Now that you are up there, Riten, tell your thakma how much you admired her
Dear Riten,
I first met Ila Mitra through you in March 2021, deep in the global panic of Covid19, although she was already gone 19 years then. I had glimpsed her in disparate blogs and some newspaper articles in Bengali online but she was the stuff of legend there—the subject of a poem by the great poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay, the recipient of songs by the iconic Suchitra Mitra. It was in your writing that I saw the strict, annoyingly energetic grandma who woke you up at the hour of dawn when only the crows are awake, the busybody neighbour, the distinct oddball. Through you, she became a person of flesh and blood to me. Through you, I too missed telling her how much I admired her.
How beautifully you wrote about her, the ‘thakma’ you steadfastly avoided because she was always marching you off someplace, forever on a mission. Your favourite grandparent was your grandfather who taught you maths and science, but the one you were amazed, and a little intimidated, by was your ‘thakma’. As soon as I read you, I knew I would have to evoke her through your eyes: you had captured her so tenderly. Like the college boy who lost his grandma before he could really know her as a person. In the end, I realised I could not write like you. So I let your words do the telling. How many people have told me that the Ila Mitra chapter is their favourite? So many that I have lost count. Did I tell you that a filmmaker said she would love to do something about it if she has the means?
One night in the pandemic, I had dreamed of Ila Mitra, the enigmatic figure I had read about in blogs several years ago and then lost the trail of. The next morning when I returned to the computer, I found your blog post on her, and within hours of my writing in, you responded. You agreed immediately to talk to me. I wrote then that it felt like Ila di had tapped me in my sleep, and reminded me that I had once gone looking for her. And then put us all in touch like a cosmic whatsapp group. Now I think, it was you, wasn’t it? You wanted to tell your grandmother’s story.
You had left India 20 years ago to do your PhD. I thought it was the professionalism that America moulds into those who attend her first class education system that made you take me so seriously, a writer who was still writing her first book. Whose journalism you had never encountered because you were living in another continent by the time I started writing. Later, I realised as we spoke, and I met your father too, that you was the sort of inherently decent, serious people who valued the written word for its own sake. Truly bhadro (civil). You didn’t care who was writing. How patient you were with me, a first-time writer, how respectful.
Now that you are up there, Riten, tell your grandma everything that you told me. Tell her you admired her so much that a woman who never met her cries thinking of her sometimes. And keep writing on the blog. Tell us about all the love and wistfulness and dancing laughter you carry in your eyes.
Until we meet again up there, my friend. There will be no time differences up there. We will speak and speak and speak.
Riten Mitra passed due to a motor accident on 13 March 2025. His paternal grandmother Ila Sen Mitra could have been the first Indian original woman at the Olympics in 1940 if they were not cancelled for World War II. She became a prominent leader of the Communist Party of India, leading the Tebhaga peasants’ movement from the front. In 1950, she was arrested on the charge of killing four policement. In 1951, she became arguably the first woman in the subcontinent to speak in public about the experience of rape when she gave testimony about her gangrape in custody. My book The Day I Became a Runner: A Women’s History of India Through the Lens of Sport end with a chapter on Ila Mitra titled The Women Who Missed the Olympics.