DT
PT
Subscribe To Print Edition About The Tribune Code Of Ethics Download App Advertise with us Classifieds
search-icon-img
search-icon-img
Advertisement

Ae Ladki

From withdrawing her first book over editing changes to turning down the Padma Bhushan, from designing her own gararas to rattling off coarse words used in her book at a seminar — each act of Krishna Sobti was an act of defiance. Remembering the literary icon in her birth centenary year
  • fb
  • twitter
  • whatsapp
  • whatsapp
featured-img featured-img
Born in Gujarat city of undivided Punjab, memories of a life before Partition and the violence, displacement and trauma of this catastrophic event became central to the works of Jnanpith awardee Krishna Sobti (February 18, 1925 - January 25, 2019). Photos courtesy: Beeba Sobti
Advertisement

Krishna Sobti was furious. The proofs of her first novel had just come and to her horror, the publisher had changed the language. ‘Trikaal vela’ had become ‘sandhya’; Shahni was Sethani. The changes threatened to dilute the very essence of her work. She shot off a telegram to the publisher in Allahabad: “Coming tomorrow. Stop printing.” There was nothing that could persuade her to accept the changes. When told that way too many copies had been printed, she bought them all and burned them down. The manuscript of ‘Channa’ was consigned to the back of her mind, to be revisited only in her final days, but the template was set for life: the market wouldn’t drive her. That was Krishna Sobti. This year marks her birth centenary.

In times when political masters dictate what is to be written and publishers are ready to take convenient positions, Sobti stood for the autonomy of the writer. She refused the Padma Bhushan during the UPA regime in 2010 — “As I writer, I have to keep a distance from the establishment”; she returned her Sahitya Akademi Award in 2015 when rationalists were targeted in BJP’s new India.

Krishna Sobti. Photo courtesy: Rajkamal Prakashan

One of the most influential writers in Hindi literature, Sobti was born in Gujarat city of undivided Punjab and grew up in Delhi and Shimla. While her Punjabi roots left a lasting imprint on her writing, she distinguished herself with a bold narrative style, complex characters and exploration of human emotions and societal norms. Her 1966 work ‘Mitro Marjani’ is considered groundbreaking for its bold theme of the unabashed sexuality of a married woman. The monumental ‘Zindaginama’ (1979) is an epic reconstruction of life in the early 20th century in western Punjab, where people neither had the experience nor the memory of communal slaughter they were to see during Partition. ‘Ae Ladki’, her 1991 work, a dialogue between a mother and daughter, dealt with the complexities of relationships, identity, and the search for self-empowerment. In all these, feminine concerns and Partition remained the dominant themes, weaving a tapestry of struggles, aspirations and self-discovery that shaped individual and collective histories.

Advertisement

‘Ae Ladki’ (1991) dealt with the complexities of relationships, identity, and the search for

self-empowerment.

Whether it was one of her earliest works ‘Daar Se Bicchudi’ (1958) or one of her last works, ‘Gujarat Pakistan Se Gujarat Hindustan’ (2017), memories of a life before Partition and the violence, displacement and trauma of this catastrophic event became central to her work. “For my generation of writers, it was the most traumatic experience; a kind of encounter between man and reality; a collision between a political agenda and a long tradition of pluralism. Writers on both sides soon realised that after so much hatred, violence and killing, human values had to be affirmed and restored. As writers, we had to reassert that in spite of the political and religious divisions, the two communities had lived for centuries in a workable harmony, almost like cousins,” she said during a conversation with scholar-poet Alok Bhalla at the IIAS, Shimla, in 1996.

Advertisement

‘Zindaginama’ (1979) is an epic reconstruction of life in the early 20th century in western Punjab.

‘Zindaginama’ won her the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1980. A novel of epic proportions, it depicted the lives of various characters in rural, pre-Partition Punjab, with a rich portrayal of social norms, traditions and tensions that defined the era. For critic and author Prof Harish Narang, who has written a lot about her work, ‘Zindaginama’ will stand out always, as will her short stories, such as ‘Sikka Badal Gaya’, where she creates the powerful character of Shahni, an affluent woman who has to leave home for a refugee camp. Interestingly, ‘Sikka Badal Gaya’ paved the way for ‘Zindaginama’.

Sobti’s works challenged conventional norms in literature. Sukrita Paul Kumar, editor of ‘Krishna Sobti: A Counter Archive’, says that, in a way, she was daring the whole world, questioning everything. “Krishnaji wanted to test everything. For instance, her own gender. As a woman writer, she would often be asked about the female voice, so she decided to write in the male voice. And she did. ‘Hum Hashmat’ (a collection of her pen-portraits of other writers and her friends) ran into four volumes. And because she was writing a lot, she was not just writing from the point of view of a woman. She was able to move easily into the male psychology, male persona.”

Sobti’s characters offered a complex and nuanced look at women’s “being and belonging, as also their longings”, to borrow the words of writer Mamta Kalia. Chaman Lal, former professor of Hindi at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who knew Sobti closely and supervised several PhDs on her works, says hers wasn’t “rooftop shouting feminism, but a very assertive feminism” that revealed itself through her writing.

She hated the title of a feminist writer, but the concerns of women loomed large over Sobti’s writing. Her novels, such as ‘Mitro Marjani’, explored the bold themes of sexuality, desire and female body. ‘Surajmukhi Andhere Ke’ delved into the toll sexual violence takes on sexual relationships.

‘Mitro Marjani’ (1966) stood out for its bold theme of the unabashed sexuality of a married woman.

Narang wrote an entire article on Sobti’s feminism, ‘Feminism with a small f’. A great fan of her critique of the way men looked at women, he says that when she gained fame, there were very few women novelists. “Male writers resented the fact that she was emerging as a nuanced voice in the domain of novels. When they could not find much to pick on her themes, on her treatment of the structure and other things, they found an excuse. They said that this woman writes so openly about sexuality and that her language became so sexual at times, it was unbecoming of a woman writer. Sobti was up to the challenge. She would question their nonsense, giving examples of male writers using abusive language in their writings and so on.” Writer Jainendra had once called Sobti’s works a celebration of sex. For Narang, though, her writings empowered women by creating women characters with a lot of positivity.

Defiance was the hallmark of Krishna Sobti’s being and her work, whether in the way she dressed — a dupatta over her head and a garara under the shirt; the use of expletives in ‘Yaaron Ke Yaar’; fighting a court case against Amrita Pritam over the use of ‘Zindaginama’ in the title of a book; or getting married to Dogri writer Shivnath at 70. She once refused to attend an event where she was addressed as a “varishtha lekhika” (senior woman writer). Reminiscing in ‘Krishna Sobti: A Counter Archive’, writer Viswanath Tripathi mentions how when discussing ‘Yaaron Ke Yaar’ at a seminar, a young writer dared her to utter the coarse language she had used in the book. “Krishnaji got up slowly, grabbed the mike and after speaking those words quietly sat down.”

‘Mitro Marjani’ would certainly be her most talked about work. It has been adapted for the stage several times, with the likes of Himani Shivpuri playing the protagonist. There was an attempt to turn it into a film also and Sobti once went all the way to Mumbai to see how the shooting was progressing. To her shock, Mitro had been made to wear a bikini! “Sobti came back to Delhi, sent them a short novel in 20 days and told them, ‘Here you are, this is your masala film. Go ahead and make it.’ The film never got made,” shares Sukrita Kumar. “Whatever she did, it was with the spirit of resistance, of defiance and questioning,” she adds.

Sobti would start writing late in the day and work through the night. Sometimes beginning at 11 pm or midnight, she wrote until 4 am. She famously produced three drafts of every novel, most often going back to the first one in the end.

Kumar says Sobti talked about her writing process all the time. “She would say words are magical and they have their own texture. She would write each and every word very carefully. You have to examine it fully and then language starts throbbing, she would say.”

In an obituary (published in ‘Indian Literature’, Sahitya Akademi’s journal) following Sobti’s death at the age of 93 in 2019, Rumi Malik, who translated her ‘Sikka Badal Gaya’ and ‘Nafisa’, wrote: “Krishnaji believed that every word has a ‘taaseer’ or essence or flavour. She chose her words carefully and beautifully and ones which captured the milieu. There are so many layers and meanings to a seemingly simple sentence of hers. In ‘Sikka Badal Gaya’, there are words typical of the region, like ‘dyori’, ‘asaamiyan’, ‘aatewali kanaal’, ‘gandaasa’, ‘patwari’, jaildar’, etc.” Sobti felt it was imperative to establish the diction of the agrarian society. “Diction, idiom and the language are all connected with each other and together they weave a texture a novelist needs for the period he is dealing with. Here was West Punjab peasantry, rustic, rough, down to earth, whose very fabric and temperament was conditioned by constant resistance movements and confrontations. This diffused the traditional reflexes and reactions of death and after-death. This also gave them an aggressive zest for life,” she once said in a 1980 interview to Rama Jha (‘Indian Literature’).

‘Channa’ (2019) narrates the story of a woman born into a farming family in pre-Partition India.

Decades after ‘Channa’ had been pulped, Sheela Sandhu, the legendary publisher of Rajkamal Prakashan, asked her to publish it again. But Sobti was unconvinced. “When consolidating her works in the last few months of her life, we told her once again to consider publishing ‘Channa’. She felt the relevance had been lost and some of ‘Channa’ had made it to other books. She consulted several people and finally agreed to publish it. We chose an Amrita Sher-gil painting for the cover. Krishnaji loved it. She was in the hospital when the book came out. She was happy to see it but remarked that the cover was better than the novel!” laughs Ashok Maheshwari, chairperson of Rajkamal.

This story about ‘Channa’ is today an immortal tale of a writer’s ‘ishq’ with language. Mamta Kalia recalled in her piece how Nirmal Verma once pointed out the unreadability of ‘Zindaginama’ due to its language pattern: “He found Phanishwar Nath Renu’s novel ‘Maila Anchal’ and ‘Zindaginama’ incongruous due to the use of obsolete and regional words. Krishnaji argued through the evening and insisted upon Nirmal Verma to withdraw his words.” That was Krishna Sobti.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
tlbr_img1 Home tlbr_img2 Opinion tlbr_img3 Classifieds tlbr_img4 Videos tlbr_img5 E-Paper