Abstract
I prided myself on being the country’s pioneering development journalist but a decade-and-a-half before I entered the hallowed portals of The Times of India, Kamla Mankekar (nee Chopra) had done the spadework for the entry of women into a male-dominated profession. She was a child of the Partition and after nine months of attending evening classes in a camp college set up for children of refugees obtained a diploma in journalism. She had to contribute to the family’s survival and armed with the diploma set out to get a job.
If getting a job is tough now, it was a Herculean challenge in the early 1950s, especially for a girl just out of college. Kamla decided to barge into Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s office to demand a job. After all, he had said there would be no nepotism in free India and the government would help refugees find jobs. Needless to say, she could not meet the prime minister because he was not in town but that was Kamla—gutsy from the word go. She also knocked on the doors of the Press Information Bureau and publishing houses before joining the Indian News Chronicle at Mori Gate as an unpaid apprentice coming in for a couple of hours in the morning because the office had no toilet. It was only in 1950, when The Times of India launched its Delhi edition that Kamla joined the newspaper. She was the only woman in the Chronicle as well as in the Times, a paper where she worked for 12 years as a sub-editor but managed to push in stories when she was not on duty on the desk. She then moved on to Bombay (now Mumbai) where she worked another five years for the Sunday section of the Indian Express.
In her book, Breaking News, a Woman in a Man’s World published in 2014, Kamla recounts her Me Too moments in the newspaper… the propositioning, being invited by a senior journalist, old enough to be her father, to a hotel room where he expressed his desire to have a relationship with her. The senior continued to embarrass and harass her until she considered quitting the job. But she worried about the scandal after she quit and whether any other newspaper would employ her. She needed to support herself and contribute to the family income so stayed on. Luckily, her harasser was recalled by the Bombay office.
She edited the Sunday section of the newspapers, did film reviews and interviews and got to meet world leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev, Che Guevara, Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, Soviet painter Svetoslav Roerich and his wife Devika Rani, Martha Graham and several others. She was a pioneer in bringing gender issues into the mainstream media and later went on to take up social issues with various organisations she was associated with. She ran a series of interviews with the women elected to the first Parliament of the country—Renu Chakravarty, Tarakeshwari Sinha, Sucheta Kriplani, Parvati Krishnan, Anusuyabai Kale and Maniben Kara. Some were her sources of information and others her friends.
I first saw Kamla in the Indian Express in Bombay and read with avid interest her cover stories for the Sunday section of the newspaper, the Sunday Standard. In she walked in her crisp cotton saris, wafting a favourite French fragrance and heads turned. Her series on the stars of yesteryears, the retired heroines of the silver screen, many of them neglected, forgotten and in penury was heart-warming and forced the government to look into their plight. She wrote about foster care, foundling homes, women’s welfare homes, social issues, corruption in public and state institutions and on the arts and crafts.
As a founder member of the Consumer Guidance Society (CGS) in Bombay, she pressured the society to look at food and drug adulteration and creating consumer awareness on these issues. Through public contributions, the society was able to come out with a monthly CGS bulletin with inputs from the British Consumer Association and the American Consumer Research Incorporated. Probably as a reaction to the CGS, prominent industrialists of Bombay set up the Fair Trade Practices Association. It was in Bombay that Kamla was introduced to the pioneers of the small family movement in India, the Family Planning Association of India. The social issues she took up often became cover stories for the Sunday Standard. The enormous knowledge she acquired from her travel story visits to Goa for the newspaper led to a book, Culture and Religious Traditions in the Temples of Goa.
When her husband D.R. Mankekar returned to Delhi and journalism, Kamla too moved with him but opting out of mainstream media took to socially relevant work. She brought out a children’s magazine for cartoonist Shankar Pillai of Children’s Book Trust and then moved on to edit the social science journal Social Change brought out by the Council for Social Development (CSD). Social activist Durgabai Deshmukh and Dr C. D. Deshmukh had established the India International Centre (IIC) for cultural activities and intellectual exchanges and CSD a sister institution to the IIC, devoted to research and development issues. In an email Kamla recalled her association with CSD and the journal.
Dr. Deshmukh was walking in the IIC’s back garden; when I approached him he picked up a piece of shell of a bird’s egg he had seen in the bushes and asked me, ‘What do you think about this?’ It was a brilliant sea green; and so we gave that colour to the cover of the inaugural issue of Social Change. It was so rewarding working with that distinguished couple. They made one feel a partner in their projects, and not just a subordinate or a mere employee.
In the late 1960s, CSD held four regional conferences on the country’s population policy—what the government was doing, what needed to be done and how to arrest the mounting population. Kamla during her stint in Bombay had been watching the work of the Family Planning Association of India and was in tune with the discussions on a population policy. This led to her writing a book, Abortion—A Social Dilemma, soon after the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act 1971 was passed. With women going to quacks to get rid of unwanted pregnancies and many of them dying in the process, India was one of the first countries to legalise abortion for married women.
Kamla was secretary of the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) which was at the forefront of the women’s movement soon after Independence. Though the credit for building the working girls hostel, Bapno Ghar, a home for girls walking out of bad marriages and the huge infrastructure of the AIWC goes to Lakshmi Raghuramiah, it was Kamla and the first tier of office bearers who gave vision and shape to the needs of women in a nascent Republic. AIWC also set up one of the first homes for widows in Vrindavan. Kamla was also the first Chairperson of the Delhi Commission for Women and despite not getting much support from the Delhi government took up cases of wife beating and harassment of women at the workplace. She has written and edited seven books including, Decline and Fall of Indira Gandhi which she co-authored with her husband, D. R. Mankekar, an eminent journalist who had been editor of the Indian Express and The Times of India. Kamla was a rare woman who combined journalism with social activism and a dear friend.