Lessons From Kalpana Dutta, a ‘Seditious’ Great-Grandmother

The granddaughter of a revolutionary and a Communist writes to her children about lessons from a ‘seditious’ life.

8 March 2016

My dear Tishya and Tia,

As you get bombarded with memes about Women’s Day, you will read about accepting your body, asserting yourselves and about gross gender inequalities.

You will also be reading about impending choices and struggles about career vs. family – something you will choose and negotiate later and nothing can prepare you for it.

But I want to talk to you about something else.

With sedition being the word of the moment, and with it being Women’s Day, it is hard for me not to think of my grandmother, your great-grandmother. A woman who got Deepika Padukone to eschew her makeup, wear a cotton saree and bring her story to the masses.

Kalpana Dutta-Joshi was 18, hardly older than you when she joined the Chittagong revolutionaries and was sentenced to transportation for life for seditious acts in 1933. She helped make bombs and acted as a courier of messages and was involved in attacks on the British.

She is remembered as a freedom fighter and one of the foremost women revolutionaries in India.

I want you to think about this: Seditious acts are almost always against the ruling establishment but are they always anti-constitutional?

You may say that one cannot compare foreign rule with a democratically elected government. True. But internal revolutionary movements are by indigenous people and any ruling power that “others” indigenous people invites acts of resistance.

So always be aware of “othering” and being “othered”.

As someone who does not support violence, I struggle with how to articulate your great-grandmother’s greatness to you. She embraced the means to an end that she wanted with great fervour – freedom. She was a patriot. Her country and its people meant everything to her. Even when her home, Chittagong, came under another country, she continued to work for the people. Therefore she was not nationalistic.

Be patriotic my children, not nationalistic.

She never spoke to me in terms of gender, except when she narrated how she once dressed as a boy to escape being caught. Her stories were about the beautiful landscape in Chittagong, her love for mathematics, her comrades, friendships; many, many songs, her adventures, and even her failure in winning an election.

She is remembered by all who knew her for her grace, her humility, her dedication to her country and to the upliftment of the downtrodden.

During the Bengal famine, she was wholly dedicated to organising relief kitchens for the starving and medical relief for the sick in the villages of Chittagong.

During the partition, she was involved in rescue and relief work in Bengal and Bangladesh. Aggression and compassion need not be mutually exclusive.

Do something for the less fortunate around you, wherever you may be.

She got attracted to Marxism in jail and joined the party after her release in 1939. She became a communist later. She married your great grandfather PC Joshi, the leader of the Communists in 1943.

Here is another reading I have for you - ideologies fit in after we act as we deem right, we do not act based on ready ideologies. Take your time.

What I remember vividly is ‘Thukuma’ in her seventies, jhola on shoulder, catching DTC buses with the energy of a 20-year-old. A dislocated shoulder became a source of entertainment to her – she would pop it out and in and show us.

That energy doesn’t come just from physical fitness. Tap into that energy.

She would always shun pain, be dismissive of tears, disapprove of anything but the simplest clothes and frown at PDA – and I indulged in them all. But it made me realise how contextual these things can be.

Express yourself freely but don’t let small matters seem catastrophic.

Her lullaby to me was Ekla cholo re and her grandmotherly advice while feeding me ‘ghee-lebu-bhaat’ was always about courage and determination.

I have not always imbibed that lesson, but it is something I fall back on often.

Try and overcome your fears, and believe that you can do anything you decide.

So my dear daughters, this Women’s Day, I want you not to get daunted by the grand figure your great-grandmother was, nor aim for a life that one can base a movie on but to take a few pointers from a woman who is directly linked to your birth and the birth of your free country.

With all my love,
Mama