![]() ![]() The employers, she wrote, know that their power is no longer paramount ‘they have to face a working people who have learnt the hard way the need for militant struggles and the strength that lies in their united action’. The report that Mythily published in Radical Review in April 1973 on the Valparai strike captures the wretchedness of capitalism, the bravery of the workers, and her own commitment to the struggle. ![]() The writer who came to interview her from Chennai was Mythily Sivaraman (1939-2021), a brave young scholar and journalist who was then the editor of Radical Review (1969-1973). ‘I’m not afraid of talking back to the writer or even to the durai ’. ‘I was always known as the bold one in our estate’, she said a few months later. ‘I kept murmuring, I’ll go on fighting, I’ll go on….’. As the police beat her, they asked her if she was a Communist and if she would go on strike again. When the police attacked the striking workers, Meenakshi was arrested by them and severely beaten up in the police van. Meenakshi, a worker in her forties, worked at the Periakarumalai Tea & Produce Company. On Tamil Nadu’s western border with Kerala lies the town of Valparai, where the plantation workers went on strike in May 1972. ![]() LeftWord Books pays tribute to Mythily Sivaraman (1939-2021), author of Haunted by Fire: Essays on Caste, Class, Exploitation and Emancipation. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |