About the Author
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| Me, in December 2023 |
Nationality: Indian
Education:
Till Class 2: Convent of Jesus and Mary, Karachi, where my father was posted as Consul General. I am still in touch with my Karachi friends.
Class 2 to 12: Modern School, Humayun Road and Barakhamba Road
BA Hons Mathematics, 1995, St Stephen's College, Delhi University
BA Juris (Law), 1997, St Anne's College, Oxford University. I was a Radhakrishnan Scholar.
LL.M., 1998, New York University
Special interests: philosophy, theory of science, theory and history of childhood, theory and history of family, Indian performance, folk and traditional arts, Hindustani classical music, Sanskrit literature, Hindu, Jain and Buddhist thought, Gandhi
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After completing my studies, unlike almost my entire batch at school and college, I returned to India. I returned because I had been raised to believe that my duty lay in India. I was brought up to be a patriot - on handloom, Hindustani classical music and Nehru's 'Tryst With Destiny' speech. I was brought up on tales of Satyagraha and India's non-violent Freedom Struggle. And, most precious of all, I was raised to love and cherish the composite Hindu-Muslim culture of North India. I was raised to believe that it was my duty to fulfill the promise of India for which our Freedom Struggle had been fought.
This is the edifice of my existence as a citizen of India, and it is one that is shared by many of my fellow countrymen and women. This blog is a response to the attack on this edifice in India today.
Coming back to the story of my life - I returned to India in 1998. With the idea of a career in the courts, I worked with various senior counsel - Harish Salve, Mukul Rohatgi and Aryama Sundaram. Though my bosses were nice to me, I was not happy in the courts and switched to corporate law in 2004. I joined the corporate law firm J Sagar Associates.
I was made partner at J Sagar Associates in 2007. I also got married that year. My husband is a corporate lawyer. He had studied at St Stephen's as well, and then Cambridge University. He could recite pages of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children extempore. He is also the only man, other than my father, that I ever met who can reel off Nehru's speeches by heart.
In April 2009 I had my first baby. The baby was a girl and the minute I set my eyes on her I thought she was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Motherhood burst on me like a thunderclap and I was never the same again. I went back to work after maternity leave, but it did not feel right. After agonizing over it for a few months, I quit work in August 2010 to become a full-time mom to the consternation of everyone around me.
This involved a profound change of values for me personally. For one, feminism just seemed like a big, fat lie in that it completely ignored and even denied the sheer joy of motherhood, and also its special responsibilities.
For another, I felt the poverty of my intellectual achievements and rather bookish approach to life thus far. I don't know whether this was just a delayed realisation that other people have from the start, or whether I outgrew the world that I had lived in till that time.
This shift into myself left me rather isolated. When you live in a career-driven milieu, quitting work has the effect of sprinkling salt on an anthill. Everyone. Just. Disappears. But the greater problem was not my physical but my inner isolation. I suddenly found that I had nothing in common with the non-mother-centric world.
In this era of silence, my only company was the maids. And through them I began regain the ground beneath my feet. They took my espousal of motherhood for granted. While I was somewhat taken aback by the intense love awakened in me by my child, they would see it, and simply give me a knowing smile.
They knew how to comfort, play and bear with a child. Affection was their one rule. They also humbled me with their extensive knowledge of herbal remedies and healing foods. This was a revelation - none of my baby books had anything remotely like this.
This is where I began to question Western ways. I was becoming a very Indian type of mother, and everything I did went against the rules of the baby books! So I am one person who became Swadeshi as an act of personal rebellion against "What to Expect When You're Expecting" - the baby Bible of the late 2000s!
Coming back to that era of silence, all that came to my ears, beside my babies' voices (the second one came in 2011) was the chatter of my maids. In the casual talk of these doughty village women, I saw what it was to live a life of single-minded devotion to family. I saw what 'seva' meant. I saw how self-reliant these folk were - how even their deep knowledge of herbal remedies and curative diets came from having to take care of themselves with what they could forage or grow for themselves. I saw the wisdom they had learnt from growing up in nature, and the skills they had acquired from battling it from time to time.
But above all I saw the colour and warmth of their lives. The regularity with which the humdrum of daily life would be relieved by some small festival or ritual; the excitement over weddings and other celebrations; the little ways in which they would decorate themselves and the space around them; the deep joy with which they would speak of their childhoods, remembering always the abiding love of their parents and siblings. There was nothing like this in Enid Blyton or Jane Austen or Marxist theory.
Looking back, I believe that this is where Mother India began to speak to me. Or atleast, this is where I began listening to her.
2012 - plumb-spang in the middle of this rediscovery of the genius of India and the glory of motherhood, the news exploded with reports of a Bengali expatriate family whose children had been brutally snatched by Norwegian child services. My babies were close in age to the ones in the news. I was on fire with protest! I joined the campaign to bring the children back to India. We were able to reunite them with their mother, Sagarika Chakraborty. A movie was released last year based on Sagarika's story that you might have heard of - Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway.
Since the first child protection case of 2012 in Norway, I have helped expat Indian families abroad fight unjust child removals in Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, USA and Australia. I do this work for free. I have linked up with activists, lawyers, journalists and victims all over the world on the issue of overzealous and biased child services agencies. There is a small but determined worldwide movement against the thinking and practices of these agencies that have become a law unto themselves based on misconceived notions of childhood, family and child welfare propounded by Unicef and other international child agencies. You can find my work in this field on my website - Save Your Children: All About How the Government and Child Rights NGOs are Eyeing Your Kids.
My child rights related work showed me the heartlessness of ideological thinking. No matter how noble your ideals and motivations, if they are not imbued with humanity and real life experience, then you risk becoming the advocate of much cruelty and suffering.
For these reasons, my work in child rights made me very uncomfortable with today's progressive politics. I am not a progressive and come to secularism from a different place - from our special Indian experience. This is an idea that I will be developing in this blog.
Getting back once more to my life story, I was saying that when I became a mom and quit work, Mother India began to speak to me. I was also determined to make Mother India speak to my children. So I introduced all the activities at home that my parents had diligently arranged years ago when I was a child to teach me what it meant to be Indian - the music lessons, the art lessons, the folk stories of India books and so on!
I also re-started singing lessons for myself and joined my children as they drew. I invited folk artists to give us lessons in traditional Indian arts such as Rajasthani Phad and Madhubani. This dabbling in the arts led me a few years later to start a self-published line of children's books written and illustrated by me called Mama Suranya Books. The idea was to write stories for Indian children that used the style of our oral story-telling culture, and had illustrations inspired by Indian art.
My singing lessons I took up as a personal exploration of learning in the oral tradition, as contrasted with the book-learning of my formal schooling. As I said earlier, this was a time of some disaffection for me with book-learning and scholarship. This became another entry-point for me to develop an understanding of Indian traditions and knowledge-systems.
Then came the anti-CAA protests. I had grown up in Delhi of the 1990s where secularism was a bad word and the BJP was in steep ascendent. In the 2000s, progressive politics had sprung up everywhere but, as I said earlier, I was never a good fit with the progressives.
The anti-CAA protests were a refreshing change from all that. When I went to my first CAA protest, I found people speaking the language of politics that I had learnt from my father as a child - of Hindu-Muslim brotherhood, and of the social and civic ideals of our Freedom Struggle. I went to Jamia and Shaheen Bagh many times. It was a wonderful experience that energizes and inspires me till today. Not even the implementation of the CAA a few weeks ago can shake the conviction and re-ignited resolve from my school days for a secular India that the CAA protests of 2019-20 instilled in me.
A few months into the anti-CAA protests came the Covid pandemic. I was an out-and-out lockdown naysayer and Covid sceptic, in that I completely disagreed with the World Health Organisation's approach to the disease. While everyone was burning their skin off with sanitiser, I got on the internet, pulled out all the papers I could find on epidemiology. I wrote up my findings and ideas in this blog here: Covid Lecture Series: Dodgy Science, Woeful Ethics.
The lockdown had stopped all art performances, leaving many of my artist biradari in dire economic straits. So as soon as the pandemic eased up around Dussehra 2021, in the month of October, I organised a 10-day Ram Leela at home. I invited various dancers, musicians, actors and folk artists to be part of this. I played sutradhar - reading chapters from the Valmiki Ramayan translated by me into English from the Sanskrit, along with a Hindi co-sutradhar. I had taken Sanskrit in school and would tell myself that "when I grow old" I will read the epics in their Sanskrit original. I realised that I was getting close to the age that had then counted as "old"!
Since then I have done different art projects with other Sanskrit works. This is one of the resources that I will use to make my case in this blog for the idea of India.
From post-Covid home theatricals grew my work with drama productions through Bhagyam Arts and Ideas, a forum founded by me, of which you can see glimpses here. Two of Bhagyam Arts and Ideas' productions are dramas that tell the story of Gandhiji and our Freedom Struggle through classical dance, music, drama, recitation, puppetry, pantomime and other art forms.
I think this brings you up to speed with me now. I hope you like my blog and will join me in the search for our lost India.
Here's to never giving up!
Suranya
Contact: thinkindia2024@gmail.com
March, 2024
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