prasad1
Active member
A flurry of activity overwhelms Rashtrapati Bhavan, particularly the First Lady. As one on the President's staff, I have seen Janaki Venkataraman and Usha Narayanan interiorise the tensions of that national celebration which has its focus in their house, and maintain the composure required of their role through all the comings and goings, split-second departure and arrival timings, the evening reception arrangements and the one for the banquet in honour of the visiting dignitary from abroad. Since the presidents themselves are pre-occupied, First Ladies are besieged by childish importunings from relatives, friends and acquaintances for passes for the parade and cards for the At Home. Tact of the highest order is called for, and all this with gnawing anxieties about things, like security, that can go wrong.
Our First Ladies have been taken for granted by the conventions of chronicling. This is in keeping with our mentality that regards wives, especially wives of active and prominent men, as ornamental appendages. Records of the presidencies of the US, for instance, show how deeply impactful were the personalities of the First Ladies on the respective presidents and their presidencies. Why is this not the case with us? Have our First Ladies been any less schooled in life and its trials, any less aware of the pulsations of our land, of the strengths and weaknesses of their husbands? Certainly not. It is just that our minds open the door wide to the man, doormat the woman. This is not a loss to the women concerned as much as it is to ourselves and to our understanding of our history.
Kasturba Gandhi and Kamala Nehru have managed, almost miraculously, to obtain some attention, but we do not even know the names of the wives of several of our great leaders - Maulana Azad's wife, the extraordinary Zuleikha Begum, who died when he was in the Ahmednagar Fort Prison, Sardar Patel's wife Jhaverba, who seems to have been obliterated from all accounts, even his own, or the two women Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was married to. We know not nearly enough about the wives of Lokamanya Tilak and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, or of Ramabai, Dr BR Ambedkar's first wife, to whom he was married for nearly 30 formative and troubled years until her death.
The_Hindustan_Times
Our First Ladies have been taken for granted by the conventions of chronicling. This is in keeping with our mentality that regards wives, especially wives of active and prominent men, as ornamental appendages. Records of the presidencies of the US, for instance, show how deeply impactful were the personalities of the First Ladies on the respective presidents and their presidencies. Why is this not the case with us? Have our First Ladies been any less schooled in life and its trials, any less aware of the pulsations of our land, of the strengths and weaknesses of their husbands? Certainly not. It is just that our minds open the door wide to the man, doormat the woman. This is not a loss to the women concerned as much as it is to ourselves and to our understanding of our history.
Kasturba Gandhi and Kamala Nehru have managed, almost miraculously, to obtain some attention, but we do not even know the names of the wives of several of our great leaders - Maulana Azad's wife, the extraordinary Zuleikha Begum, who died when he was in the Ahmednagar Fort Prison, Sardar Patel's wife Jhaverba, who seems to have been obliterated from all accounts, even his own, or the two women Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was married to. We know not nearly enough about the wives of Lokamanya Tilak and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, or of Ramabai, Dr BR Ambedkar's first wife, to whom he was married for nearly 30 formative and troubled years until her death.
The_Hindustan_Times
