Kapila Vatsyayan (1928-2020): A mentor and mother-like figure I will miss

With the death of scholar Kapila Vatsyayana at 92, India has lost a great cultural icon.

Daughter of Ramlal and the well-known freedom fighter Satyavati Malik, she was educated in Santiniketan, Delhi University, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the Benaras Hindu University.

A great classical dancer, historian, bureaucrat and parliamentarian, she broke many glass ceilings and established eminent institutions including the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Performing Arts. The list of awards that she was given is long and covers recognition in every major field of intellectual excellence.

Tall, graceful, usually dressed most elegantly in hand spun saris from Bengal or the North East, Kapila ji was also long associated with that hub of intellectual activity India International Centre, right till the end.

My mother was a senior to her at Santiniketan when the frail young girl Kapila Malik was sent there as a boarder. The warden put her under my mother’s wing and she always had great warmth and affection for the child she helped integrate in an alien environment and nursed through a bout of chicken pox. Kapila ji was briefly married to the eminent Hindi poet S H Vatsyayana ‘Agyeya’, but later both went their ways. My mother sent me to her when I was beginning my second innings at work after having raised two children and was feeling insecure. I will never forget the warmth and understanding she showed and how till the very end took great delight in anything that brought me acclaim. Her death, though not unexpected, is a great, deep and personal great, almost as though I have lost my mother once again.

Kapila ji’s long and rich life is salient proof that once a woman finds the work for which experience and temperament suit us, everything comes together.

If you do something people care about people will take care of you, she’d say smilingly, pointing at her deeply loyal staff headed by the unflappable Mr Ramachandran. Even our faults can be useful, she said, if you were upfront about them.

She had an imperious temper which she’d let loose at shoddy work and unfinished projects. It pushed those who worked with her to learn the rather ‘unIndian’ values of perfectionism and punctuality. She always had two tracks running side by side in her head: thinking forward to some future project on the edge of fantasy, and realistic planning for what needed to be done to move it.

In you my spiritual mentor Kapila ji, there existed a perfect microcosm, the past and the future coming together to help and encourage the likes of me, to sqeeze out a new present. My world will be lonelier without your benign and enriching presence.