What does it mean to recover the life of a woman who called herself a ‘humble housewife tied to mundane work’? In this episode, I am in conversation with Kalpana Karunakaran to discuss her book, ‘A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras’, a remarkable excavation of the life of Pankajam, a woman who defies easy categorisation.

Pankajam was a voracious reader who sought freedom from a fractured relationship with her husband. Her memories are vivid and layered, marked by a deep love for children, a spirit of travel, friendships forged across distances, and an attentiveness to nature, birds, and animals. Through it all, she reinvented motherhood entirely on her own terms. We explore why it matters to study a woman like Pankajam, someone who does not fit neatly into the conventional subject of feminist discourse and what her life reveals about resistance, memory, and selfhood. We also talk with Kalpana about her own mother, Mythily Sivaraman, a well-known Indian women’s rights activist.

References:

1. Kalpana Karunakaran: Profile, Instagram
2. Book: A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras by Kalpana Karunakaran
3. Tamil Nadu Science Forum
4. Mythily Sivaraman, Fragments of a Life: A Family Archive by Mythily Sivaraman (Life story of Subbalakshmi)
5. Indian Association of Women’s Studies, Vina Mazumdar
6. Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott (Little Women), Anton Chekhov, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Katha Prize Stories
7. Women’s India Association, All India Women’s Conference
8. Sarda Act: Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929
9. Katherine Mayo and her book, Mother India (1927)
10. Mary Rajamani, Valentina Tereshkova

In this episode of Navigating India, released on March 22nd, 2026, exactly six years after India observed the Janta Curfew, an initiative by the Government of India to combat COVID, we are joined by journalist Jyoti Yadav to discuss her book 'Faith and Fury: Covid Dispatches from India's Hinterlands'. While much of India locked itself indoors during the pandemic, she set out from Delhi to the rural heartlands of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, documenting the hardships faced by migrant workers, the shortage of oxygen cylinders, the undercounting of deaths, children orphaned by the virus, and the collapse of the state's health infrastructure. Her book is an important record of India's pandemic years, raising serious questions that the nation has been too eager to forget, at a time when the media has largely written Covid off as a closed chapter.

References

1. Jyoti Yadav: Website, X, LinkedIn
2. Book: Faith and Fury: COVID Dispatches from India’s Hinterland by Jyoti Yadav