Grand-Mothers

Light of Truth

Prema Jayakumar

The month that passed by is designated ‘Women’s History Month.’ Isn’t there a contradiction in the very name? What is recorded is mostly ‘his story,’ the story of achievements that stand out, of conquests, of victories and defeats in the public arena. Even the themes for each year’s Women’s History Month have been of this kind, that of this year being ‘Nevertheless, she persisted.’ The themes each year have celebrated efforts made by women in the public sphere, their fights against discrimination, fights for equality, for equal pay, for votes, for justice. While these spectacular struggles and achievements have their place, and a very important place, it is not through these alone that mankind has been sustained and allowed to progress. It is through the unsung, the uncelebrated, that life has gone on, that births and lives and deaths have continued. It is through another kind of persistence, that holds on to the family in the face of adversity, through the passing from mind to mind of the good things of life, that human life has progressed and not lost its way completely in spite of bewildering and often demoralising gains in science and technology. It is through the wisdom that is passed on mostly through the women in the family, especially from the grand-mother to the grand-children, often more to the grand-daughters. The values of life, that one imbibes by watching the grand-mother deal with the world, the special recipes, the quick medicines that use the leaves and plants growing right beside the house and the ingredients in the kitchen – all those small things imbibed without actually learning anything formally. I would say any child who has a grand-mother living with the family is a lucky child.

It is said that when you educate a girl, you educate a whole family, whereas when you educate a boy, you educate only him. This is even more so when the middle aged, the grand-mothers, acquire a skill that they did not possess earlier. It gets passed on not just to the immediate family, but to the community around too. This is specially so in a village. The credit for the recognition of the powerful resource called grand-mothers should go to Sri Bunker Roy, who initiated the experiment that later came to be known as the Tilonia Experiment. He found that imparting skills to women who had already crossed forty, preferably in their late forties, worked the best where benefit to the whole community was concerned. Mind you, these skills he imparted were not the traditional womanly skills such as cooking, crafts, sewing or embroidery, but technological skills that enabled them to produce solar powered equipment and light up a whole village with solar power. The women he trained were often completely uneducated, unable to read and write. But they could be trained to manufacture equipment if the parts were colour-coded and they could be trusted to pass on these skills to the younger women around. The suspicions attached to strange men coming into contact with the younger women were also absent.

He says, ‘Do you know why we insisted on women? Because training men is pointless. They will grow restless and go to big cities in search of jobs… Women will stay back home and prove their worth to their communities.’ And so grand-mothers in disadvantaged places in the world from villages in Afghanistan to villages in Africa are now leading a quiet revolution in lighting up literally and figuratively, villages that had been drowned in darkness.

There are Grand-parents’ Days and so on around the world, but that is more in the manner of treating them as needing our attention, greeting them, spending time with them, days when the young give to the old. That is all to the good. But, it is time that we woke up to the resources that grandparents, and especially grand-mothers are, and started using them to enrich our lives, to keep alive the wisdom that they have inherited and guarded, ready to pass on to the next generation. In is in the lullabies that they have sung to a number of generations, in the stories that they have told children gathered round, in the lore that they have passed on to the younger people who come in search of help that the good qualities of mankind have survived. As they once said, ‘Gray hair is a crown of splendour.’ Let us recognize it, honour it, when we honour the history of women.

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