Aruna Roy

Aruna Roy (née Jayaram, born 6 June 1946) is an Indian social activist, professor, union organiser and former civil servant.

She is the president of the National Federation of Indian Women and founder of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan.

Aruna was born on 6 June 1946, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India (Chennai was known as Madras at the time and was a part of the Madras Presidency in British India), to parents Hema and E. D. Jayaram, a family of Tamil Brahmins.

The family in which Aruna grew up was unconventional for their times and had a history of public service encompassing several generations.

They rejected orthodox beliefs about caste and religion, and were known for a commitment to egalitarian principles.

All her grandparents were highly educated and included an engineer, a magistrate and a lawyer.

The women in her family in particular served as role models for her.

Her maternal grandmother was an educated woman and was deeply involved in volunteer social work among impoverished communities.

She was born to an orthodox Tamil Brahmin family and had insisted on working with leprosy patients.

Her maternal grandfather was an engineer, who was also involved in social work and wrote textbooks which he printed and distributed at his own cost to make them affordable for poorer children.

Aruna's mother, Hema was sent to first class schools, where she had excelled in physics, mathematics, classical Sanskrit and sports.

She was also well versed in the literature of several languages and participated in musical performances with the veena.

The marriage between Hema and Jayaram defied norms as Hema had waited till she was 25 to get married and Jayaram belonged to a different sub-caste.

Jayaram's family too had a history of social and political activism.

He was sent to Shantiniketan and later became a lawyer by profession.

He participated in the Indian independence movement, became a civil servant after independence and eventually retired as the Legal Adviser for the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.

Jayaram also worked as a film and music critic and published reviews in various newspapers.

Aruna was the eldest of four siblings and had two sisters and a brother.

The children were brought up to be multilingual and the family spoke three languages at home, namely Tamil, English and Hindi.

She and her siblings were encouraged to be critical thinkers, discouraged from harboring any form of prejudice around ethnicity, caste or class and taught to respect people regardless of their social standing.

Aruna was enrolled for two years at the Kalakshetra academy in Adyar, Chennai to train in Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music.

She was also educated at a convent school and learned French on the insistence of her parents.

She was then sent to the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry while her family moved to New Delhi.

After a year at the ashram (hermitage), she expressed unhappiness with her situation so her family brought her to New Delhi where she completed the rest of her education.

She attended the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan till the age of 16, when she applied for and successfully enrolled at the Indraprastha College for Women.

Her admission was unexpected for the college faculty as she qualified at an age earlier than usual.

Aruna majored in English Literature and then immediately went for a master's degree in 1965.

She completed her post-graduation at the University of Delhi.

Following her education, she did not want to become a homemaker like most women during that time, which she considered to be a "limbo of passivity" but most fields were male dominated and her options were limited to journalism and teaching.

For a short period of time, she became a professor of English Literature at her alma mater.

In 1967, at the age of 21, she gave the difficult examinations for the Indian Administrative Service, which at the time had a selection rate of less than 0.1% and a marginal number of successful women candidates.

Aruna was able to get selected on her first attempt at the examinations and was one of only 10 women to qualify in that year.

She was influenced by feminism and considered joining the male dominated civil services in her father's footsteps to be a feminist choice.

Mahatma Gandhi also had a significant influence on her family and their ethics, and she incorporated his philosophy in her way of thinking along with the philosophy of M. N. Roy.

She was sent to the National Academy of Administration for a year's course followed by a year of supervised training called probation.

Her batch had 100 successful candidates and the course included an intensive study of economics, law, languages and basic administration.

It also included horse riding and guidelines on courtesies and etiquette from the British period.

She along with other students in her batch had rebelled against various aspects of the curriculum and were able to introduce some reforms which were implemented for the batch after theirs.

Aruna was a part of the Union Territories cadre but was sent to Tamil Nadu for her probationary period as she knew the Tamil language.

Her first assignment was that of an assistant to the supervising administrator (known as District Collector) of Tiruchi district.