On a rainy evening, Meena Kandasamy walks into the coffee shop in a long black skirt and sleeveless T-shirt. “Am I late?” she asks gently, before slipping into a chair. Her spoken word might be soft, but her written word is razor sharp, and she puts it to good use against existing hierarchies, patriarchy, and social injustice.
“Words are the little space that we are allowed to negotiate on our own,” she says as she sips her filter coffee. “Our destiny is our anger and our fight against the system, and I do it using words.”
The poet, novelist and social activist takes pains to upend traditional beliefs in her books. In her world, women are not passive, nor are the downtrodden voiceless. In Ms Militancy, her second anthology of poems which came out in 2010, the outlet for her rage is a bevy of mythological women. Her Kali kills, Draupadi strips, and Sita climbs onto a stranger’s lap. “All my women are militants,” she says. “They brave bombs, belittle kings and take on the sun. They take after me.”
Kandasamy herself is a ‘Ms Militant’, said the vice-president of the German PEN Centre, which recently awarded her the Hermann Kesten Prize 2022 for being “a fearless fighter for democracy and human rights”. Kandasamy is that, for sure, by nurture as much as by nature.
Born in 1984 in Chennai, she is the daughter of two university professors. Her mother, Vasantha, fought for the implementation of reservation policy for 18 years. Many times, Kandasamy assisted her in fighting the court case. Her father belonged to a nomadic tribe (Andi Pandaram) and was the first graduate from a village near Trichy. He went on to earn a PhD in Tamil literature. Things started to change when Kandasamy began understanding how deeply entrenched caste was in society. Slowly, the anger built up inside her.
“I started [my activism] when I was 12,” she says. Armed with a doctorate in socio-linguistics from Anna University, she became the editor of The Dalit, a bimonthly alternative English magazine. Around this time, she also took to translation. She translated into English the essays and speeches of Thol. Thirumavalavan—the founder of the political party, Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi. In 2007, she translated Dravidian ideologue Periyar’s feminist tract, Penn Yaen Adimai Aanaal? (Why Were Women Enslaved?), and co-wrote the first English biography of Kerala’s iconic Dalit leader, Ayyankali. The works of Kandasamy, who currently lives with her Belgian partner and two young sons, has appeared in 18 languages and she is the recipient of several international awards, fellowships and prizes for her literary work.
Her debut collection of poems, Touch, themed around caste and untouchability, came out in 2006, and then came Ms Militancy. In 2014, she wrote her first novel, The Gypsy Goddess, in which she powerfully recounts the massacre of 44 dalit agricultural labourers in Keezhvenmani, near Tirunelveli, on December 25, 1968. She did what mainstream Indian literature had not done in four decades—look at the incident through the prism of caste.
While her experiences trickled through The Gypsy Goddess, it was really in her second novel, When I Hit You, Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017), that her life became the fodder for her literature. It was the horror of a marriage gone sour—in which she was subjected to physical and psychological violence—that inspired the book. At a time when she had to file a case to stop her husband from harassing her, it was her books and her writing that gave her psychological relief. “For three or four years after my marriage ended, I used to have nightmares,” says Kandasamy. “I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming.”
Such fear and anger, channelled in the right direction, she says, can effect powerful change. She gives the example of her character Kannagi in Ms Militancy. “Tamil culture reduces Kannagi to just an example of chastity—somebody who loves her husband so much that she will do anything for him,” she says. “But the heart of her story is that she is somebody who fights the state. She questions what happened to her husband. How did he die? Why did he die? How do you kill somebody unfairly? So when you look at it like that, it is just like the stories of the women of Kashmir or Tamil Nadu demanding justice for those who have gone missing. If Kannagi’s rage can destroy the city of Madurai, it means a woman’s anger can take on the state and become a symbol of resistance.”
Kandasamy has been fierce with her pen, but it is not just in her writing that her conviction comes through. She has been openly critical of the arrest of her fellow writers like Varavara Rao and former Delhi University professor, G.N. Saibaba. But can such politics of hate and oppression really keep her going? Her answer is to point to the works of those like Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie, whose early books had a huge influence on her. Like these crusaders for justice, she learnt an important lesson early on in her life—that sometimes you have to break before you can fix.