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When the postman knocked
IT WASN'T Our Ladies' Magazine (Miscellany, January 21 and 28) but The Indian Ladies' Magazine, wrote several readers. And providing more details about it are Readers V. Sundaram and R. Srinivasan from Mumbai. It was Kamala Satthianadhan, the first woman in the South to get a B.A. degree (in 1898), who started the monthly journal, ``the first of its kind in Asia'', in July 1901. In her first editorial she wrote:
``The main object of the magazine will be to help advance the cause of the women of India... The main influences that are at work in this land, have not appreciably affected the women, the men having benefited more largely than the women in the matter of education and social development. If the people of India are to advance, they should realise that: `the woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink together'.''
As Reader Sundaram says, ``These words have such a contemporary ring that you would think that this is a magazine that is being launched in modern India''.
The magazine, which published at least into 1910, featured in its first issues the women who had graduated from the Universities of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, the country's first (1857). The August and September 1901 issues also featured several articles on Queen Victoria who had died that year. Contributors over the years included Sarojini Naidu (some of her early poems were first published in the magazine), Annie Besant, Lady Sadhasiva Iyer and Miss Jeenarajadasa. There were regular features on the ``progress Indian women made in various spheres of activity'' as well as reports from ``Ladies' Associations'' in places as far apart as Colombo and Peshawar, Karachi and Rangoon.
Kamala Satthianadhan was a Hensman from Colombo, I'm told, and after she was widowed young and went to work as a teacher in an Andhra Zamindari, her daughter Padmini was brought up by grandparents in Ceylon. Where Padmini met the son of ``the famous trade unionist Sen Gupta'' no one seems to know, but the Sen Gupta she married appears to have crossed the labour divide, working as he did with the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and specialising in labour matters. Apart from the biography of her mother, Padmini Sen Gupta apparently also wrote books on Sarojini Naidu and Pandita Ramabai. I am also told that Dr. S. Satthianadhan wrote a book in the 1890s titled Sketches of Indian Christians which included a piece on Krupabai's family. They moved South, it is related, because of the taunts of their neighbours when they became Christians.
The pieces on the Satthianadhans brought back memories too to reader Saraswathi Gowrishanker. She was awarded the Krupabai Satthianadhan Memorial Medal in 1943 for getting the highest marks in English among women students in the Intermediate exam. She writes that the medal ``appears to have been promoted by the Madras University from the Matriculation to the Intermediate examination sometime in the 20th Century''. She also tells me that the ``issue of academic medals was suspended during World War II, one of the many disruptions of the time'', and so she got a certificate, a cash award of Rs. 50 and a note on Krupabai's life and achievements.
Postscript: I'd always thought my 40-year old typewriter thought at the same speed as I did, but it appears to have out-paced me when I was writing the Miscellany of January 21. It got to Ahmedabad before I got to Ahmednagar, Krupabai's birthplace. And by the time I got around to writing ``the two (MS films) that Dungan directed'' it had MS starring in ``four of his films"! The moral of the stories: Never trust your typewriter.
S.MUTHIAH
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