The alter universe of an housewife

Kalpana Karunakaran’s grandmother, Pankajam, was, by her own definition, ‘a woman of no consequnce’. Not given the opportunity to complete school — she’d had just six years of schooling when she was pulled out — and confined by domestic duties in a marriage with little love, she’d yet managed to cultivate a ‘kingdom of the mind’, an alter universe that she constructed through reading extensively, with friendships that defied boundaries and through being able to see the world through the eyes of others, even as she was conscious that consequential or not, she was still a subject of the history that was unfolding around her.

Her life and her story formed the subject of discussion between Ms. Karunakaran, who teaches in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at IIT Madras, and Sreemathi Ramnath, a polyglot consultant and writer, at The Hindu Lit for Life on Saturday (January 17, 2026). Ms. Karunakaran’s book, A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras, was published in 2025.

How much to reveal was one issue Ms. Karunakaran says she grappled with. Pankajam, she says, apart from writing her life story in bits and pieces from 1939 to 1995 on the “school essay notebooks of her children and grandchildren”, had also written auto-fiction, fictionalised autobiographies, using three characters, Kamala, Lakshmi and Meena that portrayed the unsavoury, unsayable parts of conjugal life. These raw, intense stories were perhaps a way of distancing herself, Ms. Karunakaran noted, and wondered, “Do I really reveal the skeletons in the family closet” and how much should be revealed. And then, she says, she realised that through the auto-fiction, Pankajam had herself said everything and then some. “If she dared, how could I not,” Ms. Karunakaran says.

On the subject of marriage and how men treated the women in their lives and the many ways of looking at this through the lens of gender, community etc., Ms. Karunkaran says that nobody is a villain in the story. The same men who wanted to crush their wives under their feet, she points out, also wanted their daughters to soar. Pankajam though, wanted her daughter Mythili Sivaraman, well-known social activist, trade unionist and Communist lead, to find a man very different from the one she had landed, Ms. Karunakaran says.

Pankajam’s story plays out in the backdrop of the India’s struggle for independence, and despite referring to herself as a ‘mere housewife’, her writings, Ms. Karunakaran says, were self-reflexive; she was conscious that the biographical was also social, and she was not untouched by outside events. The idealism and optimism of the Nehru years for instance, evaporated in the 1960s with the many movements that defined the country: workers’, peasants’, womens’. Her household was therefore, something of a political incubator as witnessed by Mythili’s explosion.

Ms. Karunakaran stressed that she could not claim that this was the entire truth about her grandmother — she’d relied on different sources alongside Pankajam’s writing, including her memories as well as letters Pankajam had written to Mythili — she says she had attempted to provide an interpretation but gave an open invitation to readers to agree or disagree. 

There were multiple such histories out there to be written — stories of ‘mere housewives’ who were much more. “That project of resurrection is waiting to happen,” she says, adding that if any reader who read her book felt inspired to write about one of their female ancestors, it would be very worth it. 

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Published – January 17, 2026 05:18 pm IST