British lathis and starched cotton: Remembering my Minister-Grandmother

Last night I was standing at our neighbourhood August 14 function watching  assorted councillors and municipal officials act self-important. The syrupy overblown commentary, the embarrassingly gushing praise for the minister in attendance (Mukul Roy, the rail minister), the over-loud patriotic songs, the obligatory recitation of Tagores’s Where the mind is without fear – none of it inspired anything but cynicisim. I wondered what Mantri-thakurma, my great aunt, would have made of it. We always called her Mantri-thakurma – the minister grandmother. Others called her by her real name. But she was the only member of our family to have ever been a real minister, so to us she was Mantri-thakurma to distinguish her from all the other assorted great aunts – Putul-thakurma, Jolly-thakurma and Delhi-thakurma. And Mantri-thakurma she remained long after she had retired from parliament. [caption id=“attachment_418805” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. Reuters[/caption] When she passed away several years ago at the age of 95, she got the typical freedom fighter turned politician obituary snippet. Phulrenu Guha, veteran Congress leader, freedom fighter and Gandhian, died after a protracted illness. Elected to Rajya Sabha in 1964 and the Lok Sabha in 1984, became Indira Gandhi’s minister of social welfare, was married to the Biresh Guha, the father of Indian biochemistry. But I knew her only as an old woman, with cropped gray hair, black rimmed glasses, chewing paan, always in immaculate white cotton saris, riding around town in a jeep. My mother, decades younger and shuffling around with bad knees, would stand on the balcony and watch her aunt-in-law with undisguised envy. “How does she do it?” she would mutter, as Mantri-thakurma hopped on and off her jeep, unaided. To us, she was indestructible. In the late eighties, when she was already elderly, she was almost killed in a traffic accident that left her lungs punctured, most of her ribs broken. Parliament in New Delhi was apparently ready to observe a moment of silence. Family members and politicos gathered near the Kolkata nursing home to pay their last respects. But she came through. Her voice, reduced to a low rasp, was the only visible reminder of her brush with death. “All those British lathis she had to face. They must have made her tough,” said a relative. To me Mantri-thakurma was the living, breathing symbol of independence, and not just because she’d been a freedom fighter. Widowed in 1962, childless, she had fended for herself her entire life. Until almost the end of her days, she lived by herself with a maid for company. She never complained about being lonely or nephews and nieces not having enough time for her. Once, hearing she had been bedridden with fever, my mother went to visit. The maid informed her that she had already left for Delhi on the overnight train. It was a classic Mantri-thakurma story. We were the post-Independence generation – soft and used to comfort, apt to whine if the going got bumpy. She came from another world – she shrugged off bumps. In 1984 she ran for Parliament from Contai in Midnapore at an age when most of us of her peers were trading stories about bad knees and cataracts. She was tough, vinegary and unsentimental, brusque in her kindness. Assorted relatives had been on the receiving end of her plain-spokenness and regarded her with a bit of nervousness. Yet my relationship with her was always that of a grandson and great-aunt. She did grandmotherly things like get me traditional Bengali sweets from the NGO she supported – patishaapta and malpoas. The first time I came back to India while studying in the US I brought little gifts for the family. I got Mantri-thakurma some soap. I wasn’t sure how she’d react. After all this was the woman who’d probably made a bonfire of British goods in her youth. But she was thrilled. She told us later that it was marvelously soft. But my regret is that I never learned to regard her as more than a grandmother figure. When she died, I learned she had received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1938. And I wish now I had asked her about what that was like. She was part of the struggle that made India and yet I never got around to asking her what that felt like, or whether India today was living up to her dreams. She had been part of forging the Independence that the rest of us took for granted.  But I never asked her any of this and then it was too late. She had only seemed indestructible. In the end she was human after all. This article is adapted from a tribute to Phulrenu Guha that originally appeared in India Abroad.