Legacy: Letters from eminent parents to their daughters by Menon Sudha

Author:Menon, Sudha [Menon, Sudha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184003949
Publisher: Random House India
Published: 2013-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

Mallika Sarabhai

allika Sarabhai is a multifaceted woman, a restless, vibrant soul unwilling to be caged in by boundaries and societal restrictions. Her interests are many. She is dancer, choreographer, social activist, writer, publisher, and commentator. But more than anything else, she is a human being whose heart beats and feels for the women of our country, the unsung majority who live in rural India and silently suffer the indignities that an uncaring society heaps on them. Over the years, she has worked relentlessly opposing crimes against women through her dance-dramas, mobile dance troupes, traveling through rural India spreading the word against female foeticide, child marriage, and maternal mortality, among others.

Mallika herself grew up in a family of very strong women including her danseuse mother, Mrinalini Sarabhai, her aunt, freedom fighter Capt. Lakshmi Sehgal, and her great grandmother, a feisty woman who once single-handedly mollified and made friends with a rampaging mob working in the fields of the zamindaars, who attacked her home during the Moplah Rebellion in Kerala’s Malabar region in 1921. The Nair widow waited for the mobs to arrive, cooked a meal for them, and sent them home, mollified.

The biggest influence on Mallika’s life was and continues to be her father, eminent physicist and the father of India’s space programme, Dr.Vikram Sarabhai from whom she got the gift of enduring positivity. At his insistence she did a business management degree from IIM, Ahmedabad so that she would help him set up great institutions that would exist without material considerations such as income and profit. He never lived to see his daughter give shape to his vision but over the last three years, Darpana, an organization that her mother founded, has been steered by Mallika who has made it a hub for catalyzing social change through art.

Mallika is remembered for her inspiring role as Draupadi, in Peter Brook’s ‘The Mahabharata’ which ran for five years, first in French and then English, performed in France, North America, Australia, Japan, and Scotland. She has, since then, made several hard-hitting solo theatrical works, including Shakti: The Power of Women, all of which talk about the inherent strength of women.

This poem was written to her unborn baby some two decades ago. Anahita is now part of Darpana and a keen dancer herself, who accompanies her mother, and sometimes her grandmother too, on stage.

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