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The physicist’s story

Photo: S.S. Kumar

A voice for women Uma Parameswaran

Uma Parameswaran is currently working on a biography of the great physicist C.V. Raman, but that wasn’t the original plan.

You see, this retired professor of literature with a long-standing interest in woman’s issues had initially — and characteristically — been drawn to the story of his wife, Lokasundari Raman, who was all of 13 when she married Raman.

“I sent my manuscript on Lokasundari to the publishers, they invited me to write about Raman instead,” says the former Fulbright scholar who has been based in Winnipeg, Canada since 1966. “So ironically, my interest in women and women’s lives got thrown out the window, in favour of the story of a popular man!”

That might chafe slightly with Uma, who has been working with women for years — she is the president of the Immigrant Women’s Association (IWA) of Manitoba, for example — but she’s the first to admit that researching the physicist’s life has been fascinating. Particularly since he’s so closely related to her — he was her maternal grandfather’s younger brother, or her chinna thatha.

“I’ve focussed on his early life, the story of his father, for example, and his determination that his sons shouldn’t have to struggle for an education as he did,” she says.

“There have been several excellent biographies of Raman’s scientific achievements; I wanted to capture the way people lived 100 years ago, the memories of which are rapidly disappearing.”

Accordingly, her book explores everything from the furore caused by Raman marrying a girl of a different sub-sect (“Raman was an individualist — he liked her and that’s all that mattered. He was way ahead of his time”) to instances of racial discrimination he had to deal with when he first went abroad. “It’s not about the person so much as the society he lived in and the prejudices that affected the social networks of that time, global or between sub-sects,” she comments.

In the process, she hopes to retain the ideology underlying her manuscript on Lokasundari — “about how a woman’s life is circumscribed by the time she lives in and the societal space she grows up in”.

This has been a recurring theme in several of her works — collections of poems such as ‘Sisters at the well’, or novels such as ‘The Sweet Smell of Mother’s Milk-wet Bodice’, which tells the story of a young Indian woman who goes to Canada after marriage, only to be thrown out of the house by her in-laws over a dowry dispute.

“That sort of story is, unfortunately, not uncommon,” says Uma, who was teaching at the University of Winnipeg until two years ago. “It’s one of the bitter ironies that we seem to carry our bad customs with us even when we leave the country.”

There are so many more stories to be written, she says, stories she’s seen during the course of her work with the IWA, ranging from tales of abuse to feminist narratives of women who take control of their lives and of family members who try to keep up.

Meanwhile, her manuscript on Lokasundari waits to see the light of day. “Who knows if it’ll ever be published?” she says. “But I do believe hers is a story that should be read.”

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