An Uncompromising Activist

I vividly remember one crisp morning about six months after my father died, when my grandmother told me that my mother was going to the hospital to bring me a baby brother. All of my relatives hoped and dreamed that God would give my mother a son, who would take care of his mother and sister when he grew up. I was six years old and did not quite understand the difference between having a brother or a sister. Of course, my pessimistic mother had told me that she knew she would deliver a baby girl. Sadly, my sister’s birth was a somber event for my family. Niru was a quiet and cute little girl. My mother became preoccupied with raising her, so I turned to my grandmother and sought comfort in her.

Until I was ten years old, my mother and other well-wishers told me that my father was abroad getting a higher law degree. They wanted to protect me from the trauma of this monumental loss. As a child, I needed to believe that he would return one day. But when his death really sank into my heart and soul, I was overcome by a deep sense of loss and hurt.

I deeply experienced the loss of my father at every stage of my life. I cried easily when I thought of him. I looked to his memory and his spirit to help me choose the right path. My family reminded me that I looked like him and articulated my thoughts just as he had. When I expressed my convictions about anything, they would say, “There is no point in arguing with her because she has her father’s genes.” Throughout my adolescence, I searched for the cause of my father’s death, but to no avail. No doctors could provide a comprehensible explanation because he had been so young, with no history of alcoholism, peptic ulcers, or any bleeding disorders. However, my search for the cause of my father’s death led me to develop an interest in medicine. In high school, my class was asked to write an essay on the topic “Who do I want to be when I grow up?” The main point of my essay was that I wanted to become a physician to be able to save the life of another little girl’s father, so that she would never have to experience what I had. The loss of my father stayed unresolved for me into my early adult years. As an adolescent, I experienced significantly more emotional turbulence than most adolescents. I questioned everything in my life, as well as the society around me.

An important question for me was whether I would be able to fulfill my family’s expectations. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, my maternal grandfather gave me mixed messages about the role he expected me to fill. On the one hand, since there was no man in my nuclear family, I would have to pursue an education and become a professional woman so that I could be the breadwinner for my mother and younger sister, a role traditionally reserved for a son. On the other hand, I was also supposed to have an arranged marriage and bear children, as expected of every daughter.

This led me to further question the underlying societal belief system and traditions upon which my family based their expectations. Although India was one of the first countries in the world to elect a woman as prime minister, Indians generally have had a very limited view of a woman’s role in society. When I was growing up in the 1960s, a woman’s primary role in my community was that of a homemaker, a wife, and a mother. Therefore, the primary objective for any girl’s family was to find her an appropriate husband, allowing her to fulfill this role. Having a career and working outside of the home was significantly frowned upon. People feared that if a daughter was educated, her matrimonial opportunities would become limited, especially in communities like mine where few men pursued higher education; in most arranged marriages, the woman was younger and less well educated than the man. I felt, though I could not express, the difficulty of fulfilling both of these conflicting expectations my family held for me.

I resented that my culture treated women as property. A woman followed her father’s wishes as a little girl, then her husband’s after marriage, and then her son’s until she died. I promised myself that I would never be one of those women. Watching my mother, I despised the fact that she constantly played the role of a victim. I felt outraged that women who did not have husbands or sons, like my mother, felt victimized and refused to try to overcome the obstacles put in their path. I vowed never to give in to feelings of victimization myself.

Finally, I also questioned my society’s emphasis on skin color. Although people of Indian origin range in skin color from light brown to dark brown, fair skin is highly valued over dark skin. Fair skin is associated with beauty, wealth, and social status. Having darker skin greatly hurt a woman’s marital prospects. My family felt that since I was a dark-skinned woman (though my children now insist that that assessment was not accurate), I would have a better chance of finding a good husband if I pursued a profession. I resented the fact that society would judge me purely on my skin color, rather than on my character, my intelligence, or even my actual facial features.

As I questioned the society around me, I gradually became an uncompromising activist for the principles about which I felt strongly. For example, I believed that I should be able to express my feelings and articulate my thoughts freely; that an appropriate spouse for me would be an independent provider rather than someone who simply took over a family business; and that an appropriate spouse need not necessarily come from the same community I did. My family perceived my questions and independent thinking as rebellion. My maternal grandfather, a hypochondriac by nature, admitted to me on his deathbed many years later that throughout my adolescence, he had worried that my way of thinking would someday shock him to death.

Despite the forces around me, however, I always stayed true to my own values and morals. My principles became the guiding force in making me who I am today.