Mangaluru: P. P. Gomathi Memorial Education Trust is organizing the PP Gomathi Memorial Oration 2024 on Tuesday, December 3, 2024, at 3.00pm, in association with Karnataka Theological Research Institute, Mangaluru, at Sahodaya, Mission Compound, Balmatta, Mangaluru. Dr. Meena Kandasamy, poet, writer, translator, anti-caste activist and academic, described by the Independent as a ‘one-woman, agit-prop literary-political movement’, will deliver the oration titled Writing as Resistance.
Prof. PP Gomathi worked as Principal in Besant College for Women, Mangaluru and after retirement in 1984 till her death in October 2014, she had been working as Secretary, National Women’s Education Society, Mangaluru. P. P. Gomathi dreamed of a society in which there wouldn't be any discrimination of any genre or shade. She hoped that the small steps each one of us could take in the right direction would incrementally take us one day to that ideal world. P. P. Gomathi Memorial Education Trust has been providing scholarships of Rs. 1,00,000 every year to girl students of outstanding academic merit but economically poor. Lectures by eminent scholars, educationists or social activists at Mangaluru are also being organised. The first of those lectures was delivered by Dr. G. N. Devy, the second one was by Prof. Niveditha Menon and last year, Prof. EV Ramakrishnan delivered the oration and Vidwan T M Krishna presented a Carnatic vocal concert of Narayana Guru's poetry. lat year, Dr. Sindhu Manjesh, delivered the oration titled News Media in India: A Health Report, with a Special Focus on Prognosis.
Meena Kandasamy is a poet, writer, translator, anti-caste activist and academic, described by the Independent as a ‘one-woman, agit-prop literary-political movement’.
Meena Kandasamy (real name Iḷavēṉil) was born in 1984 in Chennai. Her father, Kandasamy, born in the nomadic tribe of Andi Pandaram, was the first in his family, and village, to finish school, college, and university, to receive a PhD in Tamil literature. Her mother worked at IIT Madras for three decades as a faculty of mathematics, a period during which she led a legal battle for the implementation of the reservation policy and for recognition of her work. Their struggles led Meena to work alongside Dalit movements and it influences all her work.
In 2002, she was the editor of The Dalit, a bimonthly “that provided a platform to record atrocities, condemn oppressive hierarchies and document the forgotten heritage.” Subsequently, she translated the essays and speeches of Thol.Thirumavalavan into English: Talisman: Extreme Emotions of Dalit Liberation (2003) and Uproot Hindutva: The Fiery Voice of the Liberation Panthers (2004). 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. Her debut collection of poems, Touch (2006) was themed around caste and untouchability, and her second collection, Militancy (2010) was an explosive, feminist retelling/reclaiming of Tamil and Hindu myths. Her critically acclaimed first (anti)novel, The Gypsy Goddess, (2014) smudged the line between powerful fiction and fearsome critique in narrating the 1968 massacre of forty-four landless untouchable men, women and children striking for higher wages in the village of Kilvenmani, Tanjore, Tamil Nadu. Her second novel, a work of auto-fiction, When I Hit You: Or, The Portrait of the Writer As A Young Wife (2017) drew upon her own experience within an abusive marriage, to lift the veil on the silence that surrounds domestic violence and marital rape in modern India. It was selected as book of the year by The Guardian, The Observer, Daily Telegraph and Financial Times; and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018, among others. Her third novel, Exquisite Cadavers, a work of experimental fiction was published in November 2019, and like her other novels was longlisted for the Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize. She co-taught a course on Feminist Writing as Social Activism: Perspectives from the Neocolonial World in Fall 2018 when she was Gallatin Global Faculty in Residence at the New York University (NYU). The same year, she received a PEN Translates award for her translation of Salma's Manamiyangal (Women, Dreaming; Titled Axis Press, Penguin-Randomhouse India, 2020). In 2023, she published her feminist-interventionist translation of the love poetry of the Tamil classical text Tirukkural, The Book of Desire. Her latest published work is Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You, a collection of political poetry written over the last decade.
She has been a fellow of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (2009), a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent (2011) and a fellow of the Berlin-based Junge Akademie (AdK). In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) and was also awarded the PEN Hermann Kesten Prize for her.
She holds a PhD in sociolinguistics from Anna University, Chennai.