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For my baba, the everyday commitments of care



Reflecting on my baba in gratitude.

As a young boy, I would look at my baba in wonder. My baba, ever-so-brave, prepared to place his body on the line for the various struggles of the Left that spoke to him in his youth.

My ma would tell me the story behind my name, an alias baba took up in doing resistance work. In the years of the emergency in the 1970s, this resistance work placed his body, and the bodies of many union organisers in the line of risk.

The risk of losing a job. The risk of being incarcerated. The risk of being made to disappear.

In those years, the party would place the trust him to place his body in the struggle, to offer safety to party leaders, to offer safety to landless peasants laying their rightful claims on land they had been denied across generations, to offer safety to comrades needing a passage amidst right-wing repression.

As a long-term union worker and party worker, my baba spent so much of his life in working-class struggles, in the organizing of landless peasants, and in the difficult work on the front lines of the Left.

His commitment to his joint family meant giving the whole of his salary to my grandmother, Nana, who held the family together.

To build part of our joint family home so the family had a place to live, he took out a loan against his provident fund, which he kept repaying for over a decade. This infrastructure sustains the family and offers it shelter amidst the torrential rains and floods.

My baba has long retired. Yet, he continues to give the major proportion of his pension to our joint family. This support sustains the family.

The everyday work of organizing the union for my baba was nurtured by the care he placed in sustaining us. The dreams he weaved alongside us cousins in our joint family enabled us to envision the pathways of education.

For many of us cousins, my baba’s commitment to making sure we had an education built the infrastructure that sustains us.

Learning that participating in doing the everyday labor of household chores such as cleaning, washing, and ironing formed the basis of our everyday pedagogies.

And he continues to live his life this way, for a larger collective and its good, in a way that is so inherently giving and full of care.

My baba teaches me that the organizing work of the union and the Left is deeply intertwined with the everyday labor of care.

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