A Woman of No Consequence

In this intimate, yet simultaneously anthropological, exploration of the life of her maternal grandmother Pankajam (1911-2007), Kalpana Karunakaran achieves the remarkable: capturing the singularity of an exceptional woman, even as it situates her in a social universe shaped by the conventions of Tamil Brahmin orthodoxy. 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.