Snehalatha Reddy’s dissent during Emergency: A granddaughter remembers

I grew up trying to conjure her up with this recipe of memories, but I had the additional luck of being born into the house where it all took place. Where she asked her father if she could marry a young Telugu poet — my grandfather Pattabhi Rama Reddy. Where Ram Manohar Lohia (1910-1967) sat on the clawfoot chair in the hall. Where my father was arrested for answering a fake call for a telegram and opening the white stained glass front door. It was in this house that George Fernandes (1930-2019) hid in the small room below the attic, and previously, during the filming of Chanda Marutha, an actor named Ashok Mandana took shelter in that same room; life imitated art.

But I always find it hard to begin with this, to speak about her. I remember in school, a political science teacher had once requested me to speak to his class about my grandmother’s arrest during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. But I don’t have the classroom facts as much as I have the inherited memories of losing her, trying hard to live on whatever she left behind. But I’m going to start with the house because this is what I shared with her, this is what she left to us — the diaries, the hand fans, the lace curtains, and the pink creeper that hung over the front gate.

For any movement to flourish, there needs to be a physical space that enables the free interaction of ideas, thoughts and dreams. Well, the house started off as a colonial warehouse for perhaps grain or ammunition. But, in the time that my grandmother lived in it, she had transformed it into a salon for sparkling conversation, new thoughts, ideas, politics, theatre, music, poetry, and film. When my parents and I were evicted from the space in 2013, we had covered the walls with the names of everyone who had ever walked through the white stained glass front door — Madhu Limaye, George Fernandes, Mrinal Sen, P Lankesh, UR Ananthamurthy, Peter Coe, Lakshmi Krishnamurthy, Bernice Rubens, Ramakrishna Hegde, JH Patel, Alejandro Jodorowsky — politicians, artists, journalists, anybody, maybe you. When I ask my father about what it was like in those days, he says it was a constant flow, a durbar for debate, discussion, and dissent.

Dissent. “Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters,” said Rosa Luxemburg. When I say my grandmother spoke truth to power, I mean that she practised this in all aspects of her life. She was born Joyce Patricia Powell, but adopted Snehalatha Reddy as an act of defiance against colonialism, not to appease majoritarianism but as a wide-eyed child macheting her path to justice, truth. You see, hers was the ultimate dissent, the living and dying dissent.

Snehalatha Reddy was born in Aden in 1925 to a Tamil Christian army food procurer and a Bengali/Kashmiri. She was bathed in the Red Sea. She had five brothers, two of whom died very young. She loved to dance. She loved to act. She co-founded the Madras Players in the 1960s and staged a highly acclaimed performance of Peer Gynt. She played Chandri in Pattabhi Rama Reddy’s Samskara (1970). She had a deeply inquisitive mind and a greatly empathetic, and strong spirit.

I have with me some excerpts from various bits of her life that we managed to save from time and from the white ants. Here is a tribute by socialist leader and activist Madhu Limaye. It is typewritten and has a note scribbled on the yellowing paper: File in Ms. Reddy - Personal. He writes: “Sneha was an artist. She was a very sympathetic soul. She was endowed with a sympathetic imagination and this enabled her to identify herself with the poor and the exploited. She was acutely aware of the miseries and humiliations that they have to bear in our unjust and unequal society. Her flying desire to improve the lot of the poor was the basis of her relationship with Ram Manohar Lohia and the rest of us.”

Of Mr. Lohia, I know a few things. That my father — Konarak Manohar Reddy — is named after him, that he was a kind, gentle man, that once when he was giving a speech in Madras, he was pelted with stones and my father and grandfather escorted him away in a car. I know that my grandmother cared for him and his ideals greatly. This was her political stance: Socialist. I learn more about it from one of her diaries; she kept many. Here, she writes: “The basis of socialism is freedom, decentralization, joint responsibility of the citizens in decision-making in social, political and economic affairs.” Here, she continues to write, speaking of the Emergency: “India has an old wealth of governing traditions of tolerance and civil liberties. The tradition of a police or totalitarian state is alien to us. The enforcement of removal of Human Rights has destroyed much of our social and moral life. It is a great misfortune to our nature.”

In her prison diaries, my grandmother writes: “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o’clock in the morning day after day. These were the times I wanted to die, really die.” She was incarcerated as a class A political prisoner, with MISA rights. However, since the Bangalore Central Prison lacked these facilities for female prisoners, she was kept with the Class C prisoners in a common facility. The women inmates were made to clean grain the whole day, one of the many aspects of the incarceration that was hugely detrimental to her chronic asthma. There was no recreation, no outdoors, and no facilities.

When her family went through hoops, requesting she have her own cell. They finally gave her a dungeon with a hole for a toilet — essentially, solitary confinement. While all the male political prisoners just next door were playing volleyball and planning their long-term careers, she was collapsing regularly because every time she had an asthma attack, she had to ring a bell to summon the guard at the front gate, who would check the cell to confirm the problem before calling the doctor — all this would amount to an hour’s delay. The women’s movement? No one was prepared for any woman to move.

Her asthma was intense and she had to take injections daily, and poisonous antibiotics, which had impaired her health. She had no proper bathroom facilities, no proper bed. She writes it was either muggy and humid or cold and chilly. Her health deteriorated here quickly. On December 6, 1976, she wrote: “Deliberate locking up during the day. Deliberate negligence of the wardens instigated from the office — instigated not to go for help when I have a serious attack. Deliberately not purchasing or sending for my inhalers and medicines. Why not come out and say they are going to kill me? That would be honest at least. The whole setup is not only corrupt but horrific and evil. Deliberately keeping me in isolation, ignorant of MISA rules — no human company, no fresh air. Deliberate negligence with regards to health, food, hygiene, sanitation — playing deadly games. The mind has a thousand eyes and the heart but one, and yet in the light of a whole world, only wrong triumphs — why?” Her asthma was killing her in prison, she knew it months before her release which was ultimately only to avoid a custodial death. But again, no charges had been specified. No questions could be asked. 

Despite this, she fought for the rights of inmates, women who had been accused of murder or incarcerated for sex work, like cabaret dancers. She fought to get them access to better food, water and hygiene. She writes: “Today a cabaret dancer, who tried to commit suicide, has been remanded in judicial custody, till the 15th. But why have they sent her to prison? She should have been sent to a nursing home, where she is cared for, treated for shock and with kindness, and not prison; she has suffered and should not be treated thus.”

While in prison, a friend of the family, Murari, who was a Congress MP at the time, informed them that he had got word from Indira Gandhi that if Snehalatha Reddy ‘apologized,’ she would be released. Snehalatha Reddy said: “No, why should I apologize when I’ve done nothing wrong?” So, this was the ultimate dissent, the dying dissent.

During her incarceration, she wrote a prison diary; July 25, 1976: “Long and lonely day, I was within inches of death. I should be paroled out of here.” July 29, 1976: “No sleep last night, fitful weeping, couldn’t stop. I get easily exhausted even if I do a simple act as washing a glass. I feel afraid it’s my heart that’s affected with all this cortisone.” August 8, 1976: “Attack all night. No respite.” It goes on like this. She remained in custody for nine- and-a-half months and after countless attacks, collapses, emotional and physical blackmail by the wardens, who told her that her family didn’t care enough to visit even as they waited outside the prison gates because they were denied entry. After all that, she was released, only to avoid the charge for custodial death. Five days later, she collapsed…in that same house, making her way from the courtyard to the bedroom. In the filming of Chanda Marutha, her character falls to the ground in the hall. Again, life imitated art. I imagine her still in a pink chiffon sari, still with anklets on and flowers in her hair.

I read her play, Sita, the preface to which has been written by my grandfather. He writes: “In my mind, Sita and Sneha are one and the same, both martyrs fighting against unjust laws”. In Act 1 Scene 4, Sita’s monologue reads: “Come away Rama. Give up this kingship. Give up these narcissistic dreams of greatness. This vanity. Let’s go back to the forest. I’ll show you the wonders of love. How could you forget so soon? How could we become such strangers? We who loved so much? No, no, the world is still full of wonderful things.”

I’m thinking of the women’s socialist movement, a movement borne on a specific set of ideals and I wonder today what the essence of our activism is, our dissent, what ultimately influences our ideals. Today, would it be called the women’s capitalist movement? And what are those ideals? What is the source of our motivation?

In 2013, we were made to move from the house we lived in, the one we shared with my grandmother’s ghost. She was being taken away all over again, her lingering perfume in the chunam walls, the possibility of some smudge, some fingerprints, some letters. The house was taken away and the walls were painted over, and what my grandparents and their parents had created as a space for all things creative, free and beautiful was reclaimed, whitewashed, forgotten, and then ironically re-christened as ‘The Arts Village.’ Though all our art was done away with, this was the new wave of Bollywood dancing and pilate art — a blank slate, clean plate kind of art village. Whatever.

My point is that the names were painted over, history was rewritten. I mean the history books weren’t even read. And this has really made me question the motivation, the impetus, whatever the word is for what drives us to a cause — to anything — to ‘art,’ to freedom, to justice. What is the essence of our activism? I ask because I wonder if, in fact, despite our lives being governed by an aggressively capitalist construct, despite our earth being burned to the ground, despite the apocalypse tick-tocking across the horizon. Despite the worst and the worst and the worst, could the essence of our motivation still be an intrinsic belief in truth? Humanity? Freedom? And, if not, then what is it?