Articulation, Dissent and Subversion: Voices of Women’s Emancipation in Sanskrit Literature

My twenty-year undergraduate teaching career in Delhi University was long enough for me to have been aware of Biswamoy Pati’s name, and his activist DUTA career. I was in a sense re-introduced to Biswamoy (I always called him that rather than Pati, though he once joked with me that ‘you often drop “wa” in your pronunciation and turn me into a surprise!’) when in 2009 we both joined the Department of History at the University of Delhi. Biswamoy from then on became a friend whom I looked up to. What struck me most about him was his sheer humanity, which truly transcended the caste, class and gender divide. I was brought up on the medieval vaishnava saint Narsi Mehta’s verse, ‘vaishnavajana to tene kahiye je pira parai jane re’, and more than any other person of my acquaintance, Biswamoy was a living example of Narsi’s sentiment.