It is unusual for a slim family memoir to evoke a much larger nostalgia for an age we have left behind, in the way that Rajwati and Her Times succeeds. Through an endearing portrait of her grandmother, the author Madhu Bhaduri – a teacher of philosophy, a distinguished diplomat and a well-regarded Hindi novelist – recalls an age of social conservatism and catastrophic religious violence that was also one of steady reform, of shared living and inter-community trust. She writes of the idealism of the freedom struggle, of women emerging from the confines of domesticity, and of civility and social responsibility in public engagement.
Madhu was a child living with her extended family in Lahore when in 1947 Partition tore the country apart. Mulkraj, a reputed banker was her great-grandfather who refused to leave Lahore even as the city was tempestuously emptied out of its Hindu and Sikh residents. On the night of and August 14 and 15, when Jawaharlal Nehru in Delhi made his epochal Tryst with Destiny address to the Indian nation, Mulkraj died in Lahore, probably of a broken heart.
In the darkness of the night, his son Shivraj and daughter-in-law Rajwati dismantled a door of the house and silently built with it a pyre for…
Source: Harsh Mander: In the portrait of a 20th century woman, a fable for our troubled times
