Bihar’s Original “Difficult” Woman: Tarkeshwari Sinha’s Legacy

In Maharani Season 4 (2025), there is a moment when Rani Bharti (Huma Qureshi)—the Bihari politician who began as her jailed husband’s proxy to become a formidable force in her own right—sits across from national party leaders in Delhi. They want to use her rising popularity but keep her confined to Bihar. She listens, nods politely, and then leans forward. “Bihar se shuru kiya tha, lekin ruk thodi gayi hoon,” she says quietly. (I started from Bihar, but I haven’t stopped.) The men shift uncomfortably. An ambitious woman, but a ‘ganvaaran’ (rustic woman) from Bihar, asking for national-level power without apology—this is the nightmare scenario they have spent decades trying to prevent.

Huma Qureshi’s Rani Bharti is fictional, but her trajectory mirrors a very real archetype: the woman politician from Bihar who dares to dream beyond the boundaries men have drawn for her. And watching that scene, I thought immediately of someone my family tried very hard to make me forget: Tarkeshwari Sinha, Bihar’s original “difficult” woman.

I was 13 when I first heard about Sinha. My paternal great-grandfather summoned me to his corner one afternoon and spoke about his batchmate from Patna Science College. Tarkeshwari Prasad Singh, as she was known then, was emerging as a young firebrand student leader and freedom fighter in the 1940s, when men around her were figuring out their ways out of their villages in search of a better future in a country headed towards Independence.

He spoke of her with the intention of making her my role model, but with terms and conditions applied. She was too fiery, he cautioned. She didn’t have a “good reputation”. When boys eve-teased her in college, she took out her chappals and beat them black and blue. She wove Hindi poems, Urdu couplets and Shakespearean quotes into her speeches. She became a parliamentarian at the young age of 26 and was India’s first female deputy finance minister and Jawaharlal Nehru’s favourite.

This was the young woman I should aspire to be, my great-grandfather said. But only in parts. The sanitised parts.

That was the only time I heard of her from my paternal side, even though she was married into a family 500 metres away from both my ancestral homes, my dadihaal and nanihaal (paternal and maternal). My maternal great-grandfather was also her contemporary in politics. They were ideologically poles apart: he was a Socialist and a Janata Party leader; she a fierce Congress loyalist.

When I prodded him about her, he spoke in his usual witty tone, which in hindsight, feels as derogatory as my paternal great-grandfather’s choice of words. It wasn’t her ability that had won her the seat term after term, apparently. It was her “elite charm”.

There it was. The first lesson in how we speak about successful women—always with an asterisk, always with an unspoken accusation hiding behind the compliment.

As I grew up to be the quintessential good girl, I completely forgot about Sinha. Until I was married and discovered that she was quite close to my in-laws’ family too. My mother-in-law would regale me with her “Deviji” stories, but there was always this underlying disdain. An ambitious woman is not a family woman, the subtext always said. I heard about her saris and satin gloves, the fancy parties. I heard whispered narratives about how the family was dysfunctional, how she had a sad and lonely life.

She passed away in 2007, and I was too deeply entrenched in my postpartum phase to think about her. But I have been thinking about Deviji a lot lately, especially after watching Maharani Season 4. This freedom fighter who joined the Quit India Movement at 16, who became president of the Bihar Student Congress, who won her first Lok Sabha seat at 26 and served four consecutive terms, somehow became, in family lore, just another cautionary tale about what happens when women want too much.

I have been thinking about how Gulzar’s Aandhi (1975) was inspired not just by Indira Gandhi but by Sinha too. How the film was banned during the Emergency because it showed the female protagonist smoking and drinking, as if those personal choices mattered more than her political acumen.

I have been reading about how, in Parliament, she never shied away from questioning ministers. How colleagues who dared verbal duels with her returned “bruised and shaken”. How she spoke in a tone that combined formidable intellect with blistering rhetoric, the kind of voice that makes men uncomfortable precisely because it refuses to seek permission. “Parliament is a very hard taskmaster,” Sinha once told The New York Times. “One must be able to talk constantly and one must learn how to talk.” What an elegant understatement for the exhausting performance of competence women in power still undertake daily.

I have been thinking about the contradictions. How she fought for women’s education through her work on the National Committee on Girls’ and Women’s Education in 1958. How she championed women’s property rights in parliamentary debates. How she did all this while being told constantly that she was too fiery, too ambitious, not enough of a family woman.

After her electoral defeats in the 1970s, she withdrew from active politics and set up a hospital in her village in the memory of her brother. Was that defeat? Or was that the only kind of victory available to women who refuse to be broken? I wonder if she ever took off her armour. If the loneliness in her later years was imposed on her, or if it was the only space where she could finally breathe. And I wonder, still, whether I should be like her or not.

Because here is the paradox: The same families who held her up as an example also made it clear that I should never actually be her. Study hard, yes. Be intelligent, certainly. But don’t be too fiery. Don’t challenge men. Don’t prioritise your work over family. Don’t have “a reputation”. And most importantly, don’t seek power so nakedly that it makes people uncomfortable. Be Deviji, but only the parts we approve of.

I am 40-something now, and I have spent a lifetime negotiating this impossible bargain. I have been the good girl who became a successful screenwriter writing powerful female characters. I have built a career while tending to the relentless demands of being a “family woman”. And frankly, I am exhausted.

I am exhausted from performing this endless calibration, from trying to be just ambitious enough but not too ambitious, just outspoken enough but not too difficult. I am tired of the mental mathematics of it all.

But here is what I keep coming back to: Sinha lived a life that mattered. So maybe the question isn’t whether to be Deviji or not. Maybe the question is: Why are we still asking women to choose between being good and being whole?

I don’t have an answer. I am still conflicted. And maybe that’s the legacy I must carry forward, not perfection, or having all the answers. Maybe the legacy is just this: the refusal to apologise for being brilliant. The courage to be talked about rather than forgotten.

Maybe that’s what Rani Bharti understood when she sat across from those men in Delhi. That she didn’t need their permission to want more. That Bihar se shuru kiya tha, but she wasn’t going to stop just because it made them uncomfortable. And maybe that’s what Deviji knew too, even when it cost her everything—that being palatable was never the point.

Maybe Deviji’s lesson is not about whether to be her or not. Maybe it is about whether I am brave enough to stop asking permission: from dead great-grandfathers, from disapproving families, from the voice in my head that still audits every choice. I am not there yet. But I am thinking about it. And I suspect both Deviji and Rani Bharti, one real and one fictional, both from Bihar, both unapologetically ambitious, would call that a start.

(Views expressed are personal)

Anu Singh is a screenwriter and author who lives between Mumbai, Delhi and in every other real and imaginary place where her writing takes her