Where It All Began: Early Influences That Shaped India’s Social Leaders

Note: This episode is produced for the ear and designed to be heard, not read. Readers are encouraged to listen to the show to get the full experience. The transcripts are meant as support documents and may not include inclusions from the day of recording and may contain errors. The audio version is the final version of the show. 

Intro 

Host

Welcome to Grassroots Nation, a podcast from Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, a show in which we dive deep into the life, work, and guiding philosophies of some of our country’s greatest leaders of social change.

This is a series of short episodes that shine a spotlight on themes that arose from the conversations with the guests of Grassroots Nation. These episodes showcase what shaped their thinking, their relationships, and how small acts form the basis of collective action.  

This is the last in this set of short episodes, and in it we share the early influences that shaped the remarkable careers and lives of India’s social leaders. The stories you will hear reflect on family values and upbringings, chance meetings with influential people, finding a community of like-minded idealists, and falling in love.

 First up we hear Maja Daruwala talk about her childhood.

Maja Daruwala

When I look back on early life, not then, but looking back on it now, it just was plain privilege. But not privileged in the way that the woke people use it, it was just a very un-self conscious comfort level, happiness, safety. In every way an easy family life. Perhaps now, looking back on it, you might say it was very sheltered, but it didn’t feel particularly sheltered. I grew up as an army brat, and we grew up in all these one horse towns. My earliest memories are growing up in Ferozepur and then in a very small sort of building, which was part of… In those days, there used to be those officers’ lines called Sangli Mess and Princess Camp and all those. So that was in Delhi, but in Ferozpur, I must have been about five, six. It was a border town. We had this huge compound and a house. One of these old colonial type houses with 20 foot ceilings, or felt like 20 foot ceilings. And for a child of my age, we almost never went out. Everything was in the house. And whatever little tutor we had, or I had, because my sister was about six years older, came to the house every two days. So the whole universe was the house, the garden, the land around, and I believe it must have been an acre and a half, two acres of land. So at one end there was the house, and right at the other end of a large garden with a well and buffaloes, and all, was the guardhouse. We had the sentries living there and the staff living there.

And you know, what I do remember very well and have learned to absorb it and make a sort of more sociological thoughts about it, is that in the milieu of people who lived in the house, there were Sikh guards, there were Gorkha guards, there was my father’s army driver, who was a Brahmin, there was the lady who looked after me and her husband, who were Christians, and there were gardeners and stuff like that that you had in those days. And I remember that in the evening when my mother and father would be out, they would sit during maybe 6 o’ clock, 7 o’ clock as the sun was going out, in a circle, and the driver would tell stories from the Ramayana or even from Kabir and stuff like that. And everybody would sit around and listen. And then occasionally the cook would kind of come in with a story from Christianity. And in those days, you know what a chillum is? The chillum used to be passed around and everybody would have it. Now, I didn’t get a sense then of exclusion, which today I am very, very aware of. Now, that’s a childhood memory. What does it mean? I have no idea. I’m just telling you what I remember.

Gautam John

That’s lovely. Just to offer something as a reflection, you said Firozpur was a one horse town, it could feel monotonous. But there’s this incredible diversity of culture and conversation inside the house. You said you were an army brat. So what did that bring to your childhood? This diversity, but also the structure and regimen of your father being in the armed forces. What was daily life like?

Maya Daruwala

You know, people often ask me because they see my father as an extremely successful military man. And with that comes this notion of, as you say, structure, discipline, somehow militaristic discipline. But honestly, there was my father and there was my mother and two girls in the house. So there was very little militaristic discipline. What there was, was an expected standard of behavior. And since we had my mother and father as the exemplar over there, when I reflect back on it, it looks like something that I should be conscious of but while it was happening, it just seemed that this is how everybody lived because we had no other experience. So did we keep to militaristic timings? No, we didn’t. But did we have breakfast, lunch, dinner, studies, playtime, all of those things structured into the day? Absolutely, absolutely, we did. We all sat down for a meal together. Nobody missed a meal.

At the same time, in the evenings, we were always together if father was there, because he had a tremendously busy life. And my mother had the life of an army wife, which was in the evenings you went and played badminton or tennis, you went and fraternized with the other wives of the same age. There weren’t a great many of them, by the way, because from what I remember, my father was usually the senior person. So if he was a Brigade Commander and there was another Brigade Commander in the vicinity, that’s how we met. And they may have children of the same age, but then the junior people were much junior, so you didn’t actually really meet them. Probably the adults did, but there was no peer group for me.

Gautam John

So in that setting, I’d love to hear about the relationship you had with your sister, what explorations you all got up to, what did that look like in this context?

Maya Daruwala

Frankly, we were not the Enid Blyton type of person. We were just very… She was six years older. So when you’re five or six, twelve or eleven is a long, big distance and you’re psychologically also distant. She had much more of a social life with my father and mother than I did. I stayed home much more or was left at home much more because in those days children were to be seen and not heard. So you didn’t go out in a way that now I see my grandchildren going out with their parents for everything. We were not like that, you know, you stayed at home with the aaya and you amused yourself as you could.

And as I told you, the universe was the house. And luckily the house was big enough for you to run around in the garden the whole day, pick vegetables, sow vegetables, do agriculture, because in that house, I remember, we grew aniseed, cotton, potatoes, carrots. And so the beds had to be made, the waters had to be put, the fertilizer had to be put. And my father was one of those very rounded people who got other people to do all sorts of things, but also involved himself in it. So he involved himself with the cow, he involved himself with the buffalo, he involved himself with digging a great big pit for fertilizer, a fertilizer pit, for digging up the garden and making the beds for the potatoes. So naturally, he was doing it and he had all of us doing it.

Gautam John

Any hobbies or habits from that time that still hold? Whether it’s working with your hands or any of those?

Maya Daruwala

Reading, I think, mostly. Music, a lot of it. Being involved with everything and everybody that you are with at that time, being really involved, making little distinction, though, of course, one does make a distinction between yourself and the staff, but having more a contractual relationship with them than a status relationship, though in India, of course, the status relationship comes in no matter what you do.

HOST

Many of the guests featured on Grassroots Nation are part of a duo of sorts. Their partners whom they met along the way, have been equally instrumental in influencing, supporting and even being agents in the stories of their political lives. 

Though equally and individually renowned Aruna and Bunker Roy are seen as one such example. We hear Aruna talk about her lineage in a family deeply committed to anti casteism. And Bunker remembers meeting Aruna.

Aruna Roy 

Actually my parents were born in the beginning of the 20th century. My father is 1910, my mother in 1920, but they came from Tamil Nadu- Chennai or Madras as it was then called. They came from very progressive families in the context of their times. My grandparents married inter sub-caste in those days, and my father was born into a family which believed in workers’ rights.

And my father’s uncle actually mobilized one of the first rickshaw-police strikes in Chennai. And he also went to study in London and came back and he was enough influenced by progress, change, socialism, et cetera, but didn’t go the whole hog, but ended with trade unionism. And he began a paper called Swadharma, which he used to edit in those times.

And he was tracked by the British police. And my appa was his editor for that magazine. Appa went to. But appa and my father’s older brother were both sent to Shantiniketan by this uncle Eelaiyyar who had come back from England with these modern views ___. So my father and his, my uncle was sent to Shantiniketan at the time when it was at its heyday with

Robi Babo was there and CF Andrews. So it made a very lasting and very deep impression on my father. So he came culturally revolutionized, which I think is very important to understand in the context of today’s India. And then he had his politics with the trade union movement and he got associated with Gandhi and he was an admirer of MN Roy at that at that time.

So he grew up with a variety of ideological positions and he was a part in that sense of that generation, which did not dismiss any ideology and did not get reactive to any ideological position, but tried to understand the best of many worlds, which is what India has lost today. And therefore it bears repetition and emphasis to say because of that kind of richness in his life.

And my mother came from a family which had socially actually rejected caste. Her parents inter married between two sub castes. Their marriage notice was not published in the Hindu. My grandmother had done a senior Cambridge. My great-grandmother was literate. Her mother was literate. So it came through a huge female literacy, that side.

My grandmother did many things. She worked with leprosy patients in Chennai, then she worked with women’s groups. Then she was an honorary magistrate. So my ma grandmother was a feminist ideal in one sense of, oh, what a woman could do, being married, but still and bearing children. But yet worked outside the house. My mother did mathematics and physics.

She was also a sportswoman, she was a tennis player. So when my parents got married, they were economically not elite. They were very ordinary. But the culture that they brought into the family was of the best, in my opinion. And we grew up understanding, uh, music of course, because I’ve heard Faiyaz Khan Sahib, I’ve heard Karim Khan sahib, I’ve heard all those great musicians, but I’ve also heard I’ve heard Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar you know, all the great bhagvadars and singers of the south, I’ve seen Bala Saraswati dance.

So all these were essential part of my growing up. At the same time, politically, we were made to understand that there should be no caste system. And my father was aggressively anti untouchability. So he had grown up with the history of practicing untouchability at home. So no question of be practicing any kind of untouchability, particularly with caste, but with every other kind of untouchability and discrimination.

So with his extraordinarily rich, informal or non-formal background, I would’ve been ashamed if I had done nothing. I mean, it was a very, it was in my opinion, a very privileged upbringing that I had.

Bunker Roy  

She didn’t recognise me for one year. We were both in the same class doing English Honours in Delhi University. So she didn’t recognise me. Someone pointed… . I was pointed out to her saying that this guy is interested in you, because he is always looking at you all the time. All these girls are gossiping away together. So that’s the first time she recognized that I existed. This is in 1966. And then 1967 I left the university, but I still carried on by seeing her. And then she got into the service in 1968. I still kept writing letters to her. So finally in 1970 she agreed.

HOST

In the next clip you will hear from Ravi Chopra speaking about the political atmosphere in India in the mid 70s with the looming possibility of an emergency. As a student at the time Ravi had started to become more involved in organizing Indian students and engaging with activists and was trying to get people to learn more about what was happening.

Ravi Chopra

There was a lot of corruption, people were unhappy, people were not still not getting jobs etc. And there had been big droughts in 71-72 in Maharashtra and Gujarat and there was a drought in Bihar. So he said that he was quite apprehensive about whether India would be able to overcome these difficulties.

In January we then decided to set up the India Development Society, which would bring together most of these disparate groups in the US. So that initiative began, and one day I received a call from a friend in the Midwest who said, “Hey, there’s this young new student at the University of Chicago, a fellow named Anand Kumar. He was a part of the JP movement, why don’t you try and get in touch with him?” So I arranged for Anand to come and visit me in New Jersey and I also arranged with a professor at Columbia University, Dr. BN Verma who was from Bihar. And we had a meeting at Dr. Verma’s house. Anand talked about the Bihar movement, the JP movement and the role of students etc. And we said that, “Look, there, people in the US are simply not aware of all this. Can we send you on a speaking tour in summer?” So he said, “Sure, why not?” So the India Development Group arranged a speaking tour at all the different locations where our friends were, which started in early June.

Now sometime in June, a friend of mine, Srikumar Poddar shows up at my home in New Jersey and he says, “Can we have a meeting with the students at your university?” And I said, “Sure why not?” So we had a meeting and at that meeting he said to the students, he said, “You know, if all the laws are subverted in India and the government declares a state of Emergency and you have no human rights left, what will you do?” Immediate howls of protests. “Can’t happen in India,” “don’t talk nonsense.” So nobody believed that. And a few days later, 25th June, late night, the Emergency is declared and Anand Kumar lands up in, that was his date for a talk at Columbia University. That talk was going to be on the 26th. News had already appeared because India is ahead time wise.

MUSIC

So I get a call from Columbia University early in the morning saying maybe we should cancel Anand Kumar’s talk today. I said, “Look, the guy has come all the way from Chicago and he’s come just for this function. We can’t cancel it, what’s your problem?” So they said, they’re getting feelers from the embassy, from the consulate, “ki vo jo apka programme hai, cancel kar dijiye.” I said, “No, don’t do that. What you tell them is that we will have Anand Kumar talk as planned and a representative of the government can also put the government point of view, so let the people hear both points of view.” So it was agreed and that was quite a performance. So 26th, Anand, myself talked through the night. We talked to our friends in other locations. 30th June we showed up in Washington to protest outside the Indian Embassy.

At that time we also decided… about 25-30 people. That’s all. Bohot zyada nahi the. And we decided to set up an organisation called Indians for Democracy. So I went back and all of us went back to our locations, I went back to New Jersey. I lived in New Jersey, across the River Hudson from Manhattan. So I started contacting people in that New Jersey, New York area, and very soon we had a chapter of Indians for Democracy. They were very clear that we want nonviolent protest and if you are non-violent and you are fighting for civil liberties, we are with you. So we began and the next date was of course 15th August and we organised, tried to organise a bigger protest. About 60-70 people showed up.

So that day we decided that we should have some kind of a newsletter to inform Indians of what was going on in the country. I took over the editorship of this newsletter and I called it ‘Indian Opinion’ following Gandhiji’s newspaper in South Africa. So that was a major role that I performed while I was there. And of course, trying to expand the Indians for democracy, getting more people involved.

Then in August or so July, August of 76, there was this talk of new legislation to curb the Fundamental Rights– 42nd Amendment to the Indian Constitution. And Professor Mehta then says, “Look, if they pass the 42nd amendment, I don’t want to be an Indian citizen. I will do a padyatra from Boston to New York, and at the UN I will burn my passport.”

MUSIC

I’m sitting there. He’s supposed to be my mentor. What is he going to do, walk all by himself? So I said, “If you’re going to walk, I will work with you. Then Anand Kumar said, “I’ll walk with you,” and pretty soon there were a few of us. So I organised that walk and as you probably know that at that time the nonviolent movement in America was also very strong. They had coalesced with the civil rights movement and the disarmament people had come together. So they were doing this huge, massive walk from San Francisco to Washington – the walk for Disarmament and Social Justice. And they had feeder routes, joining them North-South directions. One of them was coming from Boston to Washington.

The people who are organising that walk was a group called War Resisters League which was an international organisation. JP had been one of the founders in the 40s and I had gotten to know them because of the anti-Emergency effort. So I went to them and I said, “How do you organise a walk?” So they helped me organise a walk. They said, “Don’t do this Boston to Washington, it’s too long for you guys, you don’t have enough people. Instead do a shorter walk.” So we came up with Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to the United Nations in New York, about 100 miles.

We did that walk and as you probably know, that’s where I ran into Jo, or Jo ran into me, on the highway because she was walking from North to South and so…

Suchitra Shenoy

That’s the lovely personal romantic bit.

Ravi Chopra

Which still survives.

HOST

And finally we hear from the inimitable Devaki Jain talking about her relationship with Lakshmi Chand Jain.

Devaki Jain

So much of my journey and its particular nuances when you call it success or happiness or even sorrow or breakdown, is in my view tethered in my romance and love, life, marriage. So the partnership with this man up there, is really what create the particular life that I had So which? When I reflect on that, I find it strange because I was such a fighting feminist, walking out of the house, not willing to marry whoever was supposed to marry, etcetera, and having sex before marriage. All that. And yet to come to asking me what makes you tick. It is a very conventional thing like like love of your man, so.

Navsharan Singh

There was such a wonderful start and because our listeners are not seeing the man on the wall,  tell us a little bit about Lakshmi.

Devaki Jain

It’s one of those things that where you find it difficult to describe it and yet it is exactly what people talk about conventionally. It was love at first sight, that is a kind of, you know, when people say love at first sight – I fell in love with him. It looks like theatre, but it is actually reality, and I have now since then seen people say that.

So here was I, recruited by the Indian Cooperative Union as a research assistant. And that story is all by chance, by chance, by chance. And I’m interviewed by this man who am I married later and two of his colleagues. One of them, Professor Rajakrishna, is very well known, the economist, and I don’t think they were serious about the interview because I don’t think they were a formal organization yet. So I was interviewed and then we there was a process which I think most of you should hear that these organisations like the Indian Cooperative Union which emerged in the Indian scene due to post-war, post-independence, rehabilitation of refugees, that is how the cooperative union was the refugee rehabilitation structure putting the refugees into cooperatives. They built Faridabad, they supported crafts. So they had a research division to which applied and I got the job.

But there was a tradition in that cooperative union organization where once a week the person who was the perhaps the most important executive of that organization, which is the man I married, was called General Secretary of the Indian Cooperative Union, would speak to employees. Remember, the employees was all very informal because the organization did not have enough money to give you what is called TA DA PA, but just people who were brought in to do various things, particularly social mobilizers, health workers who would be helping the refugees in many ways. So there I was with the panel with Raj Krishna, the man I married, and others, and they just wanted to know what brought me to work with their organization and I said “looking for a job”. But then, since I was a single woman and I didn’t have any particular place to stay, I was boarding with my brother who was in the IAS and was the joint secretary in the government. I’m sorry, some of these details are not really valuable, but I have to tell the story that way I remember it. And then it will carry on.

So every evening after work there was how to go back to where I was staying, which is with my brother. So there were like all of you must have experienced in your life, looking for somebody will give you a lift. Because not enough money to hire a taxi. It was always scrounging around and the Cottage Industries Emporium at that time was a hub, a hub of many things. Refugee rehabilitation, cooperative movement, so many things. So we all used together to hub, we meaning young women who are working but didn’t have enough support. And so it became a tradition that this man whom I married had the, was the only one had a vehicle which is belonging to the office. So I’d hang around saying, can you give me a lift? So this habit of giving me a lift became a kind of informal habit. And it was, I couldn’t believe it. I was just falling in love like a ton of bricks. But he didn’t know it. He was very inscrutable person right up to the time he died. You couldn’t by seeing his face, know what he is thinking. So then we became friends and then it this shock which have written about was that as told that he got engaged and that just broke my silence. And so, as you know, I did ask him to break his engagement and got married to him.

Now you may say, why is this part of the story? That Indian Cooperative Union then was not the place I worked in, but they had other research divisions and that is where I made my understanding of India, that at that time the big thing was the Bhoodhan movement and I just decided to walk with Vinoba. 

AUDIO – Remembering Acharya Vinoba Bhave, the first individual satyagrahi chosen by Mahatma Gandhi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQD1qZDOvaI) 

Add some friends who had met in Bangalore in the seminar and they guided me how to join Vinoba. So once that walk with Vinoba was an experience and both the kind of people walked with us and the ideas, why was I so fascinated by the idea. I had come back from Oxford the previous year and we talked about Rousseau and his idea of the village. We talked about ideals of collective struggles, when you come back from Ruskin College its all about trade unionism. So just struck me that here is something – a live show of all that you studied in Oxford. Village giving itself into itself. If you remember Rousseau, it was all about the general will. So I’m not saying that while I was engaged in this walk of mine, I would thinking of Rousseau, not at all. But I’m saying somewhere in the machine which is your head, those things are all there. 

So plunging into working with Vinoba was really quite unusual, in a way, if I may say so, for somebody like me. But happily for me, the Indian Cooperative Union and this man I married, they agreed to support me, which is the train fair. And then the time off. And then I wrote about what was Bhoodan and Gramdan. 

HOST

Grassroots Nation is a podcast from Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. For more information, visit www.rohininilekaniphilanthropies.org or join the conversation on social media at RNP_foundation.

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