For many years she was a familiar sight at almost every serious meeting or seminar held in Thiruvananthapuram city.The elegant lady draped in a striking khadi sari with her grey hair tucked up and a jhola hanging down her shoulder, she used to come driving her ancient Fiat until it broke down some time ago. Not to be outdone, she continued to hop on auto-rickshaws and make it to every seminar worth its salt even when she was in her late eighties.And when Dr. K. Saradamoni took to the stage, she tore into every piece of received wisdom on whatever subject she spoke about provoking and engaging everyone around. Even those who thought she belonged to their camp would often be stunned by her merciless exercises in introspection. And when she was only a listener, she would invariably be on her feet after every speech to shoot off a volley of hard-hitting questions at the speaker.Path-breakerDr. Saradamoni (93), the irrepressible contrarian scholar-activist until last, passed away recently in Thiruvananthapuram.She was a path-breaker in many ways. Attaining education and health on par with men has long been the conventional indicator of women’s empowerment and lauded as a proud achievement of the celebrated Kerala model of development. However, since the 1980s, the model has come under critical scrutiny for its many limitations and flip sides.Prominent among them was the continuing forms of discrimination faced by the Kerala women despite advances in education and health prompting scholars in Women Studies to ponder over the “glum behind the glitz” and the “enigma of the Kerala woman”. Most discussed was the “invisible Kerala woman”and her conspicuous absence from positions of power. She barely had a marginal presence in the legislature, the leadership of even supposedly progressive political parties, she ran much behind men in job participation, and atrocities against her too were no less in Kerala than in the ‘BIMARU’ badlands.It was then that one particular woman stood vindicated for having crying hoarse about this paradox for many years often upsetting her own comrades in the Left, the unsuspecting champions of the Kerala model. Surprisingly, even as a young student in the 1950s, Saradamoni had written about the need for women to go beyond education and health to attain real empowerment and the need to fight for justice within the families. This was almost a decade before Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, the American theorist of Intersectionality, was even born.Another myth Saradamoni pioneered to bust was about the state of Scheduled Castes in Kerala. Though Dalit scholars have of late exposed the way the SCs and STs have remained outliers in relation to others in the famed Kerala model, Saradamoni has been one of the earliest to speak and write on this. In fact, her groundbreaking book Emergence of a Slave Caste: Pulayas of Kerala (1980) was the first from a non-colonial scholar to have comprehensively proved that caste slavery among the SCs had prevailed in Kerala for many centuries.Also read: The Life of a Revolutionary Singer: At 88, P.K. Medini’s Fire Still BurnsThough Kerala had practised the worst forms of ‘untouchability’ against the lower castes (they were permitted entry in temples only in 1936) until it was banned after independence, there are many even today who contest the state ever had caste slavery.Says Professor Sanal Mohan, the doyen of Kerala’s Dalit Studies:“While many scholars were hesitant to use the word slavery to describe the conditions of the oppressed castes historically, Dr. Saradamoni was convinced of the fact that their condition was that of chattel slaves. It is surprising that many scholars who studied slavery in various parts of India failed to understand the significance of her study and therefore tend to reject the prevalence of slavery in India leading to the denial of slavery in India. Looking back one would surmise that she anticipated the coming of the later academic interventions such as Dalit Studies.”The book was Saradamoni’s PhD thesis for a doctoral degree from Paris University during 1969-71 done under the guidance of Dr Louis Dumont, famed anthropologist and Indologist. Saradamoni had gone to Paris at the behest of Madeleine Biardeau, noted Indologist who was her lifelong friend and college mate in Trivandrum where the French had come to study Sanskrit.Saradamoni was married to prominent Communist journalist N. Gopinathan Nair, was a mother of two young girls and also teaching at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) at Delhi when she left for Paris in 1969 to pursue her doctoral studies. Joining back at ISI after her return, she worked there till retirement in 1988. She had begun her professional career at the Bureau of Economic and Statistical Studies set up by the first Communist government of Kerala in 1957 under economist Ashok Rudra after she completed M.Litt in Economics from Madras University. She was also the all India president of the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW) for six years.Saradamoni continued to write prolifically after her retirement too on a range of topics like caste, gender, family, matrilineality, land rights, labour, globalisation, secularism, etc., in both Malayalam and English. She was one of the earliest to argue for the need to consider women’s household work as labour (Finding the Household: Conceptual and Methodological Issues, 1992) and also women’s special role in paddy cultivation based on comprehensive field studies (Filling the Bowl: Women in Paddy Cultivation, 1989).“She was a unique link with Old Kerala because she was not only part of it she was so immensely reflective and analytical about it. A true scholar-writer-activist,” feels Prof Robin Jeffrey, the Canadian Indologist and Saradamoni’s close friend.Never confined to academia, she was often seen on the streets until recently participating in various agitations. She was seen last in the ‘Not in My Name’ protest against growing Islamophobia in 2017. She will be sorely missed by seminar halls and streets alike.M.G. Radhakrishnan is the editor of Asianet News.
