Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha
Title: A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras
Author: Kalpana Karunakaran
Publisher: Westland/Context
When a historical account of a housewife’s quest for intellectual growth and her quiet defiance of twentieth-century orthodoxies in Madras comes alive through words and memory, it has every reason to be celebrated. A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras by Kalpana Karunakaran is a remarkable work precisely for that reason—an intimate, yet deeply analytical, exploration of the life of the author’s maternal grandmother, Pankajam (1911–2007).
Kalpana Karunakaran, Associate Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at IIT Madras, is known for her research on gender, poverty, microcredit, women’s work in the informal sector, and solidarity-based collective action. In this book, she brings both her academic depth and personal tenderness to bear on the telling of one woman’s extraordinary life.
Karunakaran achieves something rare: she captures the singularity of an exceptional woman while situating her firmly within the complex social universe of Tamil Brahmin orthodoxy. She shows how the “utterly ordinary” life of a “woman of no consequence,” as Pankajam once described herself, was in truth far from ordinary.
Drawing upon letters, semi-autobiographical short stories, and a lifetime of writing—from Pankajam’s first autobiographical fragment in 1949 to her final reflections in 1995—the book offers a riveting portrait of a woman’s inner world. Through heartbreak and endurance, yearning and creativity, Pankajam emerges as a housewife with a philosopher’s mind and an artist’s courage, whose friendships and intellectual pursuits transcended cultural and geographic boundaries.
In her foreword, Karunakaran reflects on Pankajam’s motivation to write: “A humble housewife tied to mundane work may have a story or two worth telling,” Pankajam writes, “and I write to show that my soul has ever been trying to soar up and break the bondage of the flesh.”
It is here that the book finds its deepest resonance. Pankajam understood that women—forever consigned to their bodies—were denied a life of the mind. Yet she wrote as a way of freeing herself, of realising a soul not enslaved by gender or domesticity. Her faith offered a language of liberation, but her writing offered the means to enact it in the here and now.
Set against the vast canvas of twentieth-century India, Pankajam’s story unfolds amid momentous change: the World Wars, the freedom movement, the Japanese bombing of Madras in 1943, and the dawn of Independence. Through her eyes, we see a young mother building a home and nurturing her children while also fashioning herself as a progressive patriot in a nation-in-the-making.
In its essence, this is as much a social history as it is a biography. Pankajam’s writings provide a unique window into the domestic, cultural, and intellectual world of an era often missing from mainstream histories.
In one of her later Tamil essays—written, perhaps, in the 1960s—she muses that history only records “governments, kings, wars, and conflicts,” not the “people’s everyday lives.” She wrote, therefore, so that her grandchildren might know her not merely as a loving grandmother but as a witness to history, a woman who lived fully and thought deeply.
Through Pankajam’s voice and Karunakaran’s scholarship, A Woman of No Consequence restores dignity to what is often dismissed as ordinary. It chronicles the spiritual and intellectual evolution of a woman who sought transcendence within the rhythms of domestic life, turning the everyday into a site of resistance and renewal.
Ultimately, this book is not only about one woman’s life but also about the birth of a nation as seen through its daughters—restless, self-aware women who compelled both home and nation to confront their own contradictions.
A Woman of No Consequence is a moving, layered, and profound testament to women’s inner lives, and to the quiet power of writing as an act of freedom.
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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.
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