Aloo Anklesaria - early immigrant

August 25, 2012
Summer is almost over.  Daughter and grandchildren (and son-in-law on a brief visit) have made their annual sojourn here and returned to their home.  The house is silent without their voices and shouts and laughter.  It is time then to get back to my blogging, which I have put on the backburner for far too long.  Back to the 1960s.
One of the persons I met that first year was Aloo Anklesaria, a school teacher who lived at the University Women's Club building across from Misericordia Hospital.  I was familiar with the organization, having been secretary of the Nagpur branch at a time when Mrs. Kamala Mani (wife of A.D.Mani, the editor of The Hitavada) was the President.  The Club was a stately building on West Gate. Like British Clubs, it had a lounge and dining room with elegant chandeliers and big sofas and tables of solid wood.  It also had rooms for members who lived in residence, and Aloo had been a resident for years.
Aloo was one of the very first to come to Winnipeg from India.  She was a very short, small elderly woman (though I must confess this perception of her elderliness was perhaps only due to my own young age at the time.)  She was a Parsi from Bombay, who wore a sari in the Parsi style.
In the early 1980s, when I made a poster of early immigrants from India for some exhibition that was on at the Railway Station, I had included her name and the year of her arrival, (the poster is now lost), and several people mentioned that they had not heard of her at all!  She lived a quiet life, and moved more with the community around her than with other immigrants. I lost touch with her all too soon once I started working.

 I remember having tea with her at the University Women's Club and thinking how very British the surroundings were, and when I met Kamala Markandaya at her Club in London some years later, I remember thinking how British institutions all across the Raj, in India as here in Canada, shared the same elegance and air of antiquity.

This blog is about my life in Winnipeg but life is a continuum and so I must say a word about The Hitavada (for I was once a cub reporter at The Hitavada, Nagpur's English daily newspaper. I have written briefly about it in Vignettes from Vineyards of Memory -1).
This newspaper was owned by the Servants of India Society, an organization that was formed in Pune,  on June 12, 1905 by Gopal Krishna Gokhale,  along with Gopal Krishna Deodhar and Anant Patwardhan.  Their aim was to overthrow the British rule in India through education and social consciousness. The Society organized many campaigns to promote education, sanitation, health care and to fight the social evils of untouchability and discrimination, alcoholism, poverty, oppression of women and domestic abuse. It stayed away from political affiliations such as the Indian National Congress.The publication of The Hitavada,(which means The Good Word)  commenced in 1911.