Stories About Women

Khushwant Singh was an Indian author, lawyer, diplomat, journalist and politician. His experience in the 1947 Partition of India inspired him to write Train to Pakistan in 1956 (made into a film in 1998), which became his most well-known novel.

Editor's note:  Rakshat Hooja, Usha Rani's grandson, has provided this material. The memoir was given by Khushwant Singh to the Hooja family, and was originally included in the private and limited circulation only booklet forms and figurines. The booklet was printed in 2005.

Cover page

It was sometime in 1949. I was working as Press Attaché of the Indian High Commission in London. One morning the High Commissioner, VK Krishna Menon rang me up and said "Sardar, I am sending an art student to see you. See what you can do for her." A few minutes later a younger lady glided in to my office. I gaped at her for a while, she looked more like an artist's model than an artist. She introduced herself "I am Usha Rani, I have a year's scholarship to study sculpting. It is a four year course. After my stipend is over, I hope to make it on my own."

Jitendra (Jeet) Sanghvi is a Registered Professional Engineer. He is the Structural Engineering SME and Senior Civil/Structural Engineer for the real estate division of a multinational automotive manufacturer. Jeet resides in Metropolitan Detroit. Jeet is also a fitness and healthy food enthusiast, and enjoys reading and travelling. He is a member of the Jain Society of Greater Detroit, where he teaches Jainism basics to Middle School children at the temple on Sundays.

Saklibai, my Dadi or Grandmother, was born around 1890 as an only child in the small princely state of Sirohi, now part of Rajasthan.

At this time, many in her Jain community were looking for new opportunities outside the small fiefdoms under the British Raj. Pune (erstwhile Poona), Ahmedabad, and Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay) had a lot more opportunities, unlike the hundreds of princely states in the Indian subcontinent. Travel to distance places was becoming increasingly feasible and relatively faster than before due to the railway system introduced by the British.

Jitendra (Jeet) Sanghvi is a Registered Professional Engineer. He is the Structural Engineering SME and Senior Civil/Structural Engineer for the real estate division of a multinational automotive manufacturer. Jeet resides in Metropolitan Detroit. Jeet is also a fitness and healthy food enthusiast, and enjoys reading and travelling. He is a member of the Jain Society of Greater Detroit, where he teaches Jainism basics to Middle School children at the temple on Sundays.

Author's note: This is my attempt to write a brief document on the life of my Paternal Aunt Mrs. Dharmibai Gandhi, born more than 100 years ago. I have researched events that happened during the time and used my memories growing up in a joint family, having heard anecdotal stories of events that happened during and in my Aunt's life and witnessed certain incidents, especially on her Clairvoyant abilities, myself. If I have inadvertently, omitted or modified any occasions in the write up, I ask for the readers' forgiveness in advance.

Early Life

Jitendra (Jeet) Sanghvi is a Registered Professional Engineer. He enjoys professional work as Mortgage/Construction Loan Manager in the credit arm of a multinational automotive manufacturer. Jeet resides in Metropolitan Detroit. Jeet is also a fitness and healthy food enthusiast, and enjoys reading and travelling. He is a member of the Jain Society of Greater Detroit, where he teaches Jainism basics to Middle School children at the temple on Sundays.

Author's note: This is my attempt to write a brief document on the life of my Paternal Aunt Mrs. Tipubai Sanghvi, born more than 100 years ago. I have researched events that happened during the time and used my memories growing up in a joint family, having heard anecdotal stories of events that happened during and in my Aunt's life and witnessed certain incidents. If I have inadvertently, omitted or modified any occasions in the write up, I ask for the readers' forgiveness in advance.

Early Life

Amit is a semi-retired publishing executive and owner of Green Comma, a service company for education and social-impact nonprofits. He lives in Somerville, MA, with his wife, Pam, and three cats. His two sons, Arnav, 27, and Simon, 21, did not ever get to meet their gentle grandmother, Aruna (Dutt) Shah.

Ma, as I called my mother, was 95 on April 14th, 2016. I cannot imagine what she’d be like physically. She died when she was 68.

Though my father dominated my life with his outsize emotions and contradictions, drive and aspirations, my mother gave me the tools for living . . . love of reading, of trying to understand the strength of humility, of much laughter and fortitude, and appreciation of beauty where I can find it.

She married my father, then 25, when she was 21, in the middle of the Second Word War, in 1942. A college graduate Bethune College, Calcutta, English honors , she was the oldest in a family of four children and a widowed mother. Those who know India will understand that a widow with four children, the youngest was ten, faced a very difficult situation at that time. Her father had died suddenly after a brief bout with meningitis, long before there were vaccines, when she was eleven, and her brother, the youngest, was still in my grandmother's womb.

Indira Pasricha was born on 17 January 1917 in Sidhpur in Multan district. She studied in Kinnaird College, Lahore. She married Prem Pasricha on 28 April 1940 in Lahore. She was a social worker and played an active role in saving Sikhs during the riots in 1984 in New Delhi. She was an active member of the women’s wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party. She and her husband Prem Pasricha helped the tribals in Orissa in setting up the Ekal Vidyalaya and eye camps.

Editor's note: Indira Pasricha dictated this story just five days before her death in May 2017 to her niece, Neera Burra. Indira was 100 years old when she passed away.

Mira Kathuria Purohit had her early education in Presentation Convent, Delhi, MGD, Jaipur and Hindu College, Delhi. She is a Pediatrician, having pursued her medical studies in SMS Medical College, Jaipur. She served in Rajasthan Government devoting her working career to treating children and teaching budding doctors to treat kids. She retired as a Professor, and now leads a retired life in Jaipur.

My mother, Savitri Hooja Kathuria, was a teacher. Well all parents are teachers-the first teachers a child has, before the schoolteachers step in. But my mother WAS a teacher - a real one - not only mine, but a teacher by profession - and a strict one at that! Born in the early part of the twentieth century [1918], to Shri Govardhan and Lajjawati Hooja, both of whom belonged to Arya Samaj families and were educationists, it was natural that she would be educated, even though female education was rare in India at that time.

Shakun Banfield nee Chowdhary was born and brought up in the U.K.  She retains a keen interest in her parents' achievements in their adopted country England and has many memories of a happy family life with them and her brother.

She worked for 30 years in the criminal justice system as a probation officer as well as in the family courts as a welfare officer and mediator.  She is now retired and lives with her husband in South London.

Ed. note. Her father's story is available here.

Savitri, Multan, 1928

Many Laindon (a town in England) people will remember my mother Savitri Chowdhary as the wife of my father, their well-loved General Practitioner, or G. P., as doctors as known in England. She was indeed a most supportive loving spouse and mother and her determination to succeed in whatever task she set herself knew no bounds.

Her inspiration may have come from the character she was named after in Hindu mythology as Princess Savitri's steadfast loyalty to her husband so impressed Yama, the God of Death that he granted her wish and released her husband from Death allowing him to return to life to resume his role as her husband.

Surjit was brought up in many different places in India, went from Delhi University into the Indian Foreign Service, and subsequently joined her husband in academics, shuttling between India and the United States. Now a semi-retired professor with two grown-up sons, she lives with her Himalayan cat, music, books, and walks in Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

My Dadi lived with us for the last years of her life when my parents and I returned from two years in England and were reunited with my three elder siblings. She was, in fact, my father’s bhua (father’s sister) who had adopted him when his own mother died shortly after his birth in 1904, and was known by us as Beji.

She had been widowed some time in the 1930s in a bizarre incident of robbers mounting one night to the terrace where she and her husband were sleeping to tear the jewellery off her arms and ears and throw her husband down to the hard street below. This was in the small village of Kallar, about 40 miles from Rawalpindi (in present day Pakistan). I never heard my father speak of that village with any affection, but did listen to him declaim with loathing on its regressive social customs to my historian husband and myself.

Jeet is a Registered Professional Engineer. He is the Lead Civil/Structural Engineer and Capital Budget Planner for the real estate subsidiary of a multinational automotive manufacturer, and lives in Metropolitan Detroit. Jeet is a fitness enthusiast, and enjoys reading and travelling. He is a member of the Jain Society of Greater Detroit, where he teaches Jainism basics to Middle School children at the temple on Sundays.

My mother's name is Diwali, one of India's most prominent festivals, because she was born on Diwali day. This happened in 1929 in Kolhapur (in present day Maharashtra), which was a Princely State at that time, nominally independent but in practice a part of the British Raj in India. She was the eldest surviving child of Vanaji and Santokbai Nibjiya.

I have always been amazed by my mother's perseverance. In today's culture of instant gratification, her life is an inspiration to me, and many others in her world. She has been part of and taken care of big and unique family setups, stretching the definitions of a nuclear or joint family. I have always been amazed by the stories of her childhood, especially the ones she told me, my siblings and cousins about her father and his accomplishments.