On the Wednesday that Meira Kumar was named Speaker, 80-year-old Munilal Ram ventured out of his house, ignoring the nagging pain in his legs, to see villagers celebrating Meira Kumar’s elevation as Lok Sabha Speaker. Like most people in Chandwa, Ram, a relative of Meira Kumar’s father Jagjivan Ram, says he isn’t sure what the ‘Speaker’ fuss is about—he has been told that Kumar is now the “headmistress of MPs”.

Chandwa, a village in Bihar of over 5,000 people, distributed sweets, played Holi and got little girls to dance to drumbeats. The village, part of the Ara Municipal Corporation, is a Brahmin dominated one but the Dalits here say the father-daughter duo of Jagjivan Ram and Meira Kumar have made them proud. While Jagjivan Ram was their “Chandwa ke chand”, Kumar, they say, is now “Chandwa ki chandni”.

Jagjivan Ram’s two-storeyed house, painted yellow and white and with a sloping roof, is a landmark in Ara. The house, built in 1976, is under lock, except for two rooms where caretaker Kunwar Dayal Ram and son Ajay live. Kunwar Dayal is a frail old man whose ears are failing him but he has gathered enough to know that Meira Kumar has earned a big post—“perhaps bigger than a mantri’s”. Peeping through the window of one of the locked rooms, we saw a time-weathered oil painting of Jagjivan Ram.

Meira Kumar spent much of her childhood in Patna and Delhi and the elders of Chandwa know her as Jagjivan Babu’s little girl who would come here during her holidays. Sarvanand Tiwari, who lives next to Jagjivan Ram’s house, says, “It’s only after Babuji’s (Jagjvan Ram) death in 1986 that Meira Kumar started visiting us regularly. Now she comes at least twice a year.”

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