About the Book

Approximately eighty thousand people were arrested in India between 1930-1931 under the charge of civil disobedience. Seventeen thousand of these political prisoners were women (and children). Motivated by Mahatma Gandhi’s call for peaceful protest, these women stepped outside of their domestic boundaries to take up the fight for India’s independence. However, their contributions to the freedom movement have been largely forgotten. Amma’s Daughters reclaims an important part of India’s history and gives voice and honour to the thousands of largely erased or unacknowledged women who, threatened with imprisonment, relentlessly and selflessly gave toward the revolution.

Meenal Shrivastava, the granddaughter of one of these revolutionaries writes her family’s history in this moving re-memory that uncovers the story of Gandhi’s feminist foot soldiers. Combining rigorous research with creative narrative, Shrivastava captures the courage of her grandmother, Shanti, at the age of twelve, as she joins the nationalist movement and is subsequently arrested for making seditious speeches. Despite serving many jail sentences, Shanti never wavers from her devotion to Gandhi’s teachings and her dream of equality for women.

Amma’s Daughters foregrounds the experience of ordinary women (and men) in historical movements and to demonstrate that history is ultimately the story of our lives. The aim of this creative non-fiction is to inspire the readers to examine the lives of women in their own families/communities; and to shine a light on women who are erased from historical recounting. The stories in the book show that the personal and the political are relentlessly interconnected, both in how our lives unfold and in how we curate human history(s). Individual stories make these connections immediate and personal by revealing the continuum between past and present, local and global, and us versus them.

Amma’s Daughters was “Book of the Year” finalist in the non-fiction category of the Alberta Book Publishing Awards in 2019. Along with being reviewed in literary journals, the book has been adopted in many university courses.