`She has come alive'

WITH a life committed to social and political activism, why did Mythily Sivaraman, vice-president of the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA), decide to write a biography? The answers are in Fragments of a life. In this interview to Frontline, she shares her experience as a first-time book writer, which proved to be as arduous as it was joyous. Excerpts:

While writing this book did you ever feel that you were getting invasive? After all, your grandmother was reclusive.

Not at all. I used to have this dream that my grandmother was moaning in pain, I was afraid to wake her. This dream stopped when I started exploring her life. I thought she would be with me and help me to bring her out of subterranean regions to come face to face with people. She hardly had friends, spoke little. But she had a lot to share. Now many people know her and ask questions about her. She has come alive.

You had to make many assumptions in recreating her life. Any self doubts?

Rarely. I am sorry I did not begin the book 15 years ago when my mother was in full possession of her faculties. At that time I was too obsessed with my own concerns! (Laughs) But I did not make connections out of nothing. They are based on what my mother, brother and sister told me. Of course there are gaps, many gaps. I do not know how Subbulakshmi managed to send contributions to the Congress party without her husband's knowledge. Calls for a lot of planning! I also knew that she had been close to her husband at the start. There was a notebook in which they had copied poems together. He once told his daughter that her mother who had never gone to school knew much more than those who had.

Why did you get interested in your grandmother?

I would see her sitting with The Hindu and think, well, she is different, full stop. But when I developed political interests and got into the feminist movement and learnt that she had participated in the Congress movement, even though only marginally, I thought I must dig her out. I saw this as the concerns of the feminist movement of that age.

Do you feel that you have done justice to your subject?

She was an extraordinary woman. She wrote beautifully, she could have been creative. Despite her problems and ill-health she got so much out of life. Her six years in Madras are astonishing. She ran around so much. Her fainting fits stopped all that. I wanted to give her another chance at life... Sometimes we feel bad that we did not do more with life. But we are not able to measure what we have done. Most relatives knew my grandmother as sort of crazy. I wanted to change this picture. She had reason to be crazy. Despite that she achieved so much that was significant.