Malati Kesaree, beloved mother, grandmother, sister, and friend, passed away peacefully at her home in Eugene, Oregon, on Thursday, February 13th, 2025. She had been on hospice for five weeks.
Malati was born in Dharwad, Karnataka, in South India, about 90 years ago. In her youth, she could speak multiple Indian languages, including Kannada (her mother tongue), Marathi, Konkani, and later Hindi, as well as English. She enjoyed taking part in classical Indian dance and creating skillfully detailed pencil sketches. She went on to become the first woman engineer to graduate from the state of Karnataka, and then the first woman ever to attend Roorkie University, India’s premier engineering college at the time, where she earned a master’s degree and met my father, Varada "Hary" Charyulu.
She arrived in the United States in 1958 to pursue further studies, eventually marrying Varada in 1962 and giving birth to her first child in 1963, while still in graduate school. On her way to the hospital, in labor with her second child, she stopped to hand off her thesis to the typist. She would become the first woman to earn a PhD in engineering from Iowa State University in 1964. Her last child was born in 1965, when she began her career as a professor at Oklahoma State University. In 1968, she moved with her family to Pocatello, Idaho, where she taught mathematics at Idaho State University and became the first woman engineer licensed in the state of Idaho.
Malati became a US citizen in 1976, before going on to work in various aspects of the nuclear power industry across eight different US states, from Washington to Connecticut. Almost everywhere she went, she found and joined a local European folkdance group and took time to explore local landmarks and institutions of art, culture, and history. She maintained a lifelong love of learning, which inspired her to travel across the globe and to learn German, while living there with her family and working at the Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe from 1980–81. She cultivated and maintained lifelong friendships from all the places she lived during her life. She and Varada separated in 1986 and divorced in 1988.
In 2012, she retired from her last job at Westinghouse, in Simsbury, Connecticut and returned to India to live with her ailing elder sisters, Leela and Nirmala Kesaree, caring for both of them until their deaths. During those four years in Davanagere, Karnataka, she also translated short biographies about the lives of her activist grandfather and father, Mysore Basavaiah and Mahadeo Kesaree, from Kannada to English, before writing a short biography of her pediatrician sister, Nirmala. After moving to Eugene in 2017, she would continue to build her community of friends around art and learning, including drawing, sculpture, and French language and literature.
She is survived by her three children, Rajeev Alexander, Usha Alexander, and Reena Chesla (formerly Geeta), and her three grandchildren, Mena and Brian Davidson, and Siri Alexander, as well as her brother, Prakash Kesaree, and her sister, Shobha Goud. Her energy, fortitude, kindness, and intelligence will be greatly missed by them and her several dear friends. In lieu of flowers, kindly consider donating to organizations that support girls’ education in India, like Child Rights and You, ASHA for Education, Khushii, or Smile Foundation.
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