Last week I discovered my mother’s notebooks. My mother died on 15 January. Sorting through her things just recently I discovered a bunch of notepads and diaries. The notebooks, frayed at the edges and brown with age, contain hand-written personal jottings and musings. But mostly they contain long quotes from a range of authors and poets. Over the decades, in her flowery handwriting, she painstakingly copied passages from Shakespeare, Rabindranath Tagore, Sukumar Ray, Rumi, Mahasweta Devi, WB Yeats, the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, among many other texts.
Interspersed with household accounts, recipes and phone numbers, with spiritual quotations about the after-life just a page away from practical tips on how to make the best machcher jhol (fish curry), these lines seem to somehow explain how middle-class Indian women of my mother’s generation navigated and embraced change.
Born in 1944, my mother became an adult in the 1960s and early 1970s, decades in which Indian women tasted tantalising bits of freedom but remained in chains.
My mother did not have the freedoms we take for granted today. Educated urban middle-class women were mostly brought up in tradition-bound homes and protected by large close-knit families presided over by a grand male patriarch. Many yearned to participate in the great transformations sweeping through the lives of Western women in the 1960s, but they were—like my mother—often married off into “suitable” arranged marriages at a young age. Yet my mother and many of her contemporaries hankered, above all, to be able to make free choices of their own. And in subtle cheeky ways, they did succeed in establishing their individualities.
A heady time
One of the verses my mother noted down are these lines from Tagore: “Bidhir Badhon katbe tumi amon shaktiman, Tumi ki amni shaktiman…chirodin taanbe piche, chirodin rakhbe niche..” (Are you strong enough to reverse the course of destiny? Do you think yourself strong enough…to drag someone behind and hold them down forever). Written as a protest song against the British Raj, it can also be read as individual resistance poetry.
My mother was a great beauty. With refined manners, terrific culinary skills and artistic inclinations, she was considered ideal for the marriage market. Shockingly, her parents didn’t allow her to complete her education. My imposing grandfather took her out of Kolkata’s Loreto College at the age of 19 and married her off to an “eligible” young IAS officer. After marriage, she went back to college to complete her education and obtained a BA in English Literature, hopeful of a life beyond what her parents might have imagined for her.
A mother by 20, she soon began to tilt against social conventions, eager to seize her share of the personal freedoms she read about in books, poems and magazines. She joined the advertising world in the 1970s, an industry in which celebrated filmmakers Shyam Benegal and Saeed Mirza had worked as copywriters. After the Flower Power decade of the 1960s, the 1970s were a heady time.
In 1974, the model and dancer Protima Bedi famously streaked down Mumbai’s Juhu Beach. Park Street in Kolkata was a swinging place, an entertainment hub where Pam Crain, known as ‘The Queen of Park Street’, would sing jazz at nightclubs like Mocambo and Blue Fox. A decade later, an iconic ad would feature the fresh-faced model, Karen Lunel bathing energetically under a waterfall to sell the soap, Liril. This exuberant ad became a visual representation of young women trying to break free.
India’s feminist movements
My mother’s world, the world of the cocooned bhadramahilas (Bengal’s “genteel women”) at their clubs and parties was only a thin educated patina in an India struggling with elemental challenges of inequality, illiteracy and poverty. She lived in this charmed world of 1970s Calcutta, later coming to live in the small English-speaking universe of 1980s Delhi.The capital was then a rather sleepy place with its Lutyens-land charms of garden-enclosed government apartments, a rambling semi-deserted market called Khan Market, a delicatessen named Steakhouse and social circles centred around the Delhi Gymkhana Club and the India International Centre. In this narrow world hemmed in by neat garden hedges and shabby Ambassador cars, my mother’s life turned tumultuous.
She could not make her marriage work. Yet after her divorce, she reinvented herself with gusto as a wonderfully creative chef of Bengali cuisine, delighting an army of fans with her experimental dishes. She dressed flamboyantly and colourfully, with her trademark 1960s bouffant hairdo, enjoying her food, drink and cigarettes—as if each act of joie de vivre was a bold personal rebellion against the timid secondary role society expected her to play.
The ‘feminist’ women’s movement in India began to take shape in the 1970s. The freedom struggle had brought hundreds of women out of the home and into public roles. Mridula Sarabhai, Amrit Kaur, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Sarojini Naidu had already blazed a trail for women. And in the 1970s, their legatees became part of many causes for justice and change. Women began to take to the streets, participating in protests against dowry and rape cases. Urban feminists joined hands with rural women for anti-alcohol campaigns and against price rises.
At this time, the formal feminist movement paid little attention to the “irrelevant” concerns of urban middle-class women. Greater battles were being fought. There was a campaign for justice in the 1972 Mathura rape case. Later, there was the pivotal Bhanwari Devi case. Bhanwari Devi, a rural health worker, was gang-raped in 1992 for trying to stop a child marriage in Rajasthan. The case spurred the enactment of the Supreme Court’s Vishakha guidelines against sexual harassment in the workplace.
It was the Rupan Deol Bajaj sexual harassment case in 1988 and the conviction of then Punjab DGP KPS Gill that first focused serious attention on the sexual harassment prevalent in middle-class drawing rooms and dinner parties.
Indira Gandhi to Zeenat Aman
My mother’s generation had their own role models. Indira Gandhi the stylish imperious prime minister who first came to power in 1967, bestrode the domestic and the world stage and inspired millions. During Indira Gandhi’s rule, India’s women emerged to claim their place as modern beings.
Indira Gandhi radiated modernity. She was short-haired, she wore a man’s wristwatch, and her exceptional saris were rendered even more elegant by the stark absence of any jewellery, which she considered needless accessories. She outpaced her male colleagues in both energy and political nous, campaigning across the burning Uttar Pradesh countryside in the summer months in a rattle trap Ambassador or crossing a swollen river on elephant back through a thunderstorm. Is it any wonder that she was called the only man in her cabinet?
Soon, Indian women were ready to go even further than just conscientious social workers or politicians in the field. They were ready to grab some bad girl glamour.
Enter Zeenat Aman. Aman burst into the limelight in 1971 with the film Hare Rama Hare Krishna. She appeared at a time when India’s modern women needed a new icon of womanly jauntiness, ready to push the envelope on freedom, ready to explore the grey area between stereotypical binaries of “sati-savitri” versus so-called “vamp.”
Zeenat Aman heralded change. Visibly westernised and oozing international standards of glamour, she was an ethos-defining figure who created a new modern role model for the 1970s woman.
In 1974, Mahasweta Devi’s searingly insightful novel Hajar Churashir Maa—Mother of 1084—was published. It explored how the mother of a dead Naxal realises her own complicity in the feudal society her son rebelled against. My mother has this quote from Mahasweta Devi in her notebooks:
“Life is not mathematics and the human being is not made for the sake of politics. I want a change in the present social system and do not believe in mere party politics.”
A relentless quest
A generation of Indian women born in the 1940s was inspired by the high ideals of their freedom-fighter ancestors. But ideals were not enough, they wanted real change in their own lives. In 1972, Kiran Bedi famously became the first woman IPS officer. In 1979, India’s first woman Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officer CB Muthamma moved the courts challenging discriminatory practices in government services. In 1980, Harvard-educated lawyer Lotika Sarkar and pioneer of women’s studies Vina Mazumdar founded the Centre for Women’s Development Studies.
In 1963, Anita Desai published Cry, the Peacock, a disturbingly violent novel about a marriage in crisis and in 1979, Gita Mehta published the non-fiction book Karma Cola. Both Desai and Mehta were elegant sari-clad sophisticates, at home in both East and West. And they, among others, wrote into existence a new thoughtfulness about the self in a rapidly changing culture.
My mother too, by laboriously transcribing the written words of her favourite authors and poets in her notebooks, tried to discover her own identity and find a charter of liberation for herself. Her long quotations are like sessions in self-therapy, they constitute a somewhat muddled, eclectic yet deeply personal guidebook containing philosophical pointers on how she could get on with her life. Feminism, after all, is not just about the high-profile activists. Women who lived hidden lives still pushed forward the boundaries of possibility. Many urban women of the 1960s and 1970s mounted small subversive attacks against stifling traditionalism and anonymously paved the way for the blithe millennials of today.
An entry from 18 October 2024 in my mother’s notebook reads: “Today’s Times of India carries a report of a 15-year-old girl gang-raped in Haldwani. Why no protests by citizens and shouting slogans? Have the minds and hearts of Delhiites so atrophied that they do not react to such heinous crimes. I am proud to have been born a Bengali in Calcutta!”
Proud daughter of a progressive Bengal, fierce in her defence of free womanhood, my mother’s notebooks revealed to me the restless, often tortured quest that Indian women embarked on to find voice, visibility and equality. They struck out on their own, sometimes stepping courageously with great strength of character, sometimes uncertainly with some apprehension. And they bequeathed to younger generations quiet templates of hard-won freedoms.
Sagarika Ghose is a Rajya Sabha MP, All India Trinamool Congress. She tweets @sagarikaghose. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)
This article is re-published here by kind permission of the author Sagarika Ghose. The original article can be found here – Indira Gandhi to Zeenat Aman, my mother kept extensive notes on Indian women: Sagarika Ghose
