Amma's Daughters

Amma’s Daughters Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters Social history contests the construction of the past as the story of elites—a grand narrative dedicated to the actions of those in power. Our Lives seeks instead to make available voices from the past that might otherwise remain unheard. By foregrounding the experience of ordinary individuals, the series aims to demonstrate that history is ultimately the story of our lives, lives constituted in part by our response to the issues and events of the era into which we are born. Many of the voices in the series thus speak in the context of political and social events of the sort about which historians have traditionally written. What they have to say fills in the details, creating a richly varied portrait that celebrates the concrete, allowing broader historical settings to emerge between the lines. The series invites materials that are engagingly written and that contribute in some way to our understanding of the relationship between the individual and the collective. Manuscripts that include an introduction or epilogue that contextualizes the primary materials and reflects on their significance will be preferred. Series Titles Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery Helen Waldstein Wilkes Man Proposes, God Disposes: Recollections of a French Pioneer Pierre Maturié, translated by Vivien Bosley Xwelíqwiya: The Life of a Stó:lō Matriarch Rena Point Bolton and Richard Daly Mission Life in Cree-Ojibwe Country: Memories of a Mother and Son Elizabeth Bingham Young and E. Ryerson Young, edited and with introductions by Jennifer S.H. Brown Rocks in the Water, Rocks in the Sun Vilmond Joegodson Déralciné and Paul Jackson The Teacher and the Superintendent: Native Schooling in the Alaskan Interior, 1904–1918 Compiled and annotated by George E. Boulter II and Barbara Grigor-Taylor Leaving Iran: Between Migration and Exile Farideh Goldin My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell Arthur Bear Chief The Wolves at My Shadow: The Story of Ingelore Rothschild Ingelore Rothschild, edited by Darilyn Stahl Listort and Dennis Listort Amma’s Daughters: A Memoir Meenal Shrivastava Amma's Daughters Meenal Shrivastava a memoir Copyright © 2018 Meenal Shrivastava Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8 ISBN 978-1-77199-195-7 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-77199-196-4 (PDF) ISBN 978-1-77199-197-1 (epub) doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781771991957.01 www.ammasdaughters.com Cover image © Jessica Sharmin and Jovana Milanko / Stocksy.com Cover design by Natalie Olsen, kisscutdesign.com Interior design by Sergiy Kozakov Promotional website design by Darren Johnston, Grit Multimedia Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Shrivastava, Meenal, 1971-, author Amma's daughters : a memoir / Meenal Shrivastava. (Our lives: diary, memoir, and letters) Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and electronic formats. 1. Shrivastava, Meenal, 1971- —Family. 2. Gandhi, Mahatma, 1869-1948. 3. India—Politics and government—1919-1947. 4. India—History—Autonomy and independence movements. I. Title. II. Series: Our lives (Edmonton, Alta.) DS480.45.S57 2018 954.03'5 C2018-900965-9 C2018-900966-7 We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada for our publishing activities and the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Assistance is also provided by the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution– Noncommercial–NoDerivative Works 4.0 International: see www.creativecommons. org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons license, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at [email protected]. For Amma’s great-granddaughters, Aditi, Adya, and Ananya— may you lead your lives with courage, compassion, and conviction. And for Zoleka V. Ndayi, my willful goddaughter—may you rest in power. We live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted—knowingly or unknowingly—in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. Ben Okri, A Way of Being Free Contents Preface xi A Note on Forms of Address xiii 1 Dislocations 3 2 Many Homes 31 3 No Easy Path 71 4 Meeting Babu 97 5 City of Conquests 129 6 Battlegrounds 171 7 Departures 201 8 Crossing Thresholds 229 9 Letting Go 273 Epilogue 289 Writing Amma’s Story 293 Acknowledgements 299 List of Interviews 303 Bibliography 305 Preface In the early 1990s, when I was a student of modern Indian history, women were seldom mentioned in connection with the events that shaped the new nation. The relatively few who appeared in the historical litera- ture were for the most part the wives or sisters or daughters or nieces of prominent independence activists—women who found themselves in the middle of massive social and political upheaval and were sometimes thrust into positions of leadership, often when their more famous male relative happened to be in jail. Only many years later did I discover, to my surprise, that of the more than eighty thousand people arrested during the civil disobedience of 1930–31, some seventeen thousand, or better than one in five, were women. And yet, for the most part, the stories of these women—women who had the courage of their convictions and went to prison for it—are lost to memory. In the quest for social justice, a story can be a powerful tool of intellec- tual and emotional persuasion, in its ability to move from one perspective to another, to render history immediate and personal, and to immerse us in the experience of oppression. Stories can also reclaim what standard histories have conspired to erase, as well as shedding light on the mech- anisms of this erasure. In the process, such stories do more than fill in empty pages in the historical record. They alter the lens through which we view the past, while they also provide a solid historical grounding that can help us better understand the persistence of inequality and injustices in a society. xi doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781771991957.01 Among the seventeen thousand women arrested in 1930 and 1931 was a twelve-year-old girl. At the time, she was known as Shanti, although she was later given the name Prakashwati. This girl was my mother’s mother— her Amma. I never really knew my grandmother: she died when I was still an infant. But, from the time she was only eight, she kept diaries, and she also wrote an autobiography, published when she was in her mid-forties. My mother, Surekha Sinha, the younger of Amma’s two daughters, long intended to write her own account of her mother’s life, as seen from the perspective of a daughter. But she also wanted to complete the story—to write about family relationships, about her father, who was hardly mentioned in her mother’s autobiography, and her older sister and about how their lives unfolded up to the time of Amma’s death. Sadly, that book remained unwritten. Amma’s Daughters is that book, the one my late mother never found an opportunity to write. I wrote it in her voice because it is her account, not my own. As one of Amma’s daughters, she came to know some of the women whom history has largely forgotten—her mother’s friends from the days of the freedom struggle. And, through her mother’s recollections, she met some of the men whose names have most certainly not been forgotten—Dr. Rajendra Prasad, Jawaharlal Nehru, and, above all, Mahatma Gandhi, in whose ashram at Sevagram she spent the better part of a decade. Through her eyes, we also witness the sometimes futile struggle of women to escape confinement within their families, first as daughters and then as wives, and to overcome countless centuries of oppression. This, then, is not merely a narrative account of my grandmother’s life: it is a story about a family. Beyond that, it is the story of some of the many otherwise ordinary women who were quietly extraordinary—women who insisted on opening up space in which their children could continue to redefine the boundaries of freedom, for themselves and for others. Meenal Shrivastava (née Sinha) North Saanich, June 2018 xii doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781771991957.01 A Note on Forms of Address In India, kinship terms are generally placed after a person’s name, rather than before. Thus, “Shankar chacha” is the Hindi equivalent of “Uncle Shankar.” As the list below indicates, however, kinship terms frequently distinguish younger from older and paternal from maternal relatives. A chacha, for example, is a father’s younger brother—so “Shankar chacha” would not be used for an uncle who is older than one’s father. To com- plicate matters further, kinship terms can also used be to address people who are not, in fact, kin, as a sign of respect or endearment. Although this tradition has weakened somewhat in modern urban India, it is still quite common to refer to friends of one’s parents by appending a generic term for “uncle” or “aunt” to their name. Amma’s daughters thus refer to their mother’s friend Kamala as “Kamala mausi,” Auntie Kamala. As one would expect, Surekha and her sister refer to their parents as “Mummy” and “Daddy”—Amma and Babu.

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