Janamma (c. 1860—c. 1940)

Abstract

Janamma’s beauty, her son later wrote, ‘was fatal to her education’. A skilled story-teller, she would fondly explain to her children what had happened:

One day … I was going to school with my friends. I was only 14 then. A couple of boys came from the opposite direction and, pointing to me, said, ‘That girl has magnificent breasts’. They thought I would not understand, but I did. I knew then just a few words of English, even though I have now forgotten them. My temper flared up and I used an abusive Malayalam expression, the politest translation of which is, ‘Your mother’s coconut!’ Somehow my father came to know of this incident and he decreed, ‘Janamrna shall not go to school any longer’. That was the end of my education, and that’s why I’m such an ignoramus.¹

Obviously, however, Janamma was no ignoramus. Highly literate in Malayalam, her reading aloud of classic Hindu texts in later life was sufficiently expert to hold the attention of her teenaged sons.² Even as a girl of fourteen, she knew enough English to understand the lascivious remark of the boys. And she had attended a school for seven or eight years by the time of her forced withdrawal.