The story of Kerala’s first female writer-composer who transcended her time
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A gaunt elderly woman, her face sombre and framed by wispy grey hair left loose over her shoulders, gazes out in the side-profile. She wears the unmistakable symbols of an upper caste elite woman from 19th-century Kerala: the mundu mulakacha wrap tied across her chest, layers of gold around her neck, and a yawning ear piercing that signals a lifetime of wearing heavy gold earrings. Yet to dismiss Kuttykunju Thangkachi as merely a privileged noblewoman would be a profound mistake.
The tumultuous 84 years of her life, which ended in 1904, were packed with triumphs virtually unheard of for women of her era. She was the earliest female dramatist in Malayalam with her play Ajnatavasam, the first woman to write attakathas, or librettos, for Kathakali, and a prolific creator across Kerala’s indigenous musical forms, including kummi, thiruvathira pattu, kurathipattu and thullal. Crucially, she was the first female Carnatic composer from Kerala at a time when only men were accorded the elevated title of vaggeyakara (writer-composer).
Thangkachi’s oeuvre is well known within a tight circle of Kerala’s musicians, historians and literary scholars, but beyond these circles it has received relatively little attention. That dynamic shifted recently. At a Chennai concert organised by the Sruti Foundation to...