Her new book argues Indian women succeeded in America on something their mothers handed them. After hundreds of interviews of my own, the harder question is: What else came in the package?
This piece is part of an ongoing series, “Redefining Power: How Indian American Women Are Rewriting the Rules of Leadership, Identity and Care.” The series explores what it means to modernize without losing our roots—through candid conversations with Indian American women reshaping culture, power and possibility. Have a story to share or want to be interviewed? Reach the series author Jaime Patel at redefiningpower@msmagazine.com.
Before any of it, there was a girl on a bus.
Kamini Ramani grew up in Bombay, trudging through knee-deep monsoon water to board the Number 122 red double-decker and watching for the men she calls “eve teasers,” the ones who would try to grope girls through the crush of the crowd.
She was also being raised on stories about goddesses. Fearsome ones. Women in the old parables who could drop-kick a man like that and then toss their hair over their shoulders and keep walking. Those stories are the reason her new book exists, and she is unembarrassed about what they were worth to her.
… Every Indian daughter is handed two things at once: goddesses who fight back, and a warning never to be one of them.
She is equally clear about what came with them. In her introduction, she lists it without flinching: the academic pressure cooker of immigrant expectations, “deeply patriarchal societies where sons are favored over daughters, an expectation for women to be humble and meek,” and outdated ideas about who a woman could marry or love.
So every Indian daughter is handed two things at once: goddesses who fight back, and a warning never to be one of them. Lotus Leadership: A Modern Playbook of Ancient Wisdom is the first thing I have read that treats the two as separable.
Ramani interviewed more than 100 Indian and Indian American women and profiles 33 of them. They run Waymo, HubSpot, Flex, Google TV, Room to Read. She was looking for the pattern in how they got there—and what she found was that almost none of them climbed the ladder the men did.
Only two of the 33 attended the Indian Institute of Technology, the credential that in the 1990s became, as she puts it, “the universal lazy shorthand for ‘these guys are good.'”
One of those two was Shalini Govil-Pai, now a vice president at Google. She sat for the entrance exam and placed 57th overall out of roughly 300,000 applicants, first among all the women who took it. Her father, a scientist, was thrilled.
Her mother had a different reaction—one Govil-Pai can still quote: “How am I going to get her married if she’s going to get so educated?”
The achievement and the warning, delivered at the same time.
There are inheritances from your culture that uplift you, and there are inheritances that hold you back.
Kamini Ramani
Mothers are everywhere in Ramani’s book, and they are the best thing in it. Sometimes, like Govil-Pai’s, they hand over the warning. More often, they are the reason a daughter could disregard it.
Geetha Murali, who now runs the global literacy nonprofit Room to Read, has a mother who finished high school in India at 12 years old, at which point she was expected to marry. Her mother had. Her mother’s mother had. There was a long line of child brides in that family.
She refused.
She learned shorthand, French and calculus, working problems in chalk on cement floors by kerosene lamp.
Years later, she was pressured again and refused again. Eventually she enlisted in the Indian army and trained as a nurse, and depended on no one.
I have heard a hundred versions of that woman. In the interviews I’ve done for this series, and for a book of my own, the story that surfaces is never about the woman I’m interviewing. It’s about her mother, and whether she made a single refusal or still resents that she never did.
Either way, the daughter is the one who finds out what it was worth.
Ramani knows which kind she had. The book is dedicated to her mother, Rukmani Ramani, “the original Lotus Leader.”
When I asked how she navigates the two, she answered plainly. “There are inheritances from your culture that uplift you, and there are inheritances that hold you back.”
The one that holds you back lives inside you. Don’t call attention to yourself. Let your accomplishments speak. Keep harmony. And underneath all of it, the question every South Asian daughter is raised on: log kya kahenge. What will people say?
“That’s one,” she said, “we need to burn down the house on.”
Here is what stopped me, reading her galley one week after I turned in my own manuscript. Ramani’s subjects run companies whose names you know. Mine are known in their own worlds, the women other people call first, holding up a family business, a temple, a school, a neighborhood. And we were handed the same warning, word for word. The woman running an earnings call and the woman running everything else were both raised to take up less room. Whatever this is, it does not correlate with how far you get. It correlates with being a daughter.
So what separates the women in Ramani’s book is not a better inheritance—it is that at some point each of them worked out which half to keep.
Rayman Kaur Mathoda is the clearest case. She was raised Sikh, on satnam, the principle of truth at the center of the faith. It was that word, she says, that gave her the courage to defy the people who taught it to her.
“It empowered me to go against the will of my parents, because I was following a higher principle than even my parents were following.”
What she defied them about was a woman.
They moved into her apartment to try to end the relationship. Twenty-four years after she came out, they told her they accepted her wife.
Her parents’ own faith is what armed her against her parents.
The cost of not separating the two halves is also here. Anu Bharadwaj, who would become president of Atlassian, gave a technical talk early in her career and heard the response secondhand. It was impressive, the feedback went, that the talk “was given by a woman who’s easy on the eye. And she managed to actually deliver this content that somebody had written for her.”
“I went home, and I cried,” she says. “Clearly, I don’t look like I can do this job. And people don’t even think my work is my own.”
She had filed two patents by then.
What held these women up was rarely an institution. It was usually a household. Meerah Rajavel, now chief information officer at Palo Alto Networks, was married at 20 in a small town in Tamil Nadu to a man she had never met. Hours after the ceremony, Raj told her he wanted her working and financially independent. It was 1992. He spent 30 years in and out of dialysis and treatment, and when his health began to fail, they decided together that he would retire early.
“He turned to me and said, ‘Now you can accelerate, because I’ll hold the fort at home,'” she remembers. “He would be the first to say, ‘Go to the board meeting, I don’t need you to come to my dialysis appointment.'”
American advice literature has spent a decade teaching women to split a household evenly, as if fairness were arithmetic done weekly. These marriages are settled across decades instead, one career leading, then the other, nobody keeping score.
I heard that structure described over and over in my own interviews and never once heard a woman call it feminism. But it is.
So does it ever stop being handed down?
Ramani thinks it has. Her own daughters, she told me, don’t carry what she carries. “They know how to advocate for themselves, without coming across as obnoxious.”
I’m not as sure. Some of the women I interviewed were born here, decades younger than me, straight out of college, and they are still being handed both halves by parents who would describe themselves as modern.
That’s why Ramani’s practical answer reads less like advice than like an inheritance being edited on purpose. I asked her, as a marketer of 40 years, what the women in her book could have done better. She didn’t hesitate. “Been a lot louder about it.”
Then she told me how to start when you have been trained not to.
Build the thing that’s missing—the way Sukhinder Singh Cassidy founded theBoardlist to force gender balance onto corporate boards.
Begin with somebody else’s work, the way Rajavel made sure her team got credit before she could bring herself to speak for her own.
And separate the work from the person. “Don’t aim for likability,” she said. “Aim for respect.”
Not all of it burns. When I asked what her daughters kept, she didn’t name a festival or a recipe.
“They automatically call someone auntie or uncle,” she said. “They always saw their grandparents as wise, not as someone you farm out to a senior facility.”
Her family is Tamil, so they do namaskaram, prostrating fully on the ground before an elder. Her daughters went to India as teenagers ready to rebel at everything, she said, and never rebelled at that. “We want to seek the blessing.”
Burn down the silence. Keep the reverence.
Anshu Bhardwaj, who leads AI transformation at PayPal, has a line she tells her own children: “Someone can steal your phone. Someone can steal your car. But no one can take your Saraswati from you.”
Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge. She is also one of the women in those stories, the ones the girl on the 122 bus was holding onto while she watched the crowd. Ramani carried both for four decades, the way her mother handed them to her.
What her book finally says out loud is that she was never required to carry both. One of them was always hers to put down.
*
A note from Ms. editors: We want to hear from you for The Majority, a new campaign collecting stories about how reproductive freedom has enabled readers to build the lives they want and need.
Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. What’s your reproductive freedom story? Add your voice. Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible.
