FOREWORD
Dr. MALCOLM S. ADISESHIAH, Vice-Chaneellor, University of Madras
It is appropriate that 1975 which was proclaimed by the United Nations as the International Women’s Year and the following year 1976 which was declared by that same august body as the start of the United Nations Decade for Women should see the publication by the University of Madras of the Diwan Bahadur K. Krishnaswami Rao Endowment Lectures 1971-72 devoted to the subject, ‘‘The Status of Women in Tamil Nadu during the Sangam Age.*” The status of women is a theme which has no beginning and no end. It is perennially alive and insistently challenging.
Reading through this clear, concise and illuminating historical commentary on the status of women in this part of eur vast country at the time of Valluvar’s famous writings and Nakkirar’s memorable poems, two thoughts come to my mind.
The first is whether we, the people of India, the community in Tamil Nadu, will learn from history. This is an important issue because nothing that has been adumbrated on the status of women either internationally in the World Plan of Action adopted by the United Nations Conference on the Status of Women held last year in Mexico city of set forth in detail, precision and majestic sweep in our National Report on the Status of Women in India entitled, ‘‘Towards Equality,” contains anything that has not been recorded two thousand years ago, as evidenced in the lectures published in this monograph. And so the question is, will we learn from history or will we once more live up to the generalisa- tion that the only lesson that men (and women) learn from history is that they never learn from history?
The second issue is related to our capacity for verbalisa- tion and the consequences of our normative life styles. How far are the characterisations, rights and qualities attributed to
