Maitreyi pushpa autobiography featuring
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A reflection of you
Can one working woman make way for generations of financially independent women in her family?
Brought to you in partnership with HDFC Life.
When one woman in decided she wanted to work, her confidence encouraged her sister, her daughter and eventually even her granddaughter to realise their mål. A woman investing in her career inevitably inspires generations of women after her to become financially independent and progressively more successful with each generation. But in the s and ‘60s, it took courage, a supportive family and sometimes even open rebellion to do something as natural as find a job outside home. So how did these women craft successful careers for themselves and how did their careers impact other women in their family?
We followed the stories of fem working women whose strength continues to inspire their granddaughters to follow their dreams two generations later.
Zahra Amiruddin, Freelance journa • The Details of Everyday Life Reading Three Women’s Autobiographies from Twentieth Century India Ajapa Sharma Centre for Historical Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University The sociologist C. Wright Mills said, “Neither the life on an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” C. W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, (New York: OUP, ), 3. In reading autobiographies, Mills’ proposition is a useful one to keep in mind. Even as the autobiography is form of writing seeped in personal experiences and emotions, the social milieu within which individuals are located come alive through autobiographies. Not only so, autobiographies present us with an understanding of individual responses to their social world. To think about and to understand the interplay between the personal, the social and the historical, through the autobiography proves to be a fruitfu • The residents of the Jhuggi Jhopri Resettlement Colony in Delhi’s Savda Ghevra are not residents by choice. They have been pushed to the outskirts of the city after waves of evictions, most recently in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games. On 2 November, I visited the colony to meet a year-old girl whose words had managed to find their way to central Delhi. Aanchal, an eleventh-standard student, had had her first story published, in the October issue of Hans, India’s most prestigious Hindi literary magazine. Aanchal’s short story, titled “Saikal ke Sapne”—Dreams of a Bicycle—is about a young girl’s yearning for a bicycle, with an intensely detailed account of her thoughts as she waits for her parents to come home with it. “Like Premchand, I want to write to expose the truth,” she told me. The story was published in a column called “Ghuspaithiye”—intruders—which features stories by authors below the age of 20 who come from the margins of society. “Their childhood Details of Everyday Life: Reading Three Women's Autobiographies from Twentieth Century India
The Intruders