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.
Instead, the challenges she has faced, coupled with her own character, have led her to gravitate towards many of the qualities that defined Mahatma Gandhi: conviction, perseverance, honesty, truthfulness and leadership. Living these qualities comes with its own share of daily struggles, which she endures by relying mainly on her copious reserves of stubbornness.
Ma has always been a contemporary person, a woman of the times who has enjoyed fashion, music, food and entertainment. Today she lives in her eclectically decorated house, surrounded by her hand-made dolls, supporting staff and their families, her own family and friends while dealing with the vagaries of modern life in Delhi. She does not lead an austere life nor does she impose her way of life on others. She does have a motto in her life – she is doing it ‘her way’ as in the classic Sinatra song. She is unusual and has accomplished the unusual.
She is now searching for her connection with the eternal and spiritual. Just a few months ago, she remarked that she is now struggling to find a motivation in this life. I was profoundly saddened by this comment, but on reflection I realized otherwise. Hinduism believes in unity between creatures and the creator and, that life on earth allows us to experience an existence apart from the universe and the universal spirit. Eventually they come back together and this temporary duality returns to a singularity. The Sanskrit term for this is advaita, which simply means non (a) duality (dvaita). This then gives rise to