SITA GANDHI

My mother always held strong views right until her last and was never afraid of questioning any orthodoxy. In our household, she would sometimes shock me by the way she could question Gandhi's views and actions on many matters. In her youth she was no less critical. She had lots of questions about her grandfather. She felt he dominated her parents' lives and they inquestioningly followed his dictates from India; she wondered how his relationship with his elder son, Harilal, had soured; she learnt about how Gandhi had disciplined her own father by exiling him to Madras in 1916 when he disobeted Gandhi by sending his brother Harilal money; she learnt hoe Gandhi would not allow Manilal to become a doctor since he had no faith in formal education. She above all did not understand his policy of not supporting the British war effort. She had met him twice before in India , as a one year old and then later when she was nine and ten. As she faced her teenage years, Gandhi seemed a ‘stranger' to her and she was not sure she even liked him. Manilal's solution to his daughter's questions was to send her to India to spend time with Gandhi. She was instantly drawn by Gandhi's charismatic personality and came to love him deeply. She also came to understand her parents' devotion to Gandhi. She got to know many of the leaders of the Indian nationalist movement and got them to sign her valued autograph book. This and a copy of the Gita which Gandhi gave her were among her most prized possessions. Our family'd favourite is that of Gandhi walking with his arms around teenaged Sita. Despite developing a deep attachement to her grandfather, my mother never lost her own independence. As she w says in her memoirs, after Gandhi explained his views on the war to her, ‘I still wasn't very convinced'. She also gave Gandhi's educational system---which meant working in service of poor villagers---a try but soon decided that this was not for her. The manual work was hard and she wasn't convinced that they were producing the right effects on the villagers. In her view ‘the villagers were hardly receptive to our counsel; they stored up their dirt for us to clean up, for that they reckoned, was our only good use to them'. She boldly expressed a view to finish her matriculation and go to university and thus did what her father could not do. And she obtained her grandfather's support for her dreams.

-Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, ‘Notes from a Daughter', in Sita: Memoirs of Sita Gandhi (2003)