After almost thirty years as a reporter, I’m convinced India is a land of a million epics. In nondescript towns and dilapidated villages, glow stories of the human spirit that dwarf landscape and geography. Election time brings travel to far flung corners to take stock, for the citizen, the state of Indian democracy.

Every election also brings an opportunity to meet a range of people many of whose life stories lift one’s own existence and fill the world, for a few fleeting moments perhaps, with awe and wonder. Meeting Dr Kumudini Sonkuwar Pawde in Nagpur this weekend was such an experience for me.

As I walked into her home in Nagpur, filled with artifacts of B.R Ambedkar and the freedom struggle, I almost overlooked the frail yet bright-eyed lady with neat pulled back silver hair, in a crisp cotton sari sitting upright on a wooden chair. I was here to meet and interview her son, Dr Amitabh Pawde a civil engineer and farmer, to understand the complexities of farmers issues in the Vidarbha region. As I took my seat, her voice, clear and unfaltering, rang out to ask if I was married into a Maharashtrian family she knew with links to Amravati? Yes, I am, but don’t really know much about them, I replied, anxious to get on with my interview about the farm crisis. As Dr Pawde talked, Dr Kumud listened and sometimes laughed, until as an aside, her son said, by the way, have you heard my mother’s story?

Had I heard her story? Did I know that a little girl born in 1938 to a dirt poor Mahar Dalit family in Nagpur had become a pandit of high Sanskrit? My pen froze mid sentence. Which little girl? Me of course, Dr Kumud laughed.

And what a magnificent epic story I heard! A life of unimaginable pain, tremendous achievement, great love and soaring good humour. She was always a clever girl. Her parents, fired up with the indomitable courage that BR Ambedkar pumped into the Dalit community, sent her to school knowing she would excel. “I went through all manner of struggles throughout,” Dr Kumud recalled, “par mujhe rone se nafrat hai. ( I hate crying). Mujhe roz maarte the, main roz maar khaati thi, (my classmates and teachers used to beat me up every day) but I never cried. I just kept going back to class.”

They humiliated her when she tried to drink water. They refused to let her participate in haldi kumkum ceremonies. But she just wouldn’t leave school, she attended class every day. She didn’t miss a day of school.

Her brilliance was quickly evident, she became a topper and began to excel in Sanskrit by the time she began college. At that time an idealistic young teacher, Motiram Pawde then running nightschools for underprivileged children at the Hislop College in Nagpur, was looking for young teachers like himself to teach poor children. Someone suggested the name of Kumud Sonkuwar and he asked her to join him. Motiram and Kumud met, fell in love and married in the face of violent opposition from their families—after all she was a Dalit woman and he was upper caste—but Motiram, himself a freedom fighter and Ambedkarite valiantly faced down his family’s opposition.

Ah, what fires had been lit at that time by the brilliant Bhim Rao; Babasaheb the thinker who wrote a civilizational challenge into existence! The spirit of change, the annihilation of caste, the battle for social democracy, the powerful intellectual attack on brahmanwad: the young in Maharashtra were aflame with idealism and revolution and Kumud and Motiram plunged in. “My husband helped me every step of the way,” she recalls. “When I wasn’t allowed to draw water from wells for fear they would become polluted, he would join the queue with women to get our water,” she giggles.

She was a degree holder in Sanskrit but so far had not been able to get a job. In interviews, university authorities would tell her, “but if we hire you, we won’t get pupils.” After she was married and gained a non-Dalit surname, significantly more opportunities opened up and she went from strength to strength, gaining a formidable reputation as a teacher.

She was declared a Sanskrit pandita by the Nagpur mahavidyalala, finally retiring after decades of teaching as head of department of Sanskrit from Government College, Amravati. Recalls her daughter in law Sanjivani: “ I still meet people who say, do remember me to your mother in law, I was her student and we used to love her class.”

She became a member of the all India progressive Womens movement, the national federation for Dalit women and kept campaigning for “antarjatiya” marriage (inter-caste marriage), managing to facilitate over 300 such unions. “Those who play politics in the name of the vedas and the Upanishads have no idea of the texts. In fact the idea is to keep people ignorant, so they don’t know what the texts actually reveal, how liberating they are.”

There she sits: a Dalit woman who ventured into school and university where so many would have quailed, who rode intrepidly into the brahmanical domain of the Sanskrit language, insisting that she had the right to learn. The farm labourer’s daughter who became a Sanskrit pandita.

It’s not often that cynical journalists like me find ourselves transported into the realm of the extraordinary. But somehow the upright woman with the neat silver hair, so unassuming yet so dignified, so outwardly modest yet with that heroic life story behind her, a story told with a soft laugh and self-effacing wisdom, she seemed to me like a giant towering over every day reality. “There’s only one time that I’ve seen my mother cry,” said her son, “and that’s when my father passed.”

Where does Dr Kumud find her strength? “Ambedkar’s message to me, was liberty, freedom, intellectual freedom and social freedom,” she says.

Kumud Pawde of Nagpur, scholar of Sanskrit and soldier of liberty. Elections may come and go, but secret hidden devis of learning and goodness still exist all over India, they sit in unvisited, unknown shrines, and quietly transform many lives. They are indestructible.