Sudha Murty: The First Woman on the Tata Shop Floor
Engineer, author, philanthropist — and a granddaughter herself, once
You just read a story Sudha Murty took from her own childhood. The grandmother in it is real. The village is real. The twelve-year-old narrator is Sudha Murty herself. The story is autobiography, lightly held — and the work it describes (teaching an illiterate elder to read) became, decades later, the work Sudha Murty's foundation does across India.
Triveni — the writer the grandmother loved
Anasuya Shankar wrote under the pen-name Triveni because women writers in 1950s and 60s Karnataka were rarely taken seriously. Her novels — written in Kannada, serialised in weekly magazines — focused on the inner lives of ordinary women: domestic violence, mental illness, social isolation, the cost of unrelenting duty. She died of complications in childbirth at the age of 35.
₹10,000 and the start of Infosys
Sudha Murty's husband, N. R. Narayana Murthy, co-founded Infosys in 1981. The company had no money. Sudha gave him her savings — ₹10,000 — as Infosys's seed money. The same hands that wrote the story in this chapter signed that cheque.
Q1.What is autobiographical about How I Taught My Grandmother to Read?
You just read a story Sudha Murty took from her own childhood. The grandmother in it is real. The village is real. The twelve-year-old narrator is Sudha Murty herself. The story is autobiography, lightly held — and the work it describes (teaching an illiterate elder to read) became, decades later, the work Sudha Murty's foundation does across India.
Triveni — the writer the grandmother loved
Anasuya Shankar wrote under the pen-name Triveni because women writers in 1950s and 60s Karnataka were rarely taken seriously. Her novels — written in Kannada, serialised in weekly magazines — focused on the inner lives of ordinary women: domestic violence, mental illness, social isolation, the cost of unrelenting duty. She died of complications in childbirth at the age of 35.
₹10,000 and the start of Infosys
Sudha Murty's husband, N. R. Narayana Murthy, co-founded Infosys in 1981. The company had no money. Sudha gave him her savings — ₹10,000 — as Infosys's seed money. The same hands that wrote the story in this chapter signed that cheque.
Q1.What is autobiographical about How I Taught My Grandmother to Read?