In memoriam

Meenakshi Mukherjee: a woman for all seasons

Meenakshi Mukherjee passed away with the grace and quietude that so characterized her gentle and generous personality. In death, as in life, she gave no trouble to anyone: as she sat at Hyderabad airport waiting to board a flight to Delhi, Meenakshi di, as many of her friends and admirers knew her, suffered a heart attack and, within minutes, was gone. For those who loved her, students and colleagues, intellectual companions, and her family, the loss is profound: there was so much more that she had to give, so much more that was to be learnt from her.

A day before Meenakshi di died, she was chatting with a friend, Jyotirmaya Sharma and during the course of the conversation Jyotirmaya said several complimentary things to her at which she, with her characteristic humour, quipped: ‘Why are you saying all this, I’m not dead yet.’ Prescient words: she was to die shortly after.

Meenakshi Mukherjee’s interests were wide-ranging and throughout her life she remained passionately involved in the many things she loved. Having studied and taught in Patna, she carried the memory of the Hindi heartland with her through her years in Delhi and Hyderabad and in the course of her many teaching stints outside of India. In later years she and her husband, publisher, translator and writer Sujit Mukherjee (Sujit da to his friends) made their home in Hyderabad, a city they came to love and about which Meenakshi di wrote with warmth and affection. As she wrote in a piece on the city, she came to recognize and love the shapes of the rocks she saw on her way to work, the pace of life where the word ‘parson’ could stretch into eternity, where auto drivers were happy to wait for you to do your shopping on the way home from work and meat sellers asked why they had not seen you for days and how worried they were about what you were eating.

Between them, Meenakshi di and Sujit da (who died several years earlier, in as quiet a manner) were an important part of the cultural life of the city of Hyderabad, attending book launches, hosting authors, providing a comfortable, warm and empathetic environment for people to meet and talk – and most importantly, argue – about their work and their concerns. Their friendships were strong and deep, and they were generous to a fault, engaging with their students and younger scholars with the same ease as with established ones.

It is customary, in obituaries, to list the person’s achievements in their chosen fields. Meenakshi Mukherjee was a formidable academic, a pioneer in her field of research, having written extensively on Indian literature and the history of the novel in India; she was part of a group that ran the excellent literary magazine, Wagarth; she was widely read, and had a long involvement with both the Indian and international associations of Commonwealth Literature, having organized a major conference on Commonwealth Literature in Hyderabad in 2003. But her real love was Indian literature, and in many ways she can be credited with having brought criticism of this rich seam of our literary tradition into the mainstream. She was initially also cautiously critical, and later more openly so, of what she saw as a kind of exoticising of the ‘Indian’ in the work of Indian writers in English. Her brush with Vikram Chandra is by now well known, but what is perhaps less known is that many years ago, as a young 35 year old, Meenakshi Mukherjee had the temerity to speak of some aspects of Raja Rao’s work as being imbued with an ‘expatriate nostalgia for Indian rituals,’ something which, according to her, made writers like him look at ‘all traditional acts through a mist of evolution.’

In later life, Meenakshi Mukherjee grew more fully into being the historian that she always was and it was this that turned her attention to her most recent project, a biography of R.C. Dutt, the launch of which was the reason for her last, abortive trip to Delhi. History and biography were for her hitherto unattempted genres and she was unsure of how her work would be received. Nevertheless, with her customary wry humour, she prepared to come to Delhi for the launch, excited at the prospect of having a mixed group of historians and litterateurs discussing her work.

To all her friends in Delhi – and there are many – she wrote personal letters inviting them to the event, quipping that this was the first of her books to be launched. All the others, she said, had ‘escaped’, quoting her husband who had once said, ‘Only some books get launched, most others escape.’ Sadly, it was Meenakshi di who left us – one might almost say she escaped – and the loss of this versatile writer, critic, teacher, home-maker, has left the many worlds she inhabited much poorer.

Urvashi Butalia