From India News Network (INN)
New Delhi, May 30: AIDWA deeply mourns the passing away of Dr. Vina
Mazumdar, our beloved Vinadi on May 30th, 2013.Vinadi was a symbol of
much that was of value and worthy of emulation in the generation to
which she belonged. A generation of many ‘firsts’ for women like her – a
generation born in colonial India that lived through the halcyon days
of the freedom movement and grew to adulthood in free India; a
generation that breathed and lived on the words and deeds of
Rabindranath Tagore, the revolutionaries of Bengal and Punjab, Mahatma
Gandhi, dedicated teachers and family elders who had newly imbibed the
joys of education and enlightenment. It was a generation fired with the
desire to serve a newly independent nation using all the tools that a
modern education could provide. Above all, Vinadi, represented the
first generation of Indian women who had not only accessed the hitherto
forbidden delights of all that a first class education in an Indian
metropolis and a foreign university could provide, but also enjoyed the
freedom to enter into a profession, determined to make a difference and
leave a mark.
Very soon, she became an educationist who trained young minds to
think and question wherever she went. She herself always remained open
to new sources of knowledge, always aware of what she did not know but
also unflinching in her clear-headed commitment to a socialist vision of
emancipation. In 1971, she was appointed Member Secretary of the
Committee to study the Status of Women in India set up by the
Government. This was another turning point in her eventful life. The
work of the Committee that went around the country listening to women in
villages, cities in towns who belonged to every strata and class and
what they heard brought home the unequal status of the mass of Indian
women for whom little had changed and for whom Independence was a word
that mocked their own reality. Always a crusader for social change,
Vinadi focused on the struggle for womens’ equality once the work of the
Commission had been completed. As she herself has said, she became,
more than ever ‘activist and critic, academic and mobiliser, publicist
and propogandist’. Along with colleagues like Lotika Sarkar, she founded
the Center for Women’s Development Studies and dedicated the rest of
her life to providing a unique bridge between womens’ movements, of
which she was an important participant, and womens’ studies, of which
she was a pioneer.
AIDWA is proud of the close relationship we shared with Vinadi. She
inaugurated the first and founding conference of the organization in
l981 in Madras and remained a source of inspiration, advice and
unbounding love and affection.
Today we salute the memory of a great woman, a great academic, a
great path breaker and a great comrade without whom the womens movement
will be much the poorer. A line from Rabindranath Tagore was very dear
to her – “The wonder of it all makes me sing”. A life like Vinadi’s has
brought much wondrous music into the lives of innumerable women in so
many corners of our country.
AIDWA mourns her passing and offers heartfelt condolences to all her
children and grandchildren, so many of whom are treading the paths down
which she was among the first to venture.
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