The school teachers who went on a twelve-day satyagraha

This is a photograph taken in 1977 of my mother, K Jagadammal (right) with her peer and friend Jayshree Sawant (left) in Bombay. They were on a strike, outside a school compound, protesting the injustices served by the school they both taught in. My mother, K Jagadammal was born in 1949 in Kalanjoor, Pathanamthitta District, Kerala. Her parents were farmers, and she was one of five sisters and a brother. Her father later ran his own grocery shop, exactly opposite Kalanjoor Government School, that all of his children attended. My mother and her siblings all grew up to have careers as school-teachers.

The Maharanis of Travancore

It was in the fall of 1900, that the Maharajah of Travancore adopted the two girls in this photograph (taken in c. 1905), as his Maharanis — and as his ‘nieces’. For in Kerala, queens were never wives of monarchs, but their sisters. Under the matrilineal system of succession, ranks and titles passed in the female line; the Maharajah was a ruler not because his father was king before him, but because his mother was queen.