This is my ongoing effort to digitise and freely distribute a small booklet written by my mother, Sujata Mitra, back in 1954 when she was 29 years old. It covers her social work in rural reconstruction in a small 24 family village in eastern India, where all inhabitants were Hindu, but divided in multiple castes.
The story is both touching and heart wrenching, describing the plight of the womenfolk of all clans, but particularly the lower castes and untouchables. It also shows how life was a few years before polygamy was outlawed for all citizens of India, with the exception of the Muslims. That happened in 1956, except for Goa, a Portuguese colony on the west coast of India, where bigamy remained legal till it was annexed by India in a military operation in the 1960s.
I could have just scanned the pages of the booklet and converted it into a pdf file for distribution. However, I decided to retype the write up, word by word instead. There were many reasons. Primarily, I wished to retrace my mothers footsteps of that era. Her work on that village started when she was 26 years old, and I was merely a year old toddler. The story ends when she was around 28 and I was three. It got published when she was 29.
This paints a very personal, heartwarming and also heart wrenching story of rural India, particularly of rural Bengal. It helped me see the world through her eyes, a world that was to fast disappear under the churning of the juggernaut of modernism. The story concentrates on some of the village women and it paints the extreme condition, mistreatment and harshness of existence for some of the unfortunate women, forced into marriage as a child and abandoned or widowed early in life.
It also shows the power of observation of Rabindranath Tagore in his efforts to start rural reconstruction and focus on women’s liberation and empowerment generations before rest of India was to wake up to it.
I find myself in a unique position where both my grand father and m mother were personally, directly and also indirectly influenced by Tagore’s views of rural India and the notion that, without progressive and inclusive reconstruction of the village and upliftment of the womenfolk, India had no future.
Today, the world along with India, is busy destroying its village culture, or what little remains of it, in a headlong rush of imported modernism, where there must be a massive shift of wealth out of the villages and out of the pockets of the poor, onto citifies, corporations and into the hands of the few.
Tagore had personally written long English essays in warning, generations before the west or the east was to become conscious of these factors, in his essays such as “Robbery of the soil” and crisis of civilisation.
Anyhow, I find the story as penned by my mother, describing her own day to day interaction with the village women of Nirbanpur, West Bengal, a pathbreaking view for me to trace my own identity. We are all products of village India, one way or another.
This is a work in progress. I am thinking of finishing this as an e-book, both in its original Bengali language as well as an English translation by myself. I am also toying with the idea of converting it into an audio book by reading the text myself and also reading out the translation in English.
This is a work in progress and proof reading is not done yet. Too many things to do all by myself. This WordPress program has glitches so images from URL which could be easily embedded is giving trouble now, and individual images need to be downsized and uploaded into the blog directly, which is a new hassle. I am in contact with the support team of the server host.
Let us see.
