Reflections of an Extraordinary Era

Dedicated to Amma and Appa

Contents

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