Madam Mossless

“It’s our pride that kept us from calling ourselves feminists,” she now explains. For women of her pre-Independence generation, feminism was an admission of failure, rather than a flag to brandish. After all, she points out, women like her had fought shoulder-to-shoulder with men to get rid of the “damned British” and had ensured that when the new Constitution was being drafted, it guaranteed equality to all citizens, including women. She was 45, mother of four and a respected academician before she discovered the truth.

There was nothing in her own middle-class background and upbringing, she says, that shook her belief that men and women were born to be equals. The youngest of six children born to a civil engineer father and a self-educated mother, Vina grew up without ever encountering gender constraints—she read the books she loved, took part in student protests in British India, went up to Oxford like her three brothers, and returning home, took up a teaching job in Patna, all with her parents’ full-hearted support. Nor did they demur when she decided to marry the man she loved, although he wasn’t her equal, either in education or job prospects. In fact, once when she was already the mother of two girls and shaken by the usual accusations of being a ‘bad mother’, she was tempted to give up her job. But it was her father who urged her not to. “Stop thinking like an individual and don’t waste the investment a poor country like ours has made in you.”

After that, Vina went through life untroubled by guilt. She learnt to juggle—and enjoy—her many roles: dutiful daughter-in-law (even reading aloud religious texts to her mother-in-law when she was sick), loving daughter (she performed her father’s death rites and discovered to her shock that the Sanskrit text was suggesting she buy her father a ticket to heaven by offering gifts to unknown Brahmins), wife (she supported her husband, Shankar, loyally while he tried to make a career as a classical singer), breadwinner (she supported her family of six on her own, moving from one demanding job to another) and hostess (“we were invaded every evening either by my husband’s friends or by my old students, who demanded a lot of time from me,” she writes in her recent memoir, Memories of A Rolling Stone).

And of course, the mother of all roles—mater to a brood of “lively, intelligent, charming, boisterous, rebellious and independent creatures”. She dragged the two older ones to Oxford, ignoring everyone’s warning, leaving them with a nanny while she worked till late at night on her doctoral thesis, was sometimes so caught up with her job that she took one month to get her eldest, Shaswati, admitted to a new school, and that too at the child’s prompting: “Ma, am I not to join a school?” At parent-teacher meets, she stood out: waving a cigarette in one hand, gesticulating with the other, overpowering both principal and teacher with her sharp and clear analysis of what she and her daughters needed from the school. Looking back, Vina has no regrets as a mother, only pride: “As a working mother, whatever care I was in a position to provide, I provided. And by the time they cleared their teens, I felt I had to give them the same freedom that my father had given me.”

The turning point came in May 1972 when she was asked to take charge of a country report on the status of women in India for the International Women’s Decade. The members of the original committee, set up in 1970, were mostly “wily politicians and high-society ladies,” as one member described them. Clueless about what needed to be done, they wasted two years and eventually resigned without a word written. Alarmed at the prospect of losing face before the UN, the government roped in a reluctant Vina, then with the UGC and faced with personal problems galore—“a very small flat, too little money, and rebellion from adolescent daughters.”

But once she was persuaded to take the job, Vina went at it with her usual energy, using all her skills as a social scientist to come up with an accurate report on women’s status in India. She began her journey of discovery by going to the farthest corners of the country to hear what women had to say about their lives. It was a jolt from which she never recovered: “We were the first generation beneficiaries of the equality clause in the Constitution,” she explains. But out there were millions of poor women engaged in labour of all kinds but powerless to change their lives. It was humbling, and she spent the last few months on a sofa in her office, working 9 am to 9 pm, sleeping a few hours, and waking up again at 2 am to find answers to what she sought in books by economists and historians. She ended up doing what she calls a “180 degrees turnaround”. From being a fierce opponent of women’s reservation in politics—her doctoral thesis was on this very subject—she, along with her colleague in the committee, Lotika Sarkar, declared that reservations were the only way to enable women to get the equality they had been guaranteed.

The report was so damning that Vina’s friends in the government feared it would be consigned to the National Archives without ever seeing the light of day. But with some clever strategising, it was tabled in Parliament before Indira Gandhi’s government got scent of its subversive content. It was widely read, and according to some activists, “had the same galvanising effect on the women’s movement in India as Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique had in the West”.

The one factor that saved the Indian women’s movement from going the way of similar feminist movements in the West, according to her, was their continued focus on peasant women and those working in the unorganised sector rather than the middle class. “My friends in the West tell me, ‘We are so jealous, you people still have a very active movement going on and are able to achieve so much.’” They made some mistakes in the beginning—the Black-White divide, for instance—and have never been able to get over it.”

An astrologer once told an incredulous Vina that in her last life she passed by someone who was torturing a woman and went on without intervening and is paying for that lapse in this life. In the last 35 years of serving as the “backroom girl” of the women’s struggle, she has more than made up for it.