The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History

The Self-Respect Movement launched by Periyar (E.V. Ramasami Naicker) in 1926 questioned the ways in which the oppressed castes were systematically excluded from the Indian nation and constructed as the ‘Other’ by the Brahmin elites. While Periyar’s role within the movement has received critical and scholarly attention, women Self-Respecters and the issues they raised have gone largely unnoticed. This collection of essays and fiction by women Self-Respecters, translated from the Tamil, could serve as the material basis for writing an alternative history of the movement. In mapping the voices of women who identified with the movement, this anthology helps us arrive at a different and richer understanding of what the Self-Respect movement stood for. There is an urgent need not only to improve upon existing self-respect histories, but also to critique the ways in which they have so far been written. This anthology provides a basis for such critique.

K SRILATA is a writer, translator and academic. She is co-editor of the anthologies The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry (2009), Short Fiction from South India (2007) and Lifescapes: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers from Tamilnadu (2019). Her books include This Kind of Child: The ‘Disability’ Story (2022) and seven collections of poetry, including Footnotes to the Mahabharata (2025), Three Women in a Single-Room House (2023) and The Unmistakable Presence of Absent Humans (2018). Srilata’s novel Table for Four (2011) was long-listed in 2009 for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Her published translations include the works of the Tamil writers Vatsala and Salma. A Fulbright pre-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Srilata was formerly a professor of Literature at IIT Madras. She is currently a distinguished visiting professor at Shiv Nadar University, Chennai.