Preface

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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 literature 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 intellectual 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 mechanisms 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.

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