The Library Committee at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru is organising a Book Talk on “A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras,” authored by Dr. Kalpana Karunakaran and published by Westland Books in 2025.

The talk will take place from 5:15 pm and is open to the public subject to prior registration.

Panellists:

• Dr. Kalpana Karunakaran, Associate Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Madras
• Dr. Sudheesh R C, Assistant Professor, Social Science, NLSIU

About the book

A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras is an intimate, yet simultaneously anthropological, exploration of the life of Dr. Karunakaran’s maternal grandmother, Pankajam (1911–2007). The book captures the singularity of an exceptional woman, even as it situates her in a social universe shaped by the conventions of Tamil Brahmin orthodoxy. Dr. Karunakaran conveys with clarity how the ‘utterly ordinary’ life of a ‘woman of no consequence’ (as Pankajam writes of herself), lived out largely within the confines of family and kin, was quite far from ordinary.

The book draws extensively upon letters, glimpses of Pankajam’s life narrated through her thinly-disguised semi-autobiographical short stories that allowed her to ‘say the unsayable’ about love, intimacy and conjugality, and her autobiography, which she began writing in 1949 and kept writing till her last piece in 1995. What comes together is a riveting portrait of heartbreak and violence, yearning and delight, a housewife’s quest for intellectual growth and her talent for friendships across cultures and continents.

In the final reckoning, A Woman of No Consequence is about the chequered trajectories of a newly-born nation as seen through the lens of its daughters – restless women forcing home and nation to reckon with their stubborn striving for self-actualisation.

About the author

Dr. Kalpana Karunakaran is an Associate Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Madras. Her research and writings are in the intersecting fields of gender, poverty, microcredit, women’s work in the informal sector, women’s trade unions and collective action in solidarity-based movements. A bilingual public speaker and writer in Tamil and English, Dr. Karunakaran conducts workshops and participates actively in campaigns for gender equality, labour rights and human rights organized by women’s movements, trade unions and rural development NGOs in Tamil Nadu. She also writes on women’s lives with a focus on the intersections between the personal and the political. She is the author of Women, Microfinance and the State in Neo-liberal India (Routledge 2017) and the Tamil memoir, Comrade Amma: Magal Parvaiyil Mythily Sivaraman (Comrade Mother: A Daughter’s Portrait of Mythily Sivaraman), published in 2018.