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Dedicated to Amma and Appa
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Harijan Ashram
Sewagram
Aga Khan Palace
Shimla
Valmiki Ashram
Birla House, 1947–48
Harilal Kaka, Manilal Kaka, Ramdas Kaka
Women as Victims in Conflict Areas and as Promoters of Peace
Charkha: The Hand Spinning Wheel
A Story about Dolls
The Meaning of Swaraj
Family Trees
Glossary
Picture Section
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
A Son’s Foreword
This is a book about the experiences of a young girl during an extraordinary and tumultuous period in recent Indian and world history. The seventy-eight-year-old lady recounting her childhood memories is my mother, Tara Bhattacharjee, born Tara Gandhi and known to me, my sister Sukanya and countless others simply as Ma.
Ma was born in Delhi on 24 April 1934, the eldest child of Devadas and Lakshmi who subsequently also had three sons: Rajmohan, Ramchandra and Gopalkrishna. As a granddaughter of Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi and of Chakravarti Rajagopalachari (popularly known as Rajaji), her early experiences from the late 1930s and ’40s are a virtual moving image of that era, a real period piece. In 1911, the capital city of colonial India moved from Calcutta to New Delhi, and landmark buildings like the colonnaded circular Connaught Place and the art deco Viceroy’s residence were completed in the 1930s. This book dwells on what Delhi was like at the time, and, since it is written retrospectively, it highlights how Ma has been a witness to the transformation of Delhi into the metropolis it is today.
The recollections also beautifully capture the mood of the period and reflect on thoughts, sensations and philosophies that can be drawn from moments of deep change and intense human interaction. The pages speak for themselves and I am far from being an impartial observer. My main purpose in writing this introduction is to set a context to help the reader approach the stories related by Ma with sympathy and warmth. Within this book lie some of the events and experiences that shaped Ma’s personality. This, coupled with my intense interest in India, have compelled me to commission this translation of the Hindi original published several years ago. Through this faithful English translation, I hope to share my mother’s insights with a broader audience and with her many friends across the world. So, while there are dollops of selfish interest in seeing this book through, I do believe that in Ma’s storytelling lie some beautiful reflections on humanity, spirituality, the character of legendary leaders, and the nature of the Indian society, which is the result of incredible cultural mixing over the last 5,000 years.
India is not often held up as a role model nation and heaven only knows how much needs to be fixed in the country. It would take a treatise to list down and analyze the multitude of problems in this country, but at the core the issue today is a carelessness that has crept into its society – carelessness in the execution of public services. And this carelessness is tolerance taken too far. The point I am making is that India is no longer a poverty-stricken country and has had a very long spell of economic growth that has created a wealthy and worldly middle class. It is certainly incumbent on these middle and wealthy classes, if not on everyone, to not accept poor levels of public service. Nor should they act as if it is outside their gift to make a difference for the society at large.
Freedom of press and an independent judiciary have helped in generating some change though. Over the past year or so, the nation has seemed to shed its complacence on some issues such as the decades of corruption that has made billionaires of many public officials. More generally, consider that as we gaze at the Arab Spring, the Euro crisis, the modern wars of imperialism and wonder what of Pax Americana, we should spare a thought for a country that is today one country, one currency zone, has 22 official languages with as many scripts, is arguably the most culturally and racially mixed society in the world, has sprung and/or provides shelter to countless philosophies of life (Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Zoroastrian, to name a few) and houses the world’s three Semitic religions. It is also the world’s biggest democracy.
Most of the world’s nations are tribal in nature in the sense that many of their citizens are bound together by some or all of a series of common traits: racial background, language, politics, religion, to name a few obvious ones. Such tribalism is a source of strength to those that it binds, but we should not forget that it is equally good at excluding and ostracizing those from other cultures and with other bonds. It is important to be conscious of this simple reality as we now live in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world. In the book by the BBC production, The Story of India, Michael Wood retold a quote from an Indian journalist that encapsulates one of India’s real strengths – its diversity:
‘…when Sonia Gandhi, widow of Rajiv Gandhi, Nehru’s grandson…stood down as PM-in-waiting after the 2004 election, you saw the unlikely situation of an Italian Catholic woman as prime minister-elect giving way to a Sikh who swore the (prime ministerial) oath to a Muslim president in a majority Hindu nation. Now, I ask you, where else on Earth could that happen?’
And now to return to Ma’s book. Amongst the many people Ma recalls and mentions in the book are her paternal grandfather, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, her father Devadas, her mother Lakshmi and her maternal grandfather Rajaji. Her sense of amazement in looking back is evident as these memories are of her parents, grandparents, family and friends and not of the same people as leaders, statesmen and visionaries. These are memories of individuals about whom claims were later made such as – ‘Generations to come will scarcely believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood’ – as Albert Einstein said of Mahatma Gandhi upon his death.
Ma displays a subtle bewilderment in recounting her stories as the events and people she describes have since fundamentally shaped humanity at least in the Indian subcontinent for over half a century. The experiences themselves are wonderful examples of a child’s impressions of things, and in their recounting they are unfettered by the passing of time. In that sense, they are no different from the memories of countless other children. The power of hindsight is what makes them extraordinary.
To not beat around the bush, my mother is unusual. Not in any eccentric way but in the way she leads her life and embodies with unconscious ease many contradictions in the context of today’s societies. Thus, she is a strong mother figure while never having played the traditional role of a mother; a successful and impactful leader of organizations without ever having worked in corporate environments, let alone studying business administration; a spiritual friend, philosopher and guide to many people, although a rebel at heart; a craver for attention who is at her happiest on her own.
Ma is currently the Vice Chairman of Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti, India’s leading memorial to Mahatma Gandhi and the site of his martyrdom. She is an accomplished and highly-regarded social worker who has worked with women and children in the villages of India through the Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust (an institution founded by Mahatma Gandhi) of which she is a trustee. While a major supporter of women’s welfare, she has famously shunned the activist slogan of ‘female awakening’, and instead, maintains that it is not for women but for men to awaken, known as ‘purush jaagaran’ in Hindi. In a similar vein, she maintains that it is the mothers who are to blame for the continuity of male domination in Indian families because they do not raise their daughters and sons with the same values; they are not taught alike and are given different tools with which to tackle life. Ma’s impartiality is refreshing in a society that has constitutionally sponsored affirmative action in many areas of life, with all the benefits and pitfalls that this brings. As an example of her experiences in this field, we have included in this book some essays by her. These talk about women as victims in conflict areas, the Gandhian philosophy of Khadi, and about her passion for dolls.
Ma maintains that she has found a meaning in life through her work with the spinners and weavers of Khadi, a cloth that is entirely handmade, from the spinning of the thread to the weaving of the fabric. She draws a symbolic parallel between hand-spinning and the proverbial thread of creation linking man with his origins. As a recognition of her efforts in this cottage industry, she was appointed a member on the government’s Khadi and Village Industries board, a position she held for several years.
Ma is a gifted linguist, fluent in Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Italian, and of course, English, while being conversational in Gujarati, Tamil, Punjabi and French. A couple of years ago, she informed me that she would have to give up her lessons in Mandarin as it was impinging too much on her time and that she had reached the limits of her ability to usefully absorb more languages. Needless to say, I didn’t even know that she had started taking these lessons.
She has not aged mentally and instead her natural inquisitiveness is perhaps more acute today than all those years ago as a mother of two young children. Recently, already in her mid-seventies, she remarked to me that number 9 was a magic number. ‘How do you mean?’ I asked, puzzled. ‘Whenever you add it to another number between 1 and 9 and add up all the resulting digits, the original other number is returned,’ she replied factually. Any number theorists out there will not be surprised and will know well the many notable properties of 9 in our base 10 number system. Instead, what is remarkable is that having consistently failed maths at school and university and fearful of the subject all her life, she now approaches the subject with curiosity and precision and has independently identified a mathematical perplexity! She doesn’t look at it in this way, of course, and for her this is just a beautiful discovery at which to marvel.
One day while travelling with her in a car in Delhi, I observed that she was holding biscuits and other small snacks in her hand. Normally cars stuck in Delhi traffic are besieged by children, women and men displaying all types of ailments and demanding charity. But it was different that day as no one appeared and after the long wait at yet another traffic signal, she sighed to me, ‘You see when one is prepared to give to a beggar, then try as hard as you might, none will appear. They only appear when one is least able or willing to satisfy their asking. One should try to give when one is least able; it is not giving if you give only on your own terms.’
There are a hundred more stories I could recount that would fill a whole book, and I do not want to be guilty of writing only through rose-tinted spectacles. My sister and I alone know the challenges of interacting with a single parent who is headstrong, driven and charismatic. Often I feel that she is the child and we the elders, occasional role reversals occurring since my father’s passing. In fact, the hardest thing about our relationship is accepting the life choices of the other and in having the other accept help from you. Despite all its strains and challenges, my sister and I have always had an extremely close relationship with our mother, and we consider ourselves fortunate for the depth and trust of our three-way bond.
My mother has had three distinct periods in her life: childhood, married life, and life after fifty and as a widow. Through these phases, she grew from being an extremely privileged though rebellious child to a pampered middleaged lady with her erudite diplomat husband and children in Rome, and finally to a single woman beyond her fifties leading a tough, challenging and ultimately rewarding life.
This book is about Ma’s childhood and her family. As the eldest of four children, she had responsibility thrust upon her from an early age. Her fondness and caring for her brothers has been ceaseless, a love reciprocated by the brothers and their families. Each brother has achieved enormous success in his respective field in addition to being an internationally accomplished writer. More recently, and particularly after my father’s passing, her brother Ramchandra was a deep inspiration to her. As one of the most gifted Hindu philosophers of our time and as a man who practised what he preached, Ramchandra Gandhi was a well-known figure in India and in the international academic circles who sadly passed away in 2007.
At the core of my mother’s spirituality and humanity are two key figures: her mother and her husband; in other words, my grandmother and my father. You will hear more about my grandmother in the memoirs that follow, and hence I will limit myself to a few paragraphs on my father whose own background is symbolic of and intertwined with the phenomenal evolution of Indian society.
Jyoti Prasad (or ‘Baba’ as I called him) was born in 1922 when the British empire, financially burdened by years of imperialist expansion and the debilitating effects of World War I, began to steadily unwind. He was born in the village of Bhatpara, District 24 Parganas North, outside Calcutta in today’s West Bengal. The address, still current today, is yet another remnant of the infrastructure left to India by the British, in this case of an organized postal system and its associated administrative order.
As a son of the leading Brahmin family of the village, Baba was born into respectability and responsibility, and went on to achieve recognition and success as an economist, initially in rural Bengal at Tagore’s Viswabharati University in Shantiniketan, then later in the Indian government in New Delhi, and finally at the United Nations in Rome, Italy. Twelve years younger than him, my mother met my father at Shantiniketan in the mid-1950s, and later, they married – the result of love and not arrangement. This was unique for the time, and even more so, given their different Hindu castes. My mother’s statesmanlike family was no reason for my father’s family to compromise on fundamental Hindu principles; they maintained that no Bhattacharjee family member would attend the wedding in Delhi. My father’s father, Dadu, did bless the union as he was very fond of his youngest son and equally of young Tara, but not without substantial debate via written correspondence between him and Rajaji, himself a Brahmin who had blessed the wedding of his own daughter, Lakshmi, with a lower caste banya – Devadas – the son of Mahatma Gandhi. Thus, Tara’s wedding took place in March 1957 and was held at 1 York Place (currently, 10 Janpath), which subsequently became the residence of Lal Bahadur Shastri, who in 1964 succeeded Nehru to become India’s second prime minister. Dadu did eventually yield and allowed a few distant relatives to attend what was to become the society wedding of the year.
Bengal’s role in India today is somewhat diluted, but back in the ’30s and ’40s, it was the very backbone of cultural India. It was the seat of reformist and progressive movements. Writers such as Tagore, painters such as Jamini Roy, and the rich tradition of theatre and folk music in Bengal helped to strengthen the confidence in Indians to stand on their own and demand independence from Britain. For most Indians of the time, Bengalis were the period’s equivalent of the Renaissance Tuscans, and thus despite the wedding ‘snub’, Ma’s family felt honoured to have a distinguished Bengali son-in-law.
Bhatpara is the mainspring of the Bengali Bhattacharjee clan, and an epic saga could be recounted about this village and the clan. How it has evolved in the shadows of economic and migratory cycles, our ancestral home there, the family itself and in particular Jyoti’s father, his elder brother Sambhu and Sambhu’s wife who is alive today – all put together make for a potential Satyajit Ray movie. Bhatpara is also the home of progressive India where an inter-caste wedding was allowed at a time when no one other than a Brahmin was allowed into the kitchen for fear of staining the purity of the house. This marriage was indubitably about love even if it must have been sparked by Tara’s rebellious streak.
As is so often portrayed in Indian culture and mythology, great achievement comes through great sacrifice. And so goes the legend of Sambhu who sacrificed his lifestyle to help secure his younger brother’s future. When Baba was offered a scholarship to study for a PhD at the University of Illinois, Dadu forbade him from going as leaving the shores of India was considered blasphemous at that time. Until this point, Sambhu had led a socially active life as the extrovert son of a well-to-do Brahmin businessman. As the cardinal unit of the village, the family needed worthy sons who could run the business, act with leadership in the community and play the many ritualistic roles expected of a clan head, including that of leading communal pujas at the family temple situated within the main house complex. Sambhu’s love for his younger brother steered him to take responsibility for all this so that Baba could be free to pursue academics and a career outside Bhatpara.
Dadu passed away in 1959. By then, he had seen the return of my father, his prodigal son, after six uninterrupted years in the United States, and had embraced Tara as a daughter-in-law and blessed the birth of Tara and Jyoti’s daughter, my older sister Sukanya.
Sambhu’s wife, Santvana, eighty-five years old and alive today, is a living representation of traditional Bengal. She is my Bodo Ma (or elder Ma) and is a paragon of Bengali simplicity and sophistication, attired almost always in simple white saris. She is herself a Bhattacharjee from Bhatpara and is one of nine siblings. To the best of my knowledge, she has not been outside Bengal very often, and has left Bhatpara only a few times in her life to go to Calcutta, or on pilgrimages to sacred sites in India. Today she is a diminutive figure, bent over after decades of sitting on the ground cooking for the family on a coal stove. Her mind is sharp and her voice brilliant as ever. She grasps things fast and is never surprised by world events, technological revolutions or global cultural idiosyncrasies, a trait that can at best be explained by the self-confidence that comes from being truly grounded in her own immediate society, a society which views itself as at the pinnacle of knowledge and teaching. She is above it all and has seen all manners of human interaction and socio-economic change from the window of her Bhatpara kitchen. She is the bearer of tradition and could have been Ma’s greatest detractor, but instead she always showered Ma with love and praise, as she does to this day. This is significant because she, more than any male in the house, has upheld the household rituals around purity; under a lesser woman’s watch, Ma would not have been allowed into the first floor of the house, let alone its kitchen.
The Bhatpara home stands unchanged by time, its yellow Italianate façade the same as I recall from the days I spent there as a child with Ma, Baba and Sukanya. In the hot monsoon months of July and August, we would spend a few weeks in Bhatpara eating Bengali food cooked on charcoal stoves and passing lazy afternoons resting by the tall windows overlooking the family temple. Dinner would not start before 10 p.m. and the evenings would merge into late nights addas with my cousins, aunts, uncles and parents. Things change slowly in Bhatpara; it was only in the mid-1980s that a dining table was introduced into the house, and a fridge arrived a few years after that.
Baba returned from America in the mid-1950s and established a centre for agricultural research at the university of Shantiniketan in West Bengal. From there he went on to distinguish himself as one of the great planners of the Indian socialist system and, together with other notable agricultural economists, as one of the minds behind the Green Revolution. His success in this field led him to a career with the United Nations, which in the mid-1960s took him to the headquarters of the Food and Agricultural Organization at Rome in Italy. This was the era of the Italian ‘miracolo’ and of the late ‘dolce vita’. This is where my sister and I spent our childhood, and during our twenty-year sojourn in that eternal city, Ma was primarily a mother, a wife and a homemaker. It certainly feels today that it was an idyllic childhood, and, unlike many others in the diplomatic communities, we integrated with the local Italian community effortlessly. We learnt the language, cooked the food, toured the country, and cultivated many local friends.
Baba died suddenly in 1986, and Ma, Sukanya and I relocated to Delhi during that summer. While our links with Italy still remain strong today, Ma has gone a step ahead and metamorphozed her relationship with the country from a domestic one to a working one. Given her affinity with the country and her fluency in the language, her life experiences and philosophies have attracted great interest in Italy where she is a frequent panellist and guest of honour at many conferences on peace, science and environment. The combination of Ma’s spiritualism with the flair and creativity of Italian enterprise has produced many beautiful and unique outcomes. You will find an example of this in the photo section of the book where the Italian telecommunication company, Telecom Italia, has used Gandhi’s imagery to heighten the significance of modern means of communication.
The romantic period of our family life in Rome came to an abrupt end with Baba’s passing in 1986, marking a clear watershed into Ma’s next stage in life – the current one. In some senses, this is the most accomplished phase of her life, but it has been characterized by struggle and search. Ma had a break point at the age of fifty and she literally had to reinvent herself after her husband’s death. Her children had left home to build their own careers and destinies, and she found herself completely alone. She was forced to find a new purpose in life. She rediscovered her independent spirit, and that, coupled with a strong resolve, led her to spirituality and social work. In a recent video interview covering the publication of a friend’s book on women’s lives after deep change, Ma said that her loneliness led her to look at life differently, and to consider everyone as her family, to dispel differences amongst people and, instead, be one with all.
When asked about Gandhi and her relationship with him, my mother often says that she is a granddaughter of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, but not a descendant of Mahatma Gandhi. The truth as I see it, however, is that over the past twenty-five years, her ambitions combined with her search for spiritual insight and balance has made Ma lead her life in many ways like him. Not in any ascetic way as one might do by wearing only white and by shunning jewellery. While she wears only the khadi material, she enjoys fashion, bright colours and silver jewellery, and takes pride in her appearance and looks. Nor has she consciously imitated Bapu to achieve spiritual enlightenment.