Mothers, Daughters of Freedom Fighters, and Tales of Activism

Since the past year¹, death is a nagging presence in my cerebral world. Thoughts of my mother’s imminent death filter in and out of my consciousness each day. I think of my mother lying in her bed in Bombay, unable to move. Arthritis has seized her body, leaving her rigid and immobile. Confined to her bed, she sleeps all day, awaking for a few brief minutes for food and other personal needs. She does not talk to anyone. Nor does she deal with the daily logistics of running a home. She has removed herself from this world.

I wonder what she is thinking in her removed state of being, or if she thinks at all. I am awaiting her death. I rationalize her need to die, as the life she leads is no life at all. Death can be dealt with only in its rationalized, sanitized, and cerebral state at the moment.

I think of the moment of her death. Narrating over and over to myself all the things that would need to be done at that fatal moment. Listing the people I would need to call. The obituary notice in the paper … organizing the details of the funeral … the wood that needs to be purchased to carry the body out of the house … and oh, the garland of flowers that adorn the body while it awaits cremation. Calming Jana down as she will undoubtedly cry uncontrollably. … perhaps sedating her. I think—I organize—I think. I project without a tremor of emotion.

All of this makes me think about my mother’s life. I wonder if she returns to her childhood growing up as a daughter of a freedom fighter, Jhinabhai Joshi, in India. I wonder what stories she returns to—the one of meeting Mahatma Gandhi, or the one of seeing her father in jail, or the experiences of loneliness as she was moved from house to house when her father was imprisoned. I wonder if she recalls the independence movement and her involvement in it. I wonder …

This wondering has forced me to retrieve the oral history interviews I had conducted two years ago with my mother and four other daughters of freedom fighters in Bombay. Each of them were in their eighties, and I knew that their childhood recollections of the independence struggle were important to capture before they died, as a form of informal education. I want to reclaim my mother through these stories of her life and those of the other women who grew up in activist households in India. Perhaps by telling their stories I can infuse life into my mother’s small, rigid frame. I tell this story not as a scholar, but as her daughter seeking to understand the past and present through oral history narratives. This is both a personal tale and a tale of activism, an informal educational platform, learning and history.