![]() Much before her journalism would nudge me towards the world of news, her interventions as a parent had introduced me to the lifelong battle that being a woman entailed. Though she died from a sudden brain haemorrhage when I was just thirteen, my mother’s appetite for adventure, her dogged pursuit of a story, her rejection of anything that sought to constrict her, and her determination to be her own person even when it made her unpopular, would remain the deepest influences on my own life. My defining memory of my mother would remain a photograph of her balanced precariously on the edge of an army tank, surrounded by soldiers, her head, protected by an olive green helmet, thrown back in a full-toothed smile, happy and utterly free. Thirty-three years later, when I attempted to convince the army that I be allowed to report from the combat zone of the Kargil War, that my being a woman would not cause them any inconvenience, I remembered the battle that my mother and women of her generation had fought, opening the way for us to follow. And so was born India’s first woman war correspondent. ![]() No sooner was her leave granted than she made her way to the front line in Khem Karan-all alone and without any infrastructural support or backup.įrom there she began sending war dispatches to the paper, which were too good not to be published prominently. So Prabha Dutt requested a few days of leave to visit her parents in Punjab. It was still tough for women to get the so-called hard-news assignments of reporting on politics or crime, conflict reporting was beyond the pale. Her proposal was rejected outright there was no question of sending a woman to a war zone. In 1965, when war broke out between India and Pakistan, my mother, still single and in her twenties, asked to be sent to the front line. As I grew older and started working, I often wondered whether I would have my mother’s gumption. It was never assumed that one career took precedence over the other both my parents had to make adjustments to accommodate their individual and collective dreams. ![]() In an unconventional personal decision, when my father, an Air India official, was transferred to New York for several years, my mother opted to stay back in India for at least half of that posting so as to not lose the momentum of her professional life she only shied to the US when she got a job with the United Nations. Sometimes, when there was no help available at home or when we had to be dropped off for dance or swimming lessons, we would accompany her to work and play on the noisy newsroom floor as she furiously typed away to meet the day’s deadline. When she sought to interview the notorious murderers Billa and Ranga, who had made national headlines after kidnapping and killing two schoolchildren, Geeta and Sanjay Chopra, in 1978, the jail authorities declined her request. She went to court against the decision and secured her interview just before the two men were executed, finding a place with her petition in the annals of case law.ĭespite the demands of the profession she would find the time to call us at periodic intervals to check on homework and meals. But she was relentless in her pursuit of a good story and taught us never to take no for an answer. My sister and I worried as children when she received ominous phone calls in the dead of night or shadowy men showed up at the door. She went on to become a tough-as-nails investigative journalist scooping such stories as the use of beef tallow in shudh vanaspati and a major scam at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, undeterred by threats and warnings from those she was going after. She rose to become the first woman chief reporter of the Hindustan Times, but the badge came with an initial rejection- she was told that the paper did not hire women in mainstream reporting roles. Growing up as a journalist’s daughter-at a time when women in the media were expected to write about flower shows and fashion-I watched my mother, Prabha Dutt, wrestle every single day of her working life with gender-driven preconceptions.Įven getting hired had been difficult. Around the dining table, politics was a staple diet, right up there with the obligatory portions of yucky daily greens. At the age of five, my parents would make me identify little-known world leaders on the covers of Time magazine. This extract from This Unquiet Land by Barkha Dutt has been published with permission from Aleph Book Company.
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