Review of Kalpana Karunakaran’s A Woman Of No Consequence

The best kind of personal histories are those that go beyond memory. A personal history that manages to be, at the same time, a record of the history of a nation in the throes of growth, of cities stretching out, of minds being coaxed to expand. That is the kind of narrative that makes for a riveting read. That is exactly what Kalpana Karunakaran’s book A Woman of No Consequence is all about.

Karunakaran writes a family history — a feminist treatise centring around three generations of women in her family and the men and women who shaped their lives — as a history of a newly born nation seen through the eyes of women. The fault lines of a nation, a society, and a caste are exposed in the lives of the women, who are denied time and again opportunities and rights, and who still exert themselves to rise from the morass to which society has confined them. Hemmed in as they are by Brahmin orthodoxy, there is still a free spirit that rests in the women and makes them, for us, the readers, women of great consequence, inspirational, and worthy of emulation.

Indeed, the book describes well a group of women, but the true heroine is undoubtedly Pankajam — Karunakaran’s maternal grandmother. Karunakaran’s great grandmother, Subbulakshmi, and her own mother, the late communist leader Mythili Sivaraman, play important roles, as do other women, as Karunakaran steers them through the years, crafting a treatise that sees each generation of women do better than the one before them.

Pankajam with her father.

Suffering trails the early generations, as the privations assigned to gender identity are endured — women denied an education, agency, books, a thinking mind, and an opportunity to grow into their own selves. And yet each woman tries to ensure a better life for women of the next generation. As Karunakaran says, “The book tells a universal story of the defiant striving of the human spirit to infuse life with meaning and purpose and explore to the fullest potential for transcendence of one’s circumstances.”

A Woman of No Consequence is a meta-book, in the technical sense of the term. Karunakaran draws from the writings of her grandmother, both fictional and biographical, her mother Sivaraman’s Fragments of a Life: A Family Archive (on the life of her grandmother Subbulakshmi), and extensive correspondence — epistles between family members, school mates, even a British traveller and a Russian scholar of Tamil — that are all astonishingly well preserved all these years later.

Pankajam with her children.

Pankajam was a prolific writer, yet she was constrained as she was clear that she would not resort to washing dirty linen in public. While swearing to write the truth, she declares in her foreword: “I will gladly leave so many things unsaid, rather than twist them.” But Karunakaran does a fantastic job at picking up the nuances left out deliberately, through the fictional work of Pankajam — her poems, and short stories. Having deduced early on that the life of Pankajam’s fictional characters closely mirror her grandmother’s own journey, Karunakaran teases out a more complete, fulfilling narrative. She uses the wisdom of hindsight to fill in the hazy lines, creating a comprehensive story.

Pankajam emerges as a rather extraordinary woman, one whose sharp mind “rendered her a man” for the time and segment of society she occupied. Forever seeking to free herself from the constraints imposed on her, Pankajam, from an early age, lifts herself up as the aspirational heroine, rising in thought and mind, even while she is tied down to a family bound by patriarchal norms. She writes to counter this, and writing becomes her way out of the less-than-ideal life she might otherwise have been stuck with.

In Pankajam’s own words: “My sphere is that of a humble housewife tied to mundane work, which always keeps the soul fettered down. But I write this so that I may show my nearest and dearest how my soul has been ever trying to soar up and break the bondage of the flesh.”

The greatest strength of this book is its ability to straddle the personal and intimate while charting a historical journey through troubled times — for both a nation and its women. That makes this a book of much consequence.

A Woman Of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras

Kalpana Karunakaran

Westland Books

₹599

ramya.kannan@thehindu.co.in

Published – March 06, 2026 06:00 am IST