Retired in Chiang Mai is a lady who has been
in the forefront of the women’s ecological movement. She is
Roshan Dhunjibhoy, an intelligent, interesting and articulate
woman who travels the world on a German passport, but describes
herself, with tongue in cheek, as the great great great
grandchild of Lord McCawley, the Viceroy of India.
She was born in Calcutta in India, but when
one week old was taken to Ranchi, “the most backward province
in India” where her psychiatrist father had set up a mental
hospital. That situation is always with her - the clerk who
wrote out her birth certificate got confused, writing her
father’s name as the attending midwife, leaving the father’s
name blank and putting the place of birth as “Mental Hospital
Ranchi”.
She was an excellent student, educated by
Catholic nuns in India. “I am very proud of it. They taught me
a love of literature, and my feminism started there too.” That
love of the arts fuelled her ambition. “I knew from the age of
six years old what I wanted to be - but I didn’t become it. I
wanted to be an actress.”
She had the talent, being offered an acting
scholarship, but her father responded with a resounding
“No!” A bargain was struck - she had to get herself a degree
so she went to America to study journalism.
Having arrived in America, Roshan shifted the
goalposts. She auditioned in New York and enrolled in an acting
school which offered a degree course in drama. This did not
mollify her father, who in traditional fashion, cut her off
without a penny (or even a rupee).
Again in traditional fashion, Roshan
continued studying to be an actress, but having found that she
didn’t cut it as a waitress, worked cataloguing specimens in
the mammal department of the Peabody Museum at Harvard
University. At night she was acting, and becoming an activist as
well.
In those days of McCarthyism witch hunts,
left-leaning tendencies were considered security risks, so it
was easy to invoke alien labour laws, so after three years in
America she was told to ‘exit stage left’, by Uncle Sam.
France was more liberal (and liberated) than
America in those days, so she went to Paris and studied a
subject without much thought of what it could do for her future.
An understanding of 17th Century French Tragedies rarely comes
up in qualifications required for any job these days (or then)!
However Paris was a city where a young woman
with strong political views could grow and mature and develop
her concepts on life and society. She also studied film and TV,
becoming a director/producer during the eight years she lived in
France.
Her work was seen by the German government TV
and she was commissioned to make a TV documentary for them in
Egypt. In this TV medium, she found that her political direction
was an advantage, giving her entr้e into some countries
that German TV otherwise found it very difficult to gain entry
visas. This was the way she was able to get into Egypt, through
Nasser, and even into China and North Korea.
She spent a total of 27 years associated with
German TV, and in that time lived and filmed in over 40
countries, some of which were wonderfully exotic like Jamaica
and Venezuela and some of them were downright dreadful like the
war zones in Angola and Vietnam. Her experiences in the theatres
of war did not fill her with the excitement of action, but left
her seeing how biased journalism can be. “War reporting is a
mad thing. I saw how tainted and unobjective this (style of)
reporting really is.”
With the privatization of German TV, Roshan
saw the standards of TV journalism begin to spiral downwards.
Makers of serious TV documentaries were being displaced by inane
sit-coms and the documentaries were relegated to late night TV
slots. “Times when only your close relatives and insomniacs
would be up to see them.”
It was time to move on, and Roshan found that
there was a place for her within the German Greens Party. This
political party sponsored the Heinrich Boell Foundation which
was involved in political social work, and since Roshan was
‘green’ in her outlook, believing in an ecologically
sustainable philosophy, there was a place for her to continue to
develop her personal ideas, while doing something for others in
the world.
It was with the Heinrich Boell Foundation
that she established their first office abroad with a women’s
project in Pakistan. There she was involved with pressuring the
government into changing the laws that were repressive to women
and educating Pakistani women to be more politically aware and
active. “Our work with women was quite unique,” she said
with some evident pride. From Pakistan, the foundation
mushroomed into Asia and an office was set up in Chiang Mai 4
years ago.
Though now retired, I put it to Roshan that
she could never stop, because her belief system is such that she
must continue to campaign. She agreed, saying, “Today we are
in an ecological crisis. I am an ecologically sensitive feminist
- and women are more ecologically sensitive than men.” She
also has an ongoing personal project looking at women and
religions - and why women have been given a back seat in the
major religions - even her own, being a Buddhist for the past 20
years. “I am also in a life and death struggle with the Thai
language,” a situation many of us sympathise with.
I asked if she was no longer Indian, but now
an international woman. She replied, “My roots are very
solidly Indian, but after that my training has been very
British,” prompting the reference to Lord McCawley who
promoted the idea of Indians becoming Anglicized.
Roshan Dhunjibhoy will never stop investigating life, society
and its basis, and will never stop being one of the more
interesting women in Chiang Mai. The political debate starts
now!
