Three exceptional women from India (plus one) – Part One

“There is but one ambition in my life.
That is to remain totally immersed in music and to reach that point where, through my music, I can feel at one with the divine” 
(Sharan Rani)

Sharan Rani

I believe a lot in the combinations of the case, especially when you go towards it, making it a non-coincidence. It's like accidentally opening a door and realizing that the next door is somehow connected, continuing to walk down the corridor until you get to where you were supposed to go.

Thus we discover things that otherwise would have remained forever unknown.

I'm talking about books, photographers, stories, loves, or friendships.

 

This is how I came to write this long article and tell you about the life of three incredible Indian women.

Almost as happened with a recent article on proto-feminism in Indonesia, which has a lot in common with the issue I will deal with here.

It all started with a music CD. The first door. The case.

In my search for traditional Indian music, I happened to see a CD with the recordings of three famous Indian ragas, or melodies on which the musicians improvise. I bought this CD but first I went to find who this Sharan Rani was and what her instrument was, the sarod.

I have discovered, in all my ignorance, that we are talking about a real legend.

Her biography is incredible, as is the mastery with which she plays this ancient instrument, which many trace back to about two thousand years ago, in ancient India during the age of the Gupta kings. In fact, a coin from the Gupta period depicts the great King Samudragupta playing veena, which many believe to be the forerunner of the sarod, the sacred instrument played by the Goddess Saraswati.

Sharan Rani was born in April 1929 in Old Delhi to a conservative Hindu family and educators. From childhood, she was in love with music and dance, and also studied classical Kathak dance.

But it was her encounter with the sarod that changed her life, making her remembered as a woman of incredible perseverance, courage, and devotion to music.

Because she was from a family of non-musicians and at that time you could only become a musician if you came from a gharanas family, where the musical profession was hereditary, also in Hindustani music – classical music of northern India, also known as shastriya sangeet, which differs from the southern one called carnatic – women could only sing or dance as was typical of the baiji, or tawaif, or the courtesans of the Mughal era, very young girls kidnapped from the villages who were taught the classical Kathak dance or Hindustani music, as well as Ghazali literature, to delight the court nobles. In short, not really an appropriate profession for a dignified family like that of Sharan.

But when her older brother Brij Narayan, a collector of antique instruments, brought home the sarod, which even he didn't know how to use, her life changed forever. She wasn't even ten years old yet.

If for dance, only her mother supported her studies at the age of seven, while the whole family even threatened to break her legs if she didn't stop, for music it was even more complicated because that was a world dominated by men.

After a long time in which that mysterious instrument was gathering dust on top of books, one day Sharan pulled it down and started cleaning her strings for the whole day. As the musician herself says, she still didn't know how it was to be played or with what, she just tunes the four main strings with a copper coin: Sa, Ma, Pa, and Shadaj. They played in tune and what sound entered directly into her heart.

“I decided there and then that I was made for the sarod and that the sarod was made for me.” (Sharan Rani)

At the age of ten, she performed in a concert playing in front of the great maestro Ali Akbar Khan. He was so impressed that he offered to become her teacher. He also directed Sharan Rani towards his father, the very famous Baba Allauddin Khan, who, however, before he tried again to dissuade her from playing this typically male instrument. Play the sitar, the surbahar, any instrument but not this one which is for men!

But little Sharan looked him in the eye and replied: “It is like saying 'Love one man but marry another.' I can't do it, Baba! It is the sarod that I love, not any other instrument. I have given my heart to it so there is no question of my being faithful to another.”

Although she was well aware that this was an instrument and a totally male world, she did not take a step back.

It takes devotion, determination, and willpower to make sacrifices if you are to take music seriously – that was her thought.

And how true it was that the sarod was an instrument for men Sharan learned at her expense. Not so much because of its difficulty, but because to play its 21 strings, the sound box must be placed pressed on the stomach. It cannot be played in any other way, because even a small shift would make the strings out of tune, and when she became pregnant for the first time she remembered the words of the old master Baba. She had three miscarriages due to sarod.

Despite this Sharan Rani performed concerts for seven decades, becoming the “cultural ambassador of India”, until she was called “Sarod Rani”. She was one of the first to record for UNESCO and to publish music recordings with major record companies in the United States, Great Britain, and France.

In 1960 she married Sultan Singh Backliwal who belonged to a prominent Delhi business family, with whom she had a daughter in 1974, Radhika Narain. After fighting cancer for a few years, she died on 8 April 2008, a day before her 79th birthday, first managing to donate some 450 instruments from the 15th to 19th centuries, from her 40-year-old collection to the National Museum of Delhi.

The famous Indian actor Thespian Prthivaraj Kapoor once said about her:

“Listening to Sharan Rani's recitals feel as if 'Ma Saraswati' (Goddess of music) has left her veena and picked up the sarod in her lap.”

 

“The sarod has been my best friend as well as worst enemy. It has been close to my heart, but at the same time, I have struggled a lot because of this. I couldn't behave like a normal person as it was difficult to cope with the pressures of life.” (Sharan Rani)

 

From this fatal fascination for Sharan Rani was born a pleasant chat with a very dear Indian friend of mine from Calcutta.

She obviously knew this musician well even though she didn't know the details of her biography.

What struck me once again is the moral greatness, the strength of this woman in an almost totally masculine context. With bitterness, we remarked on the difficulty of being women in the past centuries of India, but also in the present, at times. For centuries, women have been locked up in the role of wives and when their husbands died they were burned alive with their bodies because by now it made no sense for them to live, as if their husband's survival had been a fault. Even today, very often, at weddings it is the bride's family that has to pay that of her husband to marry the daughter.

Not to mention the drama of families who experienced the birth of a daughter as a misfortune. A Bangladeshi friend of mine who works in the counseling centers in Rome confessed to me that even today, in Rome and not in a remote village, there are families who need to be consoled when they learn that they are expecting a daughter.

All this is paradoxical when, in Hinduism, female divinities are venerated and prayed for most of the cases: from Parvati, who is the wife of Śiva and mother of Ganesh and Skanda, to Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, from Radha who is the divine lover of Krishna and Sita who is the virtuous wife of Rama to Laksmi who is the deity of wealth, fertility and beauty, and Kali the goddess of war. Finally, not to mention Sakti who is even the Cosmic Energy, or Supreme Reality, the creative force connected to Śiva or Durga, the great Goddess sitting on the lion who is the embodiment of female creative energy (Shakti), with both powers of creation and destruction, which is perhaps the deity with the most powerful and participated cult in India and Hinduism.

 

It is for this reason that I want to tell you, to introduce to the lives of three exceptional women who lived in India at an age that was not easy at all to be a woman – and they have left an indelible mark on history, even if they are not well known.

Sarala Devi Chaudhurani

The first woman I want to tell you about is Sarala Devi Chaudhurani.

Sarala Ghosal was born in Jorasanko, Calcutta, on 9 September 1872 to a Bengali family of well-known intellectuals. Her father was a secretary of Congress while her mother Swarnakumari Devi was the daughter of Debendanath Tagore, eminent Brahmo leader and father of the poet Rabindranath Tagore. The Bengali Brahmos are those who adhere to Brahmoism, the philosophy of Brahmo Samaj founded by Raja Rammohan Roy.

Sarala went down in history for being an educator and political activist, founder of the Bharat Stree Mahamandal (All India Women's Organization) in Allahabad in 1910, the first women's organization in India that had among its primary objectives to promote female education.

The organization opened several offices in Lahore (then part of non-partitioned India), Allahabad, Delhi, Karachi, Amritsar, Hyderabad, Kanpur, Bankura, Hazaribagh, Midnapur, and Calcutta to improve the situation of women across India.

In 1890 she earned her BA in English Literature from Bethune College, also receiving the college's first Padmavati Gold Medal for being the best female candidate in the exams.

After completing her education, Sarala went to Mysore State and joined the Maharani Girls' School as a teacher. A year later, on her return home, she began writing for Bharati, a Bengali diary, which took the shape of her political activism.

From 1895 to 1899 Sarala curated Bharati together with her mother and sister, and then alone from 1899 to 1907, with the aim of propagating patriotism and raising the literary standard of the newspaper. In 1904 she opened the Lakshmi Bhandar (shop for women) in Calcutta to popularize native handicrafts made by women.

In fact, Sarala Devi was not only active in women's education but she was one of the few women of her time to participate in the Indian independence movement. During the agitation against partition, she promulgated revolutionary nationalism in Punjab.

In 1905 Sarala Devi married Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhary, a lawyer, journalist, nationalist leader, and follower of Arya Samaj, the Hindu reform movement founded by Swami Dayananda Saraswati.

After the marriage, she moved to Punjab, where she helped her husband to edit the Urdu nationalist weekly Hindustan, which was later converted into an English periodical. When her husband was arrested for his involvement in the non-cooperation movement, Mahatma Gandhi visited her home in Lahore as a guest and he fell in love with her. Gandhi read her poems and writings and used them in his speeches, in Young India, and in other newspapers, and traveled together throughout India.

After her husband's death in 1923, Sarala Devi returned to Calcutta and resumed editing responsibilities for Bharati from 1924 to 1926. In 1930 she founded the Siksha Sadan girls' school in Calcutta. She retired from public life in 1935 and devoted herself to religion.

She died on 18 August 1945 in Calcutta.

She will forever be remembered as the founder of Bharat Stree Mahamandal, considered by many historians to be the first all-Indian organization for women. With several branches across the country, she has promoted vocational education and training for women regardless of class, caste, and religion.

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