Comrade Mythili Sivaraman, a Communist leader, feminist activist, anti-caste organizer, thinker and scholar passed away recently of COVID related complications. She had been living with Alzheimer’s for the past 13 years. She was my mother’s mentor in the Communist Party and I became friends with Kalpana, her daughter. My mother’s relationship with Mythili and their resultant political journeys have been hugely influential in the narrative of my life. Just as important, my relationship with Kalpana over the past one and half decades has shaped my relationship to Mythili. My knowing of Mythili is at once political and personal. Yet as I have sat and listened to the memorial speeches and writing that has been pouring in about her political life, they didn’t match my experience of her. This was confusing as I KNOW that I am who I am because Mythili existed. So, what is missing in these public mappings of her political life?
Narratives of Mythili’s legacy are restricted to her work within the party, her journey to the party. These narratives are nuanced by highlighting her open and loving political self that went beyond party parameters; her richly egalitarian private life with her life-partner Karunakaran; her open and political home space in which many of us were mentored; her decision to write a full-length text on her grandmother Subbulakshmi who as a housewife to a government official in colonial India was deeply troubled by many injustices and who Mythili has identified as her inspiration. Many strictly left, ‘activist’ circles barely even count her book on Subbulakshmi or Uma Chakravarty’s film based on that book as part of Mythili’s political journey. The feminists, thankfully, include this work, resolutely in her legacy.
Kalpana's speech at the memorial organized by the National All India Deocratic Women’s Association for filled in the piece of the puzzle that I felt was missing in all the eulogizing of Mythili. Kalpana said that she would like to place on record some things about the past years of being with her mother as she lived with Alzheimer’s Disease. According to her doctors, most elderly persons with Alzheimer’s tend to become aggressive towards their caretakers. In Kalpana’s remembrance, Mythili’s ‘sweetness never left’. Instead, sometimes when she or others in the household would try to feed her or bathe her when she didn’t want to, Mythili responded to what she experienced as unjust with the question: “Don’t you have a conscience? Manasatchi illaiya?”.
This was my missing piece. Her life in her own body, alone within the private realm over the past 13 years is also part of the legacy she leaves behind for us. As I re-read the iconic article “Gentleman Killers of Kilvenmani” that Mythili wrote in May 1973, I remembered the feeling I had when I read it for the very first time as a young woman. This work inspired me to become a historian of my land to expose its brutality and to record the histories of the oppressed. I remember the voice that rings through that piece which asks of the courts, society, the reader: “Don’t you have a conscience?”.
Lata Mani has written extensively about the radical potential of being in one’s own body as the basis for a political understanding of the world that is ‘radically equal’. Mythili and Lata have seemingly little in common even though they both emerged as feminist from progressive left contexts albeit a decade after one another. Lata has been writing and speaking about spirituality and politics (to put it in a barely descriptive shorthand) for the past two decades. To me, they are both significant influences. So, Kalpana’s story of Mythili’s question, that was so core to her that it did not even melt away with the melting away of her normatively functional mind- sits beautifully with Lata’s formulation of the radical potential of being in one’s own body as we journey through the path of radical egalitarianism for all beings in the world. How deep must this question have been in her body to stay with her not just through her journeys for justice in the world outside but also in the world within - a journey her caregivers went on with her, in their own way, whether they describe it as such or not.
I wrote a private tribute soon after she died where I said that I often thought her Alzheimer’s was a gift to her, so she could have some time on this earth, in her bodily vessel without having to bear the burden of all the pain and injustice she bore witness to with such depth and commitment. Today I feel that, it was not so much that the Alzheimer’s removed this ‘burden’ from her, but rather that it brought her back to her body with a depth that can only come with a removal of language, discourse, categories and frameworks. Her whole life she must have held within her this depth even as she lived entrenched in the world of discourse and frameworks. Perhaps it was these she was freed from. And perhaps when she was freed of this, she could turn the soil with the manure that was her life, in her own being, in these last few years before leaving this bodily form.
Now, I wish her the liberation of the Buddhist women of the Therigatha. And for myself and all others she has left behind on this earth I honor the entirety of her legacy – the Communist Revolutionary; the Feminist leader; the thinker who bore witness to injustice; who claimed her grandmother who defies many left-progressive frameworks/discourses and yet was, in her own way, a radical voice for justice; and the kind, wise core self who asks: “Don’t you have a conscience?”.
Mythili’s life from beginning to end shows that radical equality thrives in seeing the interconnectedness of struggles, selves, people, places, communities. Her legacy is left un-whole if her life is divided into the feminist and Marxist; the public and private; the able-bodied and disabled; of sound mind and of unsound mind; the spiritual and the secular; and myriad other seeming contradictions all of which, upon reflection, it emerges are actually on a continuum. And on that continuum, I stand as a simple dot, present in my body, interconnected and one with all the beings that make up all layers of my own being. I am me with love, compassion, empathy, rigour and a raised fist wishing for radical equality because of ALL that she was. Thank you for all that you have been which has made way for all that we will be.
Sevvanakkam Comrade. Rest in peace, love and liberation our dear Mythili.
Ponni Arasu is a historian, activist and actor. She is from Chennai and now lives next to the Lagoon in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.