Vijaya Joshi and the Foundation in Her Name

Vijaya Joshi was among the first generation of women attorneys in India. She came from a very poor family in Pune, worked her way through the education that admission to the bar required, and qualified to practice in a country where, at the time, the idea that a woman should be a lawyer at all was contested by most of the society around her. The combination — poverty, gender, and the prevailing social view of what women’s lives ought to look like — made what she did genuinely difficult. It is hard to convey, today, just how unusual it was.

Her name, Vijaya, is the Sanskrit word for victory.

This piece is her story, and the story of the Foundation that carries her name.

What it meant to qualify

The legal profession in India was opened to women, on paper, in 1923 — the year the Legal Practitioners (Women) Act was passed. In practice, the path was open but the runway was nearly empty. Cornelia Sorabji had broken some of the formal barriers a generation earlier, but for the women coming through in the decades that followed, the structural obstacles were real. Bar associations were not welcoming. Clients did not necessarily come. The judiciary did not always know what to do with a woman in a black robe. Many women who qualified did not actually practice; many who tried to practice found the social cost too high.

To qualify in that environment required tenacity. To practice required something more.

Poverty and persistence

Vijaya did all of this from a starting point of real material disadvantage. Her family was poor. None of the resources that would have made the path easier were there. Education was not, for her, the natural extension of family privilege. It was the mechanism by which she changed what was possible for the people who came after her.

She managed it anyway. The details — kept mostly within the family — were neither romantic nor easy. They involved a great deal of work that was invisible to anyone who did not know her. They involved choices that the people around her did not always understand. They involved a clarity of purpose that those who knew her remember as rare.

The work she actually did

What is most remembered about her practice is the kind of clients she took on. Most of her work, paid and unpaid, was done for people who could not afford a lawyer in any conventional sense — people who, in another set of circumstances, would not have been heard at all. She made it her business to hear them.

This is the part of her story that has stayed most prominent in family memory. It is one thing to qualify — to do the difficult thing of becoming a legal practitioner against considerable headwinds. It is another thing entirely to spend the next several decades using that qualification on behalf of the people most easily ignored by it. She did both. The second is the harder of the two.

She also did not wait. The people she helped were helped while she was alive, in front of her, through her own work. She did not defer the giving of herself to a future her clients did not have.

The Foundation in her name

The Vijaya Foundation, established in 2006, is named for her by its founding trustees.

When a foundation is created, the question of what to name it is, in some ways, the question of what it is going to be about. There were the obvious options. The trustees could have named it after themselves, the way many family foundations are named — and the way the public listings of philanthropic giving generally encourage. They could have named it after the place they live, or the sector they work in, or some abstract concept of giving.

It was named for Vijaya because the standard the Foundation wanted for its own work was the standard she had set with hers. That standard, in plain language, is: the work has to be real.

It is easy, in the world of family philanthropy, to do work that is not real. It is easy to fund organizations because someone sits on boards with their fundraisers, or because giving to them gets a name on a building, or because the cause is in fashion. None of these are bad in themselves. But they are not, on their own, sufficient. The standard Vijaya represented was a different one: do the difficult thing, against the headwinds, on behalf of the people who would not otherwise be heard. And do it now, while there is time to do it.

Giving while living

That second clause — do it now — is the organizing commitment of the Foundation. The trustees have decided to give most of the Foundation’s assets during their own lifetime, rather than to bequeath them.

That one decision changes everything that follows. It changes the tempo; the runway is finite. It changes the accountability; no future trustee will execute on intentions that were never written down. And it changes the relationship to wealth itself. Capital becomes something to deploy rather than to preserve.

Four pillars

The Foundation’s work spans four pillars: economic mobility, healthcare and medical research, education, and arts and community.

The breadth is deliberate. Vijaya’s life was, in microcosm, all four: a poor family that pushed a daughter into education, education that produced economic mobility, mobility that became service, service that made room for art and community to survive. These pillars reinforce one another in ways that purely strategic philanthropy underweights. Education without health doesn’t graduate students. Mobility without community erodes the very institutions mobility is supposed to lift. Healthcare without dignity is transaction. The arts hold a community together when nothing else does.

Investing teaches the discipline of looking for compounding returns. Philanthropy teaches that the most durable returns are the ones that cannot be put in a spreadsheet — the family whose third child becomes the first to attend college, the grandmother whose surgery was paid for so her grandchildren could keep their childhood. Both are why the Foundation does this work.

Discipline

Discipline still applies. The Foundation gives predictably, so partners can plan. Most of its checks are modest, written to many small organizations rather than a few large ones, because the people closest to the work usually know best. But as in investing, the Foundation is willing to make large, concentrated bets when the situation is exceptional — when the cause, the people, and the moment all line up. It measures when measurement helps and stops when it doesn’t. It tries to fund things that wouldn’t otherwise get funded.

What endures

A foundation, like a fund, can drift. It can become institutional in the bad sense — a vehicle that operates more or less on autopilot, doing the things foundations do, generating the documents foundations generate. What keeps it from drifting is, in the end, a person whose life sets the floor.

For this Foundation, that person is Vijaya Joshi. She is the floor. Whatever the Foundation does, in any given year, has to be the kind of work she would have recognized as real — the kind of work she lived a difficult life in order to make possible.

The vast majority of what the Foundation has, it intends to give while it can be directed. The Foundation carries Vijaya’s name. The work it does is, on its best days, an extension of hers.