Amma’s Daughters A Memoir

As a precocious young girl, Surekha knew very little about the details of her mother Amma’s unusual past and that of Babu, her mysterious and sometimes absent father. The tense, uncertain family life created by her parents’ distant and fractious marriage and their separate ambitions informs her every action and emotion. Then one evening, in a moment of uncharacteristic transparency and vulnerability, Amma tells Surekha and her older sister Didi of the family tragedy that changed the course of her life. Finally, her daughters begin to understand the source of their mother’s deep commitment to the Indian nationalist movement and her seemingly unending willingness to sacrifice in the name of that pursuit.

In this re-memory based on the published and unpublished work of Amma and Surekha, Meenal Shrivastava, Surekha’s daughter, uncovers the history of the female foot soldiers of Gandhi’s national movement in the early twentieth century. As Meenal weaves these written accounts together with archival research and family history, she gives voice and honour to the hundreds of thousands of largely forgotten or unacknowledged women who, threatened with imprisonment for treason and sedition, relentlessly and selflessly gave toward the revolution.

Amma, photographed in Wardha in 1941

A black and white photograph of Rekha, kneeling down and cradling a puppy

Amma with Rekha and her infant daughter

A black and white photograph of Babu as a young man

 

Amma’s Daughters draws a vivid portrait of a revolutionary woman who challenges the norms of her time. Drawing on diaries and oral history, Shrivastava takes us on a journey alongside her courageous grandmother as she joins the Gandhian struggle against British rule in India and, after independence, negotiates her way through a political terrain inhospitable to women while simultaneously being a wife and mother. This biography is a welcome addition to the field of women’s history as complicates the conventional dichotomy of political man/domestic woman.

—Sikata Banerjee, professor of gender studies, University of Victoria

About the Author

Meenal Shrivastava is professor and academic coordinator of political economy and global studies. She lives on Vancouver Island with her husband.

Reviews

A well-crafted memoir from the period that reinforces the reader’s understanding of women’s individual and collective importance in the struggle for independence. Within a culture that was undergoing huge cultural and political shifts, many courageous women invested so much for the principles of an independent India, yet they remained constrained and discriminated against because of traditional gendered attitudes. Within those restrictions, Amma constantly had to stand her ground. Fortunately, she had the stamina, stubbornness and fearlessness to do so.

DEP: Deportate, esuli, profughe

A great example of relational storytelling. . . . A memoir that is both engagingly imaginative and archival.

World Literature

Table of Contents

1. Preface
2. A Note on Forms of Address
3. 1. Dislocations
4. 2. Many Homes
5. 3. No Easy Path
6. 4. Meeting Babu
7. 5. City of Conquests
8. 6. Battlegrounds
9. 7. Departures
10. 8. Crossing Thresholds
11. 9. Letting Go
12. Epilogue
13. Writing Amma’s Story
14. Acknowledgements
15. List of Interviews
16. Bibliography

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). It may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original author is credited.