I saw her for the first time some seventeen years ago. It was
at a meeting addressed by Mahatma Gandhi. She occupied the front row of the
huge audience. She had a Khadi garland in her hand with which, at the
appropriate moment, she garlanded the Mahatma. Something in her appearance
immediately attracted my attention. It must have been the joy, the elation, the
exhilaration of soul shining through her eyes as she hung on the words of the
great man. Sincerity has great power. Some secret of influence in it compels,
first the attention of strangers, and then turns them into devotees. Her looks,
her mien, the concentrated, unselfconscious abandon of her bearing made a
pretty picture of sincerity that was a thing of beauty in itself—so that a
vivid vision of it still clings to me over all these intervening years. That
day I believe I completely neglected the Mahatma. Again and again I kept on
asking myself, “who is she?”
* * *
Some time later, Chance, in the form of friend O.P., made us
acquainted. The acquaintance ripened into friendship in a matter of days. O.P.
is a character by himself. Now he is committed to propagandist glorification of
Chiang Kai-shek in New Delhi’s Chinese Consulate. In those days he had just
spiritedly thrown up a post in the Madras Corporation’s service by way of
protest against British rule in India. He was given to imparting a cosmic
importance to his own individuality and whatever came out of it in the form of
implses. Non-violence was always on his lips. But he regarded all who differed
from him in the slightest particular with surprised annoyance and poured out
continually vials of far from non-violent denunciation on their heads. He
divided his admiration then between Mahatma Gandhi and Atchamamba.
* * *
O.P. and myself received in 1932 perhaps the unmercifullest trouncing
that it ever fell to the lot of Congress volunteers to receive at police hands
in this part of the country. For picketing a foreign cloth shop in China Bazaar
we were surrounded by a batch of sonstables and beaten with the leather-covered
knobs of their canes so cruelly that marks of the injury inflicted still
endure. The kind doctors of the General Hospital took three weeks to repair our
lacerated bodies, while two constables mounted guard over us day and night in
the ward where we were treated as in-patients (We had been placed under arrest
on a charge of having blocked the traffic!) Atchamamba was then a student of the Medical
College. No police sentry could stop her. She brought swarms of her friends to
see us, and while they tendered sympathy for our plight, she would go on
expatiating angrily on the wickedness of the British Government. She completely
for the time being abandoned her studies and became our nurse. The hours sped
like minutes as, with graphic gestures, she unfolded revolutionary plans for
social good and the country’s liberation.
* * *
It was through her that about this time I came to know P.
Sundarayya. Her faith in him seemed to me misplaced. I took it to be just an
exaggerated form of the way she had (and seemed to have been born with) of
mothering with affection, appreciation, encouragement, feeding, housing and
other kinds of care-taking, not to speak of whirlwind campaigns of enthusiastic
boosting, whoever approached her in a patriotic guise. Sundarayya’s
unostentatious exterior made it difficult for new-comers to rate him
immediately at his proper worth. Perhaps also at that time, I was yet in that
callow stage when it gave no pleasure to hear a valued friend waxing eloquent
over another’s greatness. But of one thing there could be no doubt. Sundarayya’s
whole being was in those days steeped in Gandhism. He led alife of ascetic
simplicity. His frugality was amazing. It was no exhibitionist indulgence with
an eye on the public. It was the surface counterpart of a fanatic conscience
that left no room for private property, luxury or personal pleasure. The only
thing un-Gandhian about him was his voracious pouring over books.
* * *
Sundarayya was one of many whom Atchamamba forced out of
their shells of diffidence, frustration, loneliness and what not, and with her
buoyant good humour and companionable helping hand, set firmly on solid paths
of political work and social service along which they have found contentment
and fulfillment if not distinction and opportunities for leadership. She made
herself in making others.
* * *
Her evolution from Gandhism to Communism came from the
disillusionments of actual experience in the course of too sincere a striving
along lines of work laid down by the Mahatma. Discontent at the power of rich
landlords and capitalists at the expense of poor labourers, wage-earners and the like has led to many defections from the
Congress fold to the Community Party. It
may be called a revolt, but a revolt not of laggards but of zealots. Those not
susceptible to the consolations of meditation and spirituality in the face of
wrongs and difficulties have been particularly drawn to it.
* * *
Atchamamba is a doctor by profession and in that capacity
renders free service to the poor. The destitute, the ill-treated and the
shattered of her sex are by her befriended, cured and made hale, taught useful
occupations like nursing and mid-wifery, and turned into highly serviceable
social workers. Her home is the training ground for unceasingly industrious
cultural squads. She wears no jewels. Crusading against the craze for jewellery
so rampant among rich and poor women alike, she has been laboring to create a
new consciousness of feminine dignity based, not on a doll-like state of
bedecked adornment for man’s pleasure, but on work, economic self-help and
active participation in movements conducive to social progress and public
welfare. From her emanates a vast educative and protective activity taking in
its stride custom-harassed women, illiterates, kisans, coolies, ration-seekers
in the throes of food shortage, expectant mothers, disease- stricken sufferers,
victims of domestic or social tyranny, having as its natural consequence a
slander campaign against her organized by powerful elements in society assailed
by it directly or indirectly and threatened with dislodgement from their
traditional position of privilege and dominance. But hers is an intrepid soul
with grit and philosophy enough to pursue its high purposes in defiance of all
vilifiers (March 2, 1946) .S A K A.
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