Being
ordinary
IRA PANDE
I
donÕt quite see my mother comfortably installed on a pedestal in this League of
Extraordinary Women. That she was extraordinary now appears to be an accepted
part of her reputation yet all her life she lived an ordinary life, in an
ordinary flat, in an ordinary city in UP, in an ordinary neighbourhood that had
mostly middle level sarkari folk and some very small-minded people as well.
Life had taught her the value of living under the radar and so she wore her
reputation and popularity lightly, happy to be largely ignored by the Big BoysÕ
Club of Important Writers. So she wrote furiously all the time after we had all
left to live our own lives and created a world for herself that sustained her
for almost 30 years.
Ironically, she has
outlived all those snobbish writers and critics who dismissed her as a mere
writer of domestic romances that appealed to gharelu women. In terms of
sheer popularity, she still outsells them and refuses, even after her death, to
go gently into the night. I have often written about her and yet I am amazed at
how much there is still left to discover. Years ago, I wrote a memoir about her
(Diddi: My MotherÕs Voice, Penguin, 2005) recalling her life through her
short stories and pen-portraits, interspersed with my own memory of the background
of these works. It was a kind of homage to a mother I forgot to honour
sufficiently when she was alive and an act of expiation for having treated her
literary work so dismissively. That book opened my eyes to a personality that
she had kept hidden from all of us and nudged me into exploring her works
through translation into English, a language that I was more comfortable
reading. The act of translation also allowed me to explore her in another
idiom, one that had a different set of social relations and web of memories.
My mother, whose pen name was Shivani, was born into a
prosperous, highly educated family of Kumaoni brahmins. Her maternal
grandfather was an eminent surgeon in Lucknow who started its first womenÕs
college called Mahila College and set up the famous Balrampur Hospital there
after persuading his rich patients to endow these institutions. Her fatherÕs
family, by far more conservative, was headed by her grandfather, Pt Hariram
Pande, a renowned scholar of Sanskrit and Astrology. A close friend of Pt Madan
Mohan Malviya, he helped to raise funds for the Banaras Hindu University, then
went on to become one of its founding faculty members.
His son, ShivaniÕs father,
was the complete antithesis of his stern father and freely smoked and drank,
ate meat and was more comfortable with his English friends than with his
fatherÕs austere circle of philosophers and savants. He respected his father
but made it clear that his life was his own. So, he chose to work in the
princely states after a long stint at RajkotÕs Rajkumar College for the scions
of the royal families, many of whom invited him later to become their adviser.
Shivani grew up in this
crazily mixed up world and was equally enchanted with her fatherÕs glamorous
life in the princely states of Jasdan, Orchha and Rampur as she was in awe of
her sternly brahmanical grandfather in Almora. The three eldest children
– Jayanti, Tribhuvan and she – were sent to Shantiniketan by their
grandfather to keep them as far away from the hedonistic life of the rajwadas
as possible. Shivani spent almost a decade under the tutelage of the gurus of
the ashram and that experience is what made her what she became. She has
recorded this in her memoir Amader Shantiniketan, written over 60 years
ago, a book that lay almost forgotten until an English translation brought it
to the notice of those readers who do not read any other language.
I think this slim book is
the key to her personality and towards under-standing what made an ordinary
life extraordinary. In the years that she spent at TagoreÕs Ashram, she was
exposed to some of the most amazing gurus and befriended several students who
went to become IndiaÕs cultural icons. Satyajit Ray, Mrinalini Sarabhai, Ram
Kinkar Baij, Balraj Sahni, Acharya Hajari Prasad Dwivedi, Kshitimohan SenÉthe
list is long and spans writers, film makers, actors, artists and scholars the
like of whom we will have to wait for another cultural Renaissance to spawn.
Nine years spent far away from home in the company of such eminent persons at
the most impressionable and exciting time of the countryÕs awakening was bound
to leave a deep and lasting impact. And it did, for throughout her life Shivani
carried the memory of that enchanted education like an inner light that
illumined the darkest times she was soon pitchforked into.
Shivani returned from Shantiniketan in 1944, three
years after Tagore had passed away, and came home to find a life that had
turned upside down. Her beloved grandfather and father passed away soon after
one another and the family was left to fend for itself, sans its wealth. My
grandmother, widowed in her early forties, with nine children to bring up in a
large house and many servants she could no longer afford to keep, slowly
started selling off the silver and valuables to feed this large retinue.
However, old habits die hard and the generous open house that she had always
kept was still a sanctuary for relatives, hangers-on and old friends. In those
days, material wealth did not have the primacy that it has acquired now and as
my grandmother was fond of telling us, ŌKhandaan and paandaan were all that
mattered.Õ So my mother was married off to another high-born Brahmin family to
a young widower who was still grieving for his beloved first wife who had left
behind a small two-year-old daughter.
I am still unable to fit these two jagged pieces of my
motherÕs life to make a credible picture. From the free, liberal and artistic
world of her childhood and Shantiniketan, she found herself pitchforked into
the dingy, cloistered life of a sternly patriarchal and brahminical life, to
become a stepmother to a small, wilful girl and a husband who never stopped
loving the wife he had lost.
I can only marvel at her
resilience: to start over a new life that was light years away from the
privileged and spoilt childhood she had been accustomed to would be enough to
try the limits of a young woman of her age and upbringing. So, she drew a
resolute curtain over that life and became a mother to four children, a wife to
a husband who was both difficult and temperamentally her polar opposite and
created a world that no one would be able to snatch away from her. This is the
world that she fashioned in her numerous novels, short stories and more and
eventually this world sustained her in a way that her ordinary life was unable
to.
Upon reflection, it appears
to me that ShivaniÕs most prolific literary output and some of her most
memorable and popular novels date to the years when Hindi magazines were avidly
read across North India. Among these, Dharmyug (edited then by the
formidable Dharmveer Bharati, a widely respected novelist and dramatist)
occupied pride of place. Published by Bennett and Coleman, its owners (Sahu
Jain and Rama Jain) promoted creative writing and later endowed the Gyanpeeth
Award, the first privately endowed prestigious literary award for writers in
various Indian languages.
The Bennett and Coleman Group (later known as the Times
of India group) also brought out a clutch of other magazines. Among these were Sarika
(contemporary Hindi writing, edited by Kamleshwar) and Dinman (a
political and economic weekly, edited by Agyeya) both respected for their
content and editorial gravitas. Filmfare, a film magazine and the Illustrated
Weekly of India were their popular English language publications. The
Hindustan Times group, owned by the Birlas, published Saptahik Hindustan
(as a rival to Dharmyug), Kadambini (as an alternative to Sarika)
and vied with each other to publish serials by the most popular Hindi writers
of those days. Throughout the Õ50s and Õ60s, there was not a single library or
reader in North India that did not subscribe to these magazines.
Almost all ShivaniÕs novels
– certainly her most popular ones – were first published as serials
in one or the other magazines mentioned above. Her most well known novel, Krishnakali,
published as a serial
in Dharmyug in the Õ60s, was later published as a novel by Gyanpeeth
(the publishing house run by the
B&C group). In addition to these magazines, two others (Navneet and Gyanoday)
I can recall from then were modelled on the popular American publication, ReaderÕs
Digest. ShivaniÕs travelogues, essays and memorial tributes were regularly
published in these Hindi digests.
Today, when we have lost the patience to wait for the
instalment of a weekly serial and prefer reading our books in one gulp or
binge-watch our favourite serials, it seems incredible that readers would
follow ShivaniÕs serialized stories for months and savour them by reading them
over and over again. Later, when they were published as novels, they were given
a fresh lease of life and her publishers vied to get rights to publication even
as it was still being serialised in a magazine. Although such publishing is now
a part of literary lore and the subject of research papers, we must never
forget the enormous role these serialised novels played in popularising quality
literature.
Just as our early
television serials are now re-run on Doordarshan to recall and emphasise the
depth of their narratives against the trivial pursuits of the eternal saas-bahu
bilge that spawned a whole industry of hysterical emotional dramas enacted by
over-dressed actors, the simple dignity of women in our small towns and their
small world was the spine of those literary serials. Written by authors who had
a firm grip on local languages with a strong sense of social responsibility,
they gave rise to a genre that has since vanished. Vulgarity – whether in
speech or character – was completely absent and whether this indicates a
prudery or an acknowledgement of what constitutes Ōgood and wholesomeÕ
literature is for others to say. As a daughter who was brought up on whatever
Shivani preached in her novels, I am no longer capable of giving an unbiased
opinion.
Naturally, the serialised
novel had its own effect on the writing it spawned. Fans wrote furious letters
to Shivani when she betrayed their hopes (such as by killing off a character)
or when she did not spend enough time on a particular strand of the narrative.
This close bond between writer and reader was perhaps what contributed to the
intimacy that readers developed over the years with their favourite writers. My
sister Mrinal Pande (who edited Saptahik Hindustan in the Õ90s) recalls
how typists vied with each other to type out ShivaniÕs (always) handwritten
manuscript when she sent in a fresh instalment so that he/she would be the
first to read it. The circulation of magazines jumped by as much as 55 per cent
when her novels were being serialized and siblings fought with each other to
grab the magazine to read it first when it was delivered to private homes.
Often they tore the pages out so that they could share it among themselves.
What gave this genre its enormous reach and popularity
was that these stories were significant documentaries. I would say that this
was an early form of reality fiction based on real life characters and episodes
and invisible to the writers based in our upcoming metros who consciously
distanced themselves from these provincial lives to become more acceptable to a
wider, international literary world. This is a fact often overlooked when
tracing the evolution of Hindi writing.
As Vasudha DalmiaÕs book on fiction and history reveals, Hindi novels
located in Allahabad, Agra, Aligarh, Banaras or Lucknow give us an insight into
the social landscapes that were shaping middle class lives in the Õ50s and
Õ60s. Beneath the romantic tales of young women and men, were rich subplots
that reveal the gradual break up of orthodox joint families, the effect of
education on the emancipation of women in provincial India and the effect of
migration from small towns to industrial cities.
The language of everyday
conversation in middle class homes and amongst families, the social terms of
exchange between men and women, workers and employers – these are
important markers of a world we seek today and cannot find because it no longer
exists. What are often dismissed as kitchen tales and romantic fiction stood
firm on its foundation because it was supported by tradition and ritual, food
and taboos, folk remedies and aphorisms that nourished clans and villages. In
the tightly packed houses of our old shahars separated by narrow lanes,
the smells and sounds that travelled across neighbourhoods became rich lodes of
narratives that had the authenticity of real lives.
The bonds between Hindu and Muslim homes, or between
upper and lower caste settlements were strong threads that wove the fabric of
our social communities. A deep suspicion of the other community was balanced by
an equally strong love for individual men and women. Look for these common
narrative strains and you will find them in all writers who lived and loved in
little India.
Of ShivaniÕs portraits, two
remain my favourites: ŌMera BhaiÕ, her loving tribute to her Muslim ŌbrotherÕ
Hamid Bhai and ŌEk Thi RamratiÕ, a homage to her companion-maid, Ramrati. Short
sketches they may be and often forgotten as a part of her literary legacy, to
me they are moving accounts of how culturally liberal the Ganga-Jamuni culture
of Lucknow – indeed most of the Gangetic Plain – once was. Today,
when we like to dismiss it as the cow belt it may help to understand how its
rich social history was distorted by vested political interests that
manipulated its weaknesses.
However, many self-styled
critics were so busy raising the bar higher that they forgot the earth they
stood on. One by one, the magazines that transported an outer world to readers
trapped in small towns were discontinued. Gradually, English was adopted as the
language of trend-setting academic discourse and the ŌrealÕ debates shifted
from cosy sahityik goshtis (literary soirees) in modest sitting rooms,
where young and aspiring writers read out their work to senior writers. The new
critical jousting spaces were now the seminar rooms of universities whose
audiences had little interest in small towns and who viewed mofussil India as a
petri dish in which to develop complex theories in meta-criticism. Such writers
and critics wrote and spoke in coteries taking care not to pollute their
pristine modern world with the smelly odours of spices that came from the
kitchens of women writers who wrote of ordinary middle class longings and
desires.
There was a time when oneÕs mother tongue was more
important than the lingua franca being promoted by
English medium schools. My mother understood this, having been exposed to so
many different languages as she and her siblings went from Gujarat to Kumaon,
to Bundelkhand and Rampur and then to Shantiniketan to become fluent in Hindi,
Urdu, Sanskrit, Kumaoni, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, English and Avadhi,
Bundelkhandi as well. My generation may have lost a few of that huge palette of
languages but retain several and added some (Punjabi in my case). My comfort
level in English is undeniable but I have still kept up my reading in Hindi and
speak Kumaoni to my siblings and cousins. And I can tell you that if my
translation skills are valued today, it is in no small measure to my motherÕs
insistence that we speak the language of the common man. She taught us to add,
rather than drop, languages as we went along our lives.
In her last years, my mother spent more and more time
in Lucknow and became a sort of fixture of the literary fraternity there.
People came to meet her and learn from her but she herself never stopped
learning. Every morning, she sat on her terrace, surrounded by her staff and a
curious fan club that included Ramrati, her faithful maid, her children and
grandchildren, Burho, an old crone who came because she had nowhere else to go,
her rickshawala, Qutb Ali, her sweeper Mohan and wife Bahuriya, even a monkey
called Ramkali who sat in her puja and put
out a paw to receive the prasad at the end. My mother was convinced Ramkali was
a failed writer and read her newspaper upside down with ShivaniÕs reading
glasses perched on her face. Who knows whether this was true or another one of
my motherÕs extraordinary stories?
Yet this woman, who
listened intently to her dhobi MisrilalÕs weekly saga of unhappiness at the
hands of an uncaring daughter-in-law was equally at home in the company of
Acharya Hajari Prasad Dwivedi, Amritlal Nagar, Mahadevi Verma and Sumitranandan
Pant. Her greatest takeaway from her time at TagoreÕs Ashram and its liberal
education was to remain a learner who listened intently to all those around
her. Who can say whether the stories she has left behind had real characters
behind them but to date all her readers stoutly believe that she was an
extraordinary teller of tales who could make you believe her in whatever she
wrote.
Perhaps that is what made
her ordinary life so extraordinary after all.