new DElhi, Nov 21
Days after the death of Budhni Manjhiyain (80), the woman who was ostracised by her Santhali tribal community and forced to flee her village after exchanging garlands with then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1959, her grandson said she had been content and had no complaints by the time of her passing on November 17. “What happened to my grandmother was very wrong, but I have let it go… During her last moments, she did not complain and was at peace when she passed away,” 43-year-old Baapi Dutta said.
Manjhiyain was just a teenager when she exchanged garlands with Nehru in 1959 when he had visited Dhanbad district, then a part of Bihar, for the inauguration of Panchet Dam.
The heads of her community issued a diktat that an exchange of garlands was equivalent to marriage, and ostracised her.
This forced her to flee her village of Kharbola, now a submerged area in Jharkhand, and move to Saltod in West Bengal’s Purulia district.
In a recent interview to a local news channel, Manjhiyain said: “What happened? Nothing. Nehru came, we exchanged garlands, and he left… I was later called the ‘tribal wife’ of Nehru. I had to flee for my own sake.” Her grandson Dutta said: “My grandmother fled for her life, as she could have been killed for ‘marrying’ Nehru ji. Those days, the old people of the village had some outdated practices, and she was a victim of that. She fled to the Saltod area and worked in a government operated coal mine.”
He works as an assistant clerk at the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC), a job that he attributes to his grandmother. “The Centre had received a lot of criticism for the treatment meted out to my grandmother. During a visit to West Bengal, a local MLA told then PM Rajiv Gandhi about her ordeal. This later led to her getting a job at the DVC around 1985-86 as a contract labourer,” he said.
She retired from the DVC in 2005, and later, at her insistence, Dutta got a job there.
However, before working at the DVC, she worked as a labourer in a coal mine in the Saltod area.
That’s where she met Sudhir Dutta, who she would go on to marry, her grandson said.
The couple then had a daughter, Ratna Dutta. Just before her death, she had visited her relatives and seemed content, he said, adding that she died of complications related to old age.
Her mortal remains were kept at the Combined Building premises at West Banda panchayat of Dhanbad district, where hundreds of people came to pay homage.
Bhairab Mondal, one of the mukhiyas of the locality, told The Indian Express: “She was a fighter her whole life. We will demand a memorial for her.”
