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 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, and thus despite the wedding ‘snub’, Ma’s family 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 a beautiful and deeply philosophical definition of love, namely the coming together of the physical and the spiritual in one energy form.

Hindu philosophy postulates that humans may experience some or all of the four stages (ashrams) in their lives on earth: Brahmacharya, Grihastha, Vanaprastha and Sanyas. The first ashram is about learning, avoiding material wealth and ostentation, building physical and mental discipline to prepare for the second ashram. In Grihastha, you seek the pleasures of life. You become a father or mother and are active in family life. You are an active and giving member of society. In the third stage, you seek detachment from physical possessions and greater bonding with a broader community than your immediate family and friends. You have experienced prosperity and family life, and can rightfully claim material possessions, but you do not seek them. Physical detachment from a social and material life is your objective. This process is long and tortuous, and leads to search and introspection. This road leads you eventually to Sanyas, and in this fourth ashram, you finally give up physical possessions and ordinary life. What remains with you is the search for spiritual unity, namely advaita.

While there is a sequence to these stages, it is recognized that they do not necessarily appear for everyone in this logical sequence. Nor is it expected that everyone will experience all the stages. Ma spent a long time in Grihastha as a result of her pampered childhood and married life. Over the past twenty-five years, she has been in Vanaprastha, and has enjoyed being part of a large global family of friends. Most recently – and perhaps this is the reason for her comment that she has no motivation in life, she has entered the detached phase of Vanaprastha. This is a difficult phase. It requires deep introspection and a conscious separation from possessions and social relationships acquired and nourished in Grihastha and early Vanaprastha. While the path ahead is difficult, Ma’s objective is pure, and there is nothing to be sad about that.

Enjoy the book.

October 2012
Vinayak Bhattacharjee

London

Harijan Ashram

My first conscious memory is of what is known as Kingsway Camp in north Delhi. Almost seventy-five years ago, situated at one end of Delhi, in the sprawling village centre was an ashram called Harijan Colony. In that ashram we had a lovely, small house. The first few years of my life are strongly imprinted on my consciousness for their simplicity.

Those were extraordinary days marked by a nation’s fight for independence, and my father had to deal with the challenges that journalism offered in such exciting times. Precisely for that reason we left the ashram at Harijan Colony and shifted to the Hindustan Times Apartments in Connaught Circus. I clearly remember our luggage being packed in our small house. It was probably morning. I can still recall the clean smell of freshly laundered clothes – mine and those of my siblings. Our hearts too were filled with freshness. Outside, the sun shone brightly. In just a while we were to leave for our new home. We children were eager to go to our new home, though there was a certain sadness at leaving the familiar surroundings. Despite the eager anticipation of change, my young heart felt apprehensive about losing the simple life of Harijan Colony. Would my childhood be left behind here forever? These thoughts ran through my mind like wildfire.

My childhood and the village environs were left behind, but my earliest recollections are still about the simple village life we had then.

Though we children were excited about the new beginning in the huge flat in Connaught Place, in some corner of our hearts we yearned for the open skies and earthy smell of Harijan Colony.

I ran into the new flat with my brothers, holding a doll in my arms. ‘Ma, where shall I put my doll to sleep?’ I asked mother.

‘Not here. This is the drawing room.’ Ma explained in Hindi but using the English term ‘drawing room’.

I ran to my brothers and told them, ‘You know, there is a big room for drawing here.’

Mother explained to me that a drawing room was indeed the sitting room.

Connaught Place in those days was very different from the Connaught Place of today. In 1940–41, the clear night sky was filled with shining stars. Standing on the terrace of our Hindustan Times Apartments we brothers and sisters would peer down at the road. Before dusk fell, men would climb up the poles on the roadside and light up the street lamps. The lamps probably ran on gas. Seeing those men climb up and down those poles every evening was a big source of entertainment for us. In the summers, men with huge skin bags would sprinkle water on the road. There were very few people. There was a lot less chaos as well. There were no three-wheelers and very few scooters, if at all. Also, there were few buses on the road. Today’s traffic is beyond the farthest margins of our imagination. Tongas and horse carriages were the general mode of conveyance then. The horse carriage today is a reminder of the hassle-free times of a bygone era.

But my childlike mind was also witness to the cruel reality of this mode of conveyance. The sound of the whip being used on horses tied to the carriages carried over to us on the second floor and would disturb and sadden me greatly. I felt a silent pain surge within me. Man’s cruelty to animal and society’s acceptance of this cruelty was my introduction to the harsh reality of life.

The beauty of truth also strongly influences a child’s consciousness. The smell of wet earth, the sight of those lamps lighting up one by one – even after all these years, these memories are vivid in my mind.

I have an unforgettable incident to narrate from that time. Like all little girls, I was also very fond of dolls. Below our flat were the newspaper office and the press. A carpenter used to work there. Father used to praise the carpenter, Nanhe Mian, a lot. One day I went to him with my doll. I almost ordered, ‘Nanhe Mian, please make a swing for my doll.’

‘Sure. I will.’ Saying this, he collected some pieces of wood, and before you knew it, he had put together a beautiful swing. His sincerity and dedication are forever etched on my mind. Today, I see Nanhe Mian as a sculptor carving a statue. For the wish of a young girl, the sculptor put in all his ability, creativity and dedication. It is also possible that through his art Nanhe Mian also tried to express his gratitude towards my father. Children capture all nuances. In the hammering of those pieces of wood, my little heart could hear the carpenter’s inner thoughts. It was like a dream come true when that little swing was ready and I picked it up with both my hands.

‘You won’t get it today, little girl. I will varnish it and give it to you tomorrow,’ Nanhe Mian said, smiling. In his voice, there was the excitement of seeing to completion a job well done. And in those words of the dedicated craftsman was also an advice to be patient.

My love of dolls outlasted my adolescence and youth, and persists even today in old age. My lifelong association with dolls and its stories always begin with the memory of Nanhe Mian. You may wonder how I remember the incidents of my childhood and youth with such clarity. Even my mother used to be amazed at my memory. But this natural power that I have is not extraordinary. Some people talk of their lives at the age of one and two! Some memories of the long gone past, of people, and the ambience of times gone by are still intact in my memory.

A few decades later, I was invited to a programme to felicitate Shri Viyogi Hari-ji in the ashram at Harijan Colony. I stood in front of our old home. Delhi had changed. Even that extension of Delhi was no longer rural. But that old house was just the same as it had been aeons ago when we had lived there. It was as if I had been transported back in time. I was the protagonist as well as the viewer.

I did not go inside. It was somebody else’s house now. I had no desire to find out how many families had made their home there. Those moments of the past, difficult to describe, frozen in time, are clear as crystal. The rural, pollution-free air of that era, the smells of cows, buffaloes, cow dung, wood stoves and raw earth had me in their spell. Then suddenly I remembered that there used to be a jungle in front of the house. I turned around to look, but the forest was no longer there. Then I looked in front of me. The house stood there, the same as before.

All of us children would go off into the jungle to play. Mother would stop us. We never went too far into the forest, but it would scare Mother nevertheless. It was difficult for her to understand the attraction nature has for children – how we longed to play in the lap of nature with full abandon. Once, when we came home after playing, I found Mother waiting for us – nervous, worried and worked up. ‘Listen, don’t go into the jungle to play, and if you hear a man laughing, don’t go investigating.’

‘Whose laughter? Which man?’ I asked.

‘It’s not a man.’ Mother explained. ‘It’s a hyena who laughs like a man. Children get taken in by the sound and go near it. The hyena lures little children and catches them.’

I can never forget how frightening those words were.

We used to come home covered in mud, and had to be cleaned up innumerable times a day. Just changing our clothes and keeping us clean would tire out mother so much. And when Dada and Dadi came to visit us, looking after them and attending to guests who came to meet them, while looking after us, must have been exhausting for Mother. Today I can only imagine how tiring it must have been for her. But the presence of my grandparents brought so much cheer that every day seemed like a festival. Bapu-ji would stay in our house at Harijan Ashram. Sometimes Ba would come and stay there alone, without Bapu-ji. We children would jump for joy on hearing the news of her arrival. There was a heavenly purity in the smell of sandalwood and sunshine that was an integral part of her body and her khadi sari with a coloured border.

Decades later, that day, as I stood before the house, all those memories from the past came flooding back to me. Mother’s voice, Dadi’s perfumed presence, the company of our cousins, Father’s busy life, his head shaking with worry (which did not leave my child’s mind untouched). Gandhi’s independence movement was at its peak. Independence was the unknown factor. Satyagrah was the known factor. Dada, Dadi, Nana, Tau, Kaka, Mama and all their companions were constantly in jail. Father would be jailed on and off for publishing news of the Satyagrah. Amidst all this, Mother and Father remained focused on our upbringing.

In our small house, we did not have a fresh-water tap and we probably didn’t have electricity either. But there was definitely a traditional luxury. Today when I think about it, it seems to be totally feudal in nature in the context of Gandhian philosophy. In one of the rooms, there hung from the roof a khadi curtain, which was one-fifth the height of the walls. On one corner of the curtain was a rope that hung to the ground. On moving the rope up and down, the curtain worked as a fan. As far as I can remember, this comfort had turned into a plaything for us children. I vaguely recollect a young boy, who was employed to help in the house, swaying the curtain-fan. I also vaguely remember that Father thought of it as a necessary evil. Perhaps he had installed the fan for Ba’s comfort; in his desire to serve Ba, he could pull that rope all night. The fan must have been there for Mother’s comfort as well, because mother suffered from illnesses like pneumonia and pleurisy in those years. Today such fans seem to have become a symbol of our cultural heritage, out on display at exhibitions.

Made and run by hand, this useful apparatus was a symbol of our exploitative society – a society for whose upliftment Mahatma Gandhi worked so hard. Anyway, it is true that even sixty-four years after Independence today, we haven’t taken any concrete steps for the rehabilitation of the downtrodden. The cord of the fan has in its various forms tied us down.

I remember Mother working hard all the time. She would take care of all the kitchen chores. If I can’t quite visualize my mother squatting on a low stool in front of a wood stove, it is not because my memory has faded; it must surely be the smoke from the stove that makes the picture hazy.

I once told mother, ‘You would do a lot of work in the Harijan Ashram.’

Mother said, ‘I was young then. I could easily manage the sweeping, mopping, washing the clothes, doing the dishes.’ Her burden would increase because of visitors. ‘I used to get upset only because having guests meant less time for kids,’ she added.

‘But yes,’ Mother reminisced, ‘when I used to fall ill, Bapu-ji would send Ba to look after you children. Ba would never stay away very long from Bapu-ji, but she wouldn’t leave you kids until I recovered completely. Neither did you leave her alone for a minute.’ Recently I found a letter written by Bapu-ji to Mother. In that short note, written in 1935, Bapu-ji tells Mother that if Tara is very ill, Ba is willing to go and look after her.

That day in front of that house, Mother’s words echoed in my thoughts. I always saw Mother being a good hostess in the best Indian tradition. Despite all the responsibilities, she always had time for us.

In the ashram there was a round temple in front of the house. That day my eyes automatically sought out the temple. Its creation is part of my first conscious memory. A painter from Gujarat came to adorn the walls of this temple when it was built. He told my brother Mohan and me very affectionately that he needed our help with the painting. ‘I will draw and paint on the walls from atop a stool or steps. You please hold my colour palette. I can then bend and take the colours I need.’ We were thrilled at the idea. Father was happy too. Mohan and I would stand there helping the painter. We used to call him Bhatt-ji. The entire ashram was excited about the construction of the temple. Bapu-ji was to come for its inauguration. Assisting Bhatt-ji was an extraordinary experience for us. Children feel rewarded when entrusted a responsibility with affection and trust, and that experience becomes a warm memory as they grow up. Children are very intuitive. People’s natural considerations touch them in a way that they never forget.

The temple was complete. I don’t remember the day of the inauguration. Recently I came across an old photograph in which Bapu-ji has a small girl in his lap wrapped up in a sheet and there is another younger child sitting next to him. I think the picture is from the inauguration of the temple.

Leaving behind the rural ambience of the ashram, I naturally took with myself, in my memory, some people and families. Annaro, a village girl who used to help mother in and around the house; Mangal Bhai, the carpenter in the ashram; and a teacher’s family of Indian Tamil origin from Malaysia – none of us can ever forget these people. Annaro had a rustic charm, Mangal Bhai was friendly, and the Malaysian family was rather modern for the times. These loving people were my first introduction to society outside of family, and I believe one’s first experience of the world outside home shapes one’s personality. In my seventh decade today, I understand that these people, my first friends in the world outside home, were extraordinary in their ordinariness.

Even after leaving the ashram, we used to nag our parents to take us back every week to meet these old friends. As soon as we reached the ashram, Mangal Bhai would come running to meet us. He would say, ‘Tara, Mohan, you still come to visit us, but gradually you will stop coming. Don’t forget us.’ Mangal Bhai’s words, along with our own displacement, had a strong effect on our minds. Till many years later, I continued comparing every place to life in the ashram.

So, yes, coming back to the point, I was rooted to the spot in front of our old house in the Harijan Colony, caught in a moment from memory, overcome with old sounds and smells. Standing there I saw Kasturba. I could clearly hear her words: ‘Wash your hands and eat. Oh my God, your clothes are so…’ The dream broke. I was looking at my clothes. They were probably not as clean as Ba would have liked them to be. And yes, I was hungry. And then another reality broke my bubble. From behind me came a voice changing the rhythm of my internal music: ‘Let’s go, Tara. The meeting is about to start.’ There was a meeting in the ashram in memory of the Late Hari-ji.

These days I constantly feel a strange curiosity, a strange excitement. I am searching for the unknown supreme power in the absolute beauty of the known powers of a mother.

Sewagram

Ba would come and stay with us in the Connaught Place flat, but Bapu-ji never managed. For Bapu-ji to stay anywhere, it was essential to organize a place for public gatherings. After coming to the Hindustan Times flat from the ashram, I would picture Ba and Bapu-ji in Sewagram, Bardoli Ashram and in the Aga Khan prison. My memories of the Bardoli Ashram are very blurry. In the Sewagram Ashram, we lived in a mud hut. In the night, we would sleep outside under a clear sky. With the first rays of the sun, Bapu-ji would come smiling to wake us up. The place always smelled of the Harsingar (Nyctanthes flowers). There were many coral trees in the ashram and sweet-smelling flowers covered the ground beneath the trees. Mother used to pick those flowers. She would explain to us that just before the first rays of the sun appeared, these flowers would by themselves fall off the trees and we were thus saved the violence of plucking them from the branches. She would tell us that we could even take these flowers for Bapu-ji because they were procured non-violently and were fit for an offering to him. She would pick the flowers while we would enjoy a morning walk with Bapu-ji.

In Sewagram, everyone would eat together, sitting on the floor in a line. Before the meal, a small Sanskrit shloka was chanted. Constantly hungry from all the running and playing in the open environs of the ashram, that short prayer seemed rather long to me. The food in the ashram tasted incredible. It is today that I understand well that prayer. It has a beautiful meaning: May He (God) protect us. May He use us. May both of us (Master-disciple) be vigorous. May we never become enemies. Om. Shanti. Shanti. Shanti.

The open clear skies of Sewagram, the smell of the earth, the village hut, the touch of pure khadi, Bapu-ji’s enchanting personality, a morning walk with him, and then the Harsingar flowers – I see these memories weaving an endless yarn on the chakra of time.

Aga Khan Palace

Ba and Bapu-ji were imprisoned in a wing of Aga Khan Palace in Pune along with some of their companions. My siblings and I would go there with our parents to meet them; we went there with as much enthusiasm as we would go to meet them at the railway station or in Sevagram Ashram. We would be so impatient to meet our grandparents that the journey from Delhi to Pune seemed endless. In Pune, we would stay in a two-room inn near the station. Mother would cook for us in a small kitchenette (probably for the lack of proper arrangement of food at the inn), and then we would be off to the Aga Khan Palace in a tonga. Before entering the palace, permission had to be sought from an English officer for the visit. Father would go to the officer’s house to seek permission. This entailed a long wait for us in the tonga outside, but Father never came back without the permit. Ba and Bapu-ji would be so thrilled to see us that the sombre atmosphere there would be instantly dispelled.

A ten-year-old girl lay quietly with her grandmother on a cot. She had come with her parents and younger brothers to meet her grandparents. Even though she had been suffering from a long illness and was extremely weak, the grandmother’s sari, her sheets and pillows were redolent of love and that special feeling that was unique to her and made the granddaughter feel secure. Every touch was familiar, but why was there a note of farewell in her grandmother’s voice? It’s amazing how children can always tell.

There was no anguish in her farewell; just an acceptance of nature’s decision. ‘Why is Dadi looking at me thus?’ thought the child. ‘Is she going to leave us? How will I live without her love?’ The grandmother’s feeble hands caressed the girl’s head with a tenderness she knew too well.

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