Living Life to the Fullest.
Ruby was inspiring, dynamic, vibrant, strong-willed, and lived life entirely on her own terms. She was accomplished in every dimension of life - as a mother, sister, wife, student, academic, friend, mentor, and dynamic member of each of the communities in which she made her presence felt.
She traveled the seven continents and the seven seas and only just managed to miss her lifelong dream of a voyage to the moon.
We’ve done our best to tell the story of her life - but we are blessed that she took the time to tell her own story many times. Our words can’t do Ruby justice.
We encourage you to read her story in her own words in this PDF and listen an audio recording of her relating her first days in the US.
Early Life in Calcutta
Ruby Roy was born in Calcutta, India on February 16, 1948, into the very large & loving Roy family, who she has remained close to all her life. Ruby was the absolute middle child of 11, with three elder sisters and two elder brothers and four sisters and one brother who were younger.
The Roy family, the city of Calcutta, and Bengali culture were all deeply influential to Ruby’s early life - and she often shared fond memories from those early days, from her childhood home, navigating the city in a newly independent India, and various adventures and exploits through her early school experiences.
Ruby was an exceptional student from a young age and a voracious reader, walking alone many city blocks at age of 12-13 to borrow books from the US Information Service (USIS) library. With her mother’s encouragement, Ruby was active in sports, enrolled in music/dance classes, and attended English-medium schools.
Ruby excelled in many dimensions. Ruby attended a girls’ school with only female teachers. Her graduating class had fewer than 30 students. Students from varied backgrounds in Calcutta – Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Zorastrian religions, as well as Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi languages – attended the school because it was an English medium school.
She entered dance competitions, and even participated in a commercial children’s dance group, earning her first spending money. She represented her state of West Bengal in the National Games in a sport called kho kho and was a member of the state’s champion kabaddi team.
Student Life in California
In early 1963, upon completing high school in Calcutta at the age of 15, her father made a fateful decision - to send Ruby to California to attend college, joining her elder brother, Dipak, who was already living and working in the United States.
In August 1963, at the age of 15, she boarded a very long PAN AM flight that made many stops – Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Honolulu before it touched down in San Francisco. Ruby remembers her whole family coming to see her off at the Calcutta airport, and a fitful journey across continents before arriving in San Francisco.
In a twist of fate, Ruby started her life in the US at a junior college in Hollister, CA — where she would eventually retire, as well. She was admitted as a freshman at the age of 15, despite having completed only 11 years of high school.
Ruby often relayed the culture shock of moving to the US. In her high school, she had to wear school uniforms – navy blue skirt and white shirt. However, after graduating, girls in India did not wear skirts and dresses. Therefore, she had come to California only with saris and salwar kameez.
It was a time when young Indian undergraduate students were rare. In Hollister, she recalled that people would actually stop their cars to stare at her. Co-education was also a radically new experience.
Ruby did well academically at her junior college and soon gained admittance with a tuition scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley. These were the Free Speech Movement years; Mario Savio, the student leader and the hippies were testing their freewheeling lives. Ruby absorbed the music of times, but was focused on her studies, enrolling in the business program.
At Berkeley, Ruby was fortunate to find excellent professors and mentors who helped guide her academic growth. Outside of the classroom, as a young immigrant student, Ruby needed to find income for living expenses to supplement her scholarship.
She found summer employment teaching Bengali language to Peace Corps Volunteers (PCV) going to her home state of West Bengal. It was a phenomenal experience.
She fondly remembered teaching Bengali and sharing her Bengali heritage and culture with young and old Americans from all parts of the USA with their distinctive accents and stories.
She also became a live-in household help for a rich Jewish family in Berkeley, Dr. and Mrs. Mankin. In exchange for room and board, bus expenses and a weekly allowance, she took on household tasks for 15-20 hours a week. This was another shock for her - since growing up in Calcutta, she had avoided even simple housework.
The relationship with the Mankins quickly evolved from live-in help to surrogate family. The Mankins filled an emotional vacuum for Ruby since she had not seen her parents and siblings since leaving India in 1963, relying on only letters for contact.
In the five years between 1963 and 1968, formative years in Ruby’s life, she earned her B.S and MBA from the Haas School at Berkeley.
She made lifelong friends, new family, and mentors in Hollister and Berkeley, like Sandy Pearson, Linda Mankin, Ron and Tonda Gillespie, and Dee Tadlock, who have influenced her and she has influenced, and whom have remained dear friends throughout her life.
Her time in California crystallized her sense of self. In Ruby’s own words:
“I had matured and been transformed by many tumultuous events. I was now an accomplished, financially independent grown woman. I was finally in charge of my own destiny. After six years of uninterrupted living in the USA, I realized it was time for me to go home.”
Return to India - IIM Calcutta
In December 1970, Ruby returned to India. In her own words:
“It was another shock reentering life in India. I had left as a 15-year-old high school graduate and returning as a 21-year-old with two college degrees from one of the most prestigious universities in the world. I was truly a fish out of water. I did not conform to any stereotype. I did not drink or smoke as a lot of people thought “modern” women in the west did. I was not docile and submissive like Indian women. People did not know how to interact with me. Many relatives thought I was too old and should be married. Luckily, my parents did not feel the urgency.”
În Calcutta, Ruby first joined an advertising agency, but found the work did not appeal to her. She then applied to the premier Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIMC), where she was hired as an Assistant Professor of Marketing. She soon found that she enjoyed teaching, even though she had to interact with and instruct older “students”, mostly men, used to positions of authority.
At IIMC, Ruby became absorbed in her role as a “marketing guru,” enjoying teaching and life as part of the faculty. And, of course, establishing herself as an intellectually fierce and personally courageous presence in the campus community.
At about the same time a popular Bengali song called “Mone Pore Ruby Roy (I Remember Ruby Roy)” was filling the airwaves. This led to her MBA students teasing her with good humor, but providing an iconic song for Ruby all her life. The song was played during her cremation service.
During this stay in Calcutta, several changes happened with Ruby’s family, who were also staying in Calcutta. Three sisters had gotten married, two by the arranged method and one by defying tradition. She also received the devastating news that one of her sisters had ovarian cancer. The death of her sister left a deep impression on Ruby. Navigating traditional, patriarchal world views still prevalent in India with her strong, independent character only increased her resolve to build a life of her own.
PhD at Northwestern
(and Other Things)
At IIMC, Ruby was able to observe and formally research some of the major changes taking place in Indian marketing in the 1970s, in consumers’ behaviors and in society generally. A deeply influential experience was planning and supervising survey research on family planning practices in Orissa, a neighboring state that was one of the poorest and whose rural character made fieldwork difficult.
Her experience conducting field work in rural villages and her overall time at IIMC led Ruby to realize that while marketing had a lot of potential for developing countries like India, the challenges of emerging markets needed something different than what she had studied at UC Berkeley.
She also decided that in order to further her professional goals, she needs to pursue a PhD.
In the early 1970s, Philip Kotler and his Northwestern University (NU) colleagues were publishing their award winning articles on “Broadening the Concept of Marketing” and “Social Marketing”. Ruby had applied to PhD programs at Ohio State and Northwestern on the advice of Prof. Jim Carman at Berkeley.
She was accepted to both, and the potential of working with Dr. Kotler drew her to the Northwestern PhD. program in 1973, determined to research the broader relationship between marketing and development.
At NU, Ruby met Nikhilesh Dholakia, her future husband, from India and A. Fuat Firat, a great friend and colleague, from Turkey. In her own words:
“What attracted us to each other were our common interests in changing the world using marketing. We did not know how but our daily afternoon tea sessions were intellectually invigorating. Nikhilesh and I married in 1974. To avoid the cultural challenges, we had a civil ceremony in San Francisco.
As Nikhilesh is fond of saying, we would have never met in India. We came from two opposite sides of the country with very different backgrounds and life history. He was an IIT engineer and MBA (IIMA) graduate. If Nikhilesh was a student at IIMC rather than IIMA, I would have taught him marketing.”
Ruby’s days at Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois continued her intellectual growth and academic developments working with giants in the field of marketing, such as Philip Kotler, Sidney Levy, Louis W. Stern, Gerald Zaltman, Brian Sternthal, and Richard Clewett and fellow students Richard Bagozzi, Paul Bloom, Carol Scott, Alice Tybout, Jack Kasulis and others.
In 1976, she finished her PhD dissertation working with Philip Kotler and with Brian Sternthal acting as a fantastic mentor, who Ruby described as “a true inspiration and my champion.”
And, of course, she married her partner in life and many academic pursuits, Nikhilesh Dholakia.
Teaching in India
After finishing her dissertation in August 1976, Ruby returned to India and re-joined IIMC. She had gone to the USA for her PhD studies as a single woman but returned married to Nikhilesh, another marketing academic with loyalty to a competing institution on the other side of the country, IIM-Ahmedabad.
When Ruby returned to the IIMC faculty, even though the faculty committee accepted her publication record, they determined she was too young to be a full professor. She was 29.
She was able to challenge the decision. There was no written rule to support the age requirement. On her academic merits, she was promoted to rank of Full Professor.
At the same time, Nikhilesh was under a five-year contract with IIMA. After Ruby’s first year at IIMC, she moved to IIMA in late 1977. While the academic experience of teaching talented groups of students at IIMC and IIMA was both challenging and invigorating, Ruby also faced challenges navigating the patriarchal bureaucracy of academia. In her own words:
“My professional struggle as the female half of an academic couple began. Holding the Professor rank at IIMC was not a problem. I had an established identity.
However, at IIMA, I was the female half. The Director, head of IIMA, did not think Nikhilesh the man, the husband, should occupy a lower rank. He was not willing to look at my resume – more years of teaching as well as publications. I served as Visiting Professor of Marketing and was not able to remove the “Visiting” appellation before we both decided to resign and return to the USA.”
While establishing her academic career in India, she continued to buck tradition in several different ways.
In 1978, Ritik was born in Ahmedabad. Choosing to balance marriage, motherhood, and a career was not common at the time, and added both complexity and richness to Ruby’s journey.
Family Life & Settling in the US
During her time at IIMA and IIMC, Ruby continued her growth as a teacher and researcher. However, in 1978, two years after re-joining IIMC, Ruby & Nik decided that exploring research questions of interest to them could not happen in India. They decided that they needed to return to the US.
The distance between the US and India in the days before the Internet made finding roles in the US difficult. So, too, did searching for two jobs for an academic couple in the same discipline.
Offers soon did arrive for the talented couple - including two associate professorships at Kansas State University. In 1979, they accepted and moved to Manhattan, Kansas - initially leaving 18-month old Ritik in the care of Ruby’s in-laws and nursemaid, before bringing him to Kansas once they were settled.
The transition to the US was professionally fruitful and intellectually invigorating. But living in Manhattan, KS, was not easy and it was difficult managing careers and family life with no family and household support.
In 1980, destiny and a summer conference where Ruby & Nik met Bob Nason and John Wish of the University of Rhode Island, leading them to the next and longest chapter in their lives.
Life in Rhode Island
In 1981, Ruby & Nik moved to the University of Rhode Island and began their life in South County, Rhode Island.
Falling in love with the coastlines of the Narragansett Bay, RI is where Ruby raised her family, fostered many rich community networks, and built her academic career.
While URI was, as Ruby describes it, “laid back, heavy on undergraduate teaching but liberal in outlook” it gave her the intellectual freedom to pursue areas that intrigued her, such as marketing and development, the American Dream and its implications for consumption, and technological innovations that were transforming society.
The year 1984 was a landmark year for Ruby, as she had her daughter Nishita, born during a year of leave in Evanston, Illinois. With the decision to have two children, Ruby & Nik agreed that Ritik would carry the Dholakia last name but that Nishita would carry her maiden name – Roy. Another bravely feminist and iconoclastic choice. Nishita’s birth certificate had to be revised three times before the officials got it right!
In the autumn of 1985, Ruby and the family returned to Rhode Island, where they would stay. She was a profound influence and guiding light on both of her children as they moved through the public school system, excelling in academics, civic activities, and being decent at sports and dance, but probably not as good as their mother.
Ruby also was a nexus of the Bengali and Indian communities in Southern New England. Ruby & Nik would regularly host gatherings for the Indian diaspora community in their home, for both the locally-based Indian community and a slightly more far flung Indian marketing faculty in New England (IM FINE). She helped organize cross-cultural American holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving with friends who became as close as family.
She opened her home each year to neighbors to celebrate Diwali. She regularly held Saraswati puja in honor of the goddess of knowledge and music. She helped bring artists from India to perform in Rhode Island.
She coached youth soccer, was a Cub Scout den mother, and active in supporting Ritik & Nishita’s youthful pursuits. She created two wonderful homes with bright, colorful interiors full of art and objects she collected on her travels, and wonderful, hand-tended gardens in Wakefield and Narragansett. She opened her home to many local friends, as well as friends, students, and visiting academics from all over the world.
In her own words:
“I spent 36 years at URI. I raised two lovely kids and now I am a grandmother.“
International Adventures
While home for much of her life was the peaceful shores of Rhode Island, Ruby was an adventurer at heart. Her life’s journey took her across continents. Ultimately, she touched all seven.
In 1989, Ruby & Nik earned a sabbatical and spent a year in Oslo, Norway teaching and exploring Europe. In a Volvo they purchased in Goteborg, Sweden, they explored Norway, visiting Nordkapp, the northern most point in Europe, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands.
The travel bug took hold.
Subsequent years, sabbaticals, and visiting appointments brought her to New Zealand (twice), Japan, Bangladesh, Finland, Hungary, and Brazil on a Fulbright Fellowship in her 60s. With each trip, she influenced countless students and colleagues through her teaching and research. She also was able to explore each region broadly, traveling to far-flung islands in the South Pacific, venturing into the Amazon and to the south of Brazil, and extending her travels to family, broadening the horizons of her children with each sojourn.
She helped to convene conferences in New Dehli and Beijing, and connecting with international colleagues at conferences every two ears in Istanbul, Budapest, Costa Rica, Romania, Greece, Casablanca, Ghana, Bangkok, Hanoi.
A true citizen of the world, Ruby made friends and memories across the globe, bringing her spirit, intellect, and fearlessness to adventures on every continent.
Scholar & Mentor:
Influence and Legacy
Ruby was an influential academic, teacher, and mentor.
Her contributions to URI were recognized with the Tom Chisholm Graduate Teaching Award in 2007 and the College of Business Dean’s Excellence Award for Research in 2006. In 2017, Ruby received the URI Foundation Scholarly Excellence Award as well as the Sheila Grubman’s Service Excellence Award.
She co-chaired the URI Branding Committee (Think Big! We Do) and served as the first President of the International Society of Markets and Development (ISMD). She was one of three coordinators for the 2009 Honors Colloquium on “Demystifying India.”
She became a Fulbright Scholar in 2018, allowing her to live and work in Brazil.
She felt she forged the strongest relationship with her PhD students. In her own words:
“I consider these PhD students as my academic children and joke that I almost matched my mother’s record of children – three boys (David Fortin, Kwan-Pin Chiang and Syagnik Banerjee) and seven girls (Patricia Norberg, Miao Xiao, Kathleen Ferris-Costa, Adriana M. Boveda, Jingyi Duan, Sereikhouch Eng and Jiyoon An). Through some, I am even an academic grandmother.”
Her Google Scholar ranking outranks her partner in life. To Nik’s great chagrin.
Retirement: Narragansett, Hollister, & Travels
Ruby retired in 2017. For Ruby, retirement did not mean repose.
In January of 2018, she planned and arranged a sea adventure to Antarctica and Tierra del Fuego, seeing penguins, puffing, and walking on the Antarctic ice shelf. In 2018 and 2019, she lived in Belem, Brazil, exploring city life in South America while teaching and researching.
She guided the building of a new house in Hollister, CA, selected to be closer to her sisters and brothers in the Bay Area. She planned and tended a beautiful garden, landscaped with a zen river, flowering plants, fragrant jasmine, fruit-bearing trees, and vegetable garden that relentlessly bore fruit from the fertile soils in her garden boxes.
She became active in local issues in Hollister, making friends with neighbors and community members. Being back in California allowed her to connect more closely with friends from earlier moments in her life.
In 2021, she suffered from an ischemic stroke. But she willed her way to an almost full recovery. Within a year she was dancing at a wedding. She and Nik took many trips, the wildest of which was a multi-country tour of Africa - safari in Kenya, touring in South Africa, and a trip to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. They went on multiple cruises, from Vancouver to LA, from Miami through the Panama Canal to Peru, to Izmir and Cappadocia in Turkey, and to the Nordics.
They visited friends and family all over the West Coast, traveling from San Diego to San Francisco, where they became regulars at cultural events. They won or lost money in casinos across California and Las Vegas, explored the Sierras, the central coast, and wine country. They traveled to New York to see broadway plays, sight see, eat well, and visit with Ritik and Erin.
They spent time in Rhode Island with Nishita, Dave, and their grandchildren Zamir and Darius, watching their soccer games, playing memory and card games, and enjoying seeing the grandchildren grow.
A Life Fully Lived
On the afternoon of April 4th, 2024, after returning home from a community forum in Hollister, Ruby suffered what neurologists later described as a catastrophic hemorrhagic stroke. Ritik and Nishita were able to reach San Jose in the following days, where Ruby received excellent care at Good Samaritan Hospital.
Given the severity of the stroke, which had left Ruby unable to swallow, speak, and with extremely limited movement, she conveyed her desire for comfort care. She was able to receive calls and visits sharing tears, memories, tributes, and love through the next few days — which she was able to receive and acknowledge. Those calls brought her comfort and peace.
Ruby passed peacefully on the night of April 14th, 2024. With her were Nik, Ritik, and Nishita, as well as all of her living siblings, Molly, Lily, Milly, and Sudeep, as well as much of their family. Her last days and moments were surrounded by the love of friends and family.
Family and friends, colleagues and students, far and near, all use similar words to describe Ruby. An inspiration. A dynamo. A firecracker. She was a role model. She lived by her rules. She did it her own way.
She was on the shorter side, but she cast a long shadow. Her life was complete in joy, adventure, influence, and impact. She lived a full life.
More Memories
To capture Ruby’s full life simply in a website is an impossible task.
Thankfully, Ruby has some left some wonderful ways to remember her in her own words & words she shaped directly.
And we have collected many remembrances from family, friends, and loved ones.
To read more:
Ruby’s story of her first days in the US for the First Days Project (with audio)
Ruby in her own words: Ruby Roy Dholakia: Autobiographical Reflections in Journal of Historical Research in Marketing (PDF)
Celebrating Ruby Roy Dholakia from the University of Rhode Island website
Memories, Tributes, and Reflections on Ruby’s life and influence
A very large Google Photos shared folder of photos