of the second generation of Swatantryavaadinis in Kerala. Below are translated excerpts from an essay she wrote about her astoundingly-talented mother, Nangayyamaandal, who was denied higher education but who struggled to provide her accomplished daughter with one. In the present when one hears of how the lack of access alone will drive lakhs of young girls outside education in India, and how no one seems to really care about this, one feels all the more obliged to excavate such stories — in a region where women did secure education, it was not as if they were simply driven into it, like sheep. It was rather an outcome of countless struggles, cutting across caste, religion, and class. Like it may be clear from the account below, or from Ratnamayi Devi’s remembrance of the struggles of three generations of women in her family for education ... Continue reading “My Mother: M Leelavathi” →

Poor Things!: K Saraswathi Amma

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Translated by J Devika

1

The bus stopped with a grr…. Sumati strained to look outside, all around. A slim good-looking young man with a blue coat and dark glasses and a thin hairline of  a moustache on his face ran up to her and said, “Oh, how long have I been waiting! Get off here, won’t you? Did you visit me even once after passing by so many times? It can’t be, this time.”

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Women Preachers of the PRDS: Kulakutti Maria

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Translated by J Devika

[I prefer to use the term the Great Churning — van-kadayal in Malayalam — to represent social change during the period of the early twentieth century of Malayali society in general, and mahaaturavi — the Great Opening — instead of the term Navoddhanam — Renaissance — to characterize the great upsurge of the oppressed communities towards liberation — of the same time, treating them as analytically distinct.

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The Struggle for Education: Three Generations of Women in Travancore — From the Autobiography of Ratnamayi Devi

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[In the opening chapter of her autobiography titled From the Dusk of Life (Konark Publishers, New Delhi, 2004), the scholar and nationalist Ratnamayi Devi (1912-1990) writes about the struggles of her mother for education and employment in the late 19th century Travancore, her own struggles, and for her daughter. These are excerpts from several chapters in it. The autobiography is a translation by I K K Menon, of a Malayalam original. Though the book mentions that her birth year was 1912, it is likely, from the events she narrates, that it was 1904. Continue reading “The Struggle for Education: Three Generations of Women in Travancore — From the Autobiography of Ratnamayi Devi” →

More Feminist than Nationalist? Ratnamayi Devi to Gandhi

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[This is an excerpt from the autobiography of Ratnamayi Devi ( 1912- 1990),  who was a scholar and nationalist activist from Kerala, who spent the substantial years of her life in Wardha and Delhi, teaching Sanskrit at the Delhi University. She was a known translator of her times, between Hindi and Malayalam.  The story of  how she escaped an abusive marriage to secure higher education and an independent life and her choice of life-partner is a remarkable one. Her autobiography, published after her passing, titled From the Dusk of Life (Konark Publishers, New Delhi, 2004, translated by I K K Menon) also provides a fascinating account of the struggles of women for education in times when matrilineal families and kinship were deteriorating in Travancore (South Kerala). From the histories of Malayali first-generation feminists, Ratnamayi’s life was unique but surely not exceptional. Continue reading “More Feminist than Nationalist? Ratnamayi Devi to Gandhi” →

Exceptions in the Labour Movement?: Anna Lindberg on Early Twentieth Century Women Workers in Travancore’s Cashew Industry

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[Here is an excerpt from Anna Lindberg’s brilliant work on gender in the cashew workers’ mobilisation in Travancore and Kerala in the 20th century, which reflects upon the way in which women workers, who formed the bulk of the participants in the massive, militant labour struggles of the mid-20th century, ended up being portrayed as more exceptional than normal. It gives a glimpse of women’s militancy — and of an exceptional incident of resistance from the early 1960s, in which a young woman worker pulled off her blouse and showing her breasts to the armed police, dared them to shoot her there. Lindberg notes that this dramatic and politically-charged use of the female body was hardly recognized for its subversion: it was seen as either ‘a manly gesture’ or ‘unnatural’. Indeed, this was the kind of participation that the elitist representatives of ‘Women’ (who echo the elitist Navoddhana Mahila of the 1930s — evident in an essay by an author named Vasumathy in 1960 (in the section Critique) — that criticised women’s participation in public demonstrations and so on as merely shouting obscenities for various political parties. And sadly enough, this remains the case in 21st century Kerala, as evident from the frenzy around the exposure of the female torso in Rehana Fathima’s body art, recently.]

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Mahila Samajams Must Belong to Ordinary People: G Vasumathi

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Translated by J Devika

[This essay which appeared in 1960, is an echo from the 1930s, The voice may well be that of the woman shaped by the Malayali ‘Renaissance’ — that of the Navoddhana Mahila, so prized by the Kerala Model enthusiasts later, for being the moderniser of family life. The Navoddhana Mahila was one who identified herself as an active domestic subject, the bearer of the new values of her modernised community, such as modesty, thrift, efficiency, and committed to the duties of the modern wife and the mother. ]

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Are We Not Women Workers Too? The Devadasis Petition the Government of Travancore

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[When sex workers began to organize in Kerala early in the twentieth century, people accused them and their supporters of importing new-fangled ‘Western’ ideas and corrupting the morals of local people. But they were mistaken — even though I would want to think more before saying that the devadasis were foremothers of the sex workers who, for example, Nalini Jameela represents, I can firmly say that the devadasis of Travancore looked at themselves as workers, as may emerge from the small paragraph they added to the text they borrowed  from the memorandum submitted by the Madras Devadasi Association to the Royal Statutory Commission of Indian Reforms (1929) for their own petition (in Malayalam) to the Travancore government in 1929] Continue reading “Are We Not Women Workers Too? The Devadasis Petition the Government of Travancore” →