Written by – Dr Anuradha Bele

One of my fondest memories of my father is my younger sister and me eagerly sitting with him after dinner and clamouring for a story. He usually dipped back into his childhood, growing up in the Maharwada in a small village of Vaduz in Sangli district in Maharashtra and the communal life there with his friends.

My father’s grandfather was a stone mason, breaking huge rocks for a nearby temple in Renavi. My dada, father’s father, started working as a coal carrier for the railway engine and finally, ended up as an engine driver on Hubli Dharwad line. This dark-skinned young man always wore a clean white dhoti and sported flowing moustaches, which led to some scuffles with the upper caste. He bought some land in the village and in addition to the small railway quarter where he lived with his first wife and their four daughters, this was in the early 1900s. All daughters were sent to school and made to study; all four ended up as Zilla Parishad school teachers and married educated young men.

The village land was managed by my dadi, my dada’s second wife, an illiterate but hardworking goatherd. She bore him two sons. The youngest was my father, born in 1939. An errant schoolboy, he preferred to swim in the nearby well or take the goats for grazing in the scrub forest. But he often said that his father passing away while he was in utero was a blessing in disguise because the women took charge of his upbringing. His mother, under threat from her brother, ran away to the elder wife’s home in town and together, the two women got down to the business of bringing up Ganu Bapu’s children. The daughters were married by then but the eldest came back to help with the household and for bringing up the two boys, who were quite a handful.

My father disliked studies; he wanted to be a wrestler and was a favourite of the ustads for his malkhamb skills. He was known as a good wrestler and people would crowd around shouting, “Konacha? (Whose?)”, and if the answer was “Maharacha (Mahar caste) “, they would stand around and cheer. One of the ustads came home and asked for him as his heir and pupil, but my dadi refused. “He is going to study a lot”, she declared.

The sisters started forcing him to accompany them to a girl’s school where one of them rose to become the Principal. So began my father’s reluctant tryst with the printed word. His biggest hero was Shahu Maharaj, the legendary king of Kolhapur. The stories of a promising young lawyer, journalist and statesman of exceptional intellect who had studied in some of the best universities abroad and whose indomitable will to stamp out the caste system, a certain Dr. B.R.Ambedkar, were already reverberating in every town and village. Shahu Maharaj had declared Babasaheb to be the leader of our people and my father, like everyone else of our community, was swept up in Babasaheb’s vision of equality, liberty and fraternity and pursuit of knowledge. “Babasaheb had said study, so I started studying”, he would often tell us.

There was no looking back after that. He volunteered to work at a local teacher’s house in return for extra tuitions in the evening. After school, he would go to the school teacher’s house, fill water, wash utensils, feed and milk the cows and then sit for studies till late in the night and then walk home with a lantern. The same teacher caught hold of my father’s hand and walked him through the entire village when he cleared his inter exam, saying “Look at this Mahar boy, look at him and learn”.

Having studied in the vernacular medium, he set himself the task of learning English by reading small ads in newspapers. He also joined Shivaji University for graduation in science, and upon completion became the first graduate from the village from our community. His elated friends decided to hold a grand celebration, local leaders were invited, and the stage was set. My father did not go. “It’s just a graduation, look at Babasaheb,” was his excuse.

His head of the department encouraged him to pursue research and he won a UGC fellowship. He finished his Ph.D. and became the first doctorate in Zoology in Shivaji University, his name leads all the rest in the Ph.D. holders list. After trying for teaching positions in nearby colleges, he decided to appear for Maharashtra Public Services Commission exam. On the day of his interview, his mother, my dadi passed away. My father aced the interview anyway. He joined Institute of Science, Nagpur as Assistant Professor in Zoology.

My mother would tell us that when my nana, mother’s father went to talk about their marriage to them, his house in the government colony had nothing but books, microscope, slide boxes and pictures of Phule, Shahu, Babasaheb and Buddha. He was very clear on one thing- he wanted an educated wife. He believed that if the mother is educated, she will make sure that the family progresses, the next generation will be better than the previous one. “It’s simple evolution,” he said.

No wonder he married his student, a shy young woman, one and half decades his junior but determined to be a professor and head of Zoology, like him, which he encouraged her to achieve. My father joined BAMCEF and he often spoke in gatherings about women’s education and the need for women to work outside homes and financially contribute to the family.

Interestingly, he never asked me or my sister to get married; it was always, “Become financially independent.” Then there was a subtle suggestion, “You have a good job but one also needs a companion. I am not saying get married, I am just saying that find someone to spend your life with; we will not be around always. “Maybe that is why I found someone a lot like him- calm, amicable, generous with a fierce intellect and a complete commitment to the sacredness of human personality.

My sister and I changed jobs, blended disparate career streams, travelled countries, changed our minds- through this all, his only concern was whether we were eating and sleeping well, rest we were adults capable of making the right decisions. When I told him I wanted to combine my skills in software design with veterinary sciences to build animal models, he went and bought me my first white apron.

After my sister’s untimely demise, something broke in him. When I told him the news, he just said one sentence, “She was a child, this was not the time. “ After that, he gave me the stick he used as support while walking, squared his shoulders and walked for a long time in the yard. Always a quiet man, who spoke only when he felt intensely and with people he felt an affinity to, this wound he buried so deep even we rarely saw it. But in the last one month of his life, he was happy in the boisterous company of his two grandchildren, with my husband and me taking care of him.

My father, coming from an impoverished background, used to tell us that anyone who said reservation promoted meritless people should be told his biography. If it weren’t for the free-ships and reservation, which Babasaheb gave to us after the relentless struggle, my father would also be a goat herder like his mother, or he would be a mill worker in Bombay.

I often think that our struggle is the struggle of generations; each generation has to do its task to make sure the next generation is more empowered to achieve Babasaheb’s vision of equality, liberty and fraternity. Because of Babasaheb, my father could become who he wanted to, there was economic stability and he held on to Buddha and His Dhamma. Now it is the turn of our generation to take this work forward and make sure that we act as a bridge between our brethren in rural areas and us in urban areas, and open up the world of opportunities to them. With education as fundamental to this process and making our people aware of the freedom of the mind, which no one can take away from us.

The pursuit of knowledge and growth of the culture of Buddhism, one family at a time, is the task for our generation. Babasaheb’s influence had converted a to-be wrestler into an intellectual giant- Dr Vasant G Baile. Today my own home has photos of Buddha, Babasaheb, the Phule couple and Shahu Maharaj-“ our teachers”, my kids call them- and yes, books- lots of them. That would be another legacy my father would want to pass on to them.