The south-west monsoon had set in, but there was no sign of rain in Uparbeda village and the surrounding areas for days on end. In keeping with Santhali practices, Biranchi Narayan Tudu, like others in the village, had placed an earthen pot, called puti in local parlance, beneath the banyan tree on the backyard to propitiate the rain gods. About a week after the puti was placed, on June 20, 1958, to be precise, there was a new arrival in the family in the shape of a skinny baby girl. As if on cue, the rains arrived almost immediately after the birth of the child.
Tudu promptly named his newborn daughter “Puti” in grateful acknowledgement of the role it had played in bringing rains and a daughter for him in a family of predominantly male members. In the years that followed, the name Puti underwent several changes to finally become Droupadi, the woman the Indian nation now knows as its incumbent President.
“In Santhali tradition, when a girl child is born, she is given the name of her paternal grandmother so that the name never dies and is kept alive. In keeping with this tradition, I was named Puti by my parents. But the teachers in my school, who mostly hailed from the coastal areas of the state, did not like the name and changed it first to Durpadi, then Dorpadi, Durpati and finally Droupadi,” the President told journalist and author Dr Iti Samanta in a video interview when she was Governor of Jharkhand. After her marriage to Shyam Charan Murmu, she acquired her husband’s surname, as is the custom, to be known as Murmu.
Delha Soren, Murmu’s senior in college and a lifelong friend, recounts an interesting anecdote involving her name from her school days which she says was narrated to her by Murmu herself. During a class examination, while Murmu was in middle school, the students were asked to write the other names by which some mythological characters from Hindu scriptures were known by. Murmu had no problem with the other names: “Dharmaraj” for Yudhisthir, “Gandivdhari” for Arjun, and so on, but stumbled at the name “Yagyanseni”. Watching her scratching her head, the teacher asked her, “Why don’t you write the answer?” “Sir, I have written down the answers to all other questions, but don’t know any other name for Yagyanseni,” Murmu replied nervously. “If you can’t recollect one, why don’t you write down your own name?” the teacher said with a smile. Murmu did as was told. It was only later that she realised “Yagyanseni” was another name for her namesake from the Mahabharata.
In most homes in the largely patriarchal Indian society, the birth of a girl is not celebrated with the same fervour as that of a boy. Even in this age and time, female foeticide is prevalent, even rampant, in many parts of the country, as reflected in the abysmal nationwide gender ratio of 1000:933. Nor does the discrimination end at birth; it continues unabated for the rest of her life. But that is not the case in the egalitarian tribal society. Here, the birth of a girl child is as much a cause for celebration as the arrival of a son. No wonder the sex ratio in tribal society is a healthy 1000:990.
In true tribal tradition, therefore, Biranchi Narayan, who already had a son named Bhagat, rejoiced at the birth of a daughter. A marginal farmer with a small land holding, Biranchi did not study much beyond primary school. But he was determined to give his daughter the best possible education. “He would often say that he would not hesitate to sell off his meagre land holding, if need be, to send his daughter to college and university,” Murmu’s teacher in middle English (ME) school, Basudev Behera, told this author.
With this kind of parental backing, it was perhaps natural that the young Murmu developed a passion for education, something that earned for her the honour of becoming the first girl in her village to join college. This was to be the first of the many firsts she would achieve in her life later: the first woman from her area to become a minister in the Odisha government, the first woman to win the coveted Nilakantha Award as the best legislator in the Odisha Assembly, the first woman – and the first tribal – to be appointed Governor of Jharkhand, the first person born after Independence to become President, the first from Odisha to rise to the highest constitutional post in the country and, of course, the first tribal in Raisina Hill.
Born as she was into a poor family, life was not easy for the young Murmu. She would walk to school barefoot, as she could not afford footwear. She had to manage the whole year with just two pairs of dress, which she wore alternately after washing. She also had to do all domestic chores: washing utensils, sweeping the floor, drawing water from the well, cleaning the cowshed, and so on, even as she pursued her passion for education. Her grandmother would call her out at 4 am to help her at the dhinki (old-style wooden lever used to remove husk from rice in the Indian countryside). “Do you think you would go to heaven by simply studying?” she would tell young Murmu.
The old lady would admonish her for using a kerosene lamp, called dibiri in local parlance, saying, “What are you doing in school then? Why don’t you study there? Do you even know how much kerosene costs?” But determined as she was to pursue her education and secure in the knowledge that she had the backing of her father, Murmu would ignore the admonishment of her grandmother and carry on.
As the exams neared, “Basu Sir” held extra classes for students in the evenings after school hours. Electricity was yet to reach the area and a dibiri, which cost about Rs 30 at the time, was not something either the school or the students could afford. So, they had to manage with a makeshift dibiri made out of inkpots, glass medicine bottles or tin pots with torn clothes used as wick. “Murmu’s father would drop her to school in the evening and would come again at 9 pm to fetch her,” says Basu Sir.
Nothing would stop her from going to school. “I can’t recollect one occasion when she missed school. Once, there was a heavy downpour, which flooded the road leading from her home to the school. The water rose to a height of about four feet in a nullah she had to cross to reach school. Only the headmaster and me, besides four or five boy students, had managed to reach school. Just as we were thinking of calling off classes for the day, I was stunned to see Droupadi arrive at school all drenched. I asked her, ‘How did you come?’ ‘I swam,’ she replied coolly. While crossing the nullah, she was holding her school bag aloft to make sure it did not get wet. That was the level of her commitment to education,” Behera says.
The genial teacher says he never imagined his student would become the President of the country one day. “The most I had expected was she would complete her matriculation and would become, given her passion for education, a teacher, like me,” Behera says with a smile.
Tankadhar Mandal, her classmate in ME school, says she was very good in studies and always stood first in her class. “As per a long-observed tradition in the school, the student who stood first in class was made monitor of the class. Thus, Droupadi was set to become the monitor. But some boys had reservations about a girl becoming the monitor. They opposed her, saying she would be unable to discharge her responsibilities as monitor properly. That is when Basu Sir stepped in and put his foot down,” he says. Distressed at the lack of confidence in her, Murmu asked Basu Sir, “Can’t I become the monitor?” “Why not? You will do a better job than any boy,” the teacher said.
Murmu duly became monitor and gave a very good account of herself in what was an early indication of her leadership quality and her determination to fight gender discrimination.
Excerpted with permission from Madam President: The Biography of Droupadi Murmu, Sandeep Sahu, Penguin India.