Taken at the Flood

Vasanth Kannabiran, noted feminist, activist, and writer gathers the many strands of her “helter-skelter” life to pen a feminist memoir that recounts not only the milestones in her own journey, but the life and times of a country in flux.

Kannabiran was witness to, and participant in, Andhra Pradesh politics and civil liberties during the tumultuous decades of the late 1970s and 1980s, both as part of the women’s movement, and through the legal engagements of her husband, the legendary K.G. Kannabiran. The dark days of the 1975 Emergency; the uneasy calm in the aftermath of communal violence in Hyderabad in 1984; the thrill of electioneering; the historic peace talks between the Naxals and the government; the anti-arrack movement; Rameeza Bee and Mathura; alliances and networks across South and Southeast Asia—she was there, and she tells it like it was.

Kannabiran carries the reader with her as she seamlessly unfolds, and enfolds, her life into the politics she lived, offering up a memoir that is candid yet empathetic, endearing yet sharply observant, personally and politically feminist on every single page.