Borrowing from Tagore’s poetry Subbalakshmi had written poignantly in her diary, “I forget, I ever forget that I have not the winged horse, that the gates are everywhere shut at the house that I dwell”. Married at 11 and mother at 14, Subbalakshmi was for Uma another instance in the long annals of Indian women who dared to dream of education and emancipation but whose dreams were snuffed out by an intensely patriarchal society.

Uma first got to know Mythili closely when she came to her with a diary of her grandmother Subbalakshmi, a victim of her age. Uma says that for her as a filmmaker the burning questions became ‘How to rediscover an event through a woman and how to recover a woman through an event?’ Mythily’s life from then on was devoted to campaigning against the atrocities of caste, and Kilvenmani thus became central to her story. But her life was utterly transformed with the Kilvenmani incident of 1968 when an entire village of Dalit agricultural labourers was burnt down by upper caste landlords. Mythily was educated in the United States and had a promising career in the United Nations. The woman in question was Mythily Sivaraman, a firebrand political and social activist from Tamil Nadu. And this was a past that was linked to one woman’s life and her tryst with history, a history fraught with pain and suffering, a history of violent caste and class struggles. Long hours after the film’s closure the fragments of the past that it sought to narrate continued to haunt many of its viewers. Communists Must Ponder: Extremism and the LeftĢ8.What is the need that spurs a historian, and a very eminent one at that, to turn to cinema for writing history? Renowned feminist historian Uma Chakravarti’s premiere screening of her documentaryįragments Of A Past in the capital city in a way answered this question with élan. Different Alignment for Assembly Election?Ģ6. Plantations: The Green Industry and its Wage SlavesĢ1.

A Report on MRF: A Monopoly, its Workers and the Stateġ2. Thanjavur: Rumblings of Class Struggle in Tamil Naduġ1. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam: The Content of its IdeologyĨ. The Relevance of Periyar: Caste or Class StruggleĤ. Harijans: Forbidden Territories, Feckless Reformsģ. Geetha and Kalpana Karunakaran Reading Mythily Sivaraman by V. Introduction: The Life and Times of Mythily Sivaraman by V. Mythily Sivaraman’s essays range from agrarian unrest, caste oppression, land, labour and wages, the centrality of class struggle, the early promise of change, the radical course of left struggles, the coercive apparatus of the state, issues of impunity, and the way the Emergency worked out on the ground.

Haunted by Fire by Mythily Sivaraman