In Jalandhar, the story of Durga Rani survives not through public office, wealth or formal education, but through the lives she transformed. She could neither read nor write. She could not even sign her own name. Yet in a society where daughters’ education was often treated as optional, she insisted that all seven of her children study. Decades later, that insistence has become an extraordinary family legacy: 10 doctors and two IPS officers, according to a recent report in The Tribune.
Her daughter, 70-year-old social worker Parveen Abrol, remembers her not as an uneducated woman, but as one with a deep instinct for education. “She never went to school, but she understood the value of education better than many educated people,” Abrol told The Tribune. That observation captures the essence of Durga Rani’s life: the difference between literacy and vision.
Durga Rani belonged to a generation of Punjabi women whose labour rarely entered official records but quietly shaped families and futures. In post-Partition Punjab, many mothers became the unseen architects of social mobility. They stretched household budgets, protected children from leaving school early and encouraged daughters to continue their studies while holding families together through economic uncertainty.
Durga Rani stood firmly within that tradition. Her own lack of schooling did not make her suspicious of education; it strengthened her determination that her children would not inherit the same limitations. At a time when girls’ education still faced social resistance, she ensured that her daughters studied as seriously as her sons. Abrol credits that support with enabling her to complete her MA and BEd, qualifications that later shaped her own social work.
That influence soon extended beyond the family. Abrol went on to found and lead Divya Drishti, a Jalandhar-based NGO working in education, women’s welfare and family counselling, particularly for women facing emotional or social distress. In that sense, Durga Rani did not simply raise educated children; she passed on a public ethic rooted in service and dignity.
Abrol’s civic work reflects the values she associates with her mother: education as necessity, service as duty and dignity as something that must extend beyond one’s own household. Over the years, she has worked with several institutional bodies, including the Punjab State Human Rights Commission, the Women Sexual Harassment Committee at the DEO office, the Punjab State Reproductive and Surrogacy Board, Mahila Thana, the Punjab Police’s Saanjh Mediation Cell and Lok Adalat initiatives.
Public engagements have continued that trajectory. In 2026, PCM S.D. College for Women in Jalandhar invited Abrol to speak on the role of NGOs in supporting entrepreneurship and start-ups. Earlier, Apeejay School hosted an awareness seminar featuring Abrol and police officials on cybercrime, the POCSO Act, women’s empowerment and public safety.
These details matter because they show how a mother’s private conviction evolved into public work across generations. Durga Rani’s home became the first classroom; her daughter’s activism became its extension.
There is also a wider Punjab story here. The state’s literacy rate rose to 75.84% in 2011, with female literacy reaching 70.73%. Jalandhar district has long stood out for educational attainment. Yet statistics alone cannot explain how such progress takes root inside families. For that, one must look at women like Durga Rani.
Her life challenges a familiar assumption: that only educated parents create educated families. Sometimes deprivation sharpens aspiration. An illiterate mother may understand the cost of illiteracy more clearly than anyone else. She may not help with homework, but she can defend the discipline, seriousness and sacrifice that education demands.
One of Abrol’s personal writings about her mother is titled Ek Ashikshit Maa Di Shikshit Soch — “the educated thinking of an uneducated mother”. It is more than a tribute. It is an argument about how social transformation often occurs in India: through women who never received opportunity themselves, but refused to let that denial become destiny for their children.
Durga Rani’s legacy, therefore, lies not only in the number of doctors and officers in her family, remarkable though that is. It also lies in the values she passed on. Her daughter turned education into community work, entering spaces of counselling, child welfare, women’s rights and civic mediation. That is legacy in its fullest sense: not merely professional success, but social responsibility.
In an age that celebrates visibility, Durga Rani represents another kind of public figure — one who shaped society without ever standing at a podium. Her name became visible because her values became visible in others. Through children who studied, professionals who served and a daughter who carried her lessons into Jalandhar’s social sector, she left behind something more durable than status.
Her story reminds us that social mobility rarely begins only in schools, coaching centres or government schemes. Often, it begins inside a home where one person decides that poverty, illiteracy or social custom will not have the final word. In that quiet but stubborn decision, generations can change.
