From Sati to Establishing the Tinnevelly Church: Women Empowerment and Social Reformation in Madhaviah’s Clarinda

The Clarinda Church at Palayamkottai, Tirunelveli, Tamilnadu, South India, holds a history that is overlooked in regional historiography. It is built on the roots of early feminism and women empowerment when a woman named Clavirunda Bai of Tanjore, the widow of a Maratha Brahmin, was saved from the practice of Sati by an English Officer named Henry Lyttelton, who took her to Palamcottah (today’s Palayamkottai) in the erstwhile Tinnevelly District of the Madras Presidency. Embracing the universal values of Christianity, Clavirunda Bai gets baptised by the German Protestant missionary Christian Friedrich Schwartz of the English Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). Her name is registered in the Palamcotta Church Register of 1780 as Clorinda or Clarinda. She goes on to build a church, which is known to date by her name, offering solace to the desolate. Clarinda Church is known to be “the first Church erected in connection with the Tinnevelly Mission” (Caldwell). She is known for her service in the region by building schools and wells and mobilising women. Novelist A. Madhaviah fictionalises this historical account in his 1915 novel Clarinda: A Historical Novel. The present paper analyses the aspects of women empowerment and social reformation in the novel, where the protagonist escapes Sati and is empowered and empowers people through education.