My Reminiscences: Social Development during the Gandhian Era and After - Book by Renuka Ray ISBN: 81-85604-78-9 Buy at Popular Prakashan Private Limited – Book Publishers – Mumbai, Maharshtra, India – Buying Cookery History Pharmacology Stree Biography Literature Medicine Anthropology Sociology Books

In writing about her life and work, Renuka Ray also relates the momentous history of India, from her birth in 1904 to her death in 1997, encompassing the years of the growth and consolidation of the nationalist movement, to partition and independence, and the equally compelling post-independence period. As a member of the ruling elite, a close associate of Gandhiji, Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bidhan Chandra Roy, Durgabai Deshmukh, Vijayalakshmi Pandit and Indira Gandhi, and a participant in the political and social movements, she provides an insider’s view to the historical events she has witnessed.

As a young girl of sixteen, she met Gandhiji at the special session of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta in September 1920, and she said, ‘it changed my life’. She was to remain a lifelong Gandhian, committed to his ideals, convinced to the end of her life that the way to rural development lay in Gandhian programmes that were infused with Rabindranath Tagore’s experiments a Sriniketan. She presents the many discussions she had with Gandhiji on several political issues.

Offering a critique of government and society before she ends her memoir, she adds, ‘it is only human to be dissatisfied with what we have done… it is the very nature of the human spirit which hankers after what is unattainable that fills me with hope.’ It is indeed this human spirit that infused her life and provides a critical document of her times.