In November of 1997, I submitted my rather ambitiously titled doctoral dissertation ‘A New Subject for Feminism: Print-Media, Dravidian Movement and the Reconstitution of Readers’. This was, for me, the culmination of an era – seven years during which I had been a doctoral scholar attached to the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. There was to be a four-year long post-script to the dissertation, one that would involve sifting through journals in various dusty archives to put together a collection of essays and fiction by women activists of the Self-Respect movement in English translation. My supervisor and another professor at the University of Hyderabad had suggested that this might be a good thing to do and that had become an earworm. The work that eventually became a book titled The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History, I hoped, would serve as the material basis for an alternative history of the Self-Respect Movement launched by Periyar (E.V. Ramasami Naicker), a movement which challenged the systematic exclusion of the oppressed castes from the Indian nation and their construction as the “other” by the Brahmin elites. The first edition of ‘The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History’.The book’s central premise was that while Periyar’s role in the movement had received due critical and scholarly attention (and rightly so), the presence of women self-respecters and the interventions they had made had gone largely unnoticed. And this, despite the wealth of evidence by way of articles, essays and stories by the latter, many of which were published in the movement’s journals – Kudi Arasu and Puratchi. By way of context: The Justice party (which preceded the Self-Respect Movement) was founded in 1916 following the deepening disillusionment on the part of a large section of non-Brahmins in South India with the pro-upper-caste leanings of the Congress and with Gandhi’s complicity with that. A decade later, the suyamariathai iyakkam or the Self-Respect Movement was launched by Periyar. This movement was remarkable not just for the radical manner in which it challenged the exclusion of the oppressed castes but also for the systematic way in which it fashioned its own print media. Periyar had joined the Congress in early 1920 but had soon begun to entertain reservations about Gandhi’s idealisation of the varnashrama dharma. Periyar saw it as a veiled justification of the evils of the caste system. In 1925, the Self-Respect journal Kudi Arasu was launched, signifying Periyar’s formal break from the Congress. The Self-Respect Movement, which positioned itself as a social movement rather than as a nucleus around which a political party would be formed later, did much of its work via its journals. The term suyamariathai, or self-respect, conveyed a sense of Tamil, non-Brahmin pride critical of caste hierarchies. What was even more remarkable was the clear-eyed fashion in which the movement’s ideologues saw the linkages between Hinduism, the caste system and the oppression of women. Self-respecters fought for women’s rights to property, work, divorce, remarriage and contraception. And much of this was indeed fuelled by Periyar’s vision. But even a cursory reading of women’s essays and stories in the self-respect journals – and there was a wealth of these – showed me one thing: that the movement was equally held afloat by women. In other words, they were holding up at least half the self-respect sky. Shouldn’t there then be an attempt to write a women’s history of this movement? Much as this idea excited me, there were various factors that stood in the way: for one thing, I was a literary studies scholar and not a trained historian. I didn’t know the first thing about archival research. So, I suffered from a form of imposter syndrome despite the fact that I was working at a time when inter-disciplinarity was a thing and Cultural Studies had just come into its own in Indian academia. Also, the very idea of an archive was, at that time at least, still very much in its infancy in India. The other issue was that I had never before seen myself as a translator. And the texts I would end up translating, with the exception of Moovalur Ramamirthammal’s novel Dasigal Mosavalai, were not literary in nature. To make matters worse, I was a slow reader and writer when it came to Tamil because even though we had always spoken Tamil at home and I was fluent in it, I had never learnt it formally in school. My early years had been spent in Kanpur and when we moved to Chennai, I was admitted to one of the Kendriya Vidyalayas because I was, at the time, most comfortable in Hindi. Within the Kendriya Vidyalaya system, the second language was Hindi. I had learnt to read Tamil at home but my reading was like cheese cloth – full of holes – even though so much of my lived experience unfolded in Tamil. In short, it wasn’t going to be easy. However, being young, foolish and audacious, I took a Pollyannish plunge buttressed by the support of a modest book grant and a promise of publication by what was then Kali for Women, India’s first feminist press. This was the era of pre-digitised, low resource, under-funded archives. In the city of Chennai, the only exception to this was the Roja Muthiah Research library which had just commenced its digitisation project. At that point in time, the archives at the Anna Arivalayam’s Perasiriyar Research Library and at the Periyar Thidal Library were decidedly pre-digital. The only way to locate what one was looking for was to befriend the librarians. Fortunately for me, the librarians at both places were friendly and supportive. They did what they could, fetching frayed, yellowing issues of Kudi Arasu and Puratchi from dusty top shelves so I could browse through them and copy down – word for word and by hand – the essays and stories I wanted to translate for and use in my collection. I briefly employed a young woman from an NGO I was working for at the time as my assistant copyist. I don’t know what I would have done without her. Some of this was fun, much of it was slow and tedious. But all of it was serendipitous. And all of it felt like an adventure. I stumbled upon texts. I found what I found. I didn’t find what I didn’t find. There were limits, I knew then as I know now, to what I was doing. There was a certain haphazardness to it all because neither of the two archives I visited most frequently had all the issues of the journals – or, if they did, the librarians were often not able to find every issue. Moreover, there were other sorts of limitations. Physical limitations. Absence of canteens, usable restrooms, the long commute between home and Periyar Thidal especially, and having to balance this research with the rest of my life – domestic chores and my NGO job. Plus of course the sheer amount of time the work itself demanded of me. Even though I told myself that I could only do my best, I was also occasionally plagued by the sense that that there was so much more to be done. The second edition of ‘The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History’.Would digitisation of all that archival material have helped? Most certainly! But would it have been as much fun? No, not half as much. There was an intangible value to this sensory experience of looking at and gently handling the crumbling pages of those journals. It was almost as though in handling these journals I was communing directly with the writers of those essays and stories – Trichi Neelavathi, Kamalakshmi, Janaki, Maragathavalliyar, Alhaj Subako, Moovalur Ramamritammal and Jayasekari. I met the fiery Trichi Neelavathi urging her male comrades not to leave their wives behind at home when they attended self-respect conferences, declaring that the principles of self-respect should first touch the lives of women. I met her again as she railed against highly ritualistic weddings and asks: “Despite the fact that the Brahmin consults the stars and performs the rituals deemed necessary for a marriage, why is it that some couples end up childless, why do some others quarrel like the mongoose and the snake?” I met the writer-activist Janaki who offered a tongue-in-cheek listing of ridiculous superstitions such as: “If women eat alongside men, the rains will fail us! If we insist that caste differences must go, the rains will fail us!” In another essay, she wrote of the petty mindedness of a temple priest who retained for his own use the bigger halves of the coconuts offered to the gods. I also met the feisty devadasi sisters Kantha and Ganavathi in the pages of Moovalur Ramamrithammal’s iconic novel Dasigal Mosavalai (The Dasi’s Wicked Snares). Nothing comes close to the excitement of “hands on” archival research, of digging, of sifting through, of discovering a text by accident, of immersion in a tangible, physical text dating back to another era, of that sense of a very real context. Digitised scholarship wouldn’t have come anywhere close even though it might, in many ways, have been more “complete”, closer to perfect, more efficient. As Ian Milligan argues in his series Historical Research in the Digital Age (published online in the Royal History Society blog), digital technology has opened up new possibilities for historical research and scholars no longer have to depend on physical travel and the micro-film reader to search and sift through sources. It now supports virtually every step in historical research from literature review to identifying primary sources, to reading texts, to writing, revising and publishing. The catch, as he points out, and one we are often not conscious of, is just how much of our literature reviews and our primary source research rests on the mediating layer of what constitutes the database. The question then becomes: Are we sacrificing the possibility of stumbling upon gems hidden in non-digitised archives at the altar of the digitised archive’s ease and apparent efficiency? Moreover, as Tim Hitchcock argues in his paper, “Confronting the Digital Or How Academic History Writing Lost the Plot (Cultural and Social History. Volume 10, Issue 1. May 1, 2015), we must not forget that algorithm-driven discovery, poor optical character recognition and the selection biases inherent in Western print archives tend to skew the way in which we research the past. And there is of course that elephant in the room: the impact of the great digital divide when it comes to knowledge production and new age scholarship especially in a country such as ours.The first edition of The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History was published by Kali for Women in 2003. It is interesting to me that the second edition of the book, published in late 2025 by Zubaan in association with the Tamil Nadu Textbook and Educational Services Corporation (TNTB and ESC), has hit the bookstores at a time when so much of historical, archival research is digitised. In fact, Periyar Thidal is now the Periyar Rationalist Digital Library and boasts of a digital archives. As for the Roja Muthiah Research Library, it has been digital for decades. What does it mean, I wonder, for a book from a pre-digital era that relies so heavily on archival material, to get another lease of life at a time when archival research is essentially the click of the mouse, an online data base search? This new edition of my book with its teal cover (in contrast to the first edition’s blood red cover) feels like a relic from another time, a historical object in its own right. K. Srilata is a poet, translator and academic. Her book The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History was published by Zubaan in partnership with the TNTB. Details about her work are available here.