by Vibhuti Patel
Professor and Head, Department of Economics, SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai-20. 

In passing away of Prof. Leela Dube on 16th May, 2012, we have lost a stalwart who enriched a discipline of anthropology by bringing insights of women’s studies and enriched women’s studies as a discipline by brining sharpness and technical expertise of an anthropologist.

Dr. Leela Dube’s academic career began in 1960 at Sagar University and she moved to Delhi in 1975. She played a crucial role in shaping Towards Equality Report: Committee on Status of Women in India (1974), GoI discussion of which in the Parliament of India brought women’s studies centre stage in the Indian academia via UGC and ICSSR. Dr. Leela Dube successfully executed innumerable research projects for both these apex institutions for higher education.   She was a mover and shaker in Indian Sociological Society in the nineteen seventies and was responsible for introducing women’s studies concerns in the mainstream sociology. She played crucial role in World Sociological Congress in 1984 in which women activists and women’s studies scholars played dominant role thro’ Research Committee (RC 32). Leeladee chaired a panel on “Declining Sex Ratio in India”, in which Dr. Ilina Sen gave a historical overview of deficit of women in India throughout history of Census of India, Prof. Veena Mazumdar passionately spoke on the finding of towards Equality Report and I spoke on “Sex Selective Abortions-An Abuse of Scientific Techniques of Amniocentesis”. Leeladee summed up the session with her insightful comments on tradition of son preference in India. Her greatness lay in synthesising complex concerns and providing an analytical framework in a lucid and convincing way. In a debate on sex selective abortions carried out in EPW during 1982-1986, her contribution was immense and her predictions about direct relationship of deficit of women and increased and intensified violence against women has proved to be true in the subsequent years.

Due to team efforts of women’s studies scholars (that included Prof. Leela Dube), RC 32 got institutionalised in World Sociological Congress. She invited many activists (that included me too) for an 12th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Zagreb, 24-31 July 1988 to present paper on “Codification of Customary Laws into Family Laws in Asia”. In the Congress, Leedadee’s speech on feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock provided new insights into departure of the feminist anthropologists from its colonial legacy of “Big brother watching you”. Power relations between the North and The South in construction of knowledge and hegemonic presence of ETIC approach in academics were questioned by Leacock as well as Leeladee who propagated “dialogical approach” in anthropological and ethnographic research.

I respected her from distance. I was too awe-struck to go close to her but always appreciated her sharp, witty comments during academic sessions and tea and lunch breaks at innumerable seminars, workshops and Indian Association of Women’s Studies conferences held every two years. She was appreciative our campaign against sex selection. During 1981 and 1991, I got to listen to her speeches, deliberations and arguments as I used to be one of the rapporteurs in most of the programmes in women’s studies held in Mumbai and Delhi. Each time I heard her, I got more motivated to read her papers and later on her books. Her work on Lakshadweep island’s matrilineal Muslim tribe was eye-opening, so was her deconstruction of polyandry in Himalayan tribes in the context of women’s workload of collection of fuel, fodder, water, looking after livestock and kitchen gardening in mountainous terrain resulting into high maternal mortality and adverse sex ratio. She showed interconnections between factors responsible for social construction of women’s sexuality, fertility and labour rooted in the political economy.

A co-edited volume Visibility and Power: Essays on Women in Society and Development by Leela Dube, Eleanor Leacock and Shirley Ardener and Published by Oxford University Press (1986) provides international perspective on the anthropology of women in the context of socio-political setting of India, Iran, Malaysia, Brazil, and Yugoslavia

Her meticulously researched piece “On the Construction of Gender: Hindu Girls in Patrilineal India” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 23, No. 18 (Apr. 30, 1988)   has been used by women’s groups for study circles and training programmes.

Volume in the series on Women and Households, Structures and Strategies: Women, Work, and Family (1990) Co-edited by Leela Dube and Rajni Palriwala has been extremely useful in teaching women’s studies in Economics, Sociology, Geography, Social Work and Governance courses.

Women and Kinship: Comparative Perspectives on Gender in South and South-East Asia by Leela Dube, Brookings Institution Press in 1997 argues that kinship systems provide an important context in which gender relations are located in personal and public arena.

Her highly celebrated book Anthropological Explorations in Gender: Intersecting Fields (2001)  by Sage Publications is a landmark contribution in feminist anthropology in India. It examines gender, Kinship and Culture by sourcing a variety of distinct and unconventional materials such as folk-tales, folk songs, proverbs, legends, myths to construct ethnographic profile of feminist thoughts. She provides a nuanced understanding on socialization of girl child in a patriarchal family, “seed and soil” theory propagated by Hindu Scriptures and Epics symbolizing domination-subordination power relationship between men and women,

Her last publication was in Marathi; Manavashastratil Lingbhavachi Shodhamohim was published in 2009.

After Prof. Iravati Karve, Prof. Leela Dube was the only scholar who made a path-breaking contribution in anthropology with gender sensitivity. Leeladee made a mammoth contribution in bringing academic credibility for women’s studies thro’ her scholarly endeavour.

In 2007, Leela Dube was conferred on the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Indian Sociological Society, and in 2005 she was given prestigious UGC National Swami Pranavananda Saraswati Award. She remained intellectually charged and busy with scholarly pursuit till the end.

Hell hath no fury
Moniben Gupta
May 19, 2012

Mamata Banerjee and J Jayalalithaa – two tempestuous and enigmatic women chief ministers currently dominating Indian politics – share two significant markers: gender and power. Feeding into and strengthening each other, both these elements have contributed to constructing their cult personalities in bewildering and striking ways. A year ago, the two leaders swept to power in their respective states of West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, defeating powerful political adversaries. Mamata even achieved what had at the time appeared to be an unattainable feat: she defeated the potent 34-year-old Left Front government with a sweeping majority.

While the Trinamool Congress leader finally made the transition from being a volatile, feisty street-fighter to Kolkata’s Writer’s Building, the scenario for her Tamil Nadu counterpart was somewhat different. The AIADMK supremo was anointed chief minister for the third time in her long and fractious political career. But unlike Mamata, Jayalalithaa was no stranger to state power and the advantages of leveraging its controls.

With both the leaders now marking the first anniversaries of their recent ascendancy to power, it is a good time to take another look at their personality cults. At the heart of the debate around Mamata and Jayalalithaa are several important and unresolved questions hinging on gender, and the complex power relations inhabiting the domain of politics. Are women politicians expected to be less competitive and aggressive, and more nurturing and compassionate than men? Or is it just a question of power corrupting those who wield it? To properly understand leaders like the women in question here, we need to locate them in a framework moving beyond gender, and then decode the inherent logic of power and how women negotiate it: especially when they alone are in supreme control of their parties and governments.

The narratives of Mamata’s and Jayalalithaa’s political lives are far from similar. Despite the varying trajectories however, both have shared comparable experiences, stemming from the overwhelmingly male political worlds they have inhabited. Both have encountered a fair bit of humiliation – political, as well as personal and physical. But that’s also where their differences begin. Tamil Nadu’s actress-turned politician shared an intense relationship with another icon, M G Ramachandran. Besides being the better half of a popular onscreen pairing, Jayalalithaa was later MGR’s political protêgê. The unconventional alliance brought her heaps of abuse and slander from political detractors, patently shaping in that process her dictatorial style of transacting politics as a way of reinforcing her position of authority – when she finally got it.

Mamata, however, has maintained a scrupulously chaste image: a woman politician who, seemingly, hasn’t ever been involved in a romantic relationship;and even more significantly, hasn’t had a male patron hovering in the background to promote her political career. But this hasn’t spared her the cut of male chauvinism. For most of her political life, Mamata has had to put up with intemperate, sexist comments and ridicule from her opponents.

Instances of patriarchal politics impinging on both women are fairly numerous. Like the shocking outrage witnessed on the floor of the Tamil Nadu assembly on March 25, 1989: when M Karunanidhi, then chief minister, rose to present the budget, and opposition leader Jayalalithaa, raised a privilege issue. What subsequently unraveled on the assembly floor was testimony to the state’s crude and sexist political culture. It is recounted by many that DMK MLAs attacked Jayalalithaa with paperweights. One pulled her sari, another her hair. But such behaviour is not unique to Tamil Nadu. One could argue that all strong, independent political women have to face the brunt of it in one form or another in India. Before coming to power, Mamata too, encountered CPM sponsored violent physical assaults. Most prominent among them was the vicious attack at Kolkata’s Hazra junction in July 1990, which left the Trinamool leader hanging on to her life by a thread.

Getting the better of a political system run mostly by men groomed in the school of patriarchy is perhaps the strongest testimony to the fortitude of both these women. In the process of coming to power in such a polity, however, both women appear to have internalised some of the worst attributes of a masculine political culture. These women have clearly found it difficult to inhabit a male political world. Their constant struggle has even, evidently, contributed to their penchant for political vendetta and megalomania. Mamata and Jayalalithaa have fiercely attacked their opponents and cultivated strong personality cults conveying that they are the final word on matters political. Mamata’s outrage over a cartoon and her imprisonment of opponents, and Jayalalithaa’s infamous midnight raid on DMK leaders are examples of their intolerance.

Yet, gender is not the only prism through which we can explain such tendencies. Women are not intrinsically more compassionate because they are women. Power, especially when unchallenged, evokes similar responses from women and men alike. It nurtures megalomania, greed, authoritarianism, and corruption. Mamata and Jayalalithaa are two exemplary products of such a complex system. Gender adds to their insecurities; it is not a cause of it.

http://www.timescrest.com/opinion/hell-hath-no-fury-7942

MC: My basic discipline is sociology. In the early 1980s when I began my research women studies had just begun. As was the dominant practice in sociology, I ought to have worked on a contemporary theme and conducted field investigation. However a small research project that I worked on, for Dr. Veena Mazumdar, on women’s political participation gave me a sense of how history could be made alive and how critical it was to understand the present. This issue of the links between the past and present has informed my work since, even when I am working on advertisement which may appear to have little connection with the past.

The dominant practice of sociology in the 1970s was also deeply a historical. That is another story. Interestingly Indian sociology in the colonial period was far more historically informed. However the disproportionate influence of an American sociology informed of structural functionalism in some sense rendered earlier traditions invisible. Recent years have seen greater interest in historical sociology.

2. Can you tell us a little about how your research interests evolved? Especially your interest in working in gender (a field in which there hasn’t been a lot of research done).

MC: Well, about the second part of your question referring to paucity of work on gender, I would differ. Speaking in 2012, there has indeed been an enormous amount of very fine research in gender in India. My edited volume on Feminism in India was an attempt to showcase the richness of the history of doing and thinking feminism in India. Mary John’s edited work on Women Studies in India also demonstrates this.

For many of us entry into gender studies was a historical happenstance, if I may describe it so. In the times I did my MA (1977-1979) we had no idea about women studies. We had no idea about ‘gender’ except for its grammatical usage. That was a period when the second phase of the women’s movement was making its presence felt in India, a moment which made us once again look to the incredible and complex history of the women’s question in India.

As mentioned before we were in the university at a time, when the women’s movement was ‘happening’, when ‘women studies’ was emerging. They were exciting times. However looking back, it was a process of learning. I grew along with it. I cannot claim any clarity of understanding the women’s question from the very beginning. I recall that while we responded to the women’s question emotively, we were not very clear about the gender question in any deep systematic sense. One learnt along the way. There was no ‘canon’, no established body of feminist scholarship. It was still a period of ‘rediscovery’ and ‘discovery’. I say rediscovery because we had to relearn what did exist in India’s past . This was a contentious question as most scholars today would know. It was important to rethink an intellectual culture that either eulogized women in ancient India or debunked India’s past as barbaric and uncivilized. Feminist historians in India have done a remarkable work in rethinking the past critically.

A related point that I would like to touch upon is the manner that our higher education is structure or not structured. Many Indian scholars trained in the west are trained in a very structured fashion. The texts that must be read are ‘givens’, even as they may change with academic times and intellectual currents. For Indian students it is either a fossilized curricula or a free exploratory journey. In JNU where I studied the latter was the case. That exploration, sometimes entailing reading ‘extraneous’ tests (if such a word can be used for learning) often led to unexpected insights.

If I think back today, I may discern a pattern in the manner that my research interest evolved. Thinking back it was odd to be working on history as a sociologist at a time when historians necessarily researched specific themes in a specific district in a very specific period. I was trying to do a history of the sociology of dominant ideas about Indian womanhood as it evolved in a colonially mediated Indian modernity. I was struggling through what I read and trying to make sense of the persistent influence of theses ideas. Even today the typical matrimonial advert that asks for the beautiful convent educated Indian bride, but homely and also educated makes better sense if we look at the specific history of the ideas that shaped the Indian middle class.

3. What is your current research project?

MC: There are a couple of different areas in which I am working on:

• Media
• Academia and the social sciences
• Doing theory

While they may appear to be disparate ‘objects of inquiry’ for me they flow from my interest in the manner that India’s public and intellectual discourse has been shifting.

I have been working on the media, advertisements and the making of the new Indian middle class post 1990s. I have been arguing that the adverts themselves and the media generally have been instrumental in breaking away from an earlier public discourse that took shape in the anti colonial movement to a new public discourse more in sync with the new developmental paradigm. I am planning to put these essays together to mark the shift from what I tem the ‘nation’’ to the ‘global’ discourse.

While the ‘national’ and the ‘global’ are terms used often, I have been feeling that they are loosely deployed. They are buzzwords and the world today seems abuzz with such buzzwords. I have been arguing that we need to break away from a culture where social science discourse is being taken over by a managerial discourse. In this context you may find my books ‘The Practice of Sociology’ and more recently (where I actually seek to theorize the ‘national’ and ‘global’) The Sociology of India: Intellectual and Institutional Discourse useful.

4. What in your view is its significance–for scholars and for society?

MC: In modern societies the academia has been a central site of knowledge production and dissemination. The role of English educated Indian middle class in the 19th social reform movement and the Indian national movement needs no reiteration. The British visualized the role of education as producing pliant Indian clerks and officials to buttress colonial rule. The consequences as we all know were unintended. This critical role of liberal education for a just and democratic society is what I argue is extremely important. That I feel is under threat.

Within the higher education sector, the discourse has increasingly been driven by questions of ‘usefulness’ to the industry and development. Linked to this of course is the question of ‘employability’. Getting jobs is important. Students must have skills that are employable. The point that I have been arguing however is that the role of a university and liberal education (in which the role of social sciences and humanities is critical) is not only about professional and vocational education. University is a site for creative and free thinking which provides a space for ideas of inclusive citizenship and justice to develop.

Further doing theory becomes critical for social sciences in higher education to train students to think out of the box, make connections, understand diversity and make sense of the empirical. Normative theory also enables students to imagine other worlds and move beyond common sense understanding.

More worrisome has been the role of the media, particularly the electronic media. It has positioned itself centrally in the making of a new public discourse. Anchors have taken over as intellectuals who think about, and to the nation. Often university professors may be drawn in for a sound bite but the terms of the discourse are set by the media. That the media is firmly located within the maneuverings of the corporate and state structures need to be highlighted. I think understanding the role of the academia, the media and social sciences in contemporary times is extremely important in today’s context.

5. Can you share a glimpse into your research wish list? If time and resources were abundant, what would you work on?

MC: I like teaching and my interest in pedagogy and curricula emerged from that. The classroom for me has been a very rich and rewarding experience. I have been tempted to follow this up in different ways. Not sure whether it will work out.

A full list of her publications can be found here.

“I recall that while we responded to the women’s question emotively, we were not very clear about the gender question in any deep systematic sense. One learnt along the way. There was no ‘canon’, no established body of feminist scholarship. It was still a period of ‘rediscovery’ and ‘discovery’. “

The full interview follows.

Laxmi Murthy is the Consulting Editor of Himal Southasian, Kathmandu; as well as Director of the HRI Institute for Southasian Research and Exchange. Her writings, with a focus on giving voice to issues marginalised by mainstream media, have appeared in major dailies including The Times of India, The Hindustan Times, The Hindu and the Indian Express. Laxmi was an editor at the Women’s Feature Service, an international news-feature agency specialising in development issues from a gender perspective and was also South Asia coordinator for the Tolerance Prize, an award for excellence in journalism instituted by the International Federation of Journalists. Recently, Laxmi and Rajashri Dasgupta have published “Our Pictures, Our Words: A Visual Journey Through the Women’s Movement,” a history of the Indian women’s movement.

Read on for the full interview!

1. You’ve been a part of the women’s movement all your life. How has the movement fared in terms of documenting its own history?

LM: The women’s movement, like all movements, has been oriented towards action, rather than recording. And this is in the nature of movements – where action is prioritized. With the NGO-isation of the movement, several mono-issue NGos (like law, environment etc), began bringing out reports of their work, but these were more to fulfil requirements of donor agencies, and contained laundry lists of “achievements”, and did not quite represent the fervour or churning that symbolized the women’s movement.

However, it is not as thought the women’s movement has not felt the need the document its experiences, and this has been done in an on-going manner. In Saheli, where I was immersed for more than 20 years of my life, “Daily Diaries” were a live record of day to day happenings, communication between members, analyses, and not least, an outlet for emotions and thoughts. Once e.mail entered the picture, much of this moved to the Internet. Sadly, the Daily Diaries, along with most of the other papers and records, were destroyed in a major fire in May 2011. This reduction to ashes, quite literally, spurred many women’s groups to hastily begin documenting their own histories.

2. What are some of the documentation projects you’ve been a part of?

LM: Since most of my adult life was spent in activism as a major focus of work, a lot of my documenting efforts are related to the women’s movement. One example is the document that was brought out to mark 25 years of Saheli‘s existence in 2006. This was no mean feat for an autonomous, non-funded group working solely on volunteer power. To re-live and document the history of one’s own group, of one’s own life, is a heady, yet fraught enterprise. Since, as is well accepted, there is no one single history. Re-interpretation of the past, subjective analyses and prioritization are hotly debated issues, and this heat and dust is reflected when activist groups attempt to narrate and publish their histories. A notable fact is that Saheli’s history has no single author or “expert” – it is the history of the group as told by its members. In that sense, collective memories are woven together to represent the past in all its diversity as well as solidarity.

3. Tell us a little about the origin and rationale for ‘Our Pictures, Our Words.’

LM: “Our Pictures, Our Words” emerged from the Poster Women project launched in 2005 by Zubaan, a feminist publishing house. The political posters of the women’s movement (1970s onward) are ephemeral in nature, since, as noted earlier, women’s groups have not prioritized documentation and cataloguing. Many posters, created at the height of euphoria, often just before a demonstration — powerful line drawings with splashes of colour — are lost forever. The idea was the collect posters from women’s organizations across the country and create a digital archive. More than 1500 posters came in, and Zubaan organized exhibitions, printed post cards and T-shirts and an online archive. The idea of a simple, easy to read book that showcased this archive, emerged two years ago, and Rajashri Dasgupta and I were commissioned to write and design the book. Rajashri and myself are both journalists, and both of us have been active in the women’s movements for close on three decades. It was this “insider-outsider” status that enabled us to get to the core of issues, yet maintain the distance you need in order to be able to write. Writing the book was a challenge: to counter the media-created notion that feminism is “boring and didactic”, while simultaneously presenting authentic narration and analyses. The design element is strong in the book, and Sarita Sunder, from the Bangalore-based design studio Trapeze, was as much part of this journey.

4. Can you tell us a little bit about HRI and the work that you do here?

LM: The Hri Institute for Southasian Research and Exchange is an offshoot of Himal Southasian magazine published out of Kathmandu. The idea was to set up a body that could do research on a longer timeline than journalism allows – to go in-depth, and branch out and follow leads to a logical conclusion. We also wanted to create a forum for discussion and debate on issues related to Southasia (used as one word) that goes beyond lip service to the idea of regionalism, and the goody goody “hum sab bhai bhai” approach. To examine Southasianism with a critical lens, and also help create and nurture a Southasian sensibility. Right now we are working on the love legends of Punjab – both East and West, and also on networking the smaller archives in the region.

5. Can you share a glimpse into your reseach wishlist? If time and resources were abundant, what would you work on?

LM: I think I would like to document the struggles for social justice that have bubbled to the fore soon after independence of most of the countries in the region. Labour and trade union movements, environmental movements, and struggles of the marginalized. The rich tradition of songs, slogans, visual material, and of course people’s experiences. It would also be a fantastic oral history project – or many projects, actually.

Report will be up shortly.

http://uohpodcasts.in/womens-magazines-have-become-vehicles-of-commercialisation/

March 24, 2012, Hyderabad, Usha Raman interviews Ammu Joseph.

PS: Ammu Joseph has been a Friend of Prajnya from the beginning and has recently joined our Advisory Panel.

***

It was an unlikely meeting. I was in Meerut after all, spending a quiet weekend with my Uncle, a colonel in the army and his artist wife. They had told me about meeting an interesting old lady who reminded them of my great grand mother. I’d come to terms with my geriatric obsession long ago and knew I’d like to meet this 93-year old ‘Amma’.

Amma was in her lawn chair, sitting in the veranda, surrounded by newspapers. Her walker was close at hand and her swollen feet were propped up on a small chair. Behind her was a collage of black and white pictures with familiar (read: famous) faces. She was admiring a brilliant ‘mohar‘, the full-blossomed mango tree, promising a lot of fruits soon. I stopped for a second, taking in the scene. Before we said hello, I knew I liked her.

She looks at me with a twinkle in the eye and asks, “So you’re in JNU. Do you have any boyfriends?” I’m caught off-guard. She was 93 and this was her first question?!! Amma is clearly not your average grandmother. She tells me, was the first lady to get her Bachelors and Masters degree from Lucknow University. She married a well-known academic and moved to Hyderabad, where she met and entertained people from all over the world.

Amma had several anecdotes for me. She knew all the bigwigs of the art world. I had finished reading a book of 3 novellas, The Artist of Disappearance, by Anita Desai that had a long, loving note from the author neatly pasted at the back. Amma had translated some of Desai’s work into Hindi. One of them had a story on a translator getting carried away with the translation. My aunt and I couldn’t help but draw parallels to Amma, wondering if there was more to it than just a story about translations.

Amma has spirit. She wasn’t going to limit herself to the role of a hostess. She did that in style and then joined in the conversation. Dr Radhakrishnan had to admit that “The young lady has several ideas and thinks for herself.”

She used to cycle and later drove a Fiat. I can visualize her behind the wheel, cutting an impressive figure in the sleepy town where her father-in-law set up a University. She moved back when her husband retired from his post in Hyderabad.

Travelling extensively, Amma drew a line at what cultural practices to accept and where to be herself. She thinks it’s equally important to teach the others “Indian tradition”– this being in reference to not addressing someone much senior by their first name.

The amazing thing about Amma is that she’s not judgmental. She has a sense of humour. Graceful, loving… The afternoon and lunch slipped by too quickly. I walked around the old haveli, built in the 1930s. There was something haunting about an empty book/show case. There were stories that I hadn’t even started to listen to.

I promised to return. She promised more stories.

***

First came Srirangamma

Shilpa CB  

Tucked away in Malleswaram are many pieces of the city’s history. One such piece lies on 17^th cross, 4^thmain within the compound walls of a residence called Kusum Bhavan, now shortened to KB by residents. Disappointingly, it reveals no visible evidence of the iconic personality — Srirangamma, popularly known in her time as BA Srirangamma—who built the house and lived here till she passed away in 1959.

Srirangamma was the first woman to graduate from Mysore University in 1883. Needless to say, her fame spread to every household in the city and beyond much before she earned her honours in English Literature. “When she walked or cycled in her nine-yard saree to Central College, people would open their windows, peep out to look at the lady who had defied norms to get a college degree,” says Sujaya S Bhagawan, the grand-daughter who inherited the gold medal Srirangamma received. “Grandmother was the first to get a BA honours degree in the whole of Madras presidency; hence the popularity as BASrirangamma. She was sent on a royal procession by the then Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar. She also received a gold bracelet or thoda with the royal emblem,” she recollects fondly. The bracelet, however, was stolen during the time Srirangamma’s youngest son, one of the four children she had, died suddenly. 

Sujaya’s association with her grandmother became stronger after the shocking incident; she had lost her mother and sister too and so, Srirangamma and an aunt took the orphan under their care. “You would find many people who would provide food to nurture your body. Srirangamma fed my soul. I turned beautiful because of these two people, I truly blossomed as a person,” she says, referring to the “great ladies”. Sujaya now runs a play home in memory of her beloved grandmother who touched the lives of hundred of women.

“Soon after she graduated, the British government employed her in the education department. As a school inspector, she would drive her Ford hatchback car from village to village, town to town,” she recollects. But it was more than just a job for the educationist who went door to door “like a social worker” urging families to send their daughters, teenage widows to school. She advanced in her career because of her work.

Educating young girls became a mission for her. She started the Vani Vilas School in Bangalore. Srirangamma went to Mysore to take the patronage of the royal family and start the Maharani’s college. Eventually, she returned to Bangalore and started the first teacher training programme for women so there would be lady teachers and parents would send their daughters to school, remembers the granddaughter who for the last 28 years has been running a play home called Kreedaranga named after Srirangamma.

“Many people who had known my grandmother have come up to me, placed their hand on my head in blessing and told me stories of her heroism, her inclination, her zeal for education, how she changed the lives of countless young girls,” she says. Srirangamma passed away at 84 when Sujaya was just 13. But talking about the woman who was a “riot of a person,” who left behind a “wealth of a legacy” still gives her “chill bumps”. That there are few records of the pioneer’s achievements should concern every one of us.

Prajnya introduced a media monitor on gender violence, The Blue Pencil, on the occasion of this roundtable.