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,