This article is a part of the #IndianWomenInHistory campaign for Women’s History Month to remember the untold legacies of women who shaped India, especially India’s various feminist movements.
In one of the stories told about her birth, as recounted in her memoirs, Lalithambika Antharjanam, writer and social activist, tells of an incident that “affected her very deeply over the years.” Lalithambika writes of herself in the third person in Balyasmriti (Childhood Memories), and in Gita Krishnankutty’s translation in the collection Cast Me Out If You Will (1997), we can infer with absolute clarity the domesticated shock of this incident for both the father and the daughter.
Lalithambika writes,“”When her father, a learned man of progressive views, heard that a daughter had been born to him, he exclaimed angrily, “No, I will not live here any longer. I’ll go away, maybe to Madras, become a Christian, and marry an Englishwoman.”
“And what if she has a daughter too?” asked my mother.
“At least I will be allowed to bring her up like a human being. I will have the liberty to educate her, give her the freedom to grow, get her married to a good man.”“
Lalithambika’s father’s words underscore a father’s helplessness at the suffering of a generation of Namboodiri women in Kerala, including foreseeing the same for his own newborn daughter, at the turn of the last century. The Kerala Brahmin caste of Namboodiris in the 1900s
Lalithambika’s imagination went beyond the borders of Kerala to embrace the hidden and conspicuous tumult in the lives of all Indian women.
While Namboodiri men wielded a great deal of social, cultural, and personal power, the community lived by a strict patriarchal and patrilineal code of ritual seclusion for their women, often giving prepubescent girls in marriage to men fifty or sixty years older than them, consigning women exclusively to the kitchen at puberty, forbidding them from getting an education, prescribing rigorous ritual seclusion for widows, including child widows, prohibiting widow remarriage, and casting out or ostracising women from family and community if they dared to question, confront or reject any of the strictures placed upon them. The term “
It was primarily this women’s world that Lalithambika delineated with great compassion and boundless imagination in over a hundred short stories written over a period of forty years between the late 1930s and 1970s. In shedding light on the inhuman indignities suffered by Namboodiri women in Kerala, Lalithambika’s stories shed light on all toxic patriarchal structures and held them accountable for the gendered abuse of women for all times.
Lalithambika’s chosen form was the short story, which she described as “the art form best suited to the powerful interpretation of a comprehensive union of thought and emotion.” Indeed, her stories, while exhibiting a heavy preference for the diegetic narrator, explore the innermost thoughts of abject women (and men) with an immediacy and rawness that contain an urgent social critique. In 1976, she won the state’s prestigious Vayalar award, the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award and the Kendra Sahitya Akademi award for her one and only novel, Agnisakshi.
Lalithambika was born in 1909 to a traditional Namboodiri household in Kottavattom in Kollam district, Kerala. Unlike many N
In Ormayile Nidhikal (The Treasures of Memory), Lalithambika writes that “as she grew older, she was aware that people disapproved of the way she was being brought up. They thought that a growing girl had no right to so much freedom”. In her autobiography, Lalithambika details a cultural milieu where in the far southern corner of the nation, news of the slow and steady fervour of a brewing nationalism and independence movement brought the external world with its full force of new ideas to a young girl growing up in protected isolation.
Her stories, such as Kodumkaattilpetta Orila (A Leaf in the Whirlwind),
“I believe that even as the artist, man or woman, pulls down the girders of a narrow, decayed society, he or she must also forge the tools to build a cultured and wholesome new structure in its place”
As a child and young woman, Lalithambika grew attracted to the ideas and ideals of Gandhi, Vivekananda, and Tagore. Tagore’s depiction of women in the traditional Bengali society, in particular, influenced the young writer, and Lalithambika referred to Tagore as “[her] god in the early phase of my literary career.” Both writers featured women characters on the cusp of climactic incidents that ruptured personal and political lives. One can easily see how Tagore modelled a form of radical womanhood to the young and aspiring writer even in a novel like Agnisakshi, a work of Lalithambika’s mature years, and which pits a socially conscious young woman to choose between a loving but placid marriage and another way to engage with the world around her. Lalithambika has often cited Tagore’s Ghaire Baire (At Home and Outside) that she read in Malayalam translation, a book gifted to her by her father, as one that had attracted her deeply.
In the early 1930s, when Lalithambika started writing, Kerala was a cauldron of social reform movements that confronted several social inequities, particularly the intersectional oppression perpetrated on putative lower castes, non-Hindu religions, and women, through a sickly confluence of caste, religion and gender prejudices. These oppressive practices included untouchability and unapproachability through a
