Kesarbai Kerkar, Marie Curie, and the empty frame.
[This column was published in its Icelandic version in Nútíminn on June 2, 2026. It arose from a simple observation: despite the bragadocio surrounding women’s rights, gender equality, and female empowerment in Iceland, the country has produced no women of truly exceptional accomplishment.]
In December 2024 I committed a grave offence by writing a column suggesting that a certain class of Icelandic women was helping lead the country in a destructive direction. The reaction was volcanic: infantile insults, earnest invitations to return to India, but not one engagement with the substance of what I had written. Bertrand Russell once observed that anger in an argument is a sign that one lacks a good reason for one’s position.
The intervening eighteen months have borne me out. Iceland has been brought to a dismal pass by the all-women government. The economy is wobbling, housing is in crisis, healthcare is under stress, immigration remains a mess, and the campaign to slip Iceland into the European Union proceeds under false pretences.
This time my scope is narrower.
Listening to Icelandic gender discourse, one might imagine that the central drama of human history is the acquisition of women’s rights. But rights are not the highest measure of a civilisation. They are the scaffolding; achievement is the cathedral. The point was never merely to secure freedoms but to build a civilisation worth handing down to the next generation.
Iceland keeps telling itself and the world that it is the pinnacle of female empowerment. But where are the great women – not the famous ones or the politicians, but women whose accomplishments transformed or enlarged the horizons of their field?
Icelandic public life is saturated with talk of equality, representation, and empowerment. But when one asks for examples of women whose achievements command worldwide admiration, the room empties rather quickly.
The usual defence is that Iceland is a tiny country. It is also a country that produced towering figures such as Halldór Laxness and Sigurður Helgason. The population defence therefore springs a leak before it has cleared the harbour.
Björk is famous. We are discussing excellence, not celebrity. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was symbolically important. She demonstrated that a woman could occupy the highest office in Iceland. But she is not of the same order as Marie Curie, Emmy Noether, Virginia Woolf, Maria Callas, or Kesarbai Kerkar.
Kesarbai who?
We shall come to her presently.
One of the minor entertainments of modern life is listening to smug Western commentary on India, which is routinely presented as patriarchal, backward, oppressive, and perpetually in need of instruction from enlightened Westerners. The tacit assumption is that if only India learned from the Nordics, Indian women might finally begin to flourish.
India’s shortcomings are neither secret nor ignored. Indians themselves discuss them incessantly. But the condescension becomes difficult to sustain when one examines the women it has produced.
If you have never heard of Kesarbai Kerkar, you should not be lecturing India about women.
Kesarbai was born in Goa. In 1977, NASA placed Kesarbai Kerkar alongside Bach and Beethoven on the Golden Record carried aboard the Voyager spacecraft, a curated collection intended to represent the finest expression of human civilisation. Today that voice from a small village in Goa is drifting through interstellar darkness and will likely outlast every nation, institution, and language alive today. Rabindranath Tagore described her as “an artistic phenomenon of exquisite perfection.”
She is not an outlier. She is merely primus inter pares. In music alone, examples of Indian women who reached Everest-like summits abound. Nor is music unique in this regard. India has produced women of extraordinary accomplishment in science, literature, business, politics, and the arts. India’s imperfections proved no barrier to the emergence of exceptional women. Nor did these women spend much time discussing empowerment.
Which brings us back to Iceland.
The country has invested an inordinate amount of emotion and energy in gender ideology. But the promised harvest remains elusive. We hear endless boasts about female empowerment and remarkably little about female greatness.
Nor has the project been cost-free.
The activists and their misbegotten ethos of equality have weakened families, impeded new family formation, and accelerated demographic decline. At the same time they have encouraged immigration from societies whose views on women and homosexuality are fundamentally at odds with the values they claim to cherish. They spend the entire morning denouncing patriarchy and the afternoon importing more of it.
The importance of a strong male presence in the upbringing of girls was once considered obvious. Today it has given way to talk of “toxic masculinity” and a persistent suspicion of masculine virtues. What Iceland calls progress has amounted to dismantling guard-rails fashioned through centuries of hard-won experience.
A civilisation cannot live on rights alone. After decades of being told Iceland is the summit of female flourishing, one question still hangs in the air, unanswered: where, exactly, are the great Icelandic women?