Description

Professor Uma Chakravarti explores questions about individual lives and dramatic historical events, the ‘small’ personal archive, and women’s quests for freedom through a poignant filmic journey. The protagonist in her film ‘A Quiet Little Entry’ is Subbalakshmi who lived out her life on the fringes of history on the salt pans of the Cholamandalam coast of South India. She was and remains an ‘unknown’ woman except perhaps for a brief period of association with the illustrious and scholarly Chattopadhyaya family –Mrinalini, Harindranath, and his wife Kamaladevi. A quirk of fate in early childhood gave her the written word which became her window into the wider world when social and domestic imperatives cut off her participation in the national movement. For the rest of her life, Subbalakshmi continued to mark her resistance in small ways and left behind fragments of paper as her archive.

Uma Chakravarti is a feminist historian, teacher, democratic rights’ activist, and theorist of caste. She taught history at Miranda House, University of Delhi from 1966-1998. She has written widely on ancient India, women in the 19th century, and on contemporary issues specially caste, gender and democratic rights. Prof Chakravarti has published 7 books and more than 50 papers including Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens and Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai in which she contextualised gender issues within the larger framework of caste contestations, class formation and legal changes. She has been involved in the Indian women’s movement for more than 40 years. As an activist, Prof. Chakravarti has also been part of collaborative academic and democratic interventions on community strife and the complicity of the state in violence against particular segments of society. She is also a filmmaker; her first film was ‘A Quiet Little Entry.