Biography & True Stories
The Story of Naadar Women (Nāṭār peṇkaḷiṉ katai)
The lives of Naadar women of five generations
by Nageswari Annamalai
The book spans the lives of Naadar women of five generations, portraying the injustice women face in the context of marriage. The women are drawn from a caste low in the hierarchy, but doing better economically, in a small industrial town in southern India. The book exhibits a kind of writing that combines ethnography and fiction, personal experience and social insights. It has the stories of the lives of twenty-five women whose lives spread over a century; each one of the stories is about a woman’s anguish and powerlessness, but each is different in its own way. The description of their stories is also a window into the way of life and the customs of this caste and the changes in the course of modern history. The book is filled with the author’s own anguish about the women’s struggles and her wit about society’s norms.
