The grand mother

Her great grandmother remains simply known as Mataji — her existence reduced to the role that she occupied, her name lost forever. This weighs deeply for writer and diplomat Madhu Bhaduri. ‘Rajwati and Her Times’ is her way of stemming the loss by chronicling the life of her grandmother.

“Does it say something disturbing about the times we live in?”’ she asks in the epilogue. “Why are names of wives and mothers missing?” Simply written and translated by Arundhati Savdatti in a similar tone, Madhu’s commitment to the memory of her grandmother is a refusal to let her remain nameless.

It is this gap that the book has filled. Not a literary gap, but an important sociological one. Women are not only numbers, or just the roles they play. Even those who didn’t have interesting lives or lived in the closeted world of the families, their voices need to be heard.

Rajwati survives in the stories of her family, but she is also a vital stitch in the social fabric of India. The book pushes a boundary to raise an essential question — what constitutes ‘history’? Which lives are worth being recorded? Who gets included? Do only the exceptional count?

In the grand sweep of history, Rajwati would be lost and would not find herself even as a footnote. She lived her life within the confines of family. Her life did not remain untouched by a broad stroke of history. The deadliest plague to hit India became a rallying point for Bal Gangadhar Tilak. For Rajwati, it changed her life. The family moved from Lucknow, the heart of Awadh culture, to Sitapur. The dynamics changed, as her father Kunj Behari married for the second time — his new wife’s name absent from family memory, an erasure that is wilful too, especially as her being included in the family brought with it tensions.

Rajwati was enrolled in the Isabella Thoburn boarding missionary school in Lucknow. It was English medium, Christian, and would have been frowned upon by polite society. Widowed at 16, her sister Kalawati was banished to invisibility. Kunj Behari couldn’t change the world for her, but he did try and change her world. So, Kalawati taught at home — girls who wanted to read and write. She finally got re-married and even authored a book on Sanskrit grammar.

Her father was not the only unusual man. Rajwati’s husband Shivraj chose to go to America for engineering — a rarity in those days. Shivraj was the first Indian engineer to be employed by Tata Steels and they set up home in Orissa — where she was very much on her own. She lived through Partition. Her father-in-law died on the night straddling August 14 and 15 in the midst of riots, never having to choose between the two countries. The family continued to stay in Lahore, only to leave with the help of the first Pakistani Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali, who had been her father-in-law’s friend.

Her brother-in-law Balaraj was implicated in the Lord Hardinge bomb case and went to Kala Pani. Her mother-in-law — who had no time for socialising — had Bhagat Singh’s family as their neighbour.

Published by Stree, run by Mandira Sen, the book is part of the larger focus on women’s memoirs and autobiographies. She worked in America at a time when the country was in the midst of change. “There was the anti-Vietnam movement, women’s movement where women decided that they won’t be secondary anymore,” she says. When she came back to India, she carried this idea to Kolkata.

“In 1990, when Stree was started, we inherited what the women’s movement had thrown up about what is history — that we were seeing half the picture.” The publishing house focuses on putting women back into sociology and finding their voices not only in what they wrote, but in “anecdotes in recipes, in cooking, in handiwork”.

This book does just that. Finding Rajwati’s spirit in her aachars and marmalades, the ashram she goes to and her life in her husband’s family. It is very much an overview of the inner world of a woman who watched the freedom movement unravel from close quarters — within reach of it, but never part of it.

Pieced together by her granddaughter, it is very much a memoir that is spun out of family history and anecdotes. It is why, perhaps, it is so important — Madhu trying to weave her grandmother into the waft of history.

Years later, when Madhu was going to study in Cambridge, she offered her a piece of advice to marry if she found a person of her choice. Her mother shot back, as long as he is not Muslim. Rajwati, who had witnessed Partition, told her that she could marry whoever she wanted: a Muslim or a Christian and her parents would accept him in five days. “In many ways then, she was more open than her daughter-in-law,” says Mandira. It is also a worldview of a generation that lived through the worst but refused to believe the worst.

In the foreword of ‘A Revolutionary: Life Memoirs of a Political Activist, Lakshmi Sehgal’, Geraldines Forbes asks what history would look like if women were truly part of the story. “What about those women who never achieved anything significant in men’s terms? Are they failures, defective human beings?” she asks.

If the lens of history was turned and what women did become part of the stories we told about ourselves, would nurturing find its way on bookshelves as worth recording?

This is a track that plays on loop while reading Madhu’s book. In Rajwati’s life, it is impossible not to look at lives and the choices made by your grandmother as more than just stories, but through the lens of a tiny detail of social history. “We didn’t expect Rajwati to be unusual. We thought it would be a memoir of an affluent lady, but it is,” she says. “She may not have initiated the change. But she responds to it.”

Their voice, their story, their witnessing history — and living through it — are vital to understand how events shaped lives. Especially, to fill in the silences that history still has.

At the India International Centre this month, filmmaker Sagari Chhabra brought the voices of women who fought in Netaji’s Rani Regiment in Southeast Asia in a photograph exhibition. These were women who were trained how to fight but never found their place in the pantheon of freedom fighters. Fiery, feisty and fearless, their stories remained in the families they were part of — as sisters, mothers, grandmothers, but never to be included in the sweep of history that we study.

But are they destined to disappear? Do grandmothers — who witness history — have to get left out of the stories we tell after them to the world? Can we find ways to keep alive than just our memory? Can we record their stories as we easily as we drape their saris or wear their jewellery. Madhu has. I wish I had too.

— The writer is a literary critic