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All images: details from photos of Punjab by Balwant Singh.

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My Mothers Story:
Marriage and Freedom
(Part Two)

by SUPRIYA SINGH

 

 

PART TWO

 

My mother stood first in the Rawalpindi district in the 8th class. She won a scholarship for the senior school for girls which had just opened in Pindi. But Bauji said she was already 13 and had to stop going to school. Baiji was also not happy with Mummy continuing.

Teachers from the school came to persuade them to send their daughter to school, but like most other parents of girls in Pindi, they stood their ground. The girl is "grown-up", they said.

At 16, Mummy was engaged to my father 13 years her senior. Though there was talk that he was "ill", that he "went up and down", the crucial selling point was that he was a medical doctor. Mummy's father was worried his daughter may die of TB, like her mother.

Soon after Mummy's marriage, her father-in-law took her aside and said his son was sometimes extravagant and sometimes lethargic. He told her not to get worried, but to make sure that she looked after the house and money herself. That is why he said they had not hosted a wedding dinner from their side. He said, "You can eat for six months on that money."

Though my mother's family had its share of mental illness, she did not understand. She had only seen my father when he was "up" during the engagement and wedding. When the relatives left after the wedding, he became lethargic. He would remain in bed until 4 pm and sometimes not even get up to eat. In the beginning she would tell him to get up, bathe, have his food. Later, she says, she became used to it. If he wanted to lie down, she would let him lie down. She preferred the lethargic state.

Normally he was a domineering husband, accustomed to having the house and family run the way he wanted. When he became manic, his bad temper escalated to abuse and violence.

This manic depressive psychosis meant my father was not able to earn much money for most of his life. He had opened a clinic in Rawalpindi shortly before his marriage. When he was "up", he was short-tempered and tactless and so lost patients. When
he was "down," he would not go to the clinic at all.

He had been a brilliant student in Lahore, winning gold medals in women's diseases and mental health. The few patients he had, stayed with him.

The family was somewhat protected against the lack of money. They were living in my father's ancestral house, so there was no rent to be paid. While Naniji was alive, she would open her stores so they could take bales of silk and velvet for clothes. As a result, the family was the best dressed in the neighbourhood. Moreover, Nanaji had left a will providing Mummy Rs. 25 a month for life.

With that Rs 25, they could buy a whole month's ration in the 1930s. Mummy also received Rs. 4000 as a lump sum from her Nanaji. He had intended the money to pay for her education as a doctor. This was a leap of faith in his time for in 1899, of the 208 students enrolled in the Lahore Medical College, only eight were women. But the money got spent, paying for my father's bouts of mental illness. Most of my mother's jewellery was sold for the same reason.

"I couldn't say that after my marriage I was unhappy," Mummy says. "People did not look for happiness. There should be food to eat, clothes to wear, a house to live in. I wasn't very unhappy or anything. I had my children. My Naniji used to love me very much. It was alright. I was quite satisfied."

THE LIBERATION OF EDUCATION
In 1941 my father joined up as a doctor in the army. My mother sneaked in a BA (Hons) in Punjabi during the time when my father was posted to Iraq for one-and-a-half years during the Second World War. In the early 1940s in Punjab, it was possible to do the BA (Hons), known as Gyani as a single subject, without having a general BA or even a Matriculation.

The tuition classes were for three hours a day in the Gurdwara. Bauji was staying with Mummy and my sisters Lata and Ranjan, while my father was away. My mother upbraided her father for not allowing her to continue her education, whereas the bride he chose for his son Khojinder had a B.A. Bauji remonstrated that in those days that was the custom, but gave her tacit permission to study.

After completing the Gyani, Mummy enrolled to study English in Government College, Rawalpindi. But my father came back earlier than expected and brought the study to a halt. Sewing classes, embroidery classes - these were acceptable. University education was not.

"He did not like it," Mummy said. "But he couldn't do anything about my having passed the Gyani. He couldn't have me failed, could he?"

The army service took the family to Karachi and Meerut. After the six years of army service ended, we moved to Karachi in January 1947. Though talk of Partition was in the air, my father discounted it. He argued that Muslims and Sikhs had lived together for centuries. So even if there was an India and a Pakistan, we would continue to live in Pakistan. After all, weren't there Sikhs in Afghanistan? Like many others, my father used to say that governments may change, but people don't change.

Mummy agreed with the decision. They had been happy in Karachi. Their world was now broader than the kinship-bounded world of Rawalpindi. So my father took his severance pay from the Army and opened a clinic in Karachi.

On the afternoon of August 14, 1947, my family was in the second row on the lawns of the Governor-General's House in Karachi watching Mohammad Ali Jinnah, accompanied by his sister Fatima, accepting independence from Lord Mountbatten.

They then went to a neighbour's house to listen to the radio and follow the news of Indian Independence scheduled for the following day.

The atmosphere was idealistic. My sister Ranjan remembers people saying, "The air of a free country is different." People in Karachi were able to relish the feeling at least momentarily. Karachi was far from the north-west frontier where troubles had already started.

Dera Khalsa, Bauji's ancestral village near Rawalpindi, was one of the first places to be destroyed.

Partition was a cataclysmic event in the history of India and our family. Ten million were made homeless. One million died. Seventy-five thousand women are thought to have been abducted and raped. Fortunately in our home, Partition was more a story to be told than a sorrow to be endured. We had our dramas but were fortunate for we left Karachi in 1948 and all of us were safe. Contrary to everything that has been written about Partition in history books and literature, for my mother it was a liberating experience.

With Partition had come the necessity and opportunity for employment. It became possible to pursue her dream of getting an education.

The unspoken story, however, has to do with the effects of Partition on marriage and family, on the shrinking of the kinship network, on changing roles, education and paid work for women, on social and physical mobility. Partition was the catalyst for the unravelling that was still to take place in our family.

Mummy's second launch towards education took place because Ranjan needed to continue her study of the Punjabi language in her last years of school in Delhi. Miss Devi Dutta, the principal of Queen Mary's School where Ranjan was enrolled, said "We do not have a Punjabi teacher." To this Mummy said, "I have done Punjabi Honours. I can teach my daughter Punjabi at home."

Miss Devi Dutta countered, "We have the princesses of Patiala who tell us every day that they want to study Punjabi. So why don't you teach Punjabi in our school? We'll give you an honorarium." At first my mother received Rs. 50 a month. To that was added another Rs. 30, to make up Rs. 80. My mother says, "I did not see it as my money. It was the respect I got there ... I felt that I knew something, I could teach somebody something. I got a bit of confidence in my own personality."

This money was helpful but not crucial to the family finances. My father's clinic at the time was the only one in the neighborhood and he was making Rs. 200 - 250 a month. My mother was successful as a teacher. Ranjan got a distinction in her Punjabi, and all the other students did well. My mother was proud of her record as a teacher and would say, "Our results were cent per cent."

Now that she was teaching students who were completing their Year 10, the principal, Miss Devi Dutta, suggested that she ought to complete Year 10 herself. This was towards the end of 1948. A child in our neighbourhood used to get tuition for his Year 10 exam. My mother persuaded my father to allow her to get a month's tuition and appear for the Year 10 exam. After two months' study she passed her Year 10 exam.

By this time, however, she had already begun tutoring a student studying Punjabi at the BA level in Miranda House, University of Delhi. The girl told the Principal, Miss V. Thakurdas, about Mummy and how satisfied she was with the lessons. Miss Thakurdas asked to meet my mother as she had been looking for a Punjabi teacher.

When Mummy went to see Miss Thakurdas at home, she was washing her hair. While she was washing her hair, she asked Mummy questions and talked to her in Punjabi.

Soon after, my mother started teaching Punjabi to Miranda House students on a semi-private basis, with each girl paying Rs. 10 a month. There were 20 or 25 girls so Mummy would bring home Rs. 200 to Rs. 250 a month. This time round the money was needed at home, for Pitaji's practice had dwindled. He only had a couple of patients a day.

My mother taught at Miranda House for nine years. She would go four days to Miranda House and for two days a week to Queen Mary's. In the evenings, for many years, she taught at a private college, Kurukshetra College. The college was about five miles away and it meant going by bicycle, but it was worth another Rs. 100 a month.

In a repeat of what had happened at Queen Mary's School, Miss Thakurdas, who became a friend, told Mummy, "Mrs. Singh, you teach BA students. At the very least, you should do your BA." So my mother started the long haul to obtaining a full-fledged BA. In the 1950s, one could do it in a two-step process - the FA first, followed by a BA, subject by subject.

Pitaji was angry about her doing her FA. But with the extra income coming in from the evening classes, she was able to get a month's private tuition for Rs. 125.

She did not pass. It was a two-year course, and a month's tuition was not enough. 

She finally passed her FA in 1950 but failed the BA English subject twice. She says: "I used to have a cousin who would say the old and decrepit can't study. (Mummy was 40.) Well, I failed English ... I did not fail once a year, I would fail every six months. Every time I would send my admission in September and April. Next day I picked up the books again. Changed the tuition centre. Went three miles further - 12 miles cycling coming and going in the evening."

After passing her English exam in 1952, she began studying for her BA history exam at Kurukshetra College in the evening. I remember going with her sometimes on the back of her bicycle. She would sit among the students for one hour studying history and would then stand up to teach Punjabi for the second hour. A couple of her students would cycle back with her on dark winter nights and escort her home. She would get back at night and her food would have been kept for her, but it was cold. I remember she was often desperately behind, and when I was eight, I would read her British constitutional history while she was having dinner.

My mother failed the BA history the first time she appeared. Her command of English was always the stumbling point. She lacked fluency and confidence in English. She passed the second time around. So with English, History and the Punjabi she had already done, she completed a full BA in 1955. 

 

The saga of Principal Inder Kaur - "Mummy" - continues tomorrow ...

 [Supriya Singh was born in India and moved to Malaysia at 23 when she got married. In 1986 she migrated to Australia. She lives in Melbourne and is Professor, Sociology of Communications at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University). She has a son and grandchildren in Melbourne and a son in Kuala Lumpur. She continues to spend part of the Indian winter in Dharamshala.]

September 10, 2010

Conversation about this article

1: S.S.N. (U.S.A.), September 10, 2010, 1:55 PM.

Thank you so much for sharing these wonderful stories. I have absolutely enjoyed reading this. It gives me a glimpse into Rawalpindi (the place of my ancestors) and also into the life of Sikhs back in the pre-Partition days. It is also a heartwarming story about persistence, role of education and the essence of moving.

2: Pritam Singh Grewal (Canada), September 11, 2010, 5:53 AM.

I enjoyed reading this candid story. More so, as I also did PU Hons-in-Punjabi in 1948 which led me to a BA in English and Pol. Science, and then an M.A English. I don't know for what reason this method was called 'via Bhatinda', jokingly.

3: C.E.S. (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), September 18, 2010, 5:42 AM.

I enjoyed reading this candid story. More so, as I also did Hons-in-Punjabi in 1948 from Punjabi University, which led me to a B.A. in English and Political Science, and then an M.A in English. I don't know for what reason this method was called 'via Bhatinda', jokingly.

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Marriage and Freedom
(Part Two)"









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