To the tell-me-a-story request from her grandchild, grandmother Rama Rau responded with tales of her own childhood and little Asha listened with wonder—’… from her expression I might have been describing a totally foreign land in a remote period of history’. From the girl’s insistence that her grandmother write her memoirs comes this century of family history—an inheritance that links up the past that Dhanvanthi Rama Rau had known with the present world of Asha’s.
The lady of family planning in India was the sixth of eleven children in a Kashmiri Pandit family, settled in a railway colony in Hubli in the south-west of India. The early and perhaps most interesting part of her book, is a portrait of her mother, lovingly and carefully pieced together from anecdotes and scraps of family history that finally link coherently ‘her past narrow orthodoxy with her later mental expansion, the phenomenal progressive growth of her thinking and the ambitions she developed for her children’. The orthodox background of Bhagbhari Handoo included being a bride at eight and moving from one large joint family to another. In her husband’s family she had a major part of the household responsibilities, her mother-in-law depending more and more on her. And then came the break when young Handoo defied his family and moved away with his wife. A break that was the beginning of many other breaks with tradition and the past.