Abstract
Mythily Sivaraman, feminist and communist, left us on May 30, 2021. She was 82. Born into a Tamil Brahmin family, she inherited an unusual female lineage that enabled her transcend the limitations of the caste household: her grandmother, Subbulakshmi had been a voracious reader and silent nationalist. Inspired by Tagore’s vision of learning and Subramania Bharati’s wistful, romantic sensibility, she lived in a world of words, ideas and visions—that Mythily brought alive in a beautifully written biography, Fragments of a Life. Mythily’s mother, Pankajam, was a cheerful and spirited woman, who did not let an unfulfilled conjugal existence take away from her capacity for generosity and joy: she read, wrote, raised a brood of children, travelled, put out a helping hand to several that needed to be held….
Mythily was born a few years before Indian independence, and was Pankajam’s last child. She was sent to school somewhat late and went on to complete her undergraduate and graduate education in Chennai and Delhi. Her family was open to further studies, and when she availed of an opportunity to study in the USA, they did not object. Enrolled at Syracuse University in New York State, Mythily was witness to, and a participant in the heady politics of the 1960s: anti-war, civil rights and feminism campaigns, and equally to the decolonising politics of the time, spearheaded by Cuba, on one hand and emergent African nationalisms, on the other. A youthful sense of social justice which, in India, had sought to expend itself in spiritual seeking and social service, now found a firm analytical and political anchor.
Not yet the socialist she would be, Mythily was aware of the virtues of the creed, and equally of the rich and lively debates around sex and race. She acquired and read the feminist classics of her time, from Betty Freidan’s The Female Mystique to Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. A clandestine visit to Cuba, time spent with the Committee on Decolonisation at the UN—books, and her public experiences, convinced her that life was inevitably political, and to lead the good life, it was necessary to engage both intellectually and practically with the concerns of the hour, and the burden of history.
Mythily returned to India in 1968—and even as she looked to chart out her path in public life, the tragic killing of 44 dalits in Kilvenmani took place. Along with the Gandhian Dalit activist Krishnammal Jaganathan, she hurried to the village, only to find the remnants of what had been: broken bangles, a heap of ashes and a howling dog. 1 These images would remain with her for very many years, and transform, as it were, into iconic memories that strengthened her vision of economic and social justice: socialism as the end, and anti-caste and struggles in the workplace, as also remaking one’s romantic and conjugal life, as the means to achieve this end.
The decade of the 1970s saw her an active member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and in that capacity, Mythily worked with industrial trade unions in Chennai, appearing at gate meetings, setting up strike committees…. She reasoned with male workers on the subject of women’s rights, and pushed women to seek justice and equality not only in the context of their work and labour, but in conjugal, domestic and familial spaces as well. Her 1975 article in the Social Scientist titled ‘Towards Emancipation’ is a fine illustration of the conceptual arguments she assembled in order to think this double vision—which was not only about being part of and loyal to a political party of the left, but about aligning arguments with practice, at home and in the factory, the workplace and in civil society.
In the 1980s, she became a full-time activist with the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), and came to address a range of matters: marital discontent and violence, the female face of poverty, and sexual subordination that women had to endure, at home and elsewhere. She wrote on these subjects, undertook pedagogic projects with younger women in AIDWA, laboured at casework or work to do with individual instances of domestic violence and dowry related deaths and coordinated with other women’s groups to take forward broad feminist demands. She helped leverage a wide feminist space in Chennai and was instrumental in the setting up of a Women’s Struggle Committee in the city, along with several other women’s groups, including those that challenged the left on its understanding of the sex-class-caste conundrum.
Even as she worked on the streets and in work places, Mythily never failed to write, in English and Tamil. Initially she wrote for The Radical Review, which she had founded in 1969 and Mainstream, but later on was a regular contributor to Economic and Political Weekly and People’s Democracy. She wrote in Tamil for dailies and weeklies and the CPM’s Theekatir. She made it clear that her intellectual labour was to be viewed alongside her political work, and that the one was necessary for the other.
She was a consummate and meticulous worker, and any task she took up, whether it was an ‘atrocity’ such as unfolded at Vachathi when Adivasi women were subject to sexual assault by men in uniform 2 or an everyday instance of gendered untouchability: she followed matters through to their very end, adverting to a mix of approaches: mobilisation on the ground, protests, filing of affidavits with concerned authorities, being part of public tribunals, writing, exhorting, arguing, going to court and so on.
Many of us in Chennai learnt public culture and civility from her, and when she passed on in May 2021, she left behind an entire way of being, at once feminist and socialist, ethical and compassionate.