In memoriam

Vasudha Dhagamwar (1940-2014)

ALTHOUGH our historiography is somewhat Bengal-centric, it was Maharashtra, rather than Bengal, and Pune, and not Kolkata, that was the epicentre of modern social reform in India. Between (roughly) 1870 and 1960, Gokhale, Phule, Pandita Ramabai, Tarabai Shinde, Ambedkar, V.R. Shinde, D.R. Gadgil, Irawati Karve, and other scholar-activists from the Deccan worked tirelessly to awaken their compatriots to the faults and failures of their society. It was to this great Maharashtrian tradition of social reform that Vasudha Dhagamwar belonged, and whose values and virtues she so nobly upheld. Her mother, Geeta Sane, was a greatly admired writer; her father, a lawyer-nationalist had been an office-bearer (and jail-goer) in the Gandhian Congress.

Vasudha herself had at least three distinct careers; as a student and teacher of English literature; as a scholar of, and writer on, India’s legal history; as an activist-researcher on development issues. She studied English at Patna and taught the subject briefly at Miranda House, where she inspired some famous future feminists, such as the publisher Urvashi Butalia and the filmmaker Meera Dewan. From a family (and tradition) that valued scholarship, she also took a degree in economics and politics from Oxford, an LLB from Mumbai University, and a PhD in legal history from the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her dissertation, supervised by the legendary Duncan Derrett, became the basis of her first book, Law, Power and Justice.

I first met Vasudha in the late 1980s. She had then just published her second book – on the Uniform Civil Code – while founding, and nurturing, the Multiple Action Research Group. Under her guidance, MARG did pioneering work on gender discrimination, and on the displacement of peasants and tribals by dams, mines, and factories. Their reports and studies influenced a whole generation of younger scholars and activists – among them Medha Patkar, who was, I believe, first introduced to the Narmada Valley by Vasudha herself.

I am not a scholar of the law – and no activist at all. My connections with Vasudha were more personal. At the time we both lived in Delhi. We met through mutual friends – the outstanding civil servant Keshav Desiraju among them – and I saw in her, at once, the personification, in spirit and in temperament, of the long (if now somewhat attenuated) tradition of Maharashtrian social reform I had studied. She, for her part, liked me, liked my wife Sujata even more, and was especially attached to our children, both of whom she knew from the time of their birth.

Between 1989 and 1994, I saw Vasudha perhaps two or three times a month. This was mostly at our house; but at least once a year we went to hers. She was born on 29 February (as, she always reminded us, was Morarji Desai) so on that date, or before or after it in anything other than a leap year, she threw a party for her students, friends, admirers and associates. These were gloriously happy occasions, perhaps because they were dominated by her Patna friends. Although very proud of her roots – and of her mother’s work in particular – Vasudha was also deeply attached to Patna, where she studied, and Dhanbad, where her parents had settled. The influence showed – to her steely Maharashtrian integrity was added on the warmth, and above all the wit, of the Biharis with whom she had spent her youth and early adulthood.

It was while living in Delhi that Vasudha was diagnosed with cancer. She had many rounds of chemotherapy, which kept the disease at bay. A decade-and-a-half later the cancer came back. She had meanwhile moved to Pune, where she lived alone, reconnecting with her roots. The last time I saw her was in December 2012 ,when I was in her city – also Phule’s and Gokhale’s – for a family wedding. She was clearly in great pain, with her left arm rendered useless by the after-effects of radiation. Ageing, physically incapacitated, she yet travelled for meetings, while writing, with her one arm, a memoir in Marathi of her mother. My last impression of her was thus like all the others – of a patriot of charm, intelligence, and an altogether exceptional courage.

Ramachandra Guha

Historian and writer, Bangalore

 

* From the late 1980s, Vasudha Dhagamwar was a regular contributor to Seminar on issues relating to labour, women and child rights, displacement and uniform civil code.