K. Saradamoni Had Shown That it is Possible to Be a Feminist and Feel at Home in India

‘Intrepid’ was the thought that very early on crossed my mind about the author of the book, In Search of Answers: A Memoir (Tulika Books, 2024), as I read it. Coming from a traditional home in a corner of India, K. Saradamoni travelled the world on her own steam and formed a wide network of associations professional and personal. This was unusual among the women of her time. More so, she gives the impression of having enjoyed doing so in a way that few women in India had been able to do, either due to a paucity of resources or the chains of patriarchy.

As I read on, I felt vindicated in my assessment of the author, for we are told that “intrepid” is the very term used by her doctoral supervisor when remarking upon her character. But individuals are also the product of their social milieu, and Saradamoni’s life was undoubtedly shaped by the times in which she lived. It is difficult today to imagine that there was a time in India when the equal rights of women were simply assumed, at least in certain circles.

The author does not speak of having had to wage any struggle within her family to pursue a life of her own or at the workplace to further her career as an academic at the prestigious Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). She is not being parochial when she implies that this may, at least in part, have had to do with the matrilineal milieu of Kerala, from which she had emerged, which granted women at least a modicum of autonomy. We need only read the biographies of some of her contemporaries, who had to leave for the United States to achieve freedom, to appreciate this.

Childhood

The memoir starts out with Saradamoni’s childhood in the environs of Kollam in the then-kingdom of Travancore. Life had been comfortable as her father was employed by the government. He was also an indulgent parent, introducing his children to the wonders of the world. The author speaks of her delight at encountering a tomato for the first time and the joys of receiving a mechanical toy. But Saradamoni’s hero is her mother who was to bring up her family of mostly girls after the death of her father. An empathy for this parent permeates the story.

Saradamoni was dutiful in looking after her mother till the very end, even if it held her back from pursuing her own interests. After university in Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram) she goes to Madras (now Chennai) to pursue research in economics, a rare progression for women at the time. We read about life in the city, especially in the world of Mylapore, a cultural centre that had grown around the Kapaleeshwara temple.

Saradamoni displays both a remarkable ability to make the best of her circumstances and adjust to new cultures, something even more in evidence when she moves to Delhi later on in life. Sadly, however, we pick up little from the book about the political climate in the Madras State of the time. EVR Naicker, ‘Periyaar’ to his followers’, was active then but the politics of the Dravidian movement do not appear in the memoir. Nor is there later any reference to the agitation much later around the adoption of Hindi as the sole official language, and agitation that was to rock Madras state.

Also read: K. Saradamoni Leaves Behind Pioneering Work in Women’s and Dalit Studies

Though Saradamoni was living in Delhi at the time, as a southerner she is unlikely to not have noticed it. Before she moved in the early 1960s to Delhi, where she spent the rest of her professional life, Saradamoni worked for a brief spell in the Bureau of Statistics of the government of Kerala. She seems not to have enjoyed it much, except for her interactions with the noted statistician Ashok Rudra. It was Rudra who encouraged her to apply for a position at the ISI, then perhaps at the height of its glory as a research institution engaged in studies over a range far wider than statistics.

Academic journey

Saradamoni arrived in Delhi in the early 1960s and was to remain there till her retirement from service in the late eighties. It is here that she comes into her own. After a short initial stay at ISI, she was to leave for Paris to work on a Ph.D., with Louis Dumont, the distinguished French sociologist who authored a study of caste in India, Homo Hierarchichus.

Her dissertation on the formation of a “slave caste” of agricultural workers in Kerala was probably her most academic work. It also seems to have led to some changes in her area of interest. She slowly branched off to Women’s Studies, in which field she may be called a pioneer. Even though she uses the term she does not tell us what its core concern is or why there is a need to have a separate branch related to the study of women when economics is already one of the human sciences. Be that as it may, Saradamoni was to find much traction in this field, with seminars, conferences and international travel galore, most significant being a presence at the UN’s World Conference on Women held at Nairobi in 1985, at which both she and her daughter were delegates. Then there were international conferences on women in India which she organized herself.

Two observations she makes during her time at the ISI are noteworthy. Though the jacket cover speaks of her as an economist, she seems not to have worked much with the economists at ISI’s Planning Unit as the economics department was called. In 1968 she penned a note speaking of her frustration with academic economics. While the narrow focus of the economists of the ISI may well be true, her claims about economics are not.

I quote her saying: “For me, economics was vital, a medium through which I could serve the country and my people. But it has failed I am thoroughly disappointed especially after I came to Delhi. Where is the political economy today? Econometricians and mathematical economists and statisticians have come to the forefront. To them, models, equations and high-sounding words are more important. Man does not find a place anywhere in this picture.”

This is a caricature inviting a response. Econometrics and statistics are only methods of analysis of data, and are perfectly compatible with political economy, a political approach to the economy. In fact, these methods can be an important part of the toolkit of the grounded economist and aid the process of understanding how the economy works. (Full disclosure: I have skin in this game. I have used econometrics extensively in my work.)

P.C. Mahalanobis, the founder of the ISI, though a statistician himself, set no great store by mathematical methods. He has written that he thought of the use of mathematical models in planning as no more than “scaffolding, to be dismantled” as soon as the point they were meant to illustrate has been made. Then there is Amartya Sen, whose imaginative use of statistics showed that the number of women “missing’ due to the systematic neglect of their well-being ran into tens of millions.

Finally, in the seventies, there were to arise in India institutions that were to take an alternative approach to economics, among them being JNU, located in the neighbourhood of the ISI. The memoir shows no sign of its author engaging with these initiatives, though students from the economics department of ISI went on to do so.

The second of the experiences narrated by Saradamoni is of her leadership of the ISI Worker’s Organisation (ISIWO) which comprised both the academics and workers. Here she is justly proud of the role she played in ensuring campus housing for the lowest grade of workers, who coming from regions far from Delhi were hard put to find housing there on their low wages. However, she remains uncritical about the overall role the ISIWO had played at the institution in her time.

In particular, she remarks upon tensions between the ISIWO and C.R. Rao, already a globally recognised statistician. Finally, after an association spanning several decades, Rao left for the United States. There, in 2023, having crossed one hundred years he was awarded the International Prize in Statistics considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field. It is yet another instance of India’s failure to retain its foremost thinkers. Saradamoni does not seem to think of this particular incident as a tragedy.

What does not figure much in this memoir is the author’s intellectual engagement. We are left with no clues as to the work of hers that made an impact on the profession. Perhaps Saradamoni saw herself more as an activist than as an academic. In this role, her life does carry a message. She comes across as remarkably open-minded when navigating the many worlds she ventured into during her career. And, while doing so she seems never to have allowed her choices to be influenced by taboos of any kind, whether perpetrated by the conservative social order or self-consciously progressive social scientists.

She comes across as a free thinker, devoid of political correctness, when she shows an attachment to some common cultural practices in India. Though once close to the communist movement of Kerala through her husband, she was devoted to her larger family, visited places of pilgrimage and was vegetarian by choice though she was born into a social strata that was not. Given the last, however, it is surprising that she mentions being ambivalent about capital punishment. Above all, Saradamoni was clear-headed in her approach to caste.

Two instances may be noted. She brushes aside the criticism she faced for choosing a Brahmin, the eminent jurist V.R. Krishna Iyer, to write the foreword to her book. Secondly, she was not squeamish about seeing merit in the practice of matriliny, in her view a great boon for women, even though it was practiced only by a small section of Kerala society, one that in today’s public discourse would be termed ‘savarna’.

She saw it as ensuring that women did not have to ever leave their homes as opposed to women elsewhere in the country, who were “given away” in marriage, thus losing all entitlement to their ancestral home. She would concur, one might expect, with Margaret Mead’s pithy remark that “motherhood is biological while fatherhood is social convention”.

Through her life, Saradamoni had shown that it was possible to be a feminist and feel at home in India, and that to be progressive did not require jettisoning all things Indian. But her memoir also shows us what we have lost. She lived at a time when the Indian state was not just benign but confident, unlike today. India’s public institutions such as the ISI, where Saradamoni spent most of her working life, let a hundred flowers bloom.

Pulapre Balakrishnan is an Honorary Visiting Professor, the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram.