“Every individual’s life is given daily problems which, in solving, we may come across the solution to the riddle of life itself.”—Pankajam, 1949.

Kalpana Karunakaran’s memoir about the life of her maternal grandmother Pankajam (1911–2007) is a moving reconstruction of the inner life of a remarkable Tamil woman in early 20th century south India. It demonstrates how intellectual curiosity and stubborn resistance could push back against the tight constraints of patriarchy.

A Woman of No Consequence is the story of a girl who was allowed only six years of formal school education in British colonial India before being married off as a teenager and becoming the mother of five children, but who never lost her endless desire to learn about the world. The book is a glimpse of Pankajam’s life based on her own writings and reflections; her semi-autobiographical autofiction; poetry; and extracts from letters, accompanied by Kalpana’s contextual notes.

Kalpana, who teaches in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at IIT Madras, has written about gender, poverty, women’s work in the informal sector, and women’s collective action in solidarity-based movements. Currently the president of the Indian Association for Women’s Studies, she has also written a memoir in Tamil about her mother, the communist activist Mythily Sivaraman.

Within the pages of this book, we encounter five generations of Tamil women: Kamakshi, widowed early, who is forced by circumstances to marry off her daughter Subbalakshmi without giving her a formal education; Subbalakshmi, an autodidact teenage mother shackled by patriarchal norms; Subbalakshmi’s daughter, Pankajam, who has learnt to be resilient and optimistic despite the early experience of adversity; Pankajam’s daughter Mythily, who goes on to become a political activist, her perspective influenced first in the US in the 1960s and then sharpened by her experience of the 1968 Keezhvenmani massacre in Tamil Nadu; and finally, Kalpana, the writer of the memoir.

Pankajam was born in 1911 as the child of a strained and abusive marriage. Her mother, Subbalakshmi, had been married at the age of 11 and had her first child at 14. Subbalakshmi’s father had dreamt of educating her at the newly opened Maharani’s College in Mysore, but he died before he could fulfil this dream. In the custom of the time, Subbalakshmi was married early. Her husband, referred to as PRG, was largely absent, undemonstrative, and disengaged. On occasion, writes Pankajam, her father was physically abusive to his wife. While he went away on work tours as an officer of the colonial government, Subbalakshmi would sit in the corner of a desolate temple on the seashore and “read until the light faded” or weep into the night.

Thus, the two lonely little children, Pankajam and her little brother Raja, spent their early childhood playing on the beach, growing like wild creepers on the vast sandy landscape of the Coromandel coast. Shortly thereafter, the child Raja would die tragically of misdiagnosed typhoid; another little brother would also not survive an illness. Pankajam remained the only surviving child. Broken by these losses and trapped within a cold, uncommunicative marriage, her mother would perhaps never fully recover her mental well-being.

“Oh poor mother mine

Ideals are chimera

Real life is different.”

—Pankajam, “My Mother”, 1978.

Subbalakshmi had wanted to educate Pankajam to become a doctor. On this matter, too, the husband and wife came into conflict. One day, quickly, and without telling her husband, Subbalakshmi sent the young girl off to Madras to stay with her mother and brother; soon thereafter, she also left her husband’s house and moved to Madras to take refuge with her maternal family. Pankajam was enrolled in school in the city. She would later look back on her six years at school in Madras as “the only happy and successful years in my life”.

Through Pankajam’s eyes, we get a glimpse of the lives of women within Tamil Brahmin orthodoxy in the early decades of the 20th century. Around them, the anti-colonial Independence struggle was growing in momentum. New ideas of freedom were being articulated with passion and force. First one war and then another would be waged across the world.

Inside the home, change was slower to come. Girls were married off as children, becoming mothers in their teenage years, and sometimes child widows. They were permitted few or no opportunities for intellectual growth: whatever learning they were allowed was only with a view to becoming better wives and mothers. Even the stories they were told, such as the one of the faithful Nalayani in mythology, tended to perpetuate stereotypes of unquestioningly obedient and self-sacrificing wives.

The artistic and intellectual Subbalakshmi felt choked by these restrictions and retreated into silence. She could see around her the growing momentum of the anti-colonial freedom movement, but she was not permitted by her family to participate; nor was she permitted to go to Santiniketan, where she might have been able to discover a different, more creative, and more empowered kind of life.

Learning to survive, even thrive

Subbalakshmi’s thwarted aspirations—an education denied, a marriage that stifled her, and children who died too soon—form the melancholy emotional backdrop to Pankajam’s childhood. Learning to survive and even thrive in desolate terrain, Pankajam faced life’s challenges more boldly. She was creative, interacted with diverse people, and read everything she could lay her hands on. She laughed at the absurd ritualistic exercise of “bride-viewing”: “Am I an auction cow?” she asked in an undated poem titled “Bride Selecting Ceremony by a Modern Girl”.

Even her husband’s infidelity did not crush Pankajam’s determination to live a full life and bring up her children as strong young people. She ran her household energetically, lighting the kitchen fire with logs, making coffee, folding clothes, bathing the children, feeding them, even homeschooling them with progressive ideas drawn from Montessori until they started formal education. She taught her five children to be fair-minded, empathetic, and considerate young people, emotionally connected and capable of fulfilling relationships.

For example, while her daughter Lalitha’s marriage unfortunately ended her dance career, three years later Pankajam encouraged her son to support and encourage his wife’s dance career.

“‘Is marriage necessary?’ asked Meena.

‘It is a necessary evil,’ he replied.

‘But evil cannot be necessary, thatha. Evil

cannot be desired.’”

—Pankajam, Untitled story No 1.

With ebullience, Pankajam read everything she could, from Little Women and Jane Eyre to engineering textbooks. From Little Women, she saw that women could choose different ways of being in the world.

Kalpana’s method of retelling, juxtaposing Pankajam’s poems, letters, and autobiographical fragments with contextual commentary, creates a rich, layered, and textured portrait in which narrative and reflection interact. Occasionally, the interpretive voice feels mildly intrusive; one wishes to hear more of Pankajam’s reflections in her voice directly.

“Five children, their children, cows in the shed, nursing and looking after my old and ailing parents, kept my nose tied to everyday mundane things. If I had not had these obstacles, perhaps I would have aspired to achieve and accomplish certain things dear to my heart.… Perhaps given a chance, I would have done the same things that I did for my children, to other children of the world. Run a school and an institution completely dedicating myself to their needs and aiding them to understand and appreciate nature and develop a love of humanity. I have been trying to instil in my children and their children a sense of wonder and teach them to appreciate everything and take an interest in everything—for life is everything.”

—Pankajam, “Thanksgiving”, 1990.

Women’s inner lives in the Tamil households in British colonial times, their aspirations as expressed in their writing and correspondence, and the changing culture of the times come together in this book. In recovering Pankajam’s voice from her unpublished personal writings, letters, poems, and short stories, Kalpana contributes to a growing body of feminist scholarship that seeks insights within domestic archives.

Across three generations—Subbalakshmi’s silenced creative life, Pankajam’s optimistic resistance, and Mythily Sivaraman’s political activism—the book traces the gradual and irreversible broadening of women’s intellectual and emotional horizons.

What is meant by consequence? What does it mean to live a consequential life? Who are the main characters of history and who are the people on the sidelines? In telling the story of a remarkable woman who might otherwise have remained invisible to history, Kalpana reminds us that although conventional history may regard the public stage with more interest, those lives that remain constrained within domestic spaces are no less complex, and of no less consequence.

“If you want me, look for me

In the love I left behind.”

—Pankajam, My Epitaph, November 1991. 

Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta is in the IAS.

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