DIFFERENT REGISTERS
Mothers and daughters
C.S. LAKSHMI
MARCH is an important month because the International Women's Day falls in March on the 8th and very often that day becomes a day of meeting of friends in the women's movement who have not met for a long time. We celebrate the day and talk about our work, future projects, listen to some of the plans and ideas of young people who have begun to take women's issues seriously and also sometimes share details about married daughters and sons, new-born grandchildren or death of a husband. This March will also be a month that will have this occasion to celebrate. But this March is important for me for some other reason too. On March 15, my mother, Alamelu, will turn 90.
Symbol of a generation
Alamelu has not participated in the women's movement although she has an opinion on every issue that the movement has dealt with. Alamelu is a woman who spent all her life raising her children and grandchildren and who, at the age of 90, is busy discussing Tamil Nadu politics with us and also dismissing our views on various issues of the nation. She avidly reads all the Tamil journals and has a weakness for writers, like Vannanilavan, who are from Tirunelveli. It is because she spent her childhood years in Kovilpatti. She has other favourite writers too. I don't think I figure in that list but she politely avoids telling me that. Alamelu has played a very important role in my life, not just as a mother but as a friend who has given me moral support at every point in my life even though she disagreed with most of the things I did. For a long time now she has ceased to be just my mother but a symbol of another generation of women who stood by women of my generation.
Motorcar eyes
Alamelu was the eldest of 10 children in her family. Born in 1915, she did go to school but did not study beyond 8th standard because she got married at the age of 11 to my father who was 20 at that time. Her parents were great connoisseurs of music and so taught her music and Alamelu had a resonant voice and in the nights her father would take the children up to the terrace and my mother and her sisters would sing much to the appreciation of the neighbours.
I don't think anyone asked my mother if she would like to get married. Those days they didn't. In her wedding photograph she is sitting looking a little bewildered in a heavy sari, at one corner of the sofa with my father at the other end, looking mature but not quite joyful. My mother has very large, beautiful eyes which jut out of her face. I believe my father had said, "I will not marry that girl with motorcar eyes." But my grandmother had told him that she was unwell, that she may leave this world any time and that she wanted to see him married before that eventuality. My grandmother was a widow who had raised five sons and two daughters single-handed and what she said was law. So my father complied. My grandmother, of course, lived up to a ripe old age. But I don't think my father regretted his decision to marry. The girl with motorcar eyes became a good life partner to him.
Unlike her parents' home, Alamelu's marital home was not too keen on music. She did take her veenai along but no one really asked her to play. At nights occasionally she played for her husband who did not know much about music but was willing to listen. But my grandmother did not think girls from good families should be entertaining their husbands this way. She knew that my mother played for my father, for, she slept right outside the door of their bedroom. Later when they lived in Chennai for a while, a music sabha was close to their house and often my mother heard the concerts happening there standing in her veranda. My mother also enjoyed playing the veenai at home on her own, but after a chance remark by my father that he did not want the neighbours to listen to her play, my mother gave up playing for a long time. She again began to play the veenai only when she began teaching us.
Supportive mother
Alamelu may not recall these incidents in the same way as I do. But she is the one who told me about them. I think these incidents and similar ones made her determined to educate her daughters and teach them music and dance. Both my sister and I learnt music and I was also sent to the dance class. Not only that. Alamelu saw to it that I performed on the stage and also had a proper arangetram. When the family asked why I was being sent to the dance class, she came up with a classic excuse — she said that the doctor had prescribed it as a good exercise as I was very skinny! Later in life too, when I wanted to come to Chennai to study in Madras Christian College and after that when I wanted to work as a schoolteacher in a small town, my mother supported me, facing all criticisms, including some from her husband. She also fully supported the kind of choice that her children made in terms of marriage. My younger brother married a Christian girl and my mother was there in the Church shaking hands with the priest ("He is from Tirunelveli," she told me) and kissing the bride's relatives. "Why are you kissing them all, Amma?" I asked her. "It is their custom. What is there if I follow it?" she said. She was supportive of others as well. When some of my cousins who had bad marriages, divorced and later married again, my mother was always the first one to congratulate them.
Part of history
My father passed away at the age of 74. He died of thyroid cancer and his voice box was removed and he could not speak during his last days. But he wrote a note to my mother urging her never to give up her music. Alamelu keeps that note folded in her spectacle case. And when my father was cremated, Alamelu went to the cremation grounds shocking the priests who had assembled there, and as my elder brother lit the pyre, she sang in a clear, resonant voice, a song that my father used to like. There was not a tremor in her voice. She finished singing and turned away. She was not sad about becoming a widow. She said that my father could never take pain and that she had prayed every day for his death.
For me, Alamelu turning 90 is not just a family event. It is part of a history that I would like everyone to celebrate.
C.S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai. She is the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women).
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