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How do we engage with the world? In modern times, we can reach out and touch many more
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parts of the world than we once could. Oh, so it seems. All the knowledge humans have
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gathered is a click or a swipe away. Every film ever made, every song ever recorded,
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every book ever written, it's all there at our fingertips, with an ocean of new content
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created every day. And yet, while our breadth of exposure to the world has increased, our
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depth has reduced. We're always clicking, swiping, all tabbing, trapped in the illusion
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of movement that the infinite scroll gives us. I'm not complaining about others here.
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My own engagement with the world has become choppy. I jump from sliver of experience to
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sliver of experience. And I can remember another life, in another century, when I wasn't like
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this. I could immerse myself in something and often didn't have a choice because there
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wasn't that much that was fighting for my attention. Now, I'm not making an argument
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for the good old days of scarcity. I'm happy I get to see these times and to benefit from
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them. The problem is not in having more choices, but in fixing the ways in which we interact
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with those choices. And that's something I need to work on. I'm throwing that thought
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to you apropos of nothing. Today's episode is not about this, but it is about memories
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and that kind of sparked this thought off. So do think about it.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen. My guest today is Ira Pandey, a writer and translator
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and someone I've known for longer than any of my guests. Irajee was my mother's friend.
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And the last time I met her before this recording was in Chandigarh in the mid 1980s, 40 years
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ago. She was a friend of my mother. She even wrote a moving obituary for her when she died
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about 15 years ago. And she used to be a member of the Chandigarh choir back in the day, which
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my mom used to direct. I'll post her only existing video, which shows my mother and
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the choir singing a song translated by the great Hindi writer Shivani, who happens to
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be Irajee's mother. You can see Irajee singing in that choir, in fact. Now, I didn't invite
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her just because of this whole connection. Irajee is a great writer and translator, and
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I particularly loved Didi, my mother's voice, her memoir of her mother. All her work is
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fantastic, but this book moved me deeply. It's just wonderful, and you have to pick
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it up. Irajee also happens to be Mrinal Pandey's sister, Pushpesh Pant's cousin, and Sehra
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Rai's friend. So if you enjoyed my episodes with them, and I did, you will love this as
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much as I did. Her memories go over the same terrain, but are different from that of her
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siblings. Irajee is almost as old as our republic, and has some deep piercing insights on our
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country as well, on our politics, on our society, on our culture. So for multiple reasons, this
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episode is a treasure. Please listen. But before that, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Do you want to read more? I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading
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habit. This means that I read more books, but I also read more long-form articles and
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essays. There's a world of knowledge available through the internet, but the problem we all
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face is, how do we navigate this knowledge? How do we know what to read? How do we put
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the right incentives in place? Well, I discovered one way. A couple of friends of mine run this
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awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com, which aims to help people up-level themselves
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by reading more. A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily
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Reader. Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read. The subjects
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covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade. This helped
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me build a habit of reading. At the end of every day, I understood the world a little
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CTQCompounds and check out their Daily Reader. New batches start every month. They also have
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and use the code UNSEEN. Uplevel yourself.
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Iraji, welcome to The Seen and The Unseen. Thank you. I'm looking forward to this. I
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felt very strange while coming here this morning because I thought that the last time
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we met, I was 10 years old. It was probably 1984, 40 years ago. And it struck me that
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I am older now than you or my mother were then. And it's kind of a very strange feeling.
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It's like a window into another world entirely. Absolutely. I agree there. I was trying to
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put a face to the little boy I vaguely seen when I used to come to your house. And I couldn't
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even recall. I know that there were two of you because you were shushed away and thrown
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out from the room. We were, as you know, your mother was our choir teacher and she was a
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very stern person, wonderful singer. And we used to have this group called the Chandigarh
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Choir, which is where and of course your father was a colleague of my husband, so knew both
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of them well and I'm sorry that they're not here anymore. But yes, it's a bizarre feeling
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to be confronted by a little boy who's a young man now.
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Yeah, no, thank you for calling me a young man. It's been a long time. I want to start
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by, you know, taking off from that and asking you about, you know, the stretchability of
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time. How when we are very young, it seems ki arey 40 toh itna old hai, who's gonna get
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that far. Something that happened like a year ago seems a long, long time ago and something
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that lies five years in the future. You're like, why think about that? Why plan? And
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then as we grow older, it just stretches. And, you know, in the case of someone like
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you, it stretches even more because you are immersing yourself then in your mother's life
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and you're reading and translating her memoirs and going back through her life. And suddenly
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where I sit today, it seems like 50 years is like the blink of an eye. And therefore,
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when you think about history, asa lagta hai ki 200 saal bhi blink of an eye hai. You know,
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like I recorded just yesterday with Swapna Little, the historian of 19th century, you
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know, that interesting period, which is both Mughal India and colonial Delhi. And that's
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just 200 years ago. It's not that far back. So, you know, through time, how have you sort
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of how has your changing notion of time changed the way you look at the world and at yourself?
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That's a very deep and philosophical question to answer immediately. But a book that I have
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sitting in my head somewhere, I've been thinking about recording the most significant parts of our
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life, our life, meaning my husband and my life, our family, and bringing it up to date and trying
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to understand and figure out where we were right, where we were wrong. And we weren't always right,
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as I must admit now. I'm going to be 73 in two days time, so it's a long, long and I have a good
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memory. I think I remember very clearly my life from the time I was four or five years old.
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Of course, it's a selective memory. I only remember certain bits of it, some bits I prefer not to even
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think about. But a book that I've been wondering whether it's worth now doing at this time is
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just concentrating on the first two decades of our independence. I was born in 51,
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the same year that we got our constitution. So I mirror the sort of political and social changes
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that have occurred in India since then. And I do think very strongly that those first two decades
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hold so much of what India is today and is becoming or not becoming. Because whatever good
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has happened in India is largely due to the very strong fundamentals that were put together by
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those great people who were in charge of India then. But a lot of the things that are going wrong
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now are not to do with the current government or this party or that party. They have roots which
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go back to those early years, those 50s and 60s, when life was far more innocent,
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when we were so much more trusting. We were also so bedazzled by this newfound independence.
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Of course, my generation was too young to register all that. But I remember how clearly
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the whole town used to erupt in a kind of, we were in Nainital those days. And I remember
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sometime in the 57, 58 period, Nehruji came to Nainital. And the whole town went to hear him.
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Because we were little children, we were made to sit in front. Thankfully, there was no security
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and people were pushed away from the Prime Minister. And as was his want, he came first
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to the children. And I think he pinched my cheek or slapped it or something. And I felt so thrilled,
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I can't tell you. He really was the uncle Nehru that I can't tell you. I can't remember a word
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of what he said. But he was a fantastic orator. And he had this capacity to immediately connect
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with every person. Everyone felt he was talking to them alone. So that was the kind of feeling
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we had for our political leaders at that time. We didn't even consider them political. They were
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just our leaders. And this is something which I miss very much because we become so much more
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cynical about. I mean, if there is a good speaker, we always feel, yeh jumle marra hai,
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yeh phalana jo hai, wo pappu hai. What is this way of describing your leaders? What respect
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do you evoke in the people? Or what sense of pride do you have in your own country when you look back?
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The fundamentals which they put in one was this great idea of one country and a community that was
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bonded beyond religion. That I remember very vividly because as children, we were never
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conscious of. But now I realized that when I was in school, there were five or six Muslim girls
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who used to study. This was a very sort of posh convent in Nainital. And mostly they belonged to
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the Talukhaidari families or to the Rampur family, for instance, or whatever.
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Aur Sene Cambridge ke baad wo kahan chali gayi hai, pata hi nahi chalta hai. You know, they kind of
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disappeared from my world. Then I found this born homie when I came to Lucknow, much later. I was
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about 14, 15 or maybe 16, 17 when I came there. And our neighborhood, again, we had lots of, my
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mother was wonderfully secular in her outlook. And we, I think, inherited that love. So she had a
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little court in her house in Gulista colony. And every morning when she sat there with her tea and
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akhbar, yeh sab aate the waha unse milne ki bahu ji ke paas jaye, to waha chai milti hai.
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And phir wo akhbar banjti thi. Akhbar padke, she would read out the news. And it was always
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horrendous news ki ek aurat ke teen mu ke bacha hua. You know, nothing about the politics,
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but the kind of news that, you know, an ordinary person would respond to.
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So there was Kutubali, Harikshewala, Suleyman Di Andewala, Bahuriya ek thi. She was, you know,
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so it was a very mixed bag of people. Kaun Hindu tha, kaun Muslim tha, mujhe nahi malum. Kisi ke
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nahi hoti thi. But now we have lost it. Somewhere we lost that trust. So even though as a community,
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I am very fond of people from other faiths. I find that this isn't a universal feeling. In
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my childhood, maybe I'm wrong in thinking this, but we never, we grew up in a very strict brahmanical
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patriarchal world where puja part, vrat anushthan was very much part of our lives. We grew up with
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all this. And yet we had friends like Hamid Bhai and Naseem Bua and so many people who I can
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remember as being part of the family. And we never felt ki unke hain aisa main. Wal ki hum log ruke
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rehte the ki humaar ghar mein eid pe, you know, falani ki hain ki Simai, ya unki bakri eid pe,
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unki begum saab ke ghar se aaj aayega, gosht aayega. Hum log sumte the ki unke hain itna
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badhiya khaana ban raha hoon. Hum log ki hain bhenkar vegetarian brahmanical food banta tha.
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So school main jab hum jate the we used to eat each other's food. Apne ghar ka khaana koi nahi
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khaata tha. To roti beti ka ho sakta nahi tha rishta. Lekin hum log ko always auronke ghar ka khaana
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acha lagta tha, auronke ghar ki maa bap ache lagte the, auronke bhai behan zyada ache lagte the.
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And those relationships have stood the test of time. I find this a common thread in all the
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people of my generation that we are far more liberal and abhi bhi ye jo liberal crowd hai,
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tum aga dekho isme ji age group hai, it's all in the 60s and 70s range because these are the
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people who grew up in the early decades. Ek toh wo hai. Dusra thankfully because there was no
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distraction like a television or whatever, the radio was our window to the world and
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All India Radio ki wo jo signature tune hai, wo imprinted hai in everyone's head. Mere generation
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ki jitne wo jyote. That wonderful tune. Achha subhe se wo, jab news hoti thi, toh nobody was
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allowed to cough when my father used to listen. No baji ki jo khabar aati thi, usme saara ghar
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waha pe, including ghar ke naukar chakar waha baithi, sunte the news ko. Ya when President Radhakrishnan
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gave his address, these were bonding things, you know, everyone in every house and I'll end by
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saying that I remember so vividly the day that Nehru ji died. Hum log Mukteshwar mein meri mausi
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ke paas gaye hui the, we were by then in Allahabad and unki death announced we thi around din mein,
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toh usdin kisi na khana nahi khaya and I can clearly remember where I was when my mausa came
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back from the hospital. He was the doctor and he said ki aaj Nehru ji nahi rahe. Sab roye,
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kisi ke ghar mein chulha nahi jala. Aisa kabhi hota hai? Matlab maine suna tha ki jab Gandhi ji
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ki death hui thi, tab aisa hua tha. But aise leaders bhi nahi bache hain aur aise citizens bhi
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nahi bache hain aap. What was it? So those 50s and 60s hold the key to so many good things that
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happened. But equally many wrong things were also done at that time. Hum log aune jo village
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communities ko tavajjo nahi di. Jo Gandhi ji kehte the, that is why the panchayati raj was such an
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important part of his political message. I'll go back even further. I must have been three or four
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years old. Hum log Almora mein rehte the. My father was the district inspector of school so we were
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very closely associated with the kind of education world. Koi aisa bacha nahi tha,
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ladka or ladki who was not sent to school. And my mother used to say ki at the time of independence
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Almora had about the highest literacy rate in the entire country at some 56 or 58 percent.
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Everyone was literate. Hum my ghar ke jitne naukar the unko apne ghar chitti likhna aata tha.
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Baad baad mein jab hum Allahabad lag raha gaya hai and we got different set of helpers,
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they used to say ki btiya hamar ghar ke lilai chitti likhde ho.
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So they didn't know. They were not literate at all. Unko likhna nahi aata tha.
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Hum aaye jo pahadi naukar the unko dead ka pahada, dhai ka pahada, itni jaldi wo hisaab kitab
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likhte the. We had one hilarious chap called Ram Singh who was with us in Delhi, Nepal ka tha
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and he was deeply interested, padha likha bahta and he could speak
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ancient English also. To jab wo mere mother-in-law ko hisaab deta tha. Every evening my mother-in-law
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used to write down the hisaab. To wo jep se list nikalta tha, jis mein hisaab English me likha hota tha.
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And upar usme hota tha, thought for the day men may come and men may go but I go on forever.
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Yeah, Rome was not built in a day. O uske baad phir hisaab hota tha. L-A-I-M-O-N-L-I-M-O-N.
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Tomato was spelt with an E. Water chestnut singhara. Puchta tha ki Hindi English me kya
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kaita hai. To wo likhta tha waise. A-G-A-G. But jaisa wo bolta tha waise hi likhta tha.
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And finally poora hisaab ke niche signature hota tha. Ram Singh best P-A to Mata ji.
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You know literacy was such an important part of the entire North Indian belt. At least
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Kumaon ke aur Garhwal ke jitne bhi log the. Koi aisa ghar nahi tha jaha ki log pade likhe nahi hota the.
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To aur kyun kyonki gaon gaon me school the. Even in a place like Munshari, jis mein sadaq
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shayad 30 saal pehle bani hoge. I remember there is an Uchitar Rajki Mahavidyalaya,
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the intermediate college established in 1938. Can you imagine that? Ab literacy levels de.
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If you read letters, if you have any in your house from your grandfather's time,
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beautifully written. And many of them were not literate beyond intermediate or high school.
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Uske baad nahi padha kahi logon hai. Lekin wo jo likhai hoti thi Sulekh,
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jis ko kehte the Hindi mein. Now these things I regret very much that we have lost these things
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because along with that came so many moral lessons which have stood the test of time,
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you know. So many things which are right, which are wrong can be traced I think to those very
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formative early decades of India. And I would love to document that if I can. I am not a historian,
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I am not an economist, I am not a sociologist. But just memory I think is sometimes a very good
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way of remembering a good time and a bad time. I am sure when you were in Chandigarh, you remember
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Chandigarh as a very different place from what it is now. Amit, if you go back, ab hi haal mein hum
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Chandigarh gaye, we were staying in Panchkula. Whoever looked at Panchkula as a town, you know,
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it was something you passed on your way to the Mughal gardens in Pinjore, ya kahin aur Shimla
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jate wakat, achcha wahan Panchkula hai, this is a new township, ya Mohali hai. Ye shahar man gaya hain
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sahab. Chandigarh has now become a different place altogether. So landscapes change, mental
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landscape, physical landscapes, everything changes, sometimes for the good, but not always.
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I really hope you like your book because I think that there is a great deal of value in a memoir
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of a nation that is not coming from a particular lens ki economic lens hai, ye political lens hai,
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but just a free rolling sort of memoir can have a lot of value. Aapne jo handwriting ki baat ki,
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I do remember that after my dad died and we were clearing out his house, one of the things that I
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found was, which I've kept, was this diary, jis mein my maternal grandmother, and you mentioned
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before we started recording that you remember meeting her, my maternal grandmother was writing
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recipes in absolutely clear English and I don't remember her speaking English ever, but in
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absolutely clear English with, you know, all sort of colonial era recipes and her own recipes
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translated and the handwriting as you said was truly beautiful. I want to double click on a
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number of things and one of them was, is pe aapne column bhi likhi thi, Air India Radio and jo
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purani ek nationalism hoti thi and there in fact you even mentioned ki Independence Day ke pehle
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jo President's address hota tha on the eve of Independence Day, activity in the house would
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change ki pehle khana pakalo, so everybody has to be free, they have to gather, they have to listen
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and I'm thinking ki, us samane mein and you know, maybe up till the end of the 1980s,
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there was a shared understanding of culture or what the country means, we were, we would all
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read broadly the same kind of books, we would listen to the same kind of music, so ek puri
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shared understanding thi ki project kya hai, hum hai kya and what has happened and it's both good and
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bad, what has happened is that today that common consensus on what is this world, what is this
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country has sort of vanished, you know, the mainstream media has completely broken down,
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you don't have a consensus on the truth, we are surrounded all the time by narrative battles
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where truth doesn't seem to matter anymore but whatever fits your vision of the world that is
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all that you sort of notice and at a more personal level and something again, I think you've written
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about it a little bit and mentioned it, at a personal level also we are getting more and
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more atomized in the sense there is of course that cliched and much-remarked journey that we
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make from joint families to nuclear families but even beyond that, even when a nuclear family is
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sitting together at the dining table today, they're not actually with each other, they are
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looking into the black screen in their hand and it has just become much more atomized than that
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and what that means is that the world of entertainment that all of us consume is very
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fragmented, you know, jaise ki aap or mere mother, I'm sure you heard the same kind of music growing
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up, watched the same movies, read the same kind of books broadly and that's true of when I meet
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people of my generation, I don't think that's true of young people today and in one sense I think
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that is fantastic, that we can all explore our own passions and our own tastes, that so many people
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can create work without gatekeepers, you have all these niches opening up but that sense of nation
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that kind of might be there is also sort of, you know, at risk perhaps and has to be contested
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again, so what are sort of your thoughts on, you know, that particular aspect of the change that
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we get more and more atomized and that sense of community is in danger? You know, I think our
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generation or my generation is the last that has seen the growth or decline of the family
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at its various stages, we grew up with joint families, then we became nuclear, not nuclear but
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less joint and I always remember all the traffic that you see on the roads on a weekend
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is joint family traffic, you're going to visit your chacha or your grandparents or you, you know,
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have a community lunch somewhere, there was always that connection, you stayed in apartments where
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it was no longer possible for six people to stay in under one roof, so all that became, but
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even then it used to happen that in one complex, there was a flat for parents, a flat for children
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and there was free traffic between them, speaking personally in my house because my husband was an
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only child and his parents were devoted to him, they couldn't imagine life, so when my father-in-law
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retired, he came to us and Amit was still at his first posting in Samrala, in the subdivision,
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and there was so much stuff that I have to tell you, trucks full of stuff came, so we always used to
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look for a house for stuff, not for any other reason that which house can store all this stuff,
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so that was living with my in-laws and I was a very lazy housekeeper in the sense that
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and my mother-in-law was an ace housekeeper, so I quickly handed her over the house and she loved it
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because she felt that she has such a good daughter-in-law, she has given me her entire kitchen,
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I told you, even the servants knew that they would tell us about her mother-in-law,
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we and our children were on the same level, mother-in-law was on the same level,
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so that happened, after that generation went away, the children and we were in one house but we felt
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cut off from each other somehow, you know, they had reached college by then,
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they'd come and go, come and go, but now there are just the two of us left and it feels so strange,
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I just gave away a whole set of those nests of
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these are all markers of a change which we haven't registered,
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how we are shrinking, and where I live now in that gated colony,
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a lot of the people are either like us, old people, their stuff, nobody, everyone says,
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what to do about these saris, who will wear these saris, because everyone's daughters-in-law wear
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different clothes nowadays, I was joking with a friend myself, I said, I am going to send Usha Uthup
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to wear these saris, because she is the only one who wears kanji varams anymore,
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children are now dressing differently, thinking differently, their food habits are different,
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dal, roti, sabzi, eating is very less now, eating together on a table is so rare now,
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you know, someone is eating in front of the TV, someone is eating in their room,
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someone wakes up at 12 o'clock, someone wakes up at 4 o'clock, Amit's father used to say,
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the rising generation retires when the retiring generation rises, very often we would be getting
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up when our children used to roll in from a party, so you know, it has happened, but with that is a
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deep sense of loss also, Amit, I really feel sorry for my grandchildren who are growing up in Brazil
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or America, they'll never know the joy of coming to grandparents every summer,
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and how in my grandmother's house, there were no mixers, there were no refrigerators,
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and we were twenty-twenty people at home once, there was no gas, and there was no stove,
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and there was no way to do so much work, we used to sit in the kitchen and eat food,
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so the Maharaj used to say, eat one more, you know, so lovingly, with hot rotis and ghee,
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now we all have part-time cooks who come at 8 o'clock in the morning and cook dinner,
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so those joys have vanished, and you were talking of how this happened and up to what point it was
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there, if you look at the early Doordarshan serials, you'll get a hint there, we people,
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these were Manohar Shyam Joshi's people, or Sai Paranji's Ados-Pados, Nukkad,
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the foundation, how, their foundation is so deep that I once interviewed Manohar Shyam Joshi on this,
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and if you remember, in the end, Ashok Kumar used to come and give you a little piece to camera
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on what that was about, how we, I have to tell you a very funny story about the death of Nanne,
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as you know, Nanne dies, so the day he was about to die, everyone knew that Nanne was going to die,
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we had to go somewhere to eat, we were in Chandigarh, and I told Amit, you go, I can't
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miss this serial, this episode, so Amit said, no, no, you know, he has said many times,
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how many times have I left, we have to go today, when we went there, the host came out, and come,
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come, when we went inside, there were only men sitting in the seat, so I tusked out my husband,
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I said, you fool, this was a stag dinner to which you brought me, I am taking the car back,
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you ring me up, I'll pick you up, so I said, okay, Namaste, now I'm going, and you call me,
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so the host said, no, no, madam, where are you going, come inside, all the ladies are sitting inside,
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and there he was coming, the signature that used to happen, and I didn't know any of the
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ladies there, everyone said Namaste, it perfunctorily, and we sat down, and then we were glued to that
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episode, by the end of it, we all cried that Nanne died and everyone became friends, that was the
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bonding that took place between complete strangers, I didn't know anybody, there must be an office
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contact in Amit's, so where are those kinds of things left, nobody is watching the same
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serials anymore, we are not, so Manohar Shyam Joshi used to say, this is like my mother's books,
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which are her novels, just the other day, two days ago, my sister sent me a request from somebody
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saying, I want to translate, because I'm a great fan of your mother's books, I've read all her
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novels, I meet so many people who read Hindi, or who haven't stopped reading, that you are
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Shivani ji's daughter, I want to take a selfie with you, I said, I'm not Shivani, I'm her daughter,
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I don't write Hindi, still, there was something in that era, you know, there was a shared
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culture, a shared, which vanished, as you've said, after the 80s, it has gone,
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I have a theory about this also, which I must, that we have never looked at
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the Bombay film as an art form that has anything other than entertainment in it,
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huh, the Bombay film is our greatest repository of history, Amit, as I see it,
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if you look at the early black and white films that were made in the 50s and 60s,
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these were all films which were speaking, with a very strong sense of social responsibility and
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art for teaching people, educating people, Do Bigha Zameen Ho, Ganga Jamna Ho,
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koi bhi us time ki tum cinema le lo, what were we seeing in those, the stories were about how
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impoverished our villages are, how people have nothing to eat, Bhukmari ke karen,
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they were migrating to cities, wo jo Do Bigha Zameen Me Balraj Sahni, I can't ever forget,
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you know, ki wo riksha pool kar raha hai, and he yearns for his wife and the children he has
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led, Nirupa Roy, who was always the weeping mother left behind, bichari, toh us tarah ki jo cinema
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thiye, and wahan se kya hua, the next phase was the, was Bombay, the exploitative set, and that,
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yeh jaise yeh Balraj Sahni, sorry yeh Vimal Roy aur Balraj Sahni wala jo phase tha, yeh
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naturally blended into the next phase, which was Awa Raashi, 420, yeh jo gaon se aata tha
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aadmi, and who got caught up in the razzle dazzle of the big city, usme ek exploitative set hota tha,
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aur yeh bahar se dekhta tha ki club me koi crooner hai, jo adhangi aurat ga rahi hai,
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and all the set who were still wearing dhoptis, and who had bahun hain ghar pe, jinka gungat hota
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the, but they were, you know, they were black marketeers and horrendous people, or achha,
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so that was the next phase of popular Hindi cinema. Uske baad, the next phase was the angry
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young man, and wo kahan se upaj hui thi, jo yeh badmash set hota the, jo exploit karte the,
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gareeb logon ko and whatever, usme se nikla angry young man, aur phir usi me se nikla yeh
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Dawood Ibrahim aur yeh jo mafia wale the, us tare ki jo film me bani thi, those cult films of that time.
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After that came the end, then those foolish films of the 60s, which I have to talk about with all
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Biswajit and Sadhna, and you know, those romantic films jis mein, it was so predictable,
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they had no storyline, nothing but fantastic music, and R. D. Barman and whatever, so you
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know, you wipe to that, that was our modernizing of, you know, those of us who were bhenjis from
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small towns. Uske baad jo next lot aaya was Karan Johar's NRI films, and that spun the whole thing
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into another dimension altogether. You now have the animal kind of films, which is this repressed
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machismo and the, you know, the kind of sexual energy that the common Indian male has, which has
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no outlet except deviance. So within these three, you know, seven, eight types of films, you have
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documented the entire history of what India was, tried to become, failed and has become. I do think
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that that is, you know, bahut saal pehle when I was working in a publishing house, Meghnad Desai
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wrote a book on Nehru and Dilip Kumar, on how Dilip Kumar's films echo the whole Nehruvian socialist
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arc of economy. What a fine book that was, and he's an economist and he's a die-hard film buff.
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Waha se mujhe laga ki even beyond that phase, there are other phases which are equally
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important. And there was, until, you know, in my youth, there were people like Iqbal Masood and
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Amita Malik and all who thought about these things, who gave very thoughtful
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importance to what they saw and what they, what they were sad to see go.
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Each one of them was a fantastic group. Shailendra ke toh ek ek lyric pe roana aata hai.
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Aur ab dekho, I mean, I just don't understand what people see in that music. It's noise,
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it's the lyrics don't matter anymore. And then I feel I'm becoming a very crotchety old lady.
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I shouldn't, I must try and see ki yeh kahan, but kasam se mujhe kuch samajh mein nahi aata hai.
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Even the music from the West, look at John Lennon and the Beatles and Bob Dylan and that whole
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school of poetry that was music. Now I can't metallic hard rock and
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I just don't understand it anymore. And I don't like where it's going. Thankfully,
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I won't be around to see the next phase. But yes, it is something that disturbs me. And
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I feel that these are all ways of documenting the growth of a nation or the decline of a nation,
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kahlo jo bhi. Iraji, I just want to say that if you are a crotchety old woman, I'm a crotchety
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old woman also with you. I agree with all of what you said, though I must say that hard rock and
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metal and all that, I do listen to new music and all of that. But you're 40 years younger.
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Yeah, that your general, 40, I'm not that young, but your general lament, I absolutely share.
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My next question is also a very broad question, which also sort of involves, you know, a side
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question about cinema itself, which is ki pehle jab aab baat kar rahi thi, aap kar rahi thi ki wo
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zamani mein sab log likhe pare the, and there was this common sense of values and there was
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no sense of bhedbhau and there was no sense of, you know, Hindu, Muslim, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And my feeling and a very sad feeling, kind of a sad discovery for me through the many
#
conversations I've had with various thinkers and historians and all that, is ki my view of the
#
world when I was growing up was wrong, that mai ek elite English speaking bubble mein tha,
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mujhe lagta tha ki, you know, that vision that my parents shared with you of, you know, a secular,
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tolerant, liberal India was a bit of a lie. Hum log bubble mein the, fringe mein the,
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and much of what we see around us today is not something new. Like Akshay Mukul ji,
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unki jo kitab hai Geeta Press pe, he brings out so beautifully how all of these issues
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like cow slaughter, love jihad, wo twenties mein the, that in our society, it was, it wasn't a
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fringe. The conservative element was very strong. The numbers of books a Geeta Press would sell
#
are absolutely staggering. And, and therefore I wonder that, is it that the times have changed
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or is it that our gaze has also to some extent shifted out of our circles? And we can now
#
look a little beyond because while I do agree ki ye sab jo hai, jo bigotry hai, sexism hai,
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the anti-Muslimness especially, all of this, you know, finds a more vociferous expression today.
#
But my sense is that they were always a strain. They were always, maybe they were hidden. You
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know, I use the phrase closet bigots. You know, eg zaman mein blok kahte nahi the, jo feel karte the,
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some things you're not supposed to say in polite society, that India is for the Hindus or a woman's
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places in the kitchen, aap kahte nahi the. But abhi there are so many voices like that,
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that you feel emboldened to say it. And then you feel emboldened to say it more vociferously
#
and then it becomes, you know, the roar of a mob. So what is your kind of sense of this? Because
#
there is a danger also of romanticizing a past. Absolutely, absolutely. I have to tell you,
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this is something that I was planning to talk about also, is that meri ek bahut achchi dost
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hain, who belongs to a very eminent family from Rajasthan. And she's a bahut padhi likhi, westernized,
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all that. And she married a Muslim gentleman jo ki taluk idar the, abad ke purane aur unki
#
ghar mein ghor parda hota tha. So when I met her, I asked her, I said ki suno tum loon ke hain parda
#
abhi bhi hota hai. So she said, Ira, humare hain parda sirf parda ka nahi hota hai, humare hain
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zubaan ka bhi parda hota hai. To what has gone from us is that zubaan ka parda. Hum sabki zabana
#
khul gayi hain. Pehle tum keh rahe ho, bilkul tha. I mean, you know, and also this kind of
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wokeness kahlo, or political correctness idiom, jo hum logon hai apni languages main
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introduce kiya hai, you have closed all the vents through which that came out and was dispersed
#
into a larger atmosphere, where it didn't linger.
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He did, bichari ne, kitna ganda kaam karta tha.
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Whatever, I mean, har tar hai ke words which we are now so sensitive about using openly,
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we were openly used even in the most liberal, educated, elite families, where they were very
#
conscious of not hurting anybody, right. So, wo jo zubaan ka parda hata hai hum logon ke,
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aap jaise aap keh rahe hain, everybody is now talking about, musalman aise hi hote hain, bhi
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pehle bhi keh te the, par ghar ke chaar diwari ke andar. You never said this openly.
#
It's, it came out of a script that she was co-writing with somebody from the BBC on,
#
you know, the people who suffer during partition and where they are and what happened to them.
#
Ek se ek marmi kahaniya hain usme and that famous wo jo tamas ki kahani hai, bheeshma sahani ki,
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that story is a true story and jo wo apne ladkiyon ko kaat ke, unko mar ke, koe me daal dete hain,
#
rather than have them fall into the hands of a Muslim family. And us family ka jo iklauta
#
bacha hua ladka tha, he is now a tangewala or was a tangewala, ab to marmoor gaya hoga,
#
bhogal mein and Urvashi managed to reach him. Uski jo kahaniya main bhulti nahi hu and he says ki,
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mujhe yaad hai, meri jo sabsi chhoti bhen thi, who he was most fond of, uski bahut moti gut thi,
#
chutiya thi. So, he says ki, she knelt obediently in front of my father to have her head chopped off
#
and because her plait was so thick ki pehli talwar mein wo nahi katti uski gardan, toh usne apni
#
chhoti aage kari so that the father could cut her neck. I can't even bring myself to imagine that
#
scene and yet it happened. We have all been in denial about the sheer brutality, so we have
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actually also buried so many memories. Then there is another story in that, yeh sab asli kahaniya hain,
#
these are true stories which they have documented. She talks about two women who were from a Dalit
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Hindu family. So, she says ki tum logon pe nahi, she said ki, because we were not, hum Dalit the nahi,
#
we had no wajood either in one religion or in another. So, she said ki, humko toh bahut khuri
#
because they managed to loot a whole lot of stuff from both houses and they came from Pakistan into
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India laden with the loot that nobody would stop them from bringing because they had no qualms
#
about looting Hindu homes or Muslim homes, both. So, there are tropes which have so much
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historical wealth embedded in them, which we have ek aur hai, this is a Hindu chap who says that
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you know, his whole family was wiped out by the Muslim neighbours
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and of course he has very horrible memories of that. But he, at the end of it, he takes a long pause
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and tells Urvashi or who has documented, ki hum logon ne bhi toh unke upar kitne atyachar kiye,
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wo hamari ghar aate the, unke liye barta nalag hote the, hum unko apne ghar ke andar paani tak
#
nahi dete the. Think of the insults we have heaped upon them, which we never even considered
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insults. These were things that Hindus did to Muslims. And so, the anger of those neighbours,
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he says, I can now, after so many years, understand where it came from. For a long time I wondered,
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humara toh itna bhai chara tha, itna roz hum saath khelte the, ek doosre ki ghar jate the,
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mothers used to sit and knit things together. Where did this anger and hatred come from? It
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came from those memories of, haan inhone. So, kya kya hum logon ne apne desh ke baare me,
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you know, be forgotten and things. And jaha tak, languages ki baat hain amit,
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this is something which I am so concerned about, sad about. Sad is a very mild word,
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you know, absolutely devastated by how many languages we are losing and we have lost.
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My mother, who was a polyglot, I don't know how many languages she could speak,
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at least six or seven fluently, she could read and write in all of them.
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Hum log jo the, hum log Hindi, English, toh kya bolte the Hindi, English because of school,
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and ghar mein kumaonne, always kumaonne, partly because we grew up in Almora and Nainita,
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so that was the language which we were comfortable with. But my parents insisted
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that we should speak only in kumaonne at home. We spoke English and Hindi fluently and,
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you know, I am quite proud of our capacity to speak in these three languages.
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Acha phir, when I got married, uske pehle, hum log jab Lucknow aaye toh abdi sikhhi,
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Allahabad parne gayi, toh thodi bahut wahan ki purabiya bhi humne sikhli, kaan mein pad gayi,
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that those lovely musical cadences of the purabiya lilt. Acha bahut pravasi Bengali thi,
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Allahabad was full of pravasi Bengalis, so I could speak and understand quite a lot of Bangla,
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partly because my mother had a very strong Bangla streak in her. Then I got married and went to
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Punjab. Panjabi nahi bolenge toh aapko, you know, you will have problems in life, so picked up
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Punjabi. Aur my husband was the SDM and so most of the civil cases which he had to try were between
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farmers over land, property disputes, etc. Toh ek wo sare land records toh Urdu mein thi,
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Punjab mein khas kar, because that was Punjab kiya, sabhi jagah pehle se Urdu mein hote the.
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So my husband felt ki ek reader hota tha, who was appointed by the state to read those documents.
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And my husband always felt ki wo dushht aajmein hai, yeh zarur koi paise leke
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unshant keh deta hai and because I can't read the script, so I have to believe what he's saying.
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So we got ourselves ek Master Mudgil karke the, he was a CPM man. Most masters, school masters up
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to that time, up to the early mid 70s, early 70s, were CPM people. So Master Mudgil used to come,
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comrade he was, to our house every morning. Ek ghanta wo humaye ghar mein aate the aur humko
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Urdu sikhate the. I can still haltingly kind of read Urdu, of course I've forgotten most of it
#
because I haven't kept up. But Urdu because of the Lucknow connection, the vocabulary was pretty
#
strong and my pronunciation was very clear. Uske baad hum jaha aaye Chandigarh aaye,
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toh my children were going to St. John's school where all of you went, sab hi parthe the.
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Aur wahan Punjabi Sanskrit nahi thi, toh Punjabi was the default third language you had to learn.
#
Toh un logon ko aada oda aada wala tha, wo sab hai ek honkaar, satnaam, vaheguru,
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from every gurdwara you heard that. So how many languages one has picked up, you know,
#
without even realising is something that I am amazed at sometimes by hamare generation
#
because we moved from place to place. Ab ek toh ye internal movement kam ho gaya hai,
#
because women are working, so they stay in one place where the children can be educated,
#
the husband can go around everywhere, but so their language exposure has become very limited
#
as compared to what ours was. Dusta this fitur about English medium, English medium, English medium,
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ab le dekh, ab toh Hindi bhi koi nahi bolte hain log. Perfectly Hindi speaking people,
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mai auron ki kya kahoon, my own children, my son who is married to a girl from Delhi,
#
they were school sweethearts, so she is a Sharma girl who spoke Hindi like all of us did,
#
but they have one daughter who speaks only, they live now in LA, she speaks only English,
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ho mujhe itna dukh hai, toh teen chaar generations mein hamne karib saath aath languages gama di hain apne,
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unke bache toh pata nahi kya bolenge, mujhe nahi malu, if they marry,
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angreys, usse shaadi karenge, ya jisse bhi shaadi karenge,
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Language loss is something because jo hamara oral tradition tha, especially in our
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Indian bhaasha languages, which was so rich in
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onomatopoeia, ton ton ton ghanthi bajti thi, wall clock jo ye sab jagya hote the, usme chaar ka
#
ghantha bajjiya bhaiya chalo utho, then nal kholo toh usme phan phan phan karke paani nikalta tha,
#
hawa chalthi thi toh phar phar phar karke chalthi thi, these was sounds which we had incorporated
#
into our language, you know, and they enriched your imagination, your vocabulary, and this is
#
when I translate the most difficult part for me to translate is how to translate onomatopoeia from,
#
because English is such a sad flat language, ki isme wo hai nahi registers jo ki hamari apni
#
bhaashaon mein hai, toh bhaasha khone se it's not just that you're only, you're losing a whole
#
universe of understanding of synesthesia, touch, smell, taste, I have to tell you some very funny
#
thing about Kumau, you know, hamare Kumau mein ghrana shakti, the olfactory sense is so highly
#
developed that a whole dictionary of sounds, of smells could be composed of the, you know,
#
various smells that are, for instance, there's one word which is called churan, which has no,
#
you know, sort of corresponding word in it, this is the stink of piss, which you get,
#
which every Indian knows, you go to any public toilet or anywhere, there is that churan ki baas
#
aati hai. Acha, then ek nahi hoti, jo gile toliye ki baas hoti hai, which again, how do you say,
#
Hindustan mein hoti hai, wo gile toliye ki baas, usko pahadi mein kehte hain, sumran,
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then there's one which is called hantaran, which is je baal jal yata hai aag mein,
#
that is called hantaran. Acha, tautan is when you've had too much to drink or cigarette bahut
#
pi hai, to tumhari jo shareer se odor yata hai, that is tautan. Aise kitne shabd hai, main tumhe kya
#
gina ho, I mean, this is not the space for me to talk about it, I was talking to Sheila Dhar once,
#
who was a marvelous person, unki kitabe hain, ek se ek bharia hain, on classical music, on people
#
she knew. So she used to tell me ki, Eera tum iska please banao, varna yeh sab kho jayenge shabd,
#
which is true. Ab hum jo pahadi log hain, jo aapas mein pahadi bolte hain, we can understand ki
#
ganain is that baas jo ki jab mooli ki sabzi banti hai ghar mein, that farty smell ya
#
cabbage jab banata hai, that is called ganain. Everything has, you know, instantly agar wo
#
keh raha hai ki aaj isme pitlain aayi hai, matlab tumhara jo chai ka paani tha, wo pital ke
#
patili mein boil hua tha, to pitlain. How many languages there must be where there must be
#
hundreds and hundreds of these sounds and smells which have been so finely nuanced and
#
documented in bol chaal ki bhaasha ki bahut dukh hota hai, yeh sochki hai, the next generation
#
will, and the generation after them will no longer have, what language do you dream in
#
if you only speak one language, is what I want to know. Hum logon ki to dreams bhi itne multi
#
coloured aur multi lingual hote the, my older sister was a champion dreamer, we know. So she
#
told me ki kal raat mujhe ek sapna aaya tha, ki Queen Elizabeth mere sapne mein aayi and she
#
asked me ki tum mujhe bahot thand lag rahi hai, please mujhe apni razayi dedo. So my sister told
#
hai ki, is razayi mein aaj vihaaf nahi hai, mai aapko kaise dedo. To all of us said pe
#
English bol rahi thi ki Hindi bol rahi thi ki, there are you know so many things that are
#
attached to your memories which are to do with language with a particular song you hear and
#
suddenly you're transported into your aural memory is so strong why is it that koi gaana ho
#
or koi aawaaz ho usse ekdum se tumhe yaad aajata hai kuch. Advertising jingles aap
#
bhul jaate hain but jo chutpan mein tumne suna hai na jo haak lagaate the bechne wale.
#
My mother had come once to visit me in Chandigarh to humara jo sabziwala tha, he used to come wo
#
thela leke rod sabhi sabzi bechne and he said ghiya lelo, bataho lelo, phalana lelo. So my mother
#
said yeh kaun hai etna vahiyat aadmeera. I said yeh sabziwala hai. So she went out with me
#
and she asked him tum kahan ke ho toh bolhe ki je hum UP ke hain. So my mother said tumko
#
sharam nahi aati UP ke ho ke iti gandi haak lagaate ho tum. Yeh kya bech rahe tumko samajhi main nahi
#
hai ghiya. Ghiya as you know in Punjab is lauki. So my mother told him tum mere Lucknow aao main tumko
#
sikhaungi ki kaise haak lagaayi jaati hai. Humara jo phal wala hai wo kehta hai yeh kela nahi
#
haathi ka daath hai. Yeh amrood nahi Haseena ka gaal hai wo che chitri wala amrood aata hai.
#
And so she said ki you know jisko nahi kharitni hoti hai wo bhi jaake dekhne. Laila ki unglia,
#
majnu ki pasliya, aisa toh bahut sabne suna hai. So I remember once my brother was in Bombay and wo
#
you didn't have access to you know fruits from another part of the world and so my brother,
#
my mother told phal wala Suleiman ki suno bhaiya ke liye maine chausa aam bhejna hai.
#
Toh jab achha chausa aayega mujhe lana, main bhejungi bhaiya ke liye. So he called out one day,
#
bahu ji bahut umda aam laye hain aaja yeh. She went down and she said hath yeh toh chausa nahi yeh toh
#
faizabadhi safeda hai, chausa kaise bana rahe ho toh.
#
Aur itna dam laga rahe ho, koi baat hai? Itna mahinga kabhi chausa humke nahi kharida.
#
So he said dekhye, humare, yeh toh humari badkismati hai.
#
Humare bab dadon ne kandhari, angoor aur anar bech rahe hain bahu ji. Yeh toh humari badkismati
#
hai ki hum aam jaisa phal bech rahe hain. Toh sharam ki maare gutli chhoti ho gayi hain.
#
Uspe aap dam laga rahe hain, toh gutli aur chhoti ho jayegi. My mother promptly brought the whole
#
great incident. That was the kind of lachhedar bhasha jo thi nahi, that comes only from
#
a rootedness in your own environment.
#
And I'm thinking aloud and thinking that like first of all I agree with you about English being
#
such a bland language like you know I teach a writing course and over there of course I speak
#
about onomatopoeia at one point I give English examples like a snake going hiss or thud you
#
know when something falls but it is not as colorful as our Indian languages are like you
#
said bhar bhar karke for example and I'm wondering that when we lose these languages we are not just
#
using losing a way of communicating we are losing number one kind of a way of life and a slice of
#
history and number two also a way of looking at the world like if everything that happens has a
#
meaning and a word for it if every particular smell has a word for it if the way the water falls is
#
expressed in the language like water falling then I notice those things more and I am then rooted
#
in those things also not just rooted in the culture and the society but also rooted in those little
#
things around us which otherwise we are sort of living in the cloud all the time and living in our
#
little black screens and we are not mindful we don't notice the natural world around us
#
we don't notice all of that so do you feel that losing languages is also like a personal loss
#
that we are losing a faculty also for noticing around us that we start thinking in a different
#
way that that glorious good fortune that Indians automatically enjoy of being multilingual just by
#
virtue of being where they are the more we lose
#
Also you know documentation taxonomy all this was unavailable to Indians because
#
the Hindu way of looking at life the Hindu here in in words I mean the
#
bharti way of looking at life was very different we never thought of itemizing every kind of tree
#
and but in our folk poetry in our folk songs in our folk sayings you if you've ever heard of
#
ghag and bhadari these were two big poets of eastern up
#
these were all kimvadanti and my mother's maid ramrati was a fun she was a completely illiterate
#
woman but she knew so much about
#
that was the level of minuteness with which they observed nature
#
I was listening to your podcast with Sara Rai I've just finished translating nabila
#
and we have a history of you know a personal history of friendship and
#
knowing each other very well I call her choti because that is what she was called
#
and her observations about trees and plants and butterflies and insects and frogs and snails
#
and snails I mean I'm amazed at how much she there's one lovely story of hers called atakama
#
and it's about this girl who's lying on a khatia inside a white room
#
white wall here there's a darar and there's a cheetah going up that that whole story is
#
about that cheetah and only those of us who grew up in similarly boredom filled summer afternoons
#
in small town India had the fursat to observe a cheetah for one hour climbing up falling down
#
disappearing inside that crack and then emerging again and yet there is so much
#
embedded in that story so much embedded in that story this is only one of the stories I
#
can't tell you how beautifully she has been able to you know to talk about those subjects which
#
as I said the story after which the collection is named nabila is about a family in nilhabad
#
who stay next to their house and they have a little girl who's
#
working for them she must be seven eight years old and this is part of a whole lot of Bangladeshi
#
immigrants who came in the wake of the 71 war into various towns and sort of went into the cracks of
#
a city nobody knew kachar ke wo jo ganga ke kinaari zameen thi wahan pe they were growing
#
watermelons and then these to nabila jo kahaani hai is actually about this little girl who comes
#
to play with sara and her friend and who knows and uski you know itni gap maarti hai wo about
#
her flight from bangladesh to ilhabad obviously her mother was raped and killed on the way
#
violently usme she's made a story of that then she says ki mere she weh pate kapde pehati hai
#
this couple who she works for are very cruel to her and she says mere paas ek suitcase hai usme
#
das firake hain jo mere mamu ne mujhe di hain aur wo sab unme asli sona ke gota laga hua hai or
#
reshmi but she wears that fatta frock always jiska wo hem udhda hota hai and these two little
#
girls who she comes to play with always think ki achha you know and then ke mere mamu ke ghar me
#
har ek cheez sona ki hai darwaze bhi sona ki hai you know things that children make up and behind
#
that is the sense of loss and the terrible loneliness and bereft life that she has without
#
her parents brothers sisters all of whom probably died on the way her father stays away and he had
#
given her to this couple to look after ki kamse kam khana to milega the old man in this house
#
is uh he's not very you know how shall i say he i think abuses her not sexually
#
so much but you know he feels and she's too young and too small to to understand all that
#
and then one day her father comes and takes her away and these two girls are hanging around to
#
say ki wo 10 suitcases kaha gaya hai me kya bata hoon kitni marmic kahani hai talks of child abuse
#
but it's talked about in a language of how children register these things and then how
#
they process them later this is exactly what i think you and i are trying to do through
#
podcasts like this that there's so much that we remember from our past lives which we never
#
thought of we never registered at a deeper level we just saw all these things now they connect
#
together and they become pieces of a puzzle that you're trying to create a whole story out of
#
there's a beautiful passage i want to read out uh you wrote this about your mother in your book
#
didi my mother's voice such a beautiful book and you wrote quote her sharp eyes saw the shadows
#
yet she resolutely refused to expose the people she loved the most to ridicule her criticism
#
i think she sincerely hoped she could transform the nature of her past with the power of selective
#
recall and it if she did not remember the unhappiness and doubts of her past they would
#
simply disappear so she blotted out the sun by holding up a thumb stop code beautiful lines
#
and you were talking about selective memory and and i was wondering when i read this and i have
#
wondered also in the past that you know do we sort of like i feel at one level we construct
#
ourselves by choosing our memories we are curating our memories and out of that we get
#
our sense of self and then at different points of time in our lives we can look back and remember
#
something else that perhaps was hidden you know that we were blotting out with our thumb and then
#
that you know gives a new dimension to our seeing and so on and i wonder with all of the writing
#
that you've done which deeply involves memory you know and which deeply involves not just your own
#
memory but also your mother's memory in all her memoirs and her non-fiction writing
#
i wonder what sense you make of that like you know are you do the memories that you look back on
#
do they make you a different person today than even 20 years ago when you might have been
#
remembering the same passage of time but remembering it differently you know so what are
#
sort of your thoughts on memory and you know how we sort of choose what to remember
#
you know that's a very interesting question and really you know we we were four siblings three
#
sisters and a brother and pushpesh and muktesh my aunt's children stayed with us so we were six
#
children in one house each one of us remembers that childhood differently each one of us
#
now i remember when i hear her or when she speaks and she speaks beautifully about her past and
#
whatever i keep thinking
#
her memory of my mother and my memory of my mother are two completely different things
#
her relationship with my sister my brother are different from my relationship with them
#
it's not that we are different people it's just that we have a natural way of selecting as you
#
say curating those memories now when i look back
#
abhi recently i was sent a book which another friend of ours from Chandigarh has written called
#
the secret city written by a person who was in the service and who was gay
#
everyone gave him a wide berth and you know sort of tittered behind his back and so on so he's
#
written this beautiful book called the secret city which is about how and he's been able to write it
#
only now when it has been decriminalized homosexuality otherwise you know he wouldn't
#
have had the courage to write it it's a secret city which is about how and he's been able to
#
write it only now when it has been decriminalized homosexuality otherwise you know he wouldn't have
#
otherwise you know he wouldn't have had the courage to write it it's a semi-autobiographical
#
semi-fictional book about the total brutality with which these poor people
#
this was a very privileged person and his friends were also some kind of prince link
#
these poor gay people who go at the dead of night to that central park in
#
Karnat place that was the place where they were hunting partners for the night and those who
#
used to eat the brutal sticks of the police many of these policemen were also bloody gay people who
#
hid their you know sexual preferences under the guise of morality and good
#
upholders of law and so on but had very cruel bestial lives
#
when I was reading that book and he had asked me to mention it in my column so
#
except for gutter language there was no name which was of any dignity that you were able to
#
describe a person who had a different sexual orientation this is equally true of you know
#
the way we describe genitalia or private parts either you have very highly Sanskritized words
#
which were from maybe the kama sutra or wherever and or you have this pornography
#
wale jo gutter press hoti hai wahan se jo nikhla hua hai wo beach ka jo poora ek lamba arsa tha
#
which was under Edwardian Victorian prudery kahlo ye colonial times mein you think that
#
Mughal baatshah log the ya the sultanate and whatever in logon me jo itna bhari
#
division of segregation of genders hota tha rampant tha hain homosexuality isma chukta hai ki jo
#
utni famously half jo kahaani hai that is about it and she was really pilloried and wo toon ki
#
himmat thi ki unha ne lekhliya ye lekin abhi tak in our daily world we do not acknowledge many things
#
which are not acceptable to us because we don't have words to describe them in
#
this is something that you know i feel very strongly and and about and how women in in villages
#
humare pahar mein to ye bahut hota hai amit that the men come wo ya to paltan mein chale jate hain
#
kamahi karne ke liye aur ya they come down to the plains to work because pahar mein kya hai you have
#
you know subsistence level farming very hard life thand itni parthi hai
#
you know ghar mein bache hain ye hai wo hai nahi hota hai toh ya toh aadmi log toh bhaag jate hain
#
pahar se aur ye aadne become alcoholic and just lie around and saara kaam aurthon ke upad thob dete hain
#
so maabaap ki dekhbhal bachon ki padhai likhai ghar mein khana peena rishte nibhana ye kya kaiten
#
jaanwaron ke liye ghas aur lakhdi gas toh up pochi hai pahar mein but you know the kind of hardship
#
that these women have had to endure and nobody has ever given them the khitaab they deserved
#
the honor they deserve for keeping families and homes together ek meri maa ki adhput kitab hai
#
Pradhini which was actually a part of a series of lekh that she wrote for I think
#
Sabtaik Hindustan it was called Jare Eka Ki hua kya ki about 71 or so there was a jailer a warden
#
of the women's jail in Lucknow who was a great bhakto my mother's writing and she told her
#
Shivani ji aap please aayiye humare logon se mil ye and ye jo rakshabandhan ke din unke haan
#
bada bhaari koi aayojan hota hai ki aap us din aayiye and so and she said aapko kitna milega
#
wahan likhne aur sochne ke baare mein so my mother went and it's a beautiful book matlab
#
main usko translate kiya hua hai aur jo kahania wahan pe hain jo because us zamane mein children
#
up to the certain age were allowed to stay with the mothers who were there can you imagine being
#
a child and being brought up in a place in a jail I mean what kind of people were we
#
because of that high mindedness but that kind of idealism never existed outside the
#
constitutional the constitution of India the reality of India was so different which because
#
as you say many of us grew up in elite families were privy to a different life we have never
#
looked at how the other half why do you think this government has suddenly become so popular
#
you can't keep burying your neck in the sand and saying how can people how can so and so you know
#
he's like us and how can he be a reactionary right-winger
#
there's a long history behind him
#
there was a time when the entire kumaon area was strongly congress which which part of north
#
india was not you tell me
#
what happened and their place has been taken by this very aggressive
#
who has been working and
#
what killed off the the congress workers was that they were getting money from some central
#
i'll tell you there's a lovely book which i would love to translate in key
#
which is again an untranslatable party word
#
a character here who's a comrade and he says he's soviet land or
#
would you pph publications within a complete works of marks complete works of whatever
#
and because he's so dirt poor and he has no money he wears a legot and he's a
#
objective ridicule wherever he goes
#
so he literally lives and breathes what he believes in what a beautiful image that is
#
and where do you have such people anymore nowhere so naturally why will anyone want to believe
#
an ideology which only praises poverty and which only tells you that life is hard nobody want life
#
is bloody hard in a tropical country anyway man you grow up in a village you have access to nothing
#
and then you're being told you suffer this for your country why and for how long why will people do
#
it why are these questions not answered or acted upon so what i'm saying is that there are certain
#
conditions for which we had no place in our vocabulary we had no place for homosexuality
#
we had no place for there is not a word in english that i can think of
#
which will bring out the pain of that word and that condition of these men that's why our folks
#
songs, they bring tears to your eyes. Shailendra has mined those, you know
#
how would they talk of anything else how do you translate or bring so there are certain
#
uh social realities for which we will have to go to the original sources
#
why don't you learn to read in hindi it takes time i had to teach myself to read in hindi
#
because english i read you know i can read a book in two days but hindi
#
what an eye-opener that has been for me you know that there are these young bright young people
#
writing men and women whose voices are so compelling and they're writing about a
#
contemporary kumaon which i have now lost touch with because i no longer live there but i am aware of
#
i i can't wait to read the book you mentioned i remember many years back my friend
#
vikram doctor had told me this story about how gay people are entrapped by mumbai police so i
#
think 15 years ago i wrote a column called the matunga racket where what the police would do is
#
they would use the internet and they would put out these like classifieds for to uh you know get gay
#
people and say you know come and meet me at this in the station and the gentleman would land up
#
and the cops would jump on him and then they would blackmail him and then they would you know
#
they'd go to an atm and they'd use his card and take out all his money and that kind of crap would
#
happen but even worse than that is you know the silent sort of struggle of years of not being
#
able to find love of being looked upon as whatever and i criminal the criminal yeah so i i also want
#
to double click on you know what you said about how there was no dignified word in the indian
#
language for it like when you mentioned i don't know if i should use this phrase on its family
#
show but g-a-n-d-u was the word that people used for describing a homosexual man yeah and and and
#
when you mentioned uh you know genitalia either high flunk sanskrit or vulgar word i thought okay
#
so there is nothing between lingam and laura yeah so when that car came that schoda had a car call
#
or some one of these cars yeah yeah they had to remove it i think from the market i think it's
#
still there i mean i see it once in a while but we used to all titter about it car names are very
#
funny i mean not only is there laura there's also another car which is kia and i'm like it's so
#
boastful like another car is swift like yeah so if you imagine different cars talking to you it's
#
interesting but i also want to then ask a related question about language which is that in the same
#
way as it is interesting that the words that are inner language will tell you something about the
#
society like the eskimos allegedly have 40 words for snow it is is it also the case that the words
#
that are not in a language also tell you something about society like if all these words are not
#
there it is almost because you're not supposed to speak of this stuff you know and that also tells
#
you about how people live and there's a danger of taking this thought too far because i had an
#
argument with a friend recently who was making that point and what i said was look at the great
#
german word schadenfreude which means to feel happiness at others misery now there's no word
#
for that in any language that i know but everybody you know that tendency is unfortunately all too
#
widespread so the absence of a word doesn't exactly mean that that phenomenon is not present
#
but the absence of language can also sort of tell you so many things so what are your sort of
#
there is an absent vocabulary and partly it is because those conditions are either not registered
#
or understood and also because prudery has excised them out of you know normal dictionaries
#
in this there's a book that my sister wrote as a spin-off from a project that she was doing
#
for the makatha foundation binal veena mazumdar and nila ben bhat these were three women who
#
were sent by the makatha foundation to write up a report on the state of women's health
#
availability in villages across western india or a particular area
#
she was talking to i mean the report of course is with the makatha foundation god knows whether
#
it was ever acted upon or not but she used to make notes as everyone does when you're traveling like
#
this and you you know keep it kind of log of your travels and she wrote a book called the other side
#
which she translated as oh ubiri into hindi and the other side is the english translation
#
usma she i remember two three things very vividly she says there was this woman doctor who she met
#
who was like baba amte decided to stay she and her husband used to run a little clinic in a remote
#
part of maharashtra and provide medical help to the villages who had no access to a regular
#
hospital and she told me now she said you know most women have terrible gynecological problems
#
ranging from a to z just making latin okay now suppose this poor girl who's a young
#
bahu in a house has a problem
#
these are you know women's issues which you're not allowed to talk about
#
she brings up the courage to speak to him he will talk to his bhabi or to his mother to say
#
bhai iska ye problem hai kya karein when she's sent to the hospital she has to go with a man
#
so either the husband if he's there agar wo bhi gaun se kahin chala gaya hai
#
to she has to go with her sasur or her jait or her devar
#
ab bichari waha pahachti hai clinic mein and this lady doctor asks ki tumhe kya taklif hai
#
she can't say it in front of that sasur or jait or whoever so she says
#
then you have to decode then finally this doctor will tell the because she's a woman and therefore
#
he can you know trust her she'll tell him ki aap zara bahar baithi hai and that's when that poor
#
woman is able to tell her about what her problem is now can you imagine ki wo that long period
#
of silent suffering which aadniyon ke toh agar peth mein dard hota hai maar poora ghar uchal jata
#
hai but these poor women have no way of even articulating their pain forget anything else
#
so the vocabulary is itself so daunting that you know you can't i used to very interesting
#
i have to tell you i used to subtitle films for an american company once long ago
#
from english into hindi and these were for the limited viewing of groups of community
#
indians who had no access to english and they were the most horrendous because they were the
#
cheapest films going for buying on these network who used to get them translated
#
itni violent aur bhenkar toh wo filme hoti thi and the language was full of expletives the f word
#
was used 20 times in a sentence now how far can you you know go with providing alternatives
#
to that because f word is used in english as a full stop for anything it's a punctuation
#
it's a punctuation so i got myself a dictionary of american slang but naturally that was not meant
#
for subtitling things and there was something about masturbation in so i asked my mother who
#
was visiting us my mother in law who is a very holy gentle sweet old thing she was sitting there
#
she said that is where because you know most people have only access to agony aunt columns
#
and the advice he gives is really over the top advice and things
#
but what i'm saying is that you know even for something which is so either you have
#
this has to math on kind which is derived from sanskrit or you must be having words which are
#
pornographic or taken from the gutter so normal conditions which teenager doesn't do this or
#
you know it's something that you need to open out an air a little so that children don't develop
#
some terrible guilt over it but that's how to be what we are i mean i'm giving you extreme
#
examples of sexual deviance but even for you know the way my heart is broken so it's okay
#
heartbreak happened but sheeladhar used to say that these kashmiris have strange diseases
#
this is how acidity or whatever must be described but there's no
#
convergence between one language and another there are certain conditions which
#
you just have to as you say shut and shroud is a lovely example of many words which we use now
#
without hesitation because they've got incorporated and this is what that's how our
#
languages grew there are so many words conditions phrases which we have imported from a range of
#
people from turkish from persian from urdu from portuguese from french from
#
you know i must first berate you for referring to masturbation as sexual deviance
#
yeah yeah because you know then i have been frequently a deviant
#
and one of the women reading that left a comment to the effect that it's so wonderful that men can
#
talk so openly about this and what i just you know the thought that struck me when you said
#
ki you know your mother didn't know the word for it and your mother-in-law had read it in a column
#
knew it but wouldn't admit it wouldn't admit it is ki you know it strikes me that also in that
#
generation and even today but much more so in that generation that men and women didn't really talk
#
to each other this is not the kind of stuff they would ever have discussed or spoken about and it
#
it's always a sort of silent thing like when i read the letters between my parents whatever
#
i have come across and i read them 20 30 years after they happened i realized that they were
#
essentially two people living alone in the same house that you know there is that kind of
#
communication sort of simply isn't there which is which is so sad so on that reason is of our own
#
on that note let's take a quick commercial break and you know feed ourselves
#
hey the music started and this sounds like a commercial but it isn't it's a plea from me
#
to check out my latest labor of love a youtube show i am co-hosting with my good friend the
#
brilliant ajay shah we've called it everything is everything every week we'll speak for about
#
an hour on things we care about from the profound to the profane from the exalted to the everyday
#
we range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
#
the world please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our youtube
#
channel at youtube.com slash amit varma a m i t v a r m a the show is called everything is everything
#
welcome back to the scene in the unseen i have the great joy today of sitting here with
#
it feels like a slice of my childhood has come back and you know but of course we are resuming
#
from a very different place but speaking of childhoods you know i i want you to tell me
#
about you know what your growing up years were like from your perspective like i remember when
#
i invited you to the show you said ki dekho amit vrinal ne toh bata diya apni kahaani push
#
pesh ne toh bata diya abhi mai kya bataungi but as you later agreed with me i think all lives
#
are different and i'm absolutely dying to sort of hear it from your from your mouth
#
let me start with a funny ajit joke which i once heard ki ajit ke paas robert uska jo
#
henchman hai favorite wo jata hai he said ki boss mere triplets main hai toh unke naam kya rakho
#
toh ajit said ek ka naam rakho peter ek ka repeater aur tisre ka phu manju
#
he said peter aur repeater toh samajh mein aaya boss ye phu manju kya bala hoti hai
#
he said silly boy tum yeh nahi jaanti ki duniya ka har tisra bacha chinese hota hai
#
so i was the phu manju in my family me tisri beti thi so you can imagine in 1951 when i was born
#
in a very patriarchal kind of brahmanical house my birth was not exactly greeted with joy
#
and but i have no recollection of being treated badly or whatever and if there were a certain
#
like my nani was very partial to my mamu's children and one of the daughters was about the same age
#
as i was her mother was very unwell those days and in a sanatorium so my grandmother was looking
#
after her naturally she had a very soft spot for her uske aur mere beech mein there was always a
#
you know active discrimination isko kehte hain lekin i took it ki bhai us bichari ki maa nahi
#
my mother used to say us bichari ki maa bimaar hain uske you know and she and i till date have
#
very happy memories of being together so there wasn't that thing about a third daughter
#
but girls and boys were not actually treated like they are in other societies
#
but i was between my older sister and ranal there's just about two two and a half years of
#
age difference between ranal and i there's a five-year difference and between my elder
#
sister and me it's seven seven and a half years and so and by the time i came became conscious
#
of whatever was around me both ranal and my sister occupied uh not sisterly spaces but you
#
know some ranal of course was the star of our family she was always an extraordinarily bright
#
and very moody person always and difficult to come close to but feared rather and admired
#
rather than loved if you know what i mean my elder sister binu who was actually the softest
#
gentlest person and who really mothered me and my brother i still regard her as a kind of
#
late mother so we grew up more with each other than with my parents
#
somehow once the children were born it became the wife's responsibility or the mother's
#
responsibility to bring them up take care of their homework their everyday whatever
#
my father was a very distant and very feared man and as my brother used to say
#
that babu's writ was like the constitution of england it was never written but observed
#
meticulously uh so the biggest uh this thing was
#
so my father poor man he got distance partly because of this aura of discipline and whatever
#
that he had around him and also because my mother was such an outgoing noisy loud person that she
#
naturally created a kind of world around her where everyone became part of that so we had a
#
kind of secret life with my mother which was different from the life that so if my father
#
was in a bad mood or whatever we sort of tiptoed around and i remember very distinctly that
#
the reason why i think i talk so much is that we had a very silent house when my father was around
#
there's a story in that memoir which i have written we have translated my mother's story
#
called bandh ghari i can't tell you how true it is of the kind of life that we had in my childhood
#
okay my father couldn't stand filmy ghani lara lappa music
#
zor se chalna darwaze bhatkana chini dahi me chini ki karkar ki aawaaz bhi unko
#
he used to look at he never said anything but when he looked at you you just swallowed the
#
chini without masticating it so there was i now feel very bad because we never really even tried
#
to find out why he was whether it was because he was a grieving widower who took a long time to
#
get over his his first wife's death i don't know whether he was just overshadowed by my mother's
#
eminence and her reputation i don't know whether it was because he grew up in a motherless home
#
with a father and an older brother i don't know what it was he never spoke of it and i now realize
#
that later on when we got married and had our own children i saw a very different father you know
#
who was very fond of the children who would interact differently with us was very indulgent
#
as a as a child all i remember amit was that we were in any case as in a middle-class family
#
with a limited income there were very few things that you could get us
#
so we devised our own entertainment we were all voracious readers
#
that was the limit of our this thing for reading and that i must say something that i'm
#
deeply deeply grateful to both my parents for my father of course was very high-minded
#
but my mother had a very eclectic taste in things okay there was also a very strict
#
eye kept over what we were reading and much much later i was almost at the end of my school
#
i remember mrenal was in her b.a so in those days sons and lovers not sons and lovers sorry
#
lady chatterley's lover was banned if you remember so one of her classmates had managed to smuggle a
#
copy somewhere and she had passed it on to me you know so during summer holidays my sisters were
#
we were all sleeping in one lying down in one room so they were talking and my sister was telling
#
and i said oh i have to read this book because even though i didn't know what it was about and
#
why it was banned or whether it was banned at all i managed to
#
and there was only one little bit where the gardener and she have this whatever encounter
#
so i went and boasted about it in school because everyone was reading love romantic stories or
#
whatever and i told this friend of mine you know i've read sons and lovers she told her cousin who
#
was the girl who had lent it to my sister so that cousin told my sister do you know that your sister
#
who's in class eight or nine has read it already
#
and i've never forgiven mranal for telling my mother and my mother for slapping me for reading
#
a book which is a bloody classic but that was the kind of house and my mother said
#
Babu was the ultimate you know
#
Babu would be very upset
#
all of us had to stand there and greet him and whatever
#
daylight saving hours was so important to us so in the mornings we used to get up very early
#
so that was our lunch break and in the evening when we came back from school did our homework
#
and went out to play my mother used to say
#
so we had three religions whose outlines were what defined our life for us
#
durga sapti shati ka paath
#
but that's also such a wonderful way of defining a way of life i can't think of a better way of
#
the kind of open secular knitted community that we that we worked in or lived by those those markers
#
in Allahabad our house was on the road on mahatma gandhi mark which was the road that used to lead
#
to the sangam when it's bitterly cold everyone comes for a mark because that is when you're
#
and so every morning there was one
#
and his cycle used to pass our house between five and five thirty in the morning
#
and the cycle which needed oiling very badly used to be you could hear it from quite a far away
#
distance and he used to always say
#
because that was the part he was running like a book
#
so my sister who's room used to face that road she used to say
#
now these are the memories which i have of growing up in a house which was
#
noisy and silent by turns as far as my mother's thing with the noisy house
#
and when my father was around everything was silent we spoke in hushed whispers we
#
with bharti which we used to all love so much you know and actually that was such a
#
one day i don't know whether it still comes up on the radio
#
what was it called something for
#
was a great musical this thing for us
#
which was south indian music
#
so there's one song which even now i remember and it went
#
god knows what language and whether these are the words but this is what i remember
#
and my husband used to think
#
and both of us sang it we remembered those opening bars of that song
#
and because these were such you know hidden pleasures which we had to steal from a very
#
strict household run by my father that they've stayed with me forever
#
of dramas so the radio defined a lot of our and we had one counter radio but then he my brother
#
when my son who was a sophisticated from delhi he used to come to world date with you friday
#
now these were the sort of joyful memories you can imagine how sad our life was if this
#
was the only the other thing i remember very clearly is that girls were guarded like gold
#
again there were certain areas of the town i'm talking not of nainitar and almoda but of lakhanau
#
which were different territories all together where there were certain areas where you were
#
not allowed to go why i don't know but there were certainly very rough areas
#
you know things like that which i took my cousin took me on her amit's cousin actually took us on
#
a round of the city which i had lived in for so long and never seen in entirety we lived in the
#
civil lines area and a very sort of like latin's delhi a very privileged enclave where only
#
lived so our memories of childhood the only acquaintance we had was poor relatives
#
and i must say in this region
#
and as in all clans if one person did well everyone came to their house so whether
#
and some of them were so shamefully dressed that you know and they challenged in the department of
#
sartorial elegance shall i say so they would wear keds with
#
be and you know you felt a little ashamed to say
#
i don't feel my mother ever treated or amit's mother particularly she was a
#
wonderful person and i think that has remained with us that
#
you do not judge people by the wealth they have and there's a certain amount of how shall i say
#
contempt you have for people who have only money and nothing else we've seen it now you know we've
#
seen how austerity and simple living my father's favorite thing was simple living and high thinking
#
so now it is high living and simple thinking and i much prefer that even though i you know felt
#
very constrained by the kind of discipline that we had to abide by but yes it gave us the values
#
that we have grown up in and i've never been because we all were good at studies the fact that
#
we didn't have a car we didn't have a fridge we didn't have so many things never you know you
#
felt slightly sheepish about it but
#
who married came from very wealthy homes who've married into wealthier homes
#
what have you done with your mind have you done anything of that education that you and i got from
#
the same school that is something which you know the value for education and the fact that i think
#
we valued and felt deeply grateful for our parents for living really really austere lives
#
so that they could give us the best education that they could afford that is something which
#
i really admire about that generation i love the metaphor you kind of drew of the day which is
#
bookended you know parts of the day bookended by the different religions and there is this
#
beautiful quote by annie dillard how we spend our days is how we spend our lives and to you know
#
transplant that on a nation instead of people i think that hey you know maybe if we spent our
#
days like that i wish we had spent our lives like that it's i want to ask you about something else
#
now and one of the things that i loved about your beautiful book i mean there are so many layers and
#
so many things i like but what really drew me in was how gradually you peel open these layers of
#
both your mother and your father what often happens is that through childhood and well into
#
adulthood and for some of us for all our lives you think of your mother and your father as a fixed
#
thing you know a mother is a mother there's a particular role that is being played a father
#
is playing a particular role in this case you know you compared him to christopher plumber in
#
sound of music stern such a better don't move etc etc and then later as the book progresses you open
#
up layers to their personalities and we see so much so i want to you know read out a couple of
#
bits one about your dad and one about your mom where about your dad like you pointed out he was
#
widowed early and his first wife binu ji's mother died when he was 25 and later you have this moving
#
passage where you ask binu at one point i do you have any photographs of her and she takes out a
#
photograph and you look at the photograph and you realize that you know that the woman in this died
#
when she was 25 this is a young woman you're looking at and you write i cannot tell you what
#
it was like to see my father standing next to her wife who was not didi the photograph blurred
#
before me and came back into focus again i look carefully at the face of the woman who had been
#
an unspoken ghost in our lives for a lifetime no one spoke of her no one dared to ask what she was
#
like after i got married i heard of her from my mother-in-law who had been friends with her
#
in their girlhood she was a spirited young thing i was told and your father and she faced such
#
opposition from his family before they were married she loved eating red chilies and sipping hot tea
#
with them the day before she got married she ate so many raw apricots that she got the runs and
#
fainted halfway through the wedding your father had to carry her home stop good and you know you
#
go on to talk about how you know when your mother then marries your father it is almost like marrying
#
someone who is still in the process of grieving of not being the main focus of his attention and
#
perhaps love and not knowing how that changes and kind of having to live with that and i wonder about
#
your father's interior life through all these years and how he kind of manages and you also
#
speak about how your mother almost as a reaction to your dad being like this turns to writing and
#
turns to expressing herself in that way to the extent that you know the kids almost seem
#
peripheral sometimes she's doing her thing but they're not peripheral always you know there's
#
this moving para right at the end where you write that you know at one point she's staying with you
#
eases up worrying eternally when i am not with you all you all are with me all the time and you know
#
and i love the way that these layers opened up you know for the reader for me reading the book
#
and i want to ask you how it was for you through your journey these layers opening up for you
#
because in the beginning when we are kids it is a stereotype you know you'll resent your dad or
#
be scared of him and you will you know find your mom funny in some ways and etc etc
#
and then gradually over the years that sort of changes so take me through a bit about how
#
your relationship with them evolved and what you began to understand of their interior worlds
#
you know in many ways i have just not been able to write another book
#
after that memoir i wrote to my mother because so much of her and me and my family came into that
#
that i have very few reserves now left inside me to bring out more the biggest challenge
#
always when you're writing about your own family or writing a kind of memoir or biography or
#
something is how much can you reveal without turning into a critic so you preserve your love
#
and your respect for them in your life at the same time you can't be untruthful about many of
#
the flaws which now appear to you as things that held you back or created some kind of a you know
#
a condition in you that you are unable to hump over years ago soon after this big book came out
#
i was on a trip to johannesberg some junket or the other about jubita and on one of the
#
panel discussions there were three of us there was elizabeth sisulu who was
#
gandhiji's colleague as you know in south africa in the enc their daughter uh daughter-in-law
#
elizabeth sisulu there was me right who had written on my mother and there was gandhiji's
#
great-granddaughter you know gandhiji had three sons uh harilal who we've all heard about the
#
the son who went completely out of hand devdas gandhi who was uh gopal gandhi and rajmohan gandhi
#
his father tara bhattacharya's father and the third son who was ramlala i think he was called
#
ramnath or something i forget his name who was the son that gandhiji left behind in south africa
#
to look after tall story farm their daughter's daughter is a historian who teaches or used to
#
teach in capetown university a very well-known historian who had written on gandhi's forgotten
#
son because that son nobody remembered and he i don't think he ever met up with his parents
#
after they left him can you imagine you know that story haunted me and each one of us spoke
#
about that we were writing about people who had enormous person i mean gandhiji
#
man who became a mahatma living sort of worshiped person in his own lifetime and yet he had flaws
#
enormous flaws as elizabeth sisulu had stories to tell about her husband and his relationship
#
with his father because once a parent mostly a father becomes so big and so important he
#
ceases to be a father this is a story of home after home in india where fathers become so
#
focused on their careers and their jobs and their whatever life they're leading that they forget
#
we have children who we are responsible for i would love to write a book on kasturba this is
#
something which is one of those books which i've always you know like the 50s and 60s
#
decade it's another book which stays inside me maybe one day it'll come i don't know too late now
#
but what what fascinated me about kasturba and i'm sorry if i'm deviating from my own childhood
#
connected in some way there's a picture of my grandmother my nani ama we used to call her
#
in my puja it used to be in my mother's puja and so when i inherited all her other things i
#
took this picture and put it in my room in my puja and my grandmother has a remarkable you know
#
she's looking stern and yet soft how that is possible i don't know largely because she had a
#
large soft body and things and she looks directly at the camera most women of that age never did
#
direct portrait kind of thing and i thought to myself well this was a woman who was widowed at
#
40 my grandfather died when she was just 40 they had nine children he died in bangalore very far
#
away from him almora because he was on that war cabinet he was working there he suddenly he was
#
diabetic he had a carbuncle he just died and my grandmother in fact ranal has written a very
#
beautiful piece which she wrote in mainstream on ama and where she says that ama told her that
#
that one night when she had to take charge of his body arrange for his funeral the cremation
#
whatever all my tears dried up and went into my head and i my head turned white overnight
#
that is you know the kind of shock that she had absorbed after that what else was there to lose
#
so she brought this huge circus of no
#
and then for the next 50 odd years 40-50 years she stayed in almora didn't move out at all
#
the world moved around her but she's just stood stayed in that one room in her just shut up rooms
#
which were no longer in use and retreated into one cell and i was thinking how similar is that
#
life from gandhiji's from kasturba who was uprooted from south africa without consulting
#
can you imagine to leave a piece of your heart your first born child you leave behind
#
in a telephone with her she knew that she might never see him again and she left him behind and
#
i don't think she ever forgave gandhiji for that violation of her mother's love that he forced her
#
to in gandhiji's own autobiography he was a very truthful honest man he's spoken about how he turned
#
her out of the house one day when she refused to clean the latrines remember in south africa
#
then how he gave away all her jewelry and she said please let me keep at least one
#
sone ki cheez each from the sons no he said he gave all her jewelry away and they went and
#
started staying in wardha in an ashram she came from a fairly affluent background
#
without any kutram or nothing she was asked to take charge while he had his experiments with truth
#
he slept next to young girls and did all that how do you think she felt he had all these foreign
#
beauties who came and became you know his acolytes and i'm not saying that there was anything wrong
#
in that but as a woman i can feel the outrage that she must have gone through and how she
#
silently without saying a word stood his entire courage he says later that i learned how
#
concept i learned from my wife who could dig her heels in and you know decide not to give an inch
#
but her contribution to the national movement is not ever acknowledged ever acknowledged
#
everyone treats her as gandhiji's wife mrs mahatma but that she must have had the most
#
terrific time adjusting to all his strange fads hello yeah whatever that nobody ever talks about
#
so i remember once i was talking to him in our iic library i
#
it's such a hagiographic account of you know a kind of
#
idealized account of how she you know was his strength not true not true at all it doesn't it
#
seems like such a reductionist approach to what complexity that woman had inside her
#
so i was talking to gopal gandhi once he and i would i said you know he had liked my book on
#
my mother very much and i told him i said
#
i grew up in a generation after bapu and bha had died and i am not related to the family besides
#
he said that's not a book that you know that's an entirely fictionalized account of what he thought
#
bha was all about and he says all of us were very small when bha died but if somebody from outside
#
the family he said she wrote it in gujarati i said i don't read gujarati he said so how
#
difficult is it it's written in dev nagiri upar shiro rekha nahi hotiye baaki it's all
#
you can understand itna to tum seekh logi gujarati parthe parthe do teen aur then he said also that
#
he had a lot of letters which were private letters which he said you know later on of course this
#
became part of the harijan trust which he was saying and before he says before the hundred
#
years after gandhiji's death that up to that point the trust is
#
the estate belongs to the trust he said after that i have no control over what will be published who
#
will be there that i was so tempted amit i can't tell you and i must say i developed cold feet
#
i must have spoken about it to somebody and that somebody spoke to somebody else who's written a
#
book a fictionized thing on kasturba gandhi she's written this but i haven't read the book
#
but she belongs to a completely different how shall i school of writing you know where which is
#
the popular kind of pop biographies that you i haven't read the book so i can't speak about it
#
but his earlier book which was on rk dalmia her grandfather it's called daddy dearest and it's
#
almost a sort of an ugly rk dalmia was a very complex man as you know and he and he married
#
six times he had six wives and many children and whatever he was a peculiar kind of a genius
#
in his own way but also a man who was very complex and had all kinds of dark areas in his
#
a generation of women it's not just kasturba it's this entire generation of women
#
who paid such a heavy price for the glory of their husbands look at kamala nehru what a
#
wretched life she had i mean you get glimpses of that life in other people's writing one of
#
the reasons why indira gandhi hated vijayalakshmi pandit was also because she saw the crudely that
#
was inflicted in on her mother because she didn't come from the same glorious
#
family that motilal nehru nehru came from
#
if i believed in astrology i would say
#
so you have to choose between a happy family and a fulfilling public life and most of them were
#
forced or preferred to choose a fulfilling public life leaving their private lives in
#
a complete shambles indira gandhi and pharaoh's gandhi had a wretched life together so many you
#
look at anybody have charles and diana hundreds of lives abroad you know who everyone thinks oh
#
this was an ideal couple no they were not bill clinton hillary clinton if she were not as much
#
as an ambitious person that she turned out to be later she should have just kicked him out of his
#
over life any self-respecting woman would do that and she'd be a better woman for it but what i'm
#
saying is that you know there are those pitfalls that you fall into if you're writing about such
#
hugely important public figures my mother was not fortunately in that category and i began i never
#
thought that i was writing on her actually i began this as a project to translate some of the short
#
stories that i have always loved just to introduce her to another readership because when i first
#
came to delhi and as you know delhi and all this git pit english world nobody reads hindi
#
somebody once asked me i believe your mother was a writer or is a writer i said yes what is her name
#
i said shivani oh i don't think i with what what does she write on i said she writes in hindi
#
he said oh as though you know i'm at the why am i wasting my breath on finding out who she is
#
turned his back and walked off and i said f you i mean i don't need your this thing so after my
#
mother died i decided to translate something at least my own children will be able to read what
#
them when i was translating those stories i remember the stories behind those stories
#
and i thought well that's a you know an interesting discovery and i told my husband
#
that so he said why don't you write a memoir where she's a character in her own world
#
then it puts the distance between you and her then you're not writing as a daughter you're
#
writing as a reader but who also had access to a personal life of hers that's how that book
#
came to be and that was the distance that i had to keep i mean there were many things about her
#
which i was able to write at the most difficult chapter was the one on didi and babu which i
#
wrote last and bino when i wrote the chapter on bino later she and i gave it to everyone to
#
read i said bhaiyya agar kisi ko baad mein koi problem hoga aur mujhi court me le jaoge to pehle
#
hi parke mujhi bata do ki isko nikaal do isko khatam karo bino rang me up and said eru thank you you
#
brought me out to the closet she said all these years i was unable to ask those questions about
#
my own mother because i felt this was so disloyal to didi who was my own mother she said mai kabhi
#
nahi puchh bhai ki wo unki death anniversary kab hai ki unke naam ka mai kuch daan to kar sakun
#
and i realized then that you know if you write sensitively and if you write with a certain amount
#
of restraint about those but you have to write the truth you can't duck away or distort the truth
#
so in one sense memoirs and biographies are the most difficult because either people then become
#
worshipful and you know hagiographic because hum logon ko to particularly in the east
#
we have this thing about being very respectful of our parents unke samne you know
#
aabaz unchi nahi karke bolna never say to them what they need to hear because that's never done
#
so that cripples your capacity to really understand so my childhood memories are different from
#
minal's minal was because minal was different from me she saw the world differently and maybe
#
hamara temperament bhi different isi le hua because i chose to not care about those things which
#
i didn't like she on the other hand her whole gender obsession with questions of gender comes
#
very much from the world that iski ek kahaani hai kaun ladkiyaan which is such a beautiful story
#
and it's written about my grandmother and her treatment of girls despite the fact that it was
#
the daughters who looked after her and the daughters who did everything for her her own
#
sons betrayed her at every level her own husband died young but hai kuch hu zaman mein nahi tha na
#
at one point you wrote beautifully about how you know shivani ji bled into her plots in the same
#
kind of way that she bled into her children that a part of her was in her stories but a part of her
#
was also in her children and you write that after her death you know it seemed that she had lodged
#
herself in your head that she was a limb that the way sometimes if a limb is amputated there's a
#
phantom arm there or whatever and and she was kind of a phantom there and this is something i think
#
many people realize as they grow older that they are that part of their parents are in them there's
#
a beautiful song i'll link from the show notes by peter cat recording company called remain in me
#
just exactly about this so tell me a little bit about that because just writing about them
#
and entering their sort of their three-dimensional lives as opposed to the single dimension one
#
might have viewed them in earlier you know what did what did it make you recognize about yourself
#
you know do you at some points have to reconcile to you know parts of you you know also coming from
#
there and parts of you being very eternally different perhaps difficult to say because you
#
know one doesn't when you're instinctively reacting to something you're not thinking
#
it's your instinct and that instinct is formed by many areas of which nurture is certainly one one
#
is an essential nature that you were blessed with or cursed with and the other is the the kind of
#
nurturing that was done of you i think all of us siblings understood that my mother was a wonderful
#
person to be around and who gave us all a great childhood and was a wonderful wonderful teacher
#
but there was also a part of her that she never never spoke about that is the one that she bled
#
into her plots and that's why this memoir needed to be written in order for me to even understand
#
it's every layer that you uncover brought to me another side of her another aspect of her
#
personality some of which i can see in my in me some of which i can see in my brother some i can
#
see in my sisters so each one of us has you know uncovered or unpeeled that onion differently
#
keeping some and discarding some that's the only way i can explain how but the fact that it's no
#
like i i think i've also written like that just like alfred hitchcock always had himself in any
#
one frame of every film that he made even if he was part of a crowd he made that little uh cameo
#
that yeah yeah that cameo kind of appearance my mother too i think you know she couldn't bear to
#
be separated from the world that she was creating and a lot of the times the world she created was
#
the world inside her so it's a you know it's a cyclical thing your and i think a lot of the
#
first novels are always autobiographical but subsequent novels are also uncovering more and
#
from your own life that is actually the only life you know best so part of your life will always be
#
part of your fiction whatever it is you mentioned the book on again i i strongly implore you to
#
write it uh like you know so i hope you do it and it struck me that you know when you mention the
#
hagiography written of her it struck me that the way you described that is really the only way i've
#
heard of her in the public imagination which is defined by the contribution she is bringing to
#
a man's life and this alas is how too many women are sort of described or defined and even you know
#
even the praiseworthy you know even when men are trying to praise women they'll praise her as a
#
mother as a sister as a whatever it's in relation to a man you are nurturing a man or etc etc and
#
and one of the things i realized when i you know hear stories about women of the first half of the
#
20th century you know whether it's you know mukulika banerjee was on the show she spoke of how
#
her mother and her sister i think once decided to you know take a tonga from one town to the other
#
entirely on their own just two girls something like that which i've found was wild and nidalji
#
spoke about you know how shivani ji she had an argument with her once kia why are you so concerned
#
about the food being hot for your husband you know why does it matter to you so much and she
#
was like no it does and i'm thinking that you know from today's modern feminist lens
#
these were you know subdued women and they didn't fight back and all that
#
but i'm thinking that there is a kind of lived feminism which is there that within the constraints
#
that they have they are living full lives they are fighters they are fighting they are you know
#
doing all of that and and that sort of interior life is not at known anywhere near as much as
#
written about as the lives of men where you know so i i think of you know kasurba and
#
mohandas and i think that it was a terribly bad fortune to be married to a great man quote unquote
#
where the male ego divides everything maybe it is better to be married to a mediocre man who
#
doesn't think so much of himself perhaps you're right i think so because if when i look at so many
#
women who could have achieved so much you know and because they were sacrificed at the altar of good
#
wifeiness or motherhood or living up to all those things in my own case i mean i came
#
i started teaching at the punjabi university started a research scholar and then became a
#
lecturer i taught for some 14 15 years there and my husband decided to come to delhi as
#
to join the center he wanted to come to the center never once do i remember and mind you he's a very
#
good human being i'm not saying that he's done this selfishly it never occurred to me to him
#
to ask me are you ready to also go i had a career i had a job and in fact i think i
#
was earning more at that point than he used to earn as whatever he was deputy secretary
#
so i my dear i left my job had i taught for 20 years i would have got a pension for life
#
when i went to the department firstly everyone said no no you can't go you take leave without
#
pay come back i said no it's not fair because when i'm not going to come back to chandigarh why
#
should i deprive somebody else from being able to find employment here so i went to the clerk
#
who was our department and i gave him i said he looked at it he tore it up he said
#
i told him i said i have to write that letter again you go because i am leaving but that was
#
the reaction that you know they felt you are such a popular teacher you are so fond of teaching how
#
can you i came to delhi we never got a house we were living in panjab bhavan ka ek kamra for one
#
year finally we found this ancient old house on rouse avenue long story i mean that is it took me
#
two three years to find something delhi university was not an option because they do not entertain
#
anyone who's come from outside delhi university and i didn't want to i i just didn't feel
#
comfortable in the kind of environment that the delhi university had somewhere i think one carried
#
thing of low self-esteem also having come from ilahabad university and panjab university even
#
though these were fine universities in our time however that was my problem then i started working
#
part-time in the afternoons because that was the time when the kids came back from school
#
from two to four i used to work in the indian express office as a kind of sub
#
job getting some rubbish money whatever then a friend of mine
#
they said why don't you join us there assistant editor was leaving work there then it you know
#
then i entered into more and more things but it took me so many years to have the courage to work
#
a full-time job even in the university in chandigarh where i was teaching because it
#
was a postgraduate campus we had only half a day's work so i used to drop my children to school
#
come to the university go back pick them up give them lunch and then be there for them in the
#
afternoon you know but my own needs and my own qualifications came right at the bottom no i mean
#
it took me years to become the writer that i had always wanted to be perhaps if i had started young
#
enough i may have gone into fiction writing or whatever it i've never had that as an option
#
to and now i've got so many voices in my head that in translation really i'll come to translation
#
in a bit how that destroys your own capacity to write as yourself so what i'm saying is that
#
when it can happen with me when i had such a supportive husband very fine in-laws every
#
opportunity why would anyone say
#
pulling back constantly that good mothers don't do this good wives don't do this good daughters
#
in law don't do this everyone else's needs became more and more important than your own needs
#
i was just talking to our driver when we were coming here and i said
#
because my mate comes only in the morning and then she cooks lunch and goes away i heat it
#
because i've subsumed my own i'm not being a martyr here it's just something that one has
#
been programmed or conditioned into believing that everyone else's needs are first
#
and that is where the women of the house ate so we've always had this kind of blindness
#
towards the needs of women i'm talking just of their physical think of their sexual needs
#
in fact i used to laugh at my with my grandmother-in-law she was a wonderful
#
so all the boys had little rooms to themselves but their wives and the children slept in one
#
dormitory like place so they had no you know
#
i used to tell my mother-in-law
#
so she said one man used to come nobody knew whose husband he was and he slept with some woman who
#
he didn't know whose wife she was and that was i mean this is how that shame
#
there were these three sisters and nobody knew whose child it was because
#
this actually happened in these old homes and things so sexual desires and the kind of
#
whatever car you know they had all these strange relationships
#
it's about one widowed sister-in-law and this chap who had indian society was full of so much
#
quite amazing so you know your memory if you start to
#
mine it you begin to see things oh so this is what it was about
#
you know this is why she never spoke to her husband or her husband never
#
slept in the same room as his wife whatever there must have been some history there
#
which people never sort of drew attention to since you mentioned tata professor i must
#
inform my listeners that ira ji won both the sahitya academy award and the crossword prize
#
for that so i want to ask you now to blindly trust me and go on an act of imagination
#
which is i want you to imagine that you are born in a world without men there are no men at all
#
tell me about the life you live what do you become what do you do what are your what are
#
those desires which you can fulfill apart from a particular kind of desire which you know you
#
can't but other than that what is a life because you no longer have to worry about
#
you don't have to worry about those things
#
so you don't have to be the first one to open the door for the maids to come in and the last one to
#
lock the house so that tyranny has to be eradicated but on a more sober note i can't imagine a world
#
without men and two i don't know whether i want to be part of your thought experimenter please
#
indulge me i'm like your son so please indulge me because women's worst enemies are women
#
themselves let me tell you that it's not the men who hold you back as much as the women who hold
#
you back and this if you look around you you will find in situation after situation is that either
#
you have these pushy mummies or you have these horrendous viragos who will not allow their
#
daughters to do this or do that fathers may lay down the rules but they are nowhere as hard and
#
as tough as women are nor are the enemies that women generate and the kind of dirty games that
#
they play amongst themselves i'm not being anti-feminist or anything like that just being
#
completely truthful that in every family why do you think in our folk songs you always have
#
the women around it's never
#
it's because he is an enabler in her pranks
#
so i i don't know whether women are the nobler part of things but the conversely the levels of
#
low behavior that they can stoop to i don't think men do i have to say that i do think that men are
#
nobler in that sense than women are you know like you said you know one of the stereotypes that
#
people often have is about you know and in contrast your relationship with your mother-in-law
#
which you've described was very loving very good she was like a friend i was very moved by this
#
little story at the end that you know she had cancer of the tongue when you were writing the
#
book in 2004 and so you wrote this book very quickly while she was still there you wanted
#
her to read it and you gave it to her and she did and she couldn't speak clearly so she wrote on
#
a slate i give you the nobel prize for this which i think must be the most beautiful compliment
#
you've received tell me about not just your friendship with her but your friendships with
#
other women because one thing i often notice is that women form these bonds with other women
#
these sisterhoods which men are rarely fortunate enough to have those kind of relationships you're
#
always driven by ego or instrumentality and you it's rare to get past that but women form these
#
very deep bonds so tell me about some of these important women in your life and these important
#
bonds you know i have a huge number of women friends who we speak to each other some who i
#
speak to every day to my sisters i have to be no i don't speak every day because she's in deradun
#
and she has a busy life looking after her husband who's not well but mirnaal and i talk to each
#
other at least once a day if not more
#
she and i are very close and we even though there are hidden secrets about her and me which we
#
respect each other for your mother and prem goswami was such close friends i didn't realize until i
#
met prem how close your mom was to her so yes there are certain things in which you find it easier
#
to unburden yourself or to because you're not being judged see when mother when men and women
#
have things there is a kind of gender division of opinions where the man will judge a woman
#
differently and a woman will judge a man differently i mean suppose a man is telling his wife that i had
#
an affair with so and so when i was away there or whatever the judgmental part of it will overtake
#
the one where she realizes that this was you know you know one-off thing
#
conversely men also have a manufacturing defect shall i call it or what where they are emotionally
#
underdeveloped in certain areas they've been taught from childhood that men don't cry
#
men don't you know speak ill of women in the family and so on and these become terrible
#
those are all warped families
#
I mean she'd worked out the quadrilateral perfect relationships but rare is the house
#
where you have this and even when a family has many more children and you have girls and boys
#
sometimes you're attracted to a boy cousin who is able to understand you much more than his sister
#
for instance so yes i forget where this started from but in my childhood we had the three of us
#
and my brother who was much younger so he was always given a short shrift but Pushpesh and
#
Muktesh my two cousins Pushpesh is such a wonderful brother to have i mean i in many ways
#
each one of us relate to him Ranal and he are very close to each other fabulous readers and
#
raconteers both of them and kya dimag hai dono ki ek toh inko Sanskrit aayati hai which i'm
#
wildly jealous because hum kisi na Sanskrit nahi seekhi
#
he's a walking wikipedia usko koi cheez from khana to international affairs kisi baat pe karlo
#
he's phenomenal my mother used to tell me she said you know
#
Ranal ka ek chart hain astrology mein jaisi soorye apne paas kisi ko aane nahi deta hain
#
it burns everything that tries to get too close to her uska wahi yog hai so she told me when she
#
was dying that always stand by your sister there are people who misunderstand her people who she
#
manages to rub up the wrong way tum uska saath kabhi nahi chorna that she told me the other
#
thing she told me before she died she called each one of us separately she knew she was going
#
and she told us ki i want to tell you something which remember this as i told you and she told
#
me ki maa dekhtin ki you argue a lot with your husband and you uski wo jo kehta hai tum uska
#
ulta karti ho yeh galat baat hai she said hameesha yaad rakhna ki uska kendra mein brahaspati hai
#
aisey logon ko pehle zaman mein raja log dhun ke mantri banaate the uski advice kabhi galat
#
nahi hogi so my husband says wo advice to tumhe kabhi apni maaki nahi follow kari
#
kendra ka brahaspati then she used to say all of you have a buddha ditya yog aisey bache kabhi
#
bekhoof nahi hote hain jinka buddha aur all of us have that buddha ditya yog but also all of us have
#
an uchcha ka mangal argumentative we don't take things lying down we fight back but there is a
#
conditioning which i think you know sometimes ek baat pehle maa sochhti thi Indira Gandhi ka
#
astrological chart agar koi mujhe decode karke bataye to understand how she functioned and why
#
her life was what it was zaror hoga usne kahin you know there we now try and psychoanalyze people
#
but these were all embryonic sciences Amit astrology astronomy my great grandfather was
#
one of the founding members of the Banaras Hindu University along with mother Mohan Malviya
#
and he unha ne jyotish vighyan ka department unha ne waha kara tha
#
he was a bhoti vidwan aadmi the toh unki wajah se in sabko they had a smattering of
#
i don't know anything about but i would love to know now it's too late but i used to toy with
#
the idea of going to the bharti vidya bhavan they used to run a course on astrology not because i
#
wanted to become an astrologer or predict things but to be able to read people ki ye aise kyun hai
#
ya aisa kyun kiya sometimes you know it your mind fails you in trying to logically understand
#
but uske andar koi ek impulse hoti hai which drives him or her to do things in a particular way
#
so mujhe apne aur apne bhai ho jo tum puch rahe the na ki what is it about you that you both you
#
sisters are alike and yet so different there are certain things on which me know i can understand
#
where she's coming from even when she's been horrid which she was very often when we were
#
children and even now sometimes she can be very sharp and but i don't take offense anymore because
#
i know ki uska wo hai na yog ki wo burn karti hai logon ko that is how she i mean this is a joke of
#
course but what i'm saying is that perhaps by temperament i don't take people head on i don't
#
like to i am scared of confrontations and of fights and of ugliness which will drive two people
#
away as far as possible i want people to be together this is something which i think it may
#
be a weakness in that sense but i would like for everyone to always be together let's now talk to
#
another sort of relationship your relationship with language i'm i'm you know given the family
#
that you're from it is but natural that you would be a writer i'm i'm interested in number one
#
the role that this multiplicity of like multiplicity of languages played in your life
#
because i always envy people who grew up with such facility and learning in different languages i
#
mean for me it's just one language english you know i can understand and speak others but i can't
#
really read in them with any kind of dexterity so all these different languages what was the
#
influence they had on you in terms of just the literature that you were taking in in terms of
#
understanding the world and was it sort of intimidating for you that you have the kind
#
of brilliant siblings that you did because then if you think of wanting to be a writer renalji is
#
already doing that if you think of you know etc so how did you begin to form your sense of what do
#
you want to do what part of that puzzle was language and over a long period of time of course
#
you came to translation and all that we can speak about that but to take me through those processes
#
and how much of it tied in with your professional life in the sense that you know you went to
#
Chandigarh 16 you studied in Punjab university what was that sort of period like were you teaching
#
because you were in love with teaching or hey i got to keep myself busy and this is something and
#
i'm good at it and i can do it so teaching i went into because i'm genuinely fond of teaching
#
i love to pontificate as you can see and i i like to think that i have a way of communicating with
#
groups of people in a way which is instinctive i can sense people getting bored or switching off
#
very quickly so i know exactly how far to go when to break how to take it forward change tracks if
#
this is not working how about that and that i do think is a gift which i must have inherited from
#
one parent or the other my father was a teacher so that as far as languages is concerned you're
#
right there were many languages we were exposed to and i i'm telling you
#
they have a great facility with languages if they were only aware of it
#
i will not say no matter what i will always say because
#
you know i've lived in lakhan now i will never say i will always say i will never say
#
i'll always say you know so there are certain things which you are bengali also even though
#
i don't speak bengali fluently but when i do those words come clean they come with you know
#
you you know the musicality and the little to that so yes to that extent and
#
of course because we grew up speaking and we still speak it all the time
#
and music musical ear which i think we've all inherited from my mom helps in relating to
#
languages at a at a level which other people perhaps who studied academically are not able to
#
i remember once in jaipur the last mogul is ki hai na jo william dal rimple ki kitab
#
he was launching it there at the amir port
#
and he kept talking of bahadusha zafar as bahadusha zafar zafar zafar i got fed up at one point
#
and i told him i said listen for somebody who's writing about bahadusha zafar at least learn to
#
pronounce his name correctly it's simple enough to pronounce it rhymes with duffer so if you can say
#
duffer you can say zafar i said how is it that we always pronounce english words correctly
#
when we speak english i said why do people who come from abroad not take the you know the trouble
#
to pro even indo files who are otherwise very good at understanding cultures and languages
#
make the most horrendous kind of you know rama seetha
#
it's not rama and lakshmana the last a is silent is ram lakshmana so he said oh and sit
#
that's a great response
#
but what i'm saying is that languages you have to have respect for every language
#
you can't just sort of bloody die yourself because you speak good english you can get
#
away with bad hindi sorry not done at all if we can take the trouble to speak idiomatically correct
#
dramatically pure english you can very well learn to speak hindi properly when you do or for bengali
#
get your genders right you know i plead guilty i have to tell you my pronunciations are exactly
#
the opposite of yours if i can get something wrong i probably will most people are like that
#
but about translation i started with this book and when it got the kind of response that it
#
did i realized oh i can translate you know that's something i can do
#
so manohar shaham yoshi was a very dear friend of the family and somebody who we all loved and
#
admired hugely which is his most famous book but is written in such strong hindi
#
which somebody from england has translated and i must say it isn't a very good translation
#
and the other one is this data professor so harry a hercules
#
and he wrote the bafflement of harry a hercules which i thought is a great title
#
and he just gave it up he did so he met me somewhere he said
#
met a professor so i began translating tata professor he
#
won't because he was a very critical and sharp-eyed person
#
one man died suddenly he had a heart attack and died and i thought
#
marika just finished thing and i said no mehna unse koi agreement sign karaya na kuch suppose
#
his family decides ki no i'm giving it to somebody else or penguin decide to give it
#
to somebody else then what to mehna unki wife bhagwati di who herself is a very fine hindi
#
teacher lsr masala padhaya unhone hai i told her i said ki mehna wo kari hai mehna apko
#
prathalipi de rahe hoon and if you think that it's all right i would like
#
that's love labor lost and i was quite proud of that translation also very unsure because
#
this was the first time i was translating somebody who is not
#
known to me as intimately as my mother was she rang me up one day and said ki era mehna
#
lagi please so that's how that book got translated and later on bhagwati
#
how sweet is that then i got the confidence to start translating more and more
#
which her nephew was also somebody my mother knew pretty well
#
and it's one of the most bold autobiographies amit of any person i have read of that generation
#
she belonged to the family a very traditional marwari family of kolkata and she had a lifelong
#
relationship with a married man one doctor there very well known eye doctor and she had the courage
#
to move in with him and they lived in a house in a thing which had three floors
#
and it is not just a thing of the coming out of a courageous woman from the you know constraints
#
of a marwari family and being thrown out or disowned by her own family it's also an uncovering
#
of a very important part of calcutta social history when in the nakshal movement all the
#
marwari were running away when you know the left had taken over shut down everything that's when the
#
decline of calcutta's industrial empire began and you know the old kolkata just vanished the
#
bhadra calcutta is a very good book so i translated that which got buried somewhere i don't know where
#
it is so that's the only one i've translated which is not my mother's work but i am now
#
you have to know that person well because
#
why is it that you don't write your own fiction when you you know you have a facility with languages
#
and so on the whole process of translation is actually a kind of you have to lift yourself from
#
one persona into another from one vocabulary into another and that transition is so dense and so
#
absorbing that for a while i've forgotten who i am here ira and i've become prabhagaita or shyam joshi
#
you know so i have to come out of that somehow and find my own voice that search for a voice
#
which is genuine which is not a put on voice is something which is really crippling me and getting
#
me very angry at the same time i'm very proud of the fact that i'm a good translator i mean i'm
#
immodest enough to say so myself but i do think that i have a way of translating then that is also
#
we've not had any problems with each other at all and she's very and as you know she has a very sharp
#
she's a fantastic translator herself
#
i couldn't do that one because it was written in bombay which she talks of in your
#
it's written in the kind of ilhabadi patwa and bombayya hindi which is very difficult to find
#
those resonances in english so i told her she said let me try my hand at it
#
and she's done a first-rate job i couldn't have done better so i told her i said you idiot when
#
you can translate like this so there are one or two which she has done but the right but we've
#
collaborated with each other very happily and very you know cordially so you have to have
#
somewhere a kind of resonance with each other's minds and work in order for translations to work
#
but i do think that the best work in india currently is being done in our regional
#
how far and how long will you write about you know a certain kind of privileged
#
and that voice that doesn't cut ice with
#
fabulous yeah this modern impulse is alive and kicking in in in our language languages
#
sadly there are very few good translators or those who are trying to quality of translation
#
is very good sometimes it's outstanding
#
i deliberately offer to be on every jury for a translation award
#
i get to read them i've read in kannada in marathi in maithili in whatever not in those languages but
#
terrific books beautiful
#
bengalas i'm afraid are the only people who don't allow
#
that's the territory it would sell at i haven't found anybody it's very sad bengalis like me
#
should be ashamed and i love you know what you said to mr dal rumble it rhymes with duffer i
#
think that would make such a great t-shirt line it rhymes with duffer maybe you should give your
#
t-shirt to him and you know i i had the impression before this i don't know from where but uh i had
#
the impression before this that minal ji is like very ferocious and feisty and ira ji is very calm
#
and chilled out but you know talking to you and the break and uh you know hearing your stories
#
and what you just said to i don't talk like this to everyone i'll have you know it's only
#
because i've known you from my child's this thing that i can afford to let my guard down
#
thank you totally i'm reminded of you know yesterday i recorded with swapna little and
#
we have a mutual close friend in nilanjana roy so she was telling me about nilanjana and her sister
#
tara and she was saying that she quoted someone i forget who so apologies for that but that someone
#
said that tara is like a broadsword and nilanjana is like a rapier and i just thought
#
so you know don't make them angry tara is my neighbor and nilanjana of course dimpy she's
#
called their parents were friends of ours also so i have known these girls yeah no but i have to
#
tell you that as far as your own fiction is concerned i really loved your writing in didi
#
you know the craft was immaculate some of the sentences are so sparkling i've read out some
#
of them but i've taken many more in my notes so i would ask you to write that also see i'm
#
giving you 10 books to write so please get down no it's very gratifying to know
#
it was something that was waiting inside me to be written i think
#
i hope i have a mind to write with by the time
#
that is what i fear most is losing my memory because if that goes
#
i'm nobody so far your memory seems just fine so i will dig a little further into it
#
you know you had mentioned about how and i was very struck by this description
#
in 1975 shivani ji started a column in jalak and jalak sorry i see my
#
pronunciations are so bad jalak so that means window yeah okay and you point out that once that
#
started coming her popularity among the common people was amazing that she used to go to the
#
grocery store or wherever she used to go people used to say shivani ji didi etc etc
#
and you also speak of how once she was sitting in the Lucknow mail and she had she had forgotten
#
some she had forgotten her tambacu so the conductor came to her and said hey shivani
#
ji how are you are you comfortable and she said i've forgotten my tambacu and he said i'll go and
#
get it and the Lucknow mail was delayed for five minutes because the conductor went to get shivani
#
ji's sambacu and what i get a glimpse of from here is the respect that was given to writers and
#
artists like even though you earlier said there's a certain kind of literature which is for a few
#
people and then and then you have uh you know others but i think you said that in this very
#
interesting five-minute youtube clip where you talk about chetan bhagat and you say ki
#
and you know there's a certain kind of writer who may not be read by so many people but
#
reading about shivani and i've had various episodes on various other literary stars like i recorded
#
with akshay mukul a few months ago and the sense i get is that these regional writers were like
#
huge figures in the culture they were superstars they were respected by everyone which is amazing
#
because i imagine then that they could be looked upon as role models and young people would aspire
#
to be like that and that would keep the ecosystem flourishing and i want to ask you
#
ki abhi kaisa hai because abhi toh aap keh rahe ho ki regional writing you read a lot of good
#
regional writing in translation lekin meri worry ye hai ki you know a young creative person today
#
who is multi-lingual will be more attracted to writing in english
#
i'll be read all over the world or languages mei asa kabhi kabhi lagta hoga ki are
#
you know and also we have the post-colonial hangover ki there's a hierarchy of languages
#
english tabse upar hai baaki niche hai you know you almost feel embarrassed of like that person
#
who walked out on me saying who turned his back hindi yeah yeah exactly writer in hindi
#
yeah and you also described elsewhere i think in a column you wrote in the tribune about how
#
you know when you first came to delhi there's no way you would have gotten a job because the
#
jnu walas and the delhi walas would just look down on hindi speakers and nothing of what you
#
had done or taught mattered you were not in their elite world with their you know their little
#
ideology and you had to be in that bubble or you were out of it so tell me a little bit about this
#
ecosystem for the languages kyunki on the one hand apne pehle kaha tha aur at
#
you were lamenting the disappearance of languages and i would do the same routinely
#
until i did an interesting episode with the gentleman ne vini singhal jino ne ek site shuru
#
kiya platform shuru kiya call stage dot in where he said i will build a netflix for bharat but the
#
netflix for bharat meant ki he wasn't doing content in hindi bengali punjabi he was doing
#
content in haryanvi bhojpuri mathili and so on he said ki mai dialects mein hi karunga and what
#
happened there was that he now i think has three and a half lakh subscribers if not more when i
#
last checked at netflix prices and he said that there is a reverse migration ki haryanvi kids
#
who went to bombay to do filmmaking have now come back to haryana and i'm making haryanvi content
#
and i think this is something that technology is also enabling ki niches ban sakte hai to abhi
#
you know i like for example if i'm a boy and i dream in mathili i don't have to go to bollywood
#
and try to learn hindi i can turn my camera around and i can make content with myself
#
but this is an aside but in general what i want to know from you is ke ecosystem kaisa hai
#
in all of these languages now like are there still today shivani jo market me jayenge log
#
pehchanenge lakno mail rukegi i can't say i really think ki wo zamana hi lat gaya hai you know
#
that cinema has you know there is the martial mukluhan ki theory hai na the medium is the
#
massage that every successive medium kills the previous medium so theater was killed by film
#
you know theater killed reading whatever i mean it just went on and on and on also there are
#
cycles where there was a time if you remember since you are a person interested in the history
#
of cinema and the stage when people badal sarkar mohan rakesh vijay tindulkar
#
this let's say the 70s and early 80s was the time when theater and al qazi sab ka jo nid wala
#
ecosystem tha that was matlab adhbhut manohar singh wagare jo they surekha sikri matlab hunko
#
uttara bhau kar ye naam kitne yaad hai aur kitne humne dekhe hain and they were
#
legendary we used to come from Chandigarh to see these plays uske baad theater ke baad poetry
#
shuru hui you know there was a whole lot of people who were writing this very sort of fiery
#
revolutionary poetry somewhere the novel never made i mean novel had a kind of thing but what
#
killed the novel i think were the serials durdarshan ke hoke you know people who were
#
readers of books jo domestic jo gharelu librariya hoti thi those got destroyed when women stopped
#
reading and started watching serials and those serials were so good as we were mentioning
#
manohar shyam jyoshike sahib paranjpe ke ye aur bhi hai naam mujhi yaad nahi aad nahi hai ekdumse
#
but you know those early generation of durdarshan serials tamas bhi banithi o samayega
#
so many of them and what actors they had amrish puri no sorry what is that om puri nasruddin shah
#
legendary actors so that gradually sort of once you stop reading you don't go back to it just
#
think of your own life what you read as avidly when you were in your teens do you read like
#
that even i don't i'm just fiction for instance is something that i've except when i'm sitting
#
on a jury to read fiction tabhi main unko kehti un please mujhe put me on this jury because that
#
is the only way i'll ensure that i'm still reading otherwise i read a lot of non-fiction now memoirs
#
biographies political and social writing and so on lekin fiction has somehow sort of retreated
#
so ye fads hoti hai you know phases hoti hai even abroad now fiction is a declining curve pe hai
#
aur fiction ki jo gati hai you know the pace of it doesn't fit easily with the pace of our life
#
there's somewhere you know you you if you're reading a book
#
you're coming back from school and she was reading a book and she fell into a gada
#
fortunately she didn't break anything another time she was locked up in the library because
#
she was a tiny little thing sitting in one corner and reading chowkidar na my mother and father went
#
frantic ki kahan binu ji roti hui hai ki mujhe minu mili nahi they went back school gaye to dekha
#
minu ji maa bed ki kitab padni thi you know so that was the kind of complete capacity to blot out
#
everything when you were us tere ka bahut kam rahega hai i find that very few people are so
#
absorbed in reading a book that they forget suru bul jate hai and as for my mother's writing there
#
were i mean there was a whole generation of young women who grew up who were trapped in domesticity
#
who were sitting at home who died to know what was happening outside who wanted romance in their
#
very sad lives they were avid readers and diddi ki kitabe were mostly serials which ran in dharmiyoga
#
in sabta haik hindustan the marnal was in sabta haik hindustan she used to say ki you know the
#
print run used to increase by 55 percent when diddi ka koi serial nikalta tha and diddi ki
#
style mein shayak kuch hoga because there's a lovely story which i must tell you dharambir
#
bharti ji was then dharmiyug ke editor and my mother used to write because she was writing serials
#
for him to wo unko do do episodes bhejti rehti thi and then you know that's how i mean she could
#
continue writing ye nahi ki poora bhe ja ek baar mein wo bhi ek abhut aadmi the to he was traveling by the
#
local train and wo manuscript jo tha he forgot that on the train and he wo zamani mein trunk
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cause bhi kitne mushkil hoti thi he rang up my mother saying ki shimani ji anarth ho gaya hai aapne jo
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mujhe prathiri pe bheji thi wo main bhul aaya mujhe ek aur copy bhej di je my mother said main to haaj se
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likhti hoon i don't even get it typed out aap mein kaise karoon so she said aap dekhungi mein
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he was in tears achcha woos manuscript ko koi ek aur commuter tha he picked it up
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and he took it home and he thought arey wah ye toh badhi badhiya kahaani hai isko toh main aapne maan se
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chaap sakta hoon because it's handwritten so obviously there's no copy of it so he got it
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typed out and whatever this was not a serial sorry it was a short story or something like that
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and he said he showed it to his sister and said ki maine tumhe kabhi bataya nahi par main
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you know kaahania likhta hoon aur ye maine kaahani likhi hai tum isko parke mujhe batau kaisi lagi
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sister she read two pages she said ye toh Shivani ki style mein lagti hai
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so he went back to Dharanbir Bharti and said jab meri apni bhen mujhe nahi baksha toh how will readers
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ever do it what an amazing story what a story that is na so my mother's actually dedicated one of her
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books to that unknown commuter who honestly came and returned that book
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but lakhnon mein wakai aise hoti thi where there were people who
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doodhwala jo one day i remember she was giving a public lecture somewhere and somebody said ki
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Shivani ji aapki hindi bahut clisht hoti hai very hard to understand so my mother said main aapko
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batau main jab subere walk pe jaati hoon mera jo doodhwala hai he said bahu ji bahut make likhi ho
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jab wo doodhwala meri article ko parke kaita bahut make likhi ho
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toh aapki hindi ya toh achchi nahi hai ya aap achche pathak main hai aap parna hi band kar diji
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oh my god now i see where this tongue comes from
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you were talking about the pace of life aapki recently maine tribune mein kolumbi pari where
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you talk about the pace where just as you know you have written about your family in the past
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you write about your cook and you write about how your cook will come or she will do things and
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there will be like you know cheetahs of this and that all over the place and you have to clean
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up after her everything is on full flame and all of that and from there you go on to talk about
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how everything in modern life is so fast paced and this is something i think about a lot in
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the sense that i think about the forms in which we consume content and interact with the world of
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knowledge affects how we think and affects who we become as people like i think ki agar hum
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poori din scroll scroll swipe swipe karte rahenge toh bahut choppy rhythm ho jati hai thinking ki
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aap kisi cheez mein deep nahi ja sakte hai you know sara ji ko main unke saath episode kar raha tha i
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asked her that like you said her powers of description so i spoke about that and said how
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do you notice ki 40 saal pehle garden mein ek phool kaisa dik raha tha like it's mind-blowing
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and she said hum toh bored the kuch tha nahi now at some level i get that but at some level i also
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will insist that she is extraordinary and and the pace of life there is different so i think of
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myself in the 1980s if i sat down with a book i sat down with a book you know ek do gante baithe
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rahe kuch there's nothing to distract you and and i find i'm not even complaining about the young
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generation i'm complaining about me i'm complaining about you and me ki hum hi hum bhi badal gaye hai na
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so what do you think about this is it sometimes a struggle for you do you have to be intentional
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about some things that i will take time off main phone nahi dekhungi main bas bat ke likhungi ya
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parungi aur whatever you know this is an ideal situation i wish and i don't know whether i have
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it in me to just sit in a room for six hours and just write write write i need a break you know
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need to come out just think sometimes i leave a sentence deliberately at half
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when i feel i'm going off a little main aadha chod ke uthke then i go back to it again and i
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reread it and i realize ke no this is not working yahan se isko change ka so you know even when
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you're writing it's not as if a room of one's own is the thing that all women Virginia Woolf
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unki thi bhai fitrat bloomsbury walon ki they came from another world but main apni maa ko i'll
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tell you this is now almost my last story about my mother and ourselves when she died Rukku Nadwani
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his wife Anuradha Roy she wrote to me saying she used to then edit the literary page in the Hindu
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and she said Ira why don't you write me on a piece on what it was like to grow up in a house
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where your mother was a writer and i thought to myself i said my mother was a writer i never saw
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her write ah you know she had no room in which to write in she had no desk which was her own
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she had no fix matlab ki yeh gathar hai yahan pe choona nahi jaise babu ka hota tha na ki yeh
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babu ke papers hai unko haath mat lagana us bichari ke paas to itne paise bhi nahi hota the that she
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could buy a full scab paper to write on so hamari purani jo leftover exercise books hoti thi na unko
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dhobi ki account ki kitabe na usme wo likhti rehti she scribbled and put them together
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and very often as Mrinal says you know she used to give her ki isko tu bhej dena then Meenu used to
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because her mind ran so fast that sometimes she forgot to put in commas and virams and things
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wo sab Mrinal karti thi unki then she says ki that was my first lesson in editing
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which i learnt from diddi so diddi was a no fuss writer you know she just had it in her to write
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there were so many plots and stories in her that it didn't matter to her ki mere paas you know people
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make excuses ki mere paas jagah nahi hoti hai mujhe time nahi milta hai agar tumne pratibha hai aur
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fuel hai tum you will find the way of doing it you know or jinke paas sab kuch hota hai wo bada
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badhiya likhten hai kya ye bhi sochne ki baat hai so i really don't think that you know one should make
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too much of being a writer and having these angsty things ki mai jab tak mera dil nahi tutega i will
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not write about heartbreak what rubbish you have to make up some things and go on but no i don't
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have that i mean i can write anywhere anytime very often i forget ki mera column iss hafta jaana hai ki
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agle hafta jaana hai and then i get this thing from the editor there to say where is your column
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she likes it on a particular day and i said okay give me four hours aur mai baithke dhar dhar dhar dhar
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i bang out the thing and send it to her so sometimes necessity is created out of
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creates whatever output i'm i'm really glad that you said this that you can write anywhere at any
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time because now the 10 books that you and i have decided you must write they will happen i have
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taken a lot of your time today so i'll sort of ask you a final question that i ask all my guests
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which is that for me and my listeners please recommend books films music that mean a lot to
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you that are special to you and you would want us to read yeah
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outstanding i haven't read something as good in a very very long time there are
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it's called here and here after
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and what is interesting is that he's not a native hindi reader
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very good it's one of the finest books that i've read i told you i'm not reading much fiction
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such a beautiful book you know it was lying on my table and i meant to read it
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and when i started reading it it was just fascinating you know he talks about growing
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up in one small little village in the ram nagar area or village
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that is called such a beautiful book i can't tell you
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so sometimes you know books that come with no recommendation or whatever
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are such wonderful discoveries to make then which one did i like very much is
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which you know she writes i forget the title of the book if you can tell me it's about
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the history of shantagokhale's life through all the things that come by her hair her
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and you know she's delved into spaces which are just beautifully written
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the name of the book is one foot on the ground
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and my answer was she's 83 years old that is one hour for every decade of a life that
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is not close to enough and i would honestly say that you know i would have insisted you
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stay with me here for another seven hours but you have very kindly promised i'll do another
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one that you will do another one at some point so on that note i must deeply deeply thank you
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it's a great honor for me to have you on and so wonderful and i was quite intimidated when
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you said it's a long thing i said oh bapri patani what rubbish i will speak because
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i'm famous for non-sequiturs also you are absolutely incapable of speaking rubbish ma'am
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thank you so much we will do it in installments and i will see you again thank you so much for
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this thank you amit this was a great pleasure great pleasure
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will
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also hop on over to your nearest bookstore online offline and pick up all of iraji's books i
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particularly love didi but they're all a treasure she doesn't seem to be on social media but you
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can follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t b a r m a you can browse past episodes of the
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scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of
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the scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the production of the show you can go over
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to scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast
