Wednesday 23 May 2012

My Great Grand-Aunt

Times of India, May 19, 2012



The Oxford dictionary, or so my computer tells me, recognises words like great-grandfather (which means the father of a grandparent) and grand-uncle or great-uncle (meaning uncle of a parent). I crave your indulgence while I boast a little about my lineage, but with a good reason. The point is that I come from quite an illustrious family of achievers, even if I say so myself. My (maternal) uncle and (also maternal) grand-uncle both won Nobel Prizes for their work in Physics. But this article is about my paternal grand-aunt who, in my book, is the greatest achiever among all my relatives. I want to talk about this great grand-aunt (not to be confused with great-grandaunt!) who led a simply astounding life.


She was known simply as Sister - conjecturally owing to a cute remark made long ago by her kid sister, my grandmother - to multitudes of women who had had unbelievably unfortunate lives until they had the good fortune of coming across her.


She lived in a house right opposite the house where we lived when I was a little boy. I only remember her as a petite sweet old lady with a head of silvery hair, always dressed in impeccable white saris and forever fussing with a hearing aid which would periodically make cooing noises, much to her annoyance. I was 17 when she died. Her body had been laid out in the front sit-out of her house. And from the wee hours of the morning, there was a seemingly unending stream of women who kept coming, with tears streaming down their cheeks as they walked around the body of this silvery woman and paid their last respects to this great lady. It was a revelation to me, who had had no clue till then of what a fantastic life she had led. The haunting memory of that day is of the woman who came running to the old style cremation ground  just as many of us were returning after having completed the last rites and consigned the great lady's  mortal remains to the flames. This woman just kept sobbing inconsolably. As soon as she had heard (somewhere in Andhra where she was living then) of Sister's passing away, she had taken whatever buses and trains she had had to take in order to try, in vain as it eventually turned out, to pay her final respects to the physical frame that had once housed the person who had given her  a new life when any hope of a normal one had appeared to have ended.


Now let me divulge the secret of her greatness. She had been `married', when she herself was just eleven years old,  to a boy just a few years older, and who died not much later. This was around 1900, and what the Brahmin community did in those days to a child widow belonged to a master-class in sadism. The little girl would be dressed up in all her bridal finery, jewelry (and the more the better), silk sari, etc., etc. And some duly authorised dignitary would proceed to successively remove all this finery from the poor child, and the piece de resistance was when she was tonsured, and the bald girl was made to change from her silk sari to a `sari' of coarse white cotton, without even the customary blouse to cover the upper body. At the end of all this, the girl was banished to some unseen inner corner of the house, to lead the rest of her life in this attire and form, essentially as a servant/cook/odd-job-person, one never to be seen by outsiders or to participate in any `auspicious' event!














Fortunately, Sister's parents (and a widowed aunt, who also lived with them) showed themselves to be remarkably courageous and enlightened people who simply refused to permit a brutal society to steal the life of their remarkable daughter. Much to the derision and criticism of the `neighbours and relatives', not only did they spare Sister the customary barbarism doled out to child widows, they even went out of the way to enable Sister to have a complete education. She stood first in the entire Madras Presidency in her school exams. In the face of people telling him `ok you have made your point, now this is more than enough', Sister's father got her into the Presidency College for her undergraduate studies.When she passed her B.A. in Botany with honours in 1911, she was the first Hindu woman, let alone a child widow, to have ever graduated from the entire Madras Presidency!

Now she began repaying the faith and commitment of her father by leading an exemplary life as social reformer and educationist. The educational institutions she had a non-trivial role in starting are legion: Sarada Ladies Home, Queen Mary's College(*), Lady Willingdon Training School, Kuppam School (near the erstwhile Ice House), Sarada Cheri school in Cuddalore, Sarada Vidyalaya School, Srividya Kalanilayam, Mylapore Ladies Club which subsequently became Vidya Mandir, Mylapore (incidentally alma mater  to me as well as to my daughter); and many times, Sister just handed over the running of institutions she had got up and running, without once attaching her name to the venture in any way.  All along, she also kept working at creating institutions such as `widow's homes' (Sarada Illam, for instance) where she led by example in creating an environment for women to live and contribute meaningfully to society.















Sarada Illam at Ice House

I can go on about how she was part of the first All India Women's Conference on Educational Reform (along with Rukmini Arundale, Rukmini Lakshmipathy, etc.), one of only six women to have represented the entire Presidency, a nominated member of the Madras Legislative Council, ... Moving and illuminating accounts of her life may be found in Monica Felton's  A child widow's story and in Malathi Ramanathan's  Sister R.S. Subbalakshmi - Social reformer and Educationist (Ph.D. thesis from Bombay University), which are both revealing records of the black ages from which she strove to liberate our women.

Ever since I started writing this column, I have been periodically receiving mails requesting advice or assistance on a variety of issues. I have even gone so far as to say, during a public talk I gave, that if you have been so fortunate as to touch one or two lives, yours would have been a life well-lived. This kind of complacent observation, when viewed against a life such as Sister's, reminds me of Newton's oft-quoted saying: If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

I got to thinking recently of Sister, as a result of an initiative begun by a cousin of mine, herself an alumnus of Queen Mary's College, as are many many Madrasi women (including my own mother). She was startled to find that even a former Principal of this College was unaware of who Sister Subbalakshmi was! This convinced my cousin of the need to create a web-site or a biopic on Sister's life and achievements. It got me thinking that I might help things moving by writing about her in this column. This column is supposed to address the special needs of people with disabilities. If losing a husband (rather than a limb) and being forced therefore (!?) to live an eternity  of indignities is not a disability, I must be missing something. That is why you see me  writing about this most Noble of my relatives, whom I was one of a handful of relatives who were privileged to have known as, and called Ponnakka (loosely translated as `jewel among (elder) sisters')! As this cousin said when I asked her to look over this article for factual accuracy, and I couldn't summarise this article better than she did: Ponakka drew many disabled small girls to her, and transformed them into a "differently abled" set of young women, in the literal sense of the phrase!

(*) My reference to QMC in this context is based on the following anecdote in Monica Felton's book (on p. 137), apparently narrated to her by Nallamuthu Ramamurthi (the sister of Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy, another visionary woman from Sister's era): 

While she was still a student at PT School  (Presidency and Training School in Triplicane) run by Sister, a member of the  Governor's Executive Council had visited the school, and she  had read out her prize winning essay on how she wished to have a women's  college in Madras. The visitor pooh-poohed the very suggestion that it might be possible to fill a college with women. To illustrate his point, he asked the class full of girls just how many of them would really want to spend the next 3 or 4 years studying for an undergraduate degree. Every girl in the class put up her hand!









 And Queen Mary's College was started the following year, 1914, by the 
Government. Not only did Ms. Nallamuthu join the college, she even went on to become its first Indian Principal.




Sunday 6 May 2012

Is Going Legal the Only Way?


Times of India, May 5, 2012




Let me ease my way into the more serious stuff  with a multilingual joke in questionable taste which I heard as a young post-doc. at TIFR, Mumbai more than 30 years ago. Apparently,  a former resident of Mumbai and obviously non-resident Indian was annoyed with the behaviour of a BEST bus conductor and kept threatening to sue BEST; finally, in exasperation, the typical no-nonsense Mumbaikar bus conductor tells the angry woman Arre memsahib, ithar susu nahin karna! (The reader ignorant of Hindi will forgive me for not including a translation, as the little humour here will only sound crude, and suffer in translation.)

The reason I say all this is a recent conversation I had with a cousin who has returned to India after more than a decade of living in the US and been working in Kozhikode for more than a year and loving it. I had been telling him of my crusade and dreams of a better tomorrow for people with disabilities in India. He was quite supportive, but did underline the opinion that probably the only way forward is to use our judiciary, which is the most powerful in the world in his eyes. So this cousin says: `use RTI or whatever you want, try to set in place a mechanism whereby lawyers with their hearts in the right places would offer their services on behalf of this cause which can make a great impact, as well as make a great future career for a bright young lawyer who knows how to play his cards right. Basically, he was saying sue-sue is the only winning policy!

Let us consider the alternatives and examine the rights of people with disabilities (PWD) in this land of ours which has been ambiguously termed `the greatest democracy in the world'. I  shall present my arguments in the form of an imaginary baseball match, with the Govt. of India batting, and me as both pitcher and umpire. (You know who will win this mock game!)
  • Education:  The Right to Education Act (RTE), 2009 declares, among other things: Any cost that prevents a child from accessing school will be borne by the State which shall have the responsibility of enrolling the child as well as ensuring attendance and completion of 8 years of schooling. No child shall be denied admission for want of documents; no child shall be turned away if the admission cycle in the school is over and no child shall be asked to take an admission test. Children with disabilities will also be educated in the mainstream schools. The Prime Minister Shri Manmohan Singh has emphasized that it is important for the country that if we nurture our children and young people with the right education, India's future as a strong and prosperous country is secure.
 Try telling that to the mother of a paraplegic child, who lives in a modest dwelling in Mylapore. Can you cross your heart and tell her that arrangements will be made for her child to get across major throughfares like R.K. Salai and Royapettah High Road and get educated in the mainstream schools like Vidya Mandir or P.S. High School?
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Strike 1

  • Information: The Right to Information Act (RTI), 2005. mandates: timely response to citizen requests for government information. It is an initiative taken by Department of Personnel and Training, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions to provide an RTI  Portal Gateway to the citizens for quick search of information on the details of first Appellate Authorities, PIO's,   etc. amongst others, besides access to RTI related information / disclosures published on the web by various Public Authorities under the government of India as well as the State Governments.

In order to access the disability social pension or unemployment allowance, it is necessary to first have a disability card. A recent survey revealed that only 15% of people with moderate disabilities and 21% of people with severe disabilities had such a card. (The survey did not reveal how many of these PWD were even aware of these requirements and allowances.)

As an experiment, I sent an email last Sunday to the (TN) state commissioner for disability} (to scd@tn.nic.in) that I was  handicapped person confined to a wheel-chair, living in Thirunanmiyur, and asked: (a) if I would be able to come with my wheelchair to his office which is apparently on the first floor; and (b) how I might come to his office from Thiruvanmiyur using public transport?

And I had still not received a response as of this Thursday evening. So much for my right to information in the era of information technology if an email from across town cannot be responded to in four days!
                                                                                                                                                                                   Strike 2

  • Life: According to the Wikipedia, `Right to life' is a phrase that describes the belief that a human being has an essential right to live, particularly that a human being has the right not to be killed by another human being. We have the mind-boggling practice of having human beings immerse themselves in the sewage ducts to clear clogs or whatever. Not a week goes by without the newspapers carrying a story of a couple of people suffocating to death from the `lethal fumes and gases' they inhaled when they went down the sewer. And each of those newspaper stories does not forget to remind us that the Government has made it illegal to ask people to go down the sewers to do their dirty work.




Strike 3; and you're out of here













 What I am trying to say is that so many people have been clamouring for the need for implementing certain changes which the law of the land would have us believe is our basic right. Clearly, wimpy mathematicians writing clever newspaper articles is not the way to effect change. I am beginning to think that maybe what we need is the strong arm of the judiciary to fortify `our case'. 

People like me do not have the money (or the time or the mobility!) to take on costly and time-consuming legal (as well as my own not very strong) muscle. Maybe what I need is for some young lawyers with the power of righteous anger to offer to give freely of their time and lend my impotent  sense of outrage some legal standing on one or more of the above issues. If a group of right thinking people offer to come together for this crying need,  maybe only the power of such people can set these anomalies right. Let me conclude with an inspiring quotation that a good friend of mine (thanks Venky, for the perfect punchline), who has devoted his life to enabling the disabled, ends all his emails with:

Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world; indeed it is the only thing which ever has !-  Margaret Mead.