Kalaga Puthagam

Say the word rebel and the mind supplies a parade of men: Buddha, Jesus, Spartacus, Gandhi, Che Guevara. Kalaga Puthagam sets out to break that reflex. In twenty-five vivid portraits it recovers the insurgents whom history quietly filed away: chiefly women, and a few others punished for refusing to be what the world required of them.

Here is Margaret Tobin of the Titanic; Sarah Chapman, who led the match workers of London out on strike; Begum Hazrat Mahal, who answered Queen Victoria’s proclamation with one of her own; Frieda Klugg, behind the first temporary cinema in Chennai; and Beulah Louise Henry, the inventor they called “Lady Edison.” Here too are Anna Freud; Mileva Marić, the long-forgotten wife of Albert Einstein; the cross-dressing soldier Hannah Snell; and Alan Turing, persecuted to his death for whom he loved.

Grassroots history, social history and feminist history turn here on a single pivot. In every sense, a riotous book.