Against all odds: Kerala woman gets PhD, braving all insults

Sajna KP alias Sachu Aysha’s Facebook post is about saying no to a marriage that was fixed for her and the insults her parents faced for it.

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When she left her home to go to the University, saying no to a marriage that was fixed for her, Sajna KP was running away to save herself. She never thought she’d really complete the PhD course she joined for at the Calicut University. But what inspired her most was her mom’s constant question, “When should we come to watch you get a doctorate?”, writes Sajna on a long Facebook post that’s going viral. The post has a cheerful looking Sajna standing next to her parents. It was her convocation day -- she has finished her PhD in Library Science.

Sajna – using the name Sachu Aysha on Facebook -- comes from a place and a setup that didn’t believe in sending girls for higher studies – when a girl came of age, she was to be married off, what was the use in girls studying, people would say. They did not think well of her decision to leave a marriage proposal for studies. It is her mother and father that faced the wrath of everyone around them for letting their daughter study what she wanted to.

“It is my mom who had to hear the most when people blamed her for supporting me in everything. Even though my dad was strict, he too thought it a matter of pride that his daughter was getting a PhD. Perhaps my dad, who had to give up on his education because of poverty, wished to see it happen through his daughter. The first page of my thesis is a dedication to my parents,” writes Sajna, who hails from Pullalloor, Kozhikode.

On a phone call, she asks to make the story all about her parents, who had stood with her through everything – Mohammed Haji, her dad, and Ayishabi, her mom.

She is happy that their attitudes have changed much in these past years. Before, they never let Sajna go anywhere outside Kozhikode, but they did not stop her when she had to travel to other states as part of her research work. “It is only to see me get a PhD that they didn’t force me for another marriage and silently heard every rebuke that came from the near and dear. To those who told them it was a mistake letting their daughter study, they would now answer that was the only right thing to do,” Sajna writes.

She also writes about the protests she had taken part in, working for the political party she raised flags for. There was a time she was suspended for five months for a fast she took part in. It was a tense time when my mother worried if the suspension would be turned into dismissal. “I could stand up to it because of the faith I had in the flag I held, the promises of the comrades who came to help.”

It was the stubbornness of a child who cried alone when she was insulted that led her to reach where she has now, Sajna writes. She now works as assistant professor at Calicut University.

Sajna ends her post with an apology to the man who was engaged to marry her before she left to join the University, and to his mother, for any insult she has caused them.

Also read: Lost, never reunited: How mentally-ill mothers are separated from their kids in Kerala