Writing Amma’s Story

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On 7 November 2010, the day after celebrating her last Diwali, my mother died, after a valiant six-year battle with cancer. She was sixty-four. Over the course of her life, Surekha Sinha had published eight books and had composed a total of more than a thousand pieces of verse, some of them stand-alone poems, some intended to be sung as classical khyals. Yet, despite her prolific writing, one story remained untold—that of her exceptional parents, Amma and Babu. During the last three months of her life, when the crystal clarity of her perception was occasionally clouded by extremely high doses of morphine, my mother often mused about her long-deferred task. With a breaking heart, I lied to her that we would work on a book-writing project together, when she felt a little stronger. That lie became my truth.

I began writing this book the year after her death, as I struggled to come to terms with her loss, as well as with the death of my father, five years earlier. As I tried, in fitful bursts, to put the voices in my head onto paper, my aunt Abha—my mother’s sister, Didi—sent me a copy of Amma’s autobiography, Smriti ki shrinkhalayen. Hastily put together to raise charitable funds after India’s disastrous war with China in 1962, the book had little circulation and was never reprinted. Nearly half a century later, however, it became an invaluable point of departure for the writing of Amma’s Daughters. Its 161 pages contain an assortment of stories from my grandmother’s life, arranged in no apparent order and often told rather sketchily. As literature, it was not an autobiography worthy of straightforward translation, and, in writing the present book, I borrowed from its text on only three occasions: the description of the young Shanti’s experiences in jail, her conversation with Mahatma Gandhi about marriage and chastity, and the visit, many years later, of Amma and her two daughters with the writer Suryakant Tripathi Nirala.

This haphazard autobiography also became the starting point for further research. Over the years, I had heard stories about my grandmother not only from my mother and my aunt but also from the many family visitors who had known Amma, some of whom maintained a connection with Babu until his death in 1990. These included his good friend Pandit Parmanand and the ever-inquisitive Dr. B. L. Mathur, both of whom appear in the book, as well as the freedom fighter and journalist Dattatreya Tiwari. I also vividly recall conversations with Amma’s long-standing friend Maitreyi Pathak, known to readers as Maitreyi didi, the woman who arranged my parents’ marriage. This oral history enriched my understanding of Amma’s life, filling in details missing in her autobiographical account as well as supplying information about events she had omitted. I had my mother’s own writings to draw on as well—her diaries and her letters to me, as well as references to her family in some of her published works. All the same, gaps remained. So, in 2013, I travelled to London, New Delhi, and Patna, largely to conduct archival research, although, while I was in India, I also took the opportunity to interview people who had known Amma in one capacity or another.

My archival survey focused on the period of the civil disobedience movement (1930–33), in which my grandmother, then in her early teens, was caught up. I consulted microfilm copies of newspapers published in the United Provinces (later to become Uttar Pradesh), with special attention to the cities in which Shanti lived. Notable among these newspapers were Aaj (Varanasi), The Leader (Allahabad), Sainik (Agra), and Sangharsh and the Indian Daily Telegraph (both Lucknow), as well as Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi’s revolutionary weekly Pratap (Kanpur). I also examined a selection of All India Congress Committee bulletins, particularly those that supplied information about activities in Mathura, along with magazines from the period that published articles on social and political issues.

In addition, I sifted through confidential reports written by the governing officials in the British provinces of Ajmer-Merwara, the United Provinces, and Bihar and Orissa, who were responsible for exercising surveillance over the civil disobedience movement and relaying information to India’s Governor General (the viceroy). In one of these reports, dating to the first half of August 1930, I found mention of my grandmother, then known by the name Shanti, whose public speeches were described as “intemperate.” As we know, Shanti was subsequently arrested for sedition and sentenced to six months in jail. Born in 1918, she would have turned twelve that year.

This research allowed me to verify and contextualize much of the information that I already had. Beyond that, however, these archival materials revealed the scale and nature of women’s participation in the independence movement, as well as some of the social mechanisms whereby women were routinely rendered faceless. The portrait that emerged—of women committed to the struggle for freedom while at the same time burdened by oppressive traditions founded on deeply patriarchal attitudes—corroborated the stories I had heard from my mother about a number of Amma’s friends and confidants. While I knew only bits and pieces of their individual stories, their lives seemed to overlap. Most had a middle-class upbringing and at least some degree of education, and many had been widowed at an early age. They also shared the quality of strong-mindedness—women who, within their extended families, tended to be cast in the role of a willful relative who had lived a lonely life.

When I began to write about Amma, I found these women coalescing into the figure of Kamala mausi, the only “fictitious” person in the book. Although I worried that, by amalgamating their fragmentary stories into a composite character, I might be further contributing to the effacement of their identities, in the end it seemed that a single, more fully developed personality was the best way to convey a clear sense of the texture of their lives and to keep some parts of their memory alive. Growing up, I met only one of these women in person, and she is the source of my description of Kamala mausi’s physical appearance and of her family history.

Writing about my own mother so soon after her death—trying to imagine the world through her eyes—seemed at times impossibly difficult. Yet even as I was forced to confront emotions that I had perhaps never before acknowledged and grapple with insights that were not always welcome, telling her story was a powerful affirmation of her life. As I attempted to immerse myself in her experience, the closeness we shared when she was alive seemed to acquire a strange solidity and permanence, as if I was letting go of her by absorbing her, allowing her consciousness to merge with my own. Although the emotions were intense, the act of stepping into her perceptions was not as difficult as I had anticipated. She was, after all, my mother, and I knew her well.

What proved to be more challenging was the depiction of my mother’s sister, Didi. It was not easy to suppress my own knowledge of and feelings for my “badi mummy”—my “older mother,” as I was taught to call her—and imagine her instead as a daughter, albeit one whose experience is filtered through her sister’s perceptions and voice. My mother and her sister were thrown together by their shared experience of two rather unusual and demanding parents, to whom they reacted very differently. My mother coped with her anomalous upbringing by putting her Amma and Babu on a pedestal, thereby making a virtue out of necessity, so to speak. Within the context of the family, her outspokenness and her embrace of the unconventional was, ironically, a gesture of obedience—while, with her impeccable manners, Didi politely rebelled, often questioning her parents’ values. She was determined not to let her life be a sum of other people’s choices, and she quietly insisted on the right to be “normal.” As sisters, they were utterly loyal to each other, but their very closeness served to highlight their differences. I had to work hard to separate Didi from my aunt Abha Choudhary, and to capture the complex mix of devotion and tension that characterized both Didi’s relationship to her parents and my mother’s relationship to her.

Despite the mystery surrounding his past, I found it easiest to write about Babu, whom I remembered clearly, as he lived with us all the while I was growing up. My own memories of him dovetailed well with my mother’s and aunt’s stories about the father who intermittently presided over their childhood. Even as an old man, he remained somehow larger than life, ascetic and reclusive until an injustice, whether real or perceived, would produce a burst of temper, his deep voice rolling through the house like thunder. Despite his detachment, he was a devoted grandfather, the depth of his affection evident especially during my many spells of sickness as a child. I still recall him sitting by my bedside for hours on end, reciting Sanskrit mantras as he gently stroked my feet. Someday, I hope to write his own story—and may I not postpone this promise to myself until it is too late.

Early in 2014, just as I was finishing the first draft of Amma’s Daughters, my brother Peeyush contacted me with the happy news that he had managed to locate Amma’s sole surviving diary, which he subsequently scanned. The first entry is dated 24 August 1926, but, contrary to expectations, the diary does not proceed in neat chronological order. After the first few pages, it becomes a jumble of entries spanning more than three decades: an entry from 1936 could be followed by one dated 1958, followed by another from 1960, and then another from 1941. We know that Amma had multiple notebooks, and she must have reached for whichever one was at hand—writing entirely for herself, not for the convenience of a biographer. Some of the entries contain quite detailed accounts of specific incidents in her day-to-day life; others describe her emotions, although often with little explanation of what prompted them.

As I patiently deciphered the hasty handwriting on worn paper, Amma seemed to emerge from the pages. We experience our lives not as a coherent story but as a series of moments, and, after a while, the kaleidoscopic quality of the diary began to seem normal. Sometimes I was reading the words of a grown woman, absorbed in the events and cares of her day. More often, though, I was hearing the voice of the traumatized child who could never return home, the survivor intent on rejoining her sisters—the freedom fighter whose long struggle would eventually take her back to the river that had claimed their lives.

Despite extensive research, I was never able to fill in the two blank spots in Amma’s story—her family history and her activities during the time she spent with revolutionaries after she ran away from her family home in Allahabad. It is possible that she met up with members of the Bengal Volunteers, a revolutionary group officially formed in 1928, under the leadership of Subhas Chandra Bose. Articles in Allahabad newspapers dating to 1928 and 1929 mention that the group included women and children and that it was active in the area at the time. Perhaps someday concrete evidence will come to light, but, if not, then the early years of her life were obviously destined to remain concealed.

In “The Body Under the Rug,” Alexander Stille identifies two emotions that haunt the writer of a family memoir—“guilt about pillaging the lives of the dead and anxiety about harming the living.” In writing Amma’s story, I have tried not to pillage but to commemorate the lives of the dead and to respect the privacy and integrity of those still living. Knowing that my mother had long intended to write about her family did help to assuage the guilt. But I have no way of knowing how far I have strayed from what she would have written. I can only hope that I have divulged nothing that she would have kept hidden.