From Then to Now: Motherhood, Women’s Studies, and CUS

After a long silence, I return to writing—not with answers, but with a story.

A story of motherhood, misrecognition, and the quiet labour of holding everything together.

A story that moves from Women’s Studies to Centre for Undergraduate Studies, from invisibility to a second chance.

Because sometimes, writing is the only way to make sense of what we have lived.

Return: Notes from a Long Silence
It has been quite some time since I last posted on my blog. The immediate reason for this silence was the examination season of the FYUG Programme at the University. As the Academic Coordinator, this marks my second experience of FYUGP End Semester examinations since I stepped into the Centre for Undergraduate Studies in October. I have come to see each such phase as a moment of self-reflection—an opportunity to learn, both personally and professionally.
Now, as the examinations draw to a close, this piece marks my return to the world of writing. What follows is largely a series of personal reflections—revisiting the roads I have travelled so far. Those who are not inclined towards such introspection may prefer to wait for my upcoming posts. Yet, as the well-known assertion reminds us, the personal is political, and every life story matters to someone. Perhaps, more importantly, writing this piece is also a way of releasing emotions that have long remained contained—because sometimes, writing is the only way to think again, and to move forward.

Before and After October 2025
October 2025 marks a decisive turning point in my professional life—so much so that I now see my journey at the University of Kerala as divided into two phases: before and after October 2025.
The years from 2017 to 2025 were marked by difficult terrains, dark passages, and deeply unsettling experiences, with only fleeting moments of calm. Alongside this, I was raising two young children, navigating the uncertainties of the COVID pandemic, and slowly losing touch with the vibrant, energetic self I once was when I began my career at St. Thomas College, Kozhencherry, in 2007. The person shaped by my father—strong, opinionated, and unafraid to argue—had begun to feel like an apparition.

Motherhood, Work, and the Weight of Expectations
Raising two young children without consistent support from extended family was one of the most demanding phases of my life—physically exhausting, emotionally draining, and intellectually unsettling in ways I had not anticipated. It is often said, almost as a ready-made reassurance, that having a “supportive husband” is enough. While I have never denied that support, what is often left unsaid is that my husband, too, inhabits a professional world that demands time, attention, and measurable performance. Support, therefore, exists within limits; it does not dissolve structural constraints.
What weighed on me as much as the labour itself was the quiet, persistent expectation that I should be able to manage everything seamlessly. There is a deeply internalised cultural script that frames women as naturally capable of absorbing pressure—of adjusting, accommodating, and continuing without visible strain. Motherhood, in this script, is not merely a role; it is an all-consuming identity that must coexist effortlessly with every other responsibility.
Looking back, I often feel that what appeared to be my “fortune”—entering government service at the age of 25, before marriage—also became, in many ways, a “misfortune.” A woman with a stable and respectable job is assumed to have secured her place in the world. The narrative then shifts: her ambitions are considered fulfilled, and her primary responsibility becomes the home. Professional work is reduced to routine—something she “goes to”—while the real work is expected to happen within the domestic sphere.
In such a framework, my anxieties were not seen as legitimate. At a time when many women were struggling to secure employment, my struggle was of a different kind: how to remain intellectually alive, professionally committed, and ethically accountable while also being fully present for two very young children. The difficulty of this balancing act was rarely acknowledged. Instead, it was often interpreted as an inability to “manage well.”
To be fair, there were moments when members of the extended family did step in to help, and I remain grateful for those instances. But such support was often intermittent—arriving at moments when I was already on the verge of breaking down, and always accompanied by an unspoken awareness of its limited duration. Knowing that help would soon withdraw created a different kind of strain. Instead of offering stability, it often intensified anxiety, because I was constantly preparing for its absence even while receiving it. Temporary relief, in that sense, did not translate into sustained support; it only made the fragility of my situation more visible.
What troubled me more deeply was the absence of recognition from those who might have understood—other women. When emotional and intellectual exhaustion is normalised, it becomes invisible. When it becomes invisible, it is easily dismissed. In those moments, I realised that the problem was not simply a lack of help, but a lack of language and empathy to articulate what women experience when they are expected to excel simultaneously in mutually demanding spheres.
There was also a more subtle form of erasure at work. The labour of caregiving—time-consuming, repetitive, and emotionally intense—rarely counts as “work” in the way professional labour does. Yet, it is this invisible labour that sustains everything else. To move from caring for a sleepless child at night to standing in a classroom the next morning, expected to be intellectually sharp and emotionally composed, requires a kind of energy that is neither acknowledged nor measured.
Over time, this dissonance began to affect my sense of self. I found myself constantly negotiating between two competing expectations: the ideal of the devoted mother and the ideal of the committed academic. Both demanded total presence; neither allowed for incompleteness. And in trying to inhabit both, I often felt that I was falling short of each.
It is perhaps in this context that I began to understand how deeply gendered our ideas of “efficiency” and “strength” are. Efficiency, for a woman, often means the ability to endure without complaint. Strength is measured not by the capacity to question or resist, but by the ability to continue quietly. I was expected to be “strong” in precisely this way—to absorb, adjust, and move forward.
But there is another kind of strength—the one I had inherited from my father and cultivated through my academic training: the strength to question, to critique, and to refuse easy acceptance. And it was this very strength that made my struggles more visible to myself, even when they remained invisible to others.
In retrospect, what I experienced during those years was not merely personal difficulty, but a deeply structured condition—one that many women inhabit, often without the space to articulate it. And perhaps, writing about it now is not just an act of recollection, but an attempt to give form to what so often remains unspoken.

Inheritance: My Father and My Research Supervisor
In reflecting on my life, I often return to two formative influences—my father and my research supervisor.
My father, a former Assistant Commissioner in the Sales Tax Department who later chose voluntary retirement to practise law at the High Court of Kerala, embodied an uncompromising work ethic. His working day extended far beyond official hours; it ended only when every responsibility had been fulfilled. For him, drawing a salary from the public exchequer was not a reason for comfort, but a call to accountability.
When the system began to suffocate his integrity—when being incorruptible itself became an anomaly—he chose to walk away. From him, I inherited a deep commitment to hard work, integrity, and self-respect. Ironically, it was this inheritance that intensified my own moral crisis when I found myself unable to meet my standards due to the constraints of caregiving.
My research supervisor reinforced another dimension of this inheritance: the belief that a day without learning is a day lost. Her intellectual rigour, discipline, and expectations shaped me profoundly. It was only during my maternity years—when my academic life was repeatedly disrupted—that I realised how deeply the habit of reading and learning had become part of my being. 

The Maternity Years: Exhaustion Without Pause
The years between 2011 and 2017 were marked by relentless exhaustion. Two maternity periods, two young children with a three-year age gap, and minimal support created a life that was anything but peaceful.
My second delivery—a C-section—remains especially vivid. Once back home, I found myself managing a newborn and a three-year-old largely on my own. Nights were fragmented by the cries of the baby; days were consumed by the demands of the older child. Sleep became a luxury. What I longed for most was something simple—rest, uninterrupted and unburdened.
Even then, the advice I received was to be “strong” and “efficient.” Emotional fatigue was to be managed silently. Ironically, some of those who offered such advice now struggle with similar demands. Temporary help did come at times, and I remain grateful for it—but temporary support never provides stability. It only reminds you of its own impermanence. 

Entering the University: Faith, Survival, and Quiet Resistance
When I joined the University in 2017, I was emotionally drained. Yet, the desire to learn and grow remained intact.
It was during this phase that I began the practice of lighting the vilakku each morning before leaving for work. Though ritual was always part of my upbringing, this particular practice emerged out of a need for grounding. Like many, I turned to astrology in moments of uncertainty—not out of unwavering belief, but in search of reassurance. Whether it was faith, fate, or endurance, I survived.
A significant source of support during this time was Lakshmi Chechi. Her integrity, experience, and willingness to understand me made a difference. Through her, I began to be seen—if not fully understood, at least not misjudged. As life slowly returned to normal after the pandemic, my professional space too began to stabilise.

The Centre for Women’s Studies and the Sabarimala Moment
One of the most defining—and later, most misrepresented—moments of my academic and administrative life unfolded during my tenure as Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies.
In January 2019, I presented a paper at an academic conference that engaged with the Supreme Court verdict on Sabarimala—a verdict that had already unsettled Kerala’s social fabric and produced intense, polarised debates across legal, political, religious, and feminist domains. The conference itself was a significant gathering, attended by several stalwarts in Women’s Studies. As Director of a Centre for Women’s Studies, I was acutely aware that any intervention I made would be read not merely as an individual scholarly position, but as one carrying institutional weight. It was precisely this awareness that shaped the way I approached the paper.
My intention was neither to defend tradition uncritically nor to celebrate the verdict in a triumphalist manner. Instead, I attempted to develop a theoretically grounded reading of the issue—one that could hold together the tensions between constitutional morality, gender justice and lived religious practices. I was interested in asking difficult questions rather than offering easy answers.
My argument was not a rejection of gender equality, nor was it an endorsement of exclusionary practices. It was an attempt to resist the flattening of a complex issue into binaries of progressive versus regressive. I spoke about the need for feminist discourse to remain attentive to the inherent contradictions in the verdict as an ethical imperative. 
The presentation itself unfolded within what should have been a space for rigorous academic exchange. Yet, what followed was not engagement, but a striking silence. There were no sustained questions, no serious attempts at counter-argument, no effort to open a dialogue around the nuances I had tried to foreground. At the time, I read this silence as indifference, or perhaps as disagreement that had not yet found articulation.
It was only later that I began to understand that the absence of dialogue within the formal space of the conference did not mean the absence of response.
Over time, my presentation came to be recast in ways that bore little resemblance to what I had actually argued. A simplified and deeply inaccurate version began to circulate: that I had taken a conservative position against the Sabarimala verdict, and that this stance had led to my removal from the position of Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies. Neither of these claims was true.
The factual sequence is clear. The conference took place in January 2019. I stepped down from the Directorship in June 2020, of my own volition, after recognising that the administrative demands of the role were becoming increasingly difficult for me to sustain. There was no directive from the Vice Chancellor asking me to resign, nor was there any formal censure of my academic position.
Yet, the narrative persisted—and perhaps even gained traction precisely because it travelled through informal but effective channels. Looking back now, I realise that the conference itself included individuals who had the necessary networks and points of contact within Thiruvananthapuram through which such a story could circulate, gather authority, and eventually return to me as something already “known.” What began as an academic presentation thus became, in its afterlife, a carefully condensed narrative—one that was easier to transmit than the argument itself.
I came to know of this circulating version of my story only much later, and quite incidentally, when Lakshmi Chechi attended a conference outside the state and was mistaken for me. In that moment of mistaken identity, she was told, with certainty, the story of how I had taken a strong position against the Sabarimala verdict and had been removed from my administrative role as a consequence. What struck me most was not just the distortion, but the confidence with which it was narrated—as though it were an established fact.
What continues to unsettle me about this episode is not disagreement. Disagreement is fundamental to academic life; it is what sustains intellectual growth. What is difficult to come to terms with is the absence of intellectual engagement. If my argument was flawed, it could have been interrogated. If it was unclear, it could have been questioned. If it was provocative, it could have been debated. Instead, it was translated into a label—one that was easier to circulate than the argument itself.
In retrospect, this experience revealed something crucial about institutional life: that ideas do not always travel as arguments; they often travel as narratives shaped by the anxieties, expectations, and ideological investments of those who receive them. And once such narratives take root, they begin to define you in ways that are difficult to undo.
Perhaps, then, this was not merely an episode of misinterpretation, but a moment that forced me to confront the limits of being “understood” within institutional spaces. It marked, in many ways, the beginning of my gradual withdrawal into a quieter, less visible professional existence—one where I spoke less, engaged less, and chose my spaces more carefully.
And yet, even in that withdrawal, the questions that animated that paper have not left me. If anything, they have only deepened—reminding me that the work of thinking critically is not always rewarded with clarity or recognition, but it remains necessary nonetheless.

October 2025: The Unexpected Turn
On 10 October 2025, I received the University Order assigning me additional charge as Academic Coordinator at the Centre for Undergraduate Studies. It was, quite honestly, the shock of my life.
By then, all I desired was peace — to read, to think, and to remain within my own academic space. I had gradually receded into invisibility. I did not fully belong anywhere, nor was I part of any visible networks. I had come to accept that I was, in many ways, nobody’s anybody. And I had come to define myself as someone who had stepped down from the role of Director, Centre for Women’s Studies - a ready reason for the world to label me ‘inefficient’.
Looking back, I realise that what I considered my strength—the ability to question, critique, and resist easy alignments—was perhaps seen as a weakness. A critical mind is not easily accommodated. I have always been political in my perspectives, yet never in ways that allow for fixed labels. And in a world that thrives on categorisation, being unclassifiable can render one invisible.
It is precisely for this reason that I remain deeply grateful to the Hon’ble Vice Chancellor. In entrusting me with this responsibility, he recognised me despite my invisibility. He saw a possibility I had stopped seeing in myself. This opportunity, therefore, is not merely an administrative assignment—it is, in many ways, a second life within the University.
Had I been asked, I would have declined. I lacked the confidence to say “yes,” and the prospect of working in that space felt overwhelming. Yet, six months into this role, I find myself rethinking everything I once assumed.
This moment, I now realise, was not about how the institution saw me—but about how I began to see myself again.

A Second Chance: Work, Trust, and Renewal
If I continue at the Centre for Undergraduate Studies, it is, in no small measure, because of the professional environment shaped by its Director, Prof. Sam Solomon. When I first stepped into this role, I carried with me a sense of apprehension—perhaps even resistance—about working in close administrative coordination with him. That initial hesitation, I must admit, arose not from experience, but from distance and assumption.
Six months into this journey, I find that many of those assumptions have been quietly dismantled.
What stands out most in my experience of working with him is the extraordinary investment of time and energy he brings to the functioning of the Centre. Administrative work, especially in a space as complex as the FYUGP framework, is often invisible labour—meticulous, relentless, and rarely acknowledged. To ensure that such a system does not falter requires not only efficiency, but a deep sense of responsibility. In this regard, his commitment has been unwavering.
At the same time, what has made this professional association meaningful for me is not merely efficiency, but the space it allows for intellectual engagement. I have always believed that I can inhabit a workplace fully only when I am able to trust those I work with, and equally, when I am able to question, critique, and debate without hesitation. My training—both from my father and my research supervisor—has made me instinctively responsive to rigour, discipline, and integrity. But it has also made me incapable of silent compliance.
In this context, what I have found at CUS is a rare balance: an environment where discussions can be direct, disagreements can be articulated, and decisions can still emerge from mutual respect rather than hierarchy alone. The transparency in our exchanges and the absence of unnecessary opacity have allowed me to engage with my responsibilities without the constant burden of self-censorship.
Perhaps what also makes this association work is an alignment—not in personalities, but in work ethic. The insistence on thoroughness, the refusal to cut corners, and the belief that administrative responsibility is as demanding as academic labour are values I recognise from my own upbringing. In that sense, working here has not felt alien; it has felt, unexpectedly, familiar.
Till October 2025, we were two individuals who would likely never have crossed paths in any meaningful way. Our professional trajectories moved in parallel, without intersection. Yet, circumstances brought us into the same space, and what I had once perceived as a difficult possibility has gradually unfolded into a productive and even sustaining collaboration.
If I now see this phase of my life as a second chance, it is not only because of the opportunity I was given, but also because of the conditions that have allowed me to inhabit that opportunity with a sense of dignity, clarity, and renewed confidence.
And in that, the presence and working style of the Director have been central.

Closing Reflections
This has been a long narrative, and I thank those who have read it with patience.
Like the lamp I began lighting each morning out of desperation, this blog remains a space where I can release what has been weighing within me. I never expected many readers, yet over 19,000 people have visited these pages. Not everyone may agree with my thoughts, but the very act of reading matters.
And perhaps, that is enough.
Signing off for now,  Have a good day.