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Literary Review
Moments of transformation
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Listen Girl and Kalikatha, written by writers belonging to two different generations, deal sensitively with defining moments in the life of their characters, says GILLIAN WRIGHT.
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THESE novels, by two acclaimed Hindi authors of different generations, deal with defining moments in life. Krishna Sobti, by far the most well known of the two, probably cannot count all the awards she has received. Born in 1925 in Gujarat in the part of Punjab now in Pakistan, each of her novels has been a literary event and she has stretched and remoulded the Hindi language, presenting works of immense variety. While not considering herself a feminist, Sobti has, like Ismat Chughtai in Urdu, constantly created strong women characters. While Chughtai shocked the establishment back in 1944 by writing of lesbianism, Sobti created a sensation with the main character of her second novel, Mitro Marjani, a woman, and that too a married one, who honestly stated her sexual desires, while in a later novel she dealt sensitively with the plight of a rape victim.
Her short novel Eh, Larki! also attracted much attention when it was first published in 1991 and it's surprising that it's taken 12 years for it to be translated into English. The rather clumsy title Listen Girl! illustrates how difficult it can be to find a satisfactory equivalent for Hindi phrases, though the text itself has been ably translated by the Dogri scholar, Shivanath. The book takes the form of a dialogue between a dying mother and her daughter, during which Sobti explores their complex relationship. Sobti's devotion to linguistic economy leads her to pare away virtually all description, so that the reader concentrates solely on the mother and daughter just as the mother and daughter, circumscribed by the oppressive routine of the sickroom, find their world limited to one another. The stark realism of the text is born of personal experience. Sobti wrote Eh, Larki! just after her own mother's death, and the daughter of the story is herself an author.
Suffering is not necessarily ennobling, and the character Sobti creates as the mother is often testy. She wounds her daughter, who is unmarried, with pointed references to her barrenness. But having devoted her life to her husband, whom she loved dearly, and stood by the rules and conventions of society, the dying woman now questions all the restrictions under which she lived. She begins to voice her regrets at having had to sacrifice her youthful ambitions to fit into her husband's family. Sobti finds many ways for her to express this dissatisfaction — she became the boatman of her family, labouring at the oars while everyone else enjoyed the trip. Her husband was very punctual, everything on time. The elderly woman remarks, "I turned myself into a clock for him." As her soul comes closer to release, she identifies more with her daughter and rejects convention for its own sake, declaring that her daughter's writing is a kind of creativity as vital as any other, and that her completeness and independence is a great achievement. Sobti poignantly depicts their last hours together, at times so close to one another they seem to merge.
In contrast to the sparseness of Listen Girl!, Alka Saraogi's first novel, KaliKatha Via Bypass, published in Hindi in 1998, is a complex tale of a Marwari family over several generations, from their migration to Kolkata from Rajasthan in the mid-19th Century to the present day. The main protagonist is the current head of the family, Kishore. Through Kishore, Saraogi holds up a mirror to the ills of society while managing to tell her story with humour and an admirable lightness of touch.
The defining moment in Kishore's life comes when he receives a bang on the head during open-heart surgery. He leaves hospital with unclogged arteries and an unclogged mind. His family treats him as if he's gone mad, but actually he has become a truly compassionate human being. Before, he had been a Hitler in his home, a social climber who hid his humble roots in North Kolkata, a man who forced his wife to have six children so he could have a son, who was selfish, mean and materialistic. Now he starts wandering the streets of the city and rediscovering his family's past.
Initially he takes us back to 19th and early 20th Century Kolkata, creating a world, complete with babus riding out in their phaetons to visit their favourite courtesans, which has been described in a number of other novels available in English. Saraogi's characters are not as well developed as, say, those of Sunil Gangopadhyay, but they are credible and colourful and the plot moves along at a fast pace.
Kishore recalls in detail the days of his youth, especially his two best friends from the time before independence — Shantanu, a follower of Netaji, and Amolak, a disciple of the Mahatma and a devotee of Hindu-Muslim fraternity. The novel is also peopled with a range of strong women characters, whom Kishore could have learned much more from if he had been less confused. Like the dying mother in Listen Girl!, these women face and have to come to terms with the restrictions of a conservative society. The most important of them for Kishore is his mother, Ma, who has freed herself from all prejudice and is practically a goddess in her patient self-reliance and simplicity.
The transformed Kishore realises that Ma and Amolak encapsulate the best of Indian tradition, a tradition of understanding and reconciliation, which he fails to find anywhere around him now. Instead he is faced with fake holymen peddling religious enmity and the purblind nouveau riche materialism of his family who bypass the country's problems in their smart new cars.
Saraogi justifiably won a Sahitya Akademi prize for this, her first novel, and has joined the ranks of notable women writers who have been inspired by serious and dedicated authors like Krishna Sobti. She still has to prove that she can attain the enduring success of the latter. Every new novel of Sobti's is eagerly awaited but from this promising beginning, it doesn't seem unlikely that Saraogi will fit Sobti's exacting definition of a writer — someone who grows continually with every season and every situation, absorbing the realities and crises of her time and recreating them.
Listen Girl, Krishna Sobti, Katha Asia Library, p.107, price not stated.
KaliKatha: Via Bypass, Alka Saraogi, Rupa, p.295, Rs.295.
Among other works in Hindi, Gillian Wright has translated two modern classics — Raag Darbari by Srilal Shukla and Adha Gaon by Rahi Masoom Reza.
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