Suneethi Bakhshi

Born to Malayali parents in Mumbai in 1931 and married to a Kashmiri Pandit in 1957, Suneethi Bakhshi spent most of her life in Jammu and Kashmir. After completing her schooling and the first two years of college in Mumbai, she moved to Baroda?s Maharaja Sayajirao University for her graduation, post-graduation and doctoral studies. Her study of the Jammu and Kashmir Secondary School System during her PhD made her travel widely across all the 10 districts of Jammu and Kashmir for data collection. Suneethi worked in the Department of Higher Education, Government of Jammu and Kashmir, as a college teacher, a trainer at the Teachers Training College, Srinagar, and Head of the Department of Home Science at the two women?s colleges there. She also helped set up the Post-Graduate Department of Home Science in the University of Kashmir. First as associate editor and later as an editor, she published papers on various subjects in Inquiry, the bi-annual journal of the education department. Following her retirement and the forced move to Delhi in the late 1990s, for few years she edited the Journal of the Home Science Association of India. She has also written and illustrated several books for her grandchildren, most of whom are growing up abroad. The present volume is also meant to enable them to understand the cultural moorings of the society they have been born into.