Review of The Other Half of the Coconut, edited by K. Srilata

Explore the vital roles women played in the Self-Respect Movement through K. Srilata's insightful anthology, "The Other Half of the Coconut."

In today’s Tamil Nadu, most political debates about the Self-Respect Movement centre around ‘Periyar’ E.V. Ramasamy. This is not surprising: unrestrained and uncompromisingly principled, he often made provocative remarks that are easy fodder for politicians. It is perhaps because of his towering presence that much of the movement, including questions of gender, is still interpreted largely through Periyar’s lens.

This is why The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History (first published in 2003 and then in 2025), edited by K. Srilata, is important. The two-part book shifts focus from Periyar to a chorus of women who contributed to shaping the intellectual life of the movement. “Such a mapping is crucial... if we wish to understand the complexities of women’s agency during the movement,” writes Srilata in the preface to the first edition.

The essays have been translated from original speeches and writings in the Tamil, which were published between 1928 and 1936 in Self-Respect journals such as Kudi Arasu, Puratchi, and Kumaran. Together they form what the journalist Caitlin Moran described as a “massive patchwork quilt” — they carry different perspectives and highlight myriad issues, but all the writers stay focused on the movement.

Self-respect was at the heart of the ideology of the movement, and Periyar considered it a precondition for the empowerment of non-Brahmins. The first part of the collection comprises stories, treatises, and essays by women who articulate what self-respect means to them. The first piece, ‘What is in store for us?’, is about a Brahmin woman, written by Miss and Mrs Kamalakshi. Her name captures her predicament: she is married, but does not live with her husband because her dowry has still not been paid. At first, placing this text upfront seemed odd to me — why foreground a Brahmin woman’s story in an anthology against Brahminism? But that seems to be the intention: to underscore how Brahminical patriarchy, as the scholar Uma Chakravarti put it, pushed even some Brahmins into the fold of the movement.

While Kamalakshi’s voice is sad, Trichi Neelavathi’s is fiery. In ‘Womenfolk and Self-Respect principles’, she argues that women, mired in superstition and blind belief, can attain self-respect only through education. Her anger is all the more pronounced in ‘Rituals’, where she declares: “The Brahmin and no one else is responsible for the growth of rituals. I ask every one of you to courageously challenge these meaningless rituals.”

Rituals and rigid beliefs contribute to the terrible plight of widows — a theme across several essays, including ‘Pankajam’s tragic death’ and Alhaj Subako’s essay on Muslim widows. The second underscores how discriminatory practices cut across religion. She writes: “Muslims may pat themselves on the back for being progressive in their attitudes towards widows, but they are merely deceiving themselves.”