“I have lived in London for seventy years, but every morning when I wake up, the first sound I hear is the Ganga flowing in Kashi.”
~Shri Kadambari Mehra
A great deal of India’s pride has been carried forward by those who may live abroad, yet keep India beating at the centre of their hearts. In today’s Calling India column, we are covering Kadambari Mehra, a woman who resides in Britain, yet whose love for India and Indianness remains as pure and vivid as it was in her childhood days in Varanasi. Whatever sense of belonging she found in that ancient city, she never found anywhere else in the world.
Her memories of Varanasi are sacred and untainted. She once said, “In Banaras, the earth still holds my feet. Whenever I look for something that feels like home, I find it only there.” She remembers Vishwanath Gali’s colourful bindis, sindoor-filled partings, the tulsi garlands of Sankat Mochan, and women singing bhajans as they walked to Durga Mandir.
In those days, one rupee bought thirty-two rasgullas or sixteen samosas — a vanished world. She grew up in Narayan Nagar, in her ancestral haveli. Her forefathers once screened films in the village. She recalls the vast courtyard, the teacher’s cane, the devotional films, the songs of Naagin, Binaca Geetmala, and the weekly kirtan led by her father, the principal of the Hindu School. All of it still lives within her.
In that same Varanasi, where the Ganga runs like a timeless hymn, a four-year-old girl once stood on a wooden platform and recited a poem that would define her life:
जिसने सूरज-चाँद बनाया,
जिसने तारों को चमकाया,
जिसने फूलों को महकाया,
जिसने चिड़ियों को चहकाया,
उसी ईश्वर के हम गुण गाते,
उसे प्रेम से शीश नवाते।
(Meaning: He who shaped the sun, moon, stars, fragrance, and birdsong is the same divine presence we honour, and we bow to Him with a heart full of love.)
The audience sat spellbound. The child’s voice was small, but the words were vast. That was Kadambari, four years old, already in love with language, rhythm, and the divine.
A year later, her mother took her straight into second standard because she could already read. Funeral processions terrified her; the smallpox epidemic of 1957 left indelible scars on her young mind. At ten, she came running home breathless: “Maa! Gopi Krishna danced for three-and-a-half hours without stopping, and a girl named Ruby Chatterjee danced too!” Soon she was learning Kathak, her anklets ringing through the house. Even today, when her great-granddaughter twirls, Kadambari Didi’s feet still remember the old teentaal.
Cinema was forbidden fruit in decent homes, so she was raised on Ramcharitmanas chaupais, Kabir’s dohas, and the full Hanuman Chalisa, memorised before she turned twelve. Jaishankar Prasad, Dinkar, and Mahadevi Verma became her lifelong companions. Mukesh’s line “Zamane ka dastoor hai yeh purana…” felt like prophecy.
Marriage took her across the black water. Her husband, London-educated and employed by a British firm, carried her to England in the difficult Nehru years. With a migrant certificate in hand, she spent thirty years teaching — first English children with golden curls, later the sons and daughters of Indian doctors who were slowly forgetting Hindi. She wore ghungroos again, this time in a Harrow school gymnasium, teaching garba to five-year-olds. She translated Aesop and Grimm into chaste Hindi so the children would never become strangers to their own tongue.
Between cooking, motherhood, and marking exercise books, she studied, earned two London University degrees, and wrote. Her first short-story collection, Chir Parai (Eternally Alien), spoke of women suspended between continents and centuries. Letters poured in from Fiji, Nairobi, and Toronto. Mahadevi Verma’s biography became her mirror.
Travel broadened her world — flamenco in Seville, fado in Lisbon — but a tiny Ganesh and a pocket Gita always travelled with her. India never left her blood.
In London, she watched Indian women light diyas after double shifts and felt both pride and pain. “We can be proud of Bharatiya nari,” she says, “but today’s age is a blind race. Everyone runs after careers; no one pauses for a grandmother’s story.”
From the Calling India Conversation
Question: Kadambari Ji, which Hindi word did you fear the children would never learn?
Kadambari Ji: “Maa. So I made sure every story began and ended with that word.”
Question: What did the British headmistress say when she saw you dancing garba in ghungroos?
Kadambari Ji: “Mrs Thompson laughed and said, ‘Mrs Mehra, I have never seen children this happy on a Tuesday!’ Then she sat down and clapped with us.”
Question: Young girls still say Chir Parai is their story. What thread remains unbroken?
Kadambari Ji: “The pain of being ‘chir parai’ — eternally the outsider who chooses both family and self.”
Question: What would four-year-old Kadambari say to ninety-three-year-old Kadambari?
Kadambari Ji: “Did you keep singing His glory even when no one was listening?”
And I would answer, “Every single day, my little poet.”
Question: After seven decades in London, what keeps your connection to India alive in such a deep, almost devotional way?
Kadambari Ji: India lives in me through memory, language, and love. The Ganga I heard as a child still flows in my ears, the stories my mother taught me still guide my steps, and the Hindi I taught thousands of children kept my country alive in every classroom. You can leave your land, but your land never leaves your breath.
Honours & Contributions to the Motherland
- Founder, Hindi Pracharini Sangh, London (1974): Still running free Hindi and Kathak classes
- Chir Parai prescribed in universities across India and the UK
- Felicitated by Sahitya Akademi, Bharatiya Jnanpith, and the Government of Uttar Pradesh
- Currently dictating her memoirs, Ganga Meri Nairn Mein, to her great-granddaughter
Today, somewhere in London, an old woman closes her eyes and hears temple bells from a city she left seven decades ago. And in that moment, Kashi is no longer far away. The river she grew up beside rises through memory, wraps itself around her, and reminds her that you can cross oceans, build a life in foreign lands, raise children who speak in many accents, yet the homeland keeps beating quietly inside you.
For Kadambari Mehra, India was never just a birthplace. It was the rhythm of her anklets, the stories of her mother, the language she guarded like a flame, the faith she carried in a tiny clay lamp across continents. She taught a generation of children not only Hindi words, but the feeling of belonging to something ancient, vast, and tender.
This is the Calling India story of Shri Kadambari Mehra — an unbroken thread between Kashi and Kensington, between a little girl reciting a poem on a wooden platform and a ninety-three-year-old woman who still wakes up hearing the Ganga. Her life is a quiet reminder that no matter where we go, Bharat travels with us — in our stories, in our breath, and in the love we never stop carrying homeward.
