Instead of joyless and bleak, she found rural India to be a place of "colour, beauty, joy, laughter and tremendous grit to struggle every day". The journey, she says, was never solitary. "There has been the joy of living, working and learning with people," she writes in her memoir, The Personal is Political. In an interview with THE WEEK, she spoke about how the situation has changed for women since she came into activism, her wish-list for Indian women and how the women in her life shaped her into the person she has become.
You once said that the women in your family served as your role models. Can you describe how?
I treasure the empowerment of the feminine consciousness in the 20th and now, the 21st century. My grandmother Lalita Krishnaswami, pushed the boundaries of social freedom using privilege to break the stranglehold of custom, like many others of her generation in India in the early 1900s. For her generation, choosing to marry out of even sub-caste was not easy. It was a struggle each step of the way. My grandmother was the first social worker in my maternal family. She worked with leprosy patients and with women and children in slums from the 1920s to the 1950s. She was even an honorary magistrate. Her concern for the poor and her disregard for caste and religious divides shaped and changed values permanently in the family.
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