Memoirs of an Indian Woman

Shudha Mazumdar, Geraldine Hancock Forbes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780873325202
• eBook ISBN: 9781317464860
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This vivid memoir recounts the experience of Shudha Mazumdar, a woman born at the turn of the century to Indian parents whose ideas on child rearing differed greatly. Her father, a wealthy Europeanized Zamindar, tried to instill Western values, while Shudha's mother emphasized the traditional, even going as far as arranging a marriage for her daughter when she was thirteen. Although true to Indian traditions, Shudha eventually manifested her father's influence by becoming a published writer, by becoming a member of a number of social service organizations, and by serving as the Indian Delegate to the International Labour Organization.

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“Wife brought to bed of a daughter. …” The entry was dated 22 March, the year 1899. I was only ten years of age when I found this item, written in English, in an old diary. My advent had been important enough to be noted down by my father!

Mohan Chand House in the Kidderpore area of Calcutta was our home. The family had landed property, some of which was in Sripur—a little village in Khulna district. In 1842, our ancestor, Mohan Chand Ghose, had moved from there to Calcutta and acquired the home. Later, my father, Tara Pada Ghose, extended it and named it after my great grandfather.

The house was enormous. The front wing was Father’s. It had an English dining room, a vast Victorian drawing room, a book-lined library, shady verandas and corridors, and a marble staircase that led up to the immense roof-terrace overlooking the Kidderpore Docks. On this side also was the office where the clerical staff worked at huge ledgers under the eagle eye of the manager, who had a superintendent to help him in the administration of the estates. They lived in a separate block which was called the amla quarters. Here they, and many men and maid servants of the house, were provided with food and lodging.

Mother’s room was situated in another wing. Father also had a suite here and so did each of my brothers after marriage. And here too was a cheerful little room, the accouchement chamber, where all the family had been born and were to be born.

Of a family of five, I was the youngest and seemed to be always in the background. My elder sister, thirteen years my senior, had been married a few months before my birth. People always appeared to be occupied with her and her husband in some way or other, for though they lived in Howrah, they often visited us. There was one brother before and two others after her.

The youngest, then six years old, was much disgusted at my arrival. One of my earliest recollections was a quarrel with him. “Why were you born?” he burst out. “Ever since you came, both Mother and Father have stopped loving me. I do not wish to see your face!” I took the words to heart and for a long time after used to pull my pinafore over my face whenever we chanced to meet. He was a terrible tease and took a particular delight in my discomfiture. But he was my only playmate in my father’s vast house and I bore it all for fear of forfeiting his friendship.

As time went on I grew more attached to him than to my other brothers and many were the games we had together. I had several dolls and played with them all by myself, but since it was imperative to have someone else when I wanted them to get married, I begged him to become the father of the groom. Long before the ceremony we secretly prepared tiny earthen lamps and dried them in the sun. Then, with the kind help of the cook, who let us have some oil and rag wicks, we lit them on the wedding night. Placed in a long line, the little flickering flames made a brave show when the bridegroom was driven forth in state. The groom doll was an English sailor and his coach was a doll’s wicker perambulator for which his legs were far too long.

Besides being the father of the groom, my brother was helpful in other ways. He became the horse that drew the coach and the musician who hummed tunes from Lobo’s wedding band as he pranced along with the perambulator in tow. I never breathed freely till the bridegroom had reached his destination on the other side of the veranda. There I waited with the blushing bride, whose veil was lowered in accordance with the time-honoured tradition of Bengal.

My brother obligingly officiated as the priest as well, and later begged people to come and “see the face of the bride.” The blessings, which were invariably in the form of small coins, were promptly pocketed by him. He argued that as the bridegroom’s father he was entitled to take all that was given to the bride and I, never quite certain of my status in the matter, was compelled to relinquish my rights. Once, I remember, we felt strongly that we could not honourably accept these gifts without dispensing some sort of hospitality to those who attended the ceremony, and so decided to invite them to a carai bhati [picnic] which would be the wedding feast.

Once again, the cook cooperated and made available to us one of his stoves on which to prepare the khichuri [rice cooked with lentils] but hovered over us to see that we did not set ourselves on fire. I do not know whether my brother parted with the cash to buy the foodstuffs or whether they were supplied by this obliging cook, but I do remember that there was a delicious khichuri. As I was stirring the mixture, weighed down by the importance of being the brides’s mother, my brother came in. “No onions,” he warned, knowing my weakness for this edible root, for onions are considered “unclean,” and our guests were extremely orthodox.

Ours was a very quiet household and we saw little of the world outside the great walls surrounding the garden. Except for my mother’s numerous relations and a few of my father’s, we seldom had visitors. Sometimes, drawn in a closed brougham by a draped grey horse of uncertain temper, I accompanied my mother on visits to her people. Something or the other was always happening to them: engagement ceremonies or weddings, babies arriving or functions connected with their coming. Then, of course, there were times when I heard that they were ill, but I was never allowed to go with her on those occasions; instead of me, she took with her a small basket of fruit or some such invalid food for the patient. The clan instinct was strong in her and she was always lending a helping hand to anyone who came from her father’s village.

My father, Tara Pada Ghose, was a landowner—a zamindar. as they were then called in Bengal. Most of the ancestral property which my father inherited was in the area of the Sunderbans—the sundari forests in the delta of the Ganges. His position as zamindar required him to visit these remote areas. In later years he used a motor launch, but in those days it was the budgerow [houseboat] rowed by many men that took him on his tours over the rivers. Among his retinue also sailed his beloved horse Jack to enable him to visit his tenants in their scattered holdings.

My father took a great interest in his tenants and did not leave them entirely to the mercy of the overseers. Every cold weather—as we refer to wintertime—I remember seeing many of the tenants arrive with their families. For weeks they lived in a separate portion of our great house. The women and children came to Mother and told her all about their wants in the village. Every afternoon, in a large tent with a top gaily colored in orange and red, the men had an audience with my father.

When Father held court, he sat in a special chair on a raised platform, surrounded by the officers of his estate. One by one the peasants came foward with their grievances and he lent a patient ear to each one. They were now the guests of their landlord, and Mother kept careful watch to see that they were all fed amply and well. The women and children toured the zoo and Kali temple, bathed in the Ganges, and visited the jadu ghar [home of magic], the museum. These activities delighted the children and their mothers while the menfolk were busy with more important matters.

Apart from his estate, Father had two great hobbies: his health and his horses. He had four horses in his stables, and I remember so well the manner in which he fussed over their food and had them groomed in his presence. He was a familiar figure on the maidan [open field], riding there every morning accompanied by his attendant with flying turban-tail. Once, near the Red Road, he was thrown. It was on his seventy-second birthday, but he picked himself up and rode home.

“What made you do that, Mr. Ghose?” asked Colonel Denham White, our family physician, as he felt his patient’s pulse. He had been called when father discovered that his aches and pains were bad enough to keep him in bed. “You could have returned home in your car. Was it not waiting for you as usual?” “Yes,” father replied, “but Jack would have never acknowledged me as his master if I had.”

In a specially built gymnasium, he exercised regularly and kept magnificent health in old age. I never saw him eat our food. He dieted according to every book on dieting, experimenting to discover what was best for him. His diet was composed, according to an English recipe book, of meat and fish—boiled, baked, or steamed—and vegetables. But there came a time when, much to Mother’s distress, it was nothing but fruits and nuts. When he felt he was putting on weight he made drastic cuts in the courses. It was fascinating to watch the cooked meat and fish being weighed on scales at the dinner table, and to see bits being snipped off here and there to conform to the exact requirement suitable for his size and age according to the book he happened to be following.

Even though he did not partake of our food, a tray of little bowls containing many kinds of curries was unfailingly set before him by Mother. Sometimes he sampled them and commented on their richness, firmly convinced that this, together with the rice eaten with them, was the cause of all the illness in the country. The one Bengali food he ate with relish was dahi [yoghurt], and regularly each night Mother put a little bowl of milk to set for his lunch the following day.

He was also extremely fond of sandesh [a milk sweet] which was served in tiny terra-cotta bowls sprinkled with rose petals as a special delicacy at his dinner parties. Mother was never present at these parties for we were all in purdah [seclusion] in those days in spite of Father’s advanced Western ideas.

My father had lost his father in infancy and had been brought up by his uncle, Jogendro Chandra Ghose. This uncle, whom we called grandfather, was a remarkable personality. In his dress and in his living he was extremely orthodox, but in religion he was staunchly Positivist. He was a follower of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, and considered Richard Congreve, the head of the London Positivist Society, his guru.

To Jogendro, Positivism seemed to be the ideal philosophy to tie together the valuable Hindu social institutions and certain secular, rational concepts from the West. He began to write books and articles which explained his brainchild, “Hindu Positivism.” Having accepted the Positivist “sacrament of maturity” in 1884, Jogendro was qualified to become the leader of the * “Society for the Study of Comte’s Positivist Philosophy in India.” As leading member, Jogendro organized the festivals of the Positivists and carried on a lengthy correspondence with Richard Congreve.

I never saw my great uncle, but many were the tales current in our family of his simplicity, courage, and absolute freedom from convention. This background was a strong influence in my father’s life so that he in turn became unorthodox and immovable in his ideas.

My mother was the sweetest soul, but poles apart from my father. While he remained unorthodox to a degree, wholeheartedly adopting Western ideas, she clung to the Eastern ones. He had his ways of living and thinking, but she held firmly to her own.

My mother’s people came from nobler lineage than my father’s because they had the blood of Maharaja Protapaditya in their veins. Protapaditya of Jessore was the pride of Bengal—the rebel lord famed for his valour and stubborn resistance to Mughal sovereignty. Stirring tales were told of how well he fought and was victorious in the sixteenth century, but, alas, was later conquered and captured. Guruprasad Roy Chowdhury, my mother’s grandfather, owned extensive land and property in Khulna, in the surrounding areas, and in Calcutta. There can still be found a lane named after him in the southern part of Calcutta.

The family mansion is at Taki Saidpore by the broad Ichamati River. Here his son, Rajendra Nath, a much beloved landlord, maintained the old traditions of charity and almsgiving, fulfilled all obligations to his tenants and dependants, lived honourably and died full of years leaving ten children to mourn his loss.

My mother was the eldest daughter. Her name was Giri Bala, “daughter of the mountains,” and it was an appropriate one. She had amazing strength and endurance; her mind was stronger than her frail and ailing body, which never dominated her spirit. She had no tact, spoke the truth bluntly without mincing matters, and was immovable as a rock where her principles were concerned. She was a curious mixture of sentiment, practicality, and courage.

The Ramayana and the Mahabharata epics were her favourite reading, yet she was passionately fond of the very popular historical romances of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. In those days, she also loved the writing of Hem Chandra Banerjee and had learnt most of his poems by heart. Many were the stories she told us about him, and in her jewelbox was a treasured pair of earrings that the poet had blessed her with when she arrived as a bride. His palatial home, which now has a rather desolate look, was very near ours, and his family seemed to be the only one in Kidderpore with whom our womenfolk were on visiting terms.

We learnt from her of the famous visitors to the house, for Jogendro regarded his special apartments as similar to a French salon. Mother had watched all this from a distance for she never appeared before men. During the years, she had had glimpses of many who became famous—Henry J. S. Cotton of the Indian Civil Service; W. C. Bonnerjee, the first President of the Indian National Congress; Dwarakanath Mitra, the first Indian High Court Judge; and of course, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Hem Chandra Banerjee.

Mother told us in detail about the leading literati who gathered in our home—how they would read out their contributions to Banga Darshan, a popular Bengali monthly published by Bankim Chandra, and shout with laughter as some important personage was ridiculed without mercy. She loved those evenings and loved dispensing hospitality to the jovial men who gathered there. She was a young wife then, and being weary after the long day would sit nodding on the steps as she watched dinner get cold. At times it was past midnight when she finished serving the men and was able to have her own meal, but those were happy days for her.

We never tired of hearing how the poet Hem Chandra Banerjee once played a practical joke on her. To all who belonged to the coterie, he posted a doggerel in Bengali which, translated, would be something like this:

Tapsiya fish just off the fire with piping hot loochi

Chipped potatoes, cauliflowers and young goat’s meat

On a cold winter eve should you care to eat.

Then hasten to Number 14 Puddapukur Street.

Mother faithfully maintained the various rituals, functions, and social customs that had been handed down to her by Grandmother. In spite of my father’s liberal ideas and Western way of life, in faith he was essentially a Hindu, and it was here that he and my mother were one; both were religious and pious without cant.

Many of my Mother’s beliefs, to Father’s rational mind, were mere superstitions, but he never seriously interfered or forbade anything she chose to do within our home. He had at one time tried his best to persuade her to eschew our age-old customs and to adopt Western ones, but she had been adamant in her refusal.

“At a very early age I was brought to this house by your mother to keep the traditions. So as long as I am here I must be true to the things into which I have been initiated. Should you leave this ancestral home of yours and live elsewhere, then only in the new surroundings and in altered circumstances can I think and act according to your desires. Here I am not only your wife, but the daughter-in-law of the house …” she told him. And it was ever thus. She kept her faith and lived up to her beliefs, and rigidly adhered to the family traditions she felt it her duty to uphold. We, the children, knew in some measure how difficult was life for her and how easy it could have been had she agreed to follow Father’s wishes. But no, she had her own ideas of duty and those were of paramount importance to her. The legacy left by her mother-in-law lay heavily on her but she bore all with equanimity. “A man may do whatever he chooses, but that home is doomed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Index