Life Back Then

Sadhona Debi Chatterji was born in October 1931 in Calcutta to Hari Prasad and Subarna Bannerjee. She did her matriculation, and got married to Birendra Kumar Chatterji in June 1948. She has a son and a daughter. Her husband, like her father, was in the Imperial Bank of India, which later became the State Bank of India. Her husband retired as Chairman UCO Bank in 1984, and passed away in 1989.

She has had a tremendous interest in national and world affairs, with her own opinions on many issues. She is an avid reader. She has been a popular and well-loved person among the family and a very large circle of friends. Even at the age of 85 and ailing, she got phone calls from all over the world. She passed away in 2015.

Editor's note: Sadhona Chatterji wrote this note in her diary in the 2002. It has been typed and provided by her son in 2018.

When we were in Bhopal in the early 1970s, a friend of ours [likely this was Tarun Kumar Bhaduri, who wrote a book in Bengali Abhishapath Chamba], who had written a book about the dacoits of Chambal a few years earlier, used to relate an interesting story.

Sometime in the early 1950s, he was touring around that area to collect information about those dacoits, particularly about the famous and the notorious dacoit of that time, the legendary Man Singh.

One evening after a whole day of hard work, our friend came back to the dak-bungalow he was staying at and was relaxing with a drink and a book in the sitting room of the dak-bungalow.

It was a cold winter night, and outside it became dark very soon.

Late Khem Chandji was born in Alwar in 1911, and educated in St. Stephen's College, Delhi. In 1935, he got his first job as ‘Extra Naib Nazim' (a revenue officer below the district level) in the Princely State of Alwar. In 1937, he married Dayawanti from Agra in a civil law wedding. They had eight children. He rose to become a leading, respected, commanding IAS officer in Rajasthan. After he retired, he continued his hobbies of gardening and Urdu shayari. And, he indulged his grand-children. He passed away in 2004, 93  years old, in his garden in Jaipur, after he done a bit of gardening.

Khem Chand. In his garden. B-87 Ganesh Marg, Jaipur. Early 2000s.

Subodh Mathur, one his sons, writes: These papers of Mr. Khem Chand somehow did not surface until February 2018, nearly 14 years after he passed away. They were written in 1952, when he was 41 years old. He was the Collector of Jhalawar District at that time. There are places where we are unable to read his handwriting - indicated below. There are places where an explanation is useful, and is provided in [ ...].

The full handwritten document is attached as a pdf file.

Tilak Mathur is a PhD in English Literature with specialisation in the British poet and playwright T. S. Eliot. Tilak is very actively engaged with social and charitable work in and around Jaipur. Basically a homemaker, she came into her own as a natural leader when she got an opportunity to lead. She lives in Jaipur with her husband Subhash. She often travels to Ahmedabad and USA where her two sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren live.

When I was a child, my mother, Rummni Devi Bhatnagar, narrated many stories about her Nanaji (her mother's father), Shri Gauri Shankarji, a Barrister stationed at Ajmer. What fascinated me was not his profession. I was more awed by the description of one his havelis and tam tam (4-horse carriage). My interest in his background grew when my son Gaurav became a lawyer. I was happy to have a pedigreed advocate

Recently, at a family meeting in Ajmer, I became aware of a handwritten document that had been written about Gaurishankarji by his son, Shri D. G. Verma. (The document was with Shri Surendar Shankar Bhatnagar, son of Shri D. G. Verma. Shri Bhatnagar, now about 93 years old, lives in Ajmer, and is still quite active. He has provided all the materials and photos in this story.)

The document appears below. As you will see, several parts of the document are illegible, and there does not appear to be a proper conclusion. Still, it tells a fascinating tale that Is more than 125 years old.

Subhash Mathur is a resident of Jaipur after superannuation from Indian Revenue Service in 2007. Presently, Subhash is engaged in social and charitable work in rural areas. Subhash is also Editor of http://www.inourdays.org/, an online portal for preserving work related memories.

11^th January 1966 began as a cold overcast day in Jaipur.  For me, it was going to be like any other cold day of January in those days. Soon, a pitter patter rain started hitting the window panes, and the cold conditions consolidated. Mild surface winds added to the chill.

I was in my first year in Rajasthan College, Jaipur. And gearing up for exams around the corner.

Just then, the news filtered in via a phone call that Indian Prime Minister Shastri had died in the wee hours of the night at Tashkent. Shastri was in Tashkent to attend a summit with Pakistan to settle the issues arising out of Indo-Pak conflict of September 1965 under the aegis of USSR Premier Kosygin.

Those days, landline telephones and word of mouth were the only means of spreading the news far and wide. Once the news spread, largely via telephonic talks, our home (B-87 Ganesh Marg, Bapu Nagar, Jaipur)  started filling up to discuss the aftermath.  Mostly friends of Bhai Sahib (eldest brother P C Mathur) from the Rajasthan University started trickling in.

Introduction

Subodh Mathur writes:

I completed my high school from St. Xavier's School, Jaipur in 1966. In those days, the school offered two different final examinations. One was the Indian School Certificates (I.S.C), which was a descendant of the older Senior Cambridge examination conducted by Cambridge University, England. The other was All-India Higher Secondary (A.I.H.S.), which was a national examination conducted by an Indian government agency.

Regardless of whether you took the I.S.C or A.I.H.S. examination, life in Standard XI - the final year - was focused heavily on doing well in the final examination.

Standard X was different. You were senior enough in the school, which gave you some freedom. And, the academic pressure was not so high. Every year, one of the activities of Standard X students was to stage a full-length play, under the supervision of a teacher.

As was the norm in those days, our school was for boys only. No girls. So, how could they choose a play that had a woman in it? There was simply no way that a Standard X boy would do a woman's role. Not in Jaipur in 1965. Anyhow, our teacher did solve this problem - read about it below.

The school used to publish a year book called The Blue and Gold. It included the photos and brief bios of all the students in the graduating class. I am using those photos - they show us as we were then.

Born in 1941, Vinod was brought up and educated in Amritsar. He attended Government Medical College, and subsequently trained as a surgeon at PGI, Chandigarh. He left for USA in 1969, and retired in 2003 as Director of Critical Care Services at a teaching hospital in Michigan. Married with two grown sons, he continues to visit India at least once a year.

That was my mother! Named Sumitra by her parents, her name was changed to Jagat Kumari after her marriage. The custom was not uncommon in India. It is supposed to indicate that the married woman starts a new life after marriage. I still get confused when credit card companies want me to give my mother's maiden name. I waver between her real 'maiden' name and the one she used officially after her marriage.

I have been reluctant to write about her. For years I have thought that in life, she was not appreciated. My conviction has only strengthened as I have grown older. And I have felt guilty about falling in the trap of adolescent perceptions and callousness in thinking of her as inconsequential.

She was the youngest of the four sisters. She also had three brothers who were older than her. She had one brother, Hari mama (uncle), younger than her and the one she seemed to love more than others. Their bond was due to their being younger than all the older siblings.

I was born in Ludhiana on 19 April, 1943, though my recorded date of birth is 11 July, 1942. After India's Partition, I was raised and educated in Lahore. I studied at Forman Christian College, Lahore and University of the Punjab. In 1964, I was selected to join the Pakistan Air Force's (PAF) College of Aeronautical Engineering. I served in the PAF for 27 years, retiring voluntarily in 1991 as a Group Captain. My services were recognized with a National Award. I was told at the time of my retirement that if I did not retire, I was sure to get promoted to Air Commodore, with the strong possibility of another promotion to the rank of Air Vice Marshal. I cannot say what made me give up my career at its prime. The only reason that comes to my mind is that I was looking for "Fresh air". In my post retirement life I got what I was looking for, and have since lived a satisfied life.

Let me share some history of my mother’s family belonging to Ludhiana.

Noor Mohammad was my Nana (Maternal Grandfather). He had two brothers. The elder brother, Ghulam Muhammad (Lala), popularly known in the family as Lala, a name generally used for a father or elder brother in the Muslim families of India, and the younger brother was Wali Muhammad. Their elders migrated from Kashmir and settled in Ludhiana sometime in the beginning of 19th century. They used the surname of Sufi for reasons that I am not aware of. I am not sure if it is a sub-caste, a clan from Kashmir or their association with Sufism.

Jatinder Sethi was born in Lyallpur, now Faisalabad, in pre-Independence India. He finished his M.A. (English) from Delhi University in 1956, and went off to London to study Advertising in 1958. He passed his Membership Exam of The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (M.I.P.A) in1965, and joined Rallis India in Bombay. Later, for over 20 years, he worked for the advertising agency Ogilvy &amp\; Mather. Now retired, he helps his son in his ad agency in Delhi.

Some old grannies, with lot of time on their hands, keep themselves busy by knitting, for their great grand (even yet unborn) children mojas (socks) and dastanas (gloves) using different colour leftover wool balls.

Similarly, I am trying to knit a tale of my family, especially my mother and sister Toshi (Santosh) from the left over tit-bits of talks with my brothers and sister in later life. It may seem disjointed but it will, like the grannies' mojas, come out colourful. I hope so.

It is a story of the turbulent times of India's Partition and after - late 1940s and early 1950s.  But it is NOT the usual gory tale of partition like hundreds of others.

It was the time when young Indian girls, including Hindu girls, had to wear long salwar, shirt and Chunni on her head, with long hair gut with, preferably, paranda. Yet, girls were allowed to study in co-educational colleges like Government College, Lyallpur. The concept of boy-friends was taboo, even in liberal families like mine, where girls went to Government College for FA and BA - but no boyfriends