Krishna Sobti (February 1925-January 2019): The Unceasing Genius

Sukrita Paul Kumar

M

y conversations with Krishna Sobti in the last three years were frequent and unusually intense. During this period she was in and out of the hospital with serious bouts of ill health that perhaps led to her rather nervous concern that time was running out and that it needed to be used well to consolidate her writings, intellectual as well as material possessions, as also a whole lot of her life experiences vibrating in her bountiful memories . Though extremely private about the nature of her illness, it seemed as if she felt compelled for a greater sharing than ever before, of her  ideas and responses to the present times and the experiences of the past. She had always resisted talking about her health issues and needed to be persuaded by her companion and caretaker, Vimlesh, to attend to her physical ailments. Sharply alert about time moving on and conscious about her ageing self, she seemed to acquire greater energy to go down the memory lane on the one hand and on the other, become acutely attentive to the present-day political environs and its social impact.

Krishna ji had an inimitable style of narrating an incident. Never would one feel that she may be recalling something from as long back as seventy or more years ago. In the very process of narrating an incident or a story, she relived every moment as though it were happening in that moment itself. The eyes sparkling with a glint and her cheeks swelling with a chuckle in her mouth, with a small indication of a likely twist in her tale, she embarked upon the telling of the tale as though confessing some naughty deed of hers lying in secrecy within her. One such story was that of her horse ride of 1943, when as a young lady of eighteen, she conspired with the horseman Nawab Babu, and without telling her mother, got on the saddle of a horse to travel back home on a horse. Her eyes danced in delight as she went on to describe how she fell off the horse along with the saddle when he joggled in excitement on sighting a mare drinking water at a pond yonder. She broke her ankle but concealed it from the mother till much later!

But that is so characteristic of Krishna ji, the one who was a storyteller par excellence precisely because she was able to store so much in the secret recesses of her memory and then she’d make a selective and creative use of the rich repertoire discreetly. She spent long hours alone with her self in darkness, night after night, exploring her mind and adding to the research required for the imaginative reconstruction of stories she planned to write. Her conversation demonstrated her vast reading of classics in English as well as in translation from different parts of the world and of course she kept herself informed about contemporary Hindi writers and their writings. The first book that she ever read she said was on Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife, followed by the memoires of Napoleon himself. She confessed how she was for some reason fond of reading War novels, perhaps because she felt intrigued by the conspiratorial planning that went into the making of wars in the world. Many a time she referred to James Baldwin’s Another Country with great warmth and passion and recommended it fervently as a modern classic. Her comments on other people’s writings were always very interesting. Once when Namwar Singh asked her to comment on Swadesh Deepak’s novel Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha, she responded, “this is the sick man’s most healthy book.”

Often in informal conversations with Krishna ji, I had the fortune of travelling back to the times when the literary scene for modern fiction in Hindi was at its zenith. As a storyteller is adept to do, she would describe in detail her interactions with literary stalwarts who were actually, along with her, making history through their vibrant fiction while writing with a new post-Independence sensibility. New  Hindi journals and magazines were getting established. Those were the “happening” times for literature in Hindi and many other Indian languages. A remarkable tableaux of iconic and legendary writers such as Agyeya, Nirmal Verma, Krishan Baldev Vaid, Bhisham Sahni, Kamleshwar ran before my eyes as Krishna ji would narrate anecdotes that yielded important insights into their works and times. Some of the pieces in the series of sketches by Krishna ji in Hum Hashmat emerge from these times.

In the last few years of her life, many times Krishna ji voiced her keen desire to write a piece on Kapila Vatsyayan as part of her Hum Hashmat series. I witnessed how she agonized about not having done adequate research on this iconic personality to whom she felt so attracted. The fourth volume of the series was published just about a month before she passed away but she could not somehow write on Kapila ji. Writing about her contemporaries, commenting also on socio-political issues and recording her experiences of literary parties and get togethers, Krishna Sobti  had worked out a different style and a distinct voice for these volumes. The sketches in Hum Hashmat demonstrate the writer’s extraordinary alertness with which she discerned people and her environs; she chose to write these series in the male voice. This was perhaps used as a strategy to free herself as from gender biases; she acquired a distinctly different voice and style for Hum Hashmat. It may be pertinent to mention here that she often discussed with me the concept of androgyny for writers, as defined by Virginia Woolf. She never wished to be confined to the female gender as a writer. As she stepped into the role of Hashmat, she said often, her personality transformed and her began writing differently .

When I brought Kapila Vatsyayan to Krishna Sobti’s flat in Mayur Vihar less than two years ago, I became acutely aware of the unusual energy each one reflected while involved in a fervent dialogue on contemporary times. While both of them deeply engaged with the present moments, each carried the baggage of a rich past. Not them, to be indulging in the nostalgia of the times gone by, nor did they involve themselves in constructing merely futuristic dreams…they were engaged with the ‘here and now’ enthusiastically. Even this hour-long intense conversation was clearly not adequate for Krishna ji to do her piece on Kapila ji. I brought to her Jyoti Sabharwal’s book, Kapila Vatsyayan: A Cognitive Biography, and skimmed through all of it with her but somehow whatever she may have sought was not to be found! And Krishna ji was not able to write her piece till the end. Indeed, it was to do with some creative urge to resolve something about a character or a situation that compelled her to write a novel, or even a piece for her book of sketches.

The restlessness to write notwithstanding, Krishna Sobti was not a writer who was impatient to publish after she finished with a novel or a story. Like bricks, words had to remain in the kiln till they were absolutely ready to be delivered. There was never a hurry to publish. As she told me, usually she created three drafts of any novel, before sending it off for publication. The second draft usually changed radically into becoming something else but the third draft almost always went back to acquiring the shape of the first one! The process had to be gone through anyway, for the writer to feel content with the manuscript.

 

Not so in the case of her first novel entitled Channa. That ironically became her last published novel. This novel came out recently in January 2019, in the very last days of her life when she was in the hospital. Written more than six decades ago, she had withdrawn this novel from the publisher on discovering that the editors had changed the language of the novel here and there. Sobti bought all the published copies then, burnt them and put away the original manuscript of the novel locked in a trunk for decades. Her other works kept getting written and published over the years, but not this one. She had always wanted to get back to Channa for a fresh look before giving it to a new publisher. A perfectionist, as also an extremely patient reader and editor of her own work, she did not want it to be published as it was. When in the hospital last year, she had to be persuaded to get it out of the trunk. Earlier, no one – absolutely no one – could challenge her writerly decisions, not even her own self when not in the creative mode. It would be pertinent to recall here a remark she made to me about the cover of Channa: “Amrita Shergil’s painting on the cover is beautiful. It is, I believe, much better than the novel between the covers.” I think this remark came out of a tinge of unhappiness she suffered in not being able to revise the manuscript as she desired before its publication. She had given in…It must be noted that this is not a judgement on the novel as it exists now but I narrate this only to highlight the writer’s persistent wish to re-look at the manuscript as a perfectionist. She was perhaps too weak to take on the project of the revision of the novel at this stage and thus, even though she succumbed to the persuasion so uncharacteristically, to publish it, she used her pragmatic discretion to have the book out.

The autonomy Krishnaji cherished for her own self, gets amply reflected in her characters too. The pulsating characters of her novels demand the ‘dignity of being’ in the same way as she sought for herself. She fiercely guarded this dignity for her self as also for her characters. Be it Mitro of Mitro Marjani or Mehak and Kutumb of Dilo Danish, or the mother and the daughter of Ay Ladki and many of her other characters, each one acquires a distinct identity as an individual. Each one cherishes her own desires and each one wishes to carve out her own life. Even though the mother and the daughter in Ay Ladki remain in dialogue with each other throughout, each maintains her own specific voice. As for the writer’s own unique voice, as she often remarked, in order to write she needed to be constantly attentive to the inner voice which she could hear most clearly in the darkness of the night. Sleeping through the daytime and fully awake at night, she was completely receptive to the call from the inner being. Krishna Sobti spent her nights at her desk which was in fact like a sacred altar to her. “In some blessed moment, creation knocks at the inner being of the writer…a writer’s insight searches immortality for human existence in the eternity of this world” – So said Krishna Sobti in a voice that seemed to emerge from some deep well of experience. She was a wordsmith who weaved words meticulously with great skill into fiction that told more truth than reality itself, agonising over each phrase, a word and it sound too. Each of her novels is a complete universe unto itself.

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Also read Conversations on Modernism: Extracts

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As for her magnum opus, Zindaginama, this is a novel that fetched Krishna ji the Sahitya Akademi Award. And this novel, most deservedly. The novel tells the tale of a whole age, an epic saga of times that could be showcased as the culmination of an evolving composite culture of the Indian subcontinent. This brings to mind the Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder’s celebrated novel Aag ka Darya. In both these novels, it was the apocalyptic division of the country that triggered the creative urge in these writers to recall the macro story of shared cultures that grew so naturally on this soil. Zindaginama evocatively presents a large socio-cultural canvas filled with different but shared myths, legends, festivals and beliefs but also minor quarrels and strife amongst varied classes, men and women and communities in the rural setting of Gujarat/Punjab. There is no single protagonist or a villain and the novel is peopled by a large number of persons. While Hyder’s novel spreads over a large range of time, Sobti’s offers a microscopic and detailed cultural mapping of a rich geographical domain. In both, there is extraordinary artistic skill and energy at work, in innovating fresh language and style to narrate a history pertinent specifically to the post-Partition Subcontinent right up to contemporary times. The truths unravelled by the authors of such range of vision serve as guiding forces in the very living of lives in communal togetherness. The emphasis is on an empathetic understanding and then respect for differences amongst people. Harmony is possible only where there is respect for difference: that seems to be the vital message to be taken from such a sensitive portrayal of the cultural negotiations presented through life experience in Zindaginama.

For many a writer, the pain of Partition has been difficult to express. Krishna ji lived with that anguish till her end but at different points of time she kept reverting to the theme of Partition in a variety of ways. Her autobiographical narration of the experience of Partition found its way earlier in three chapters of Gujarat Pakistan se, Gujarat Hindustan published as three episodes in the Hindi magazine “Tadbhav” from Lucknow several years before she actually developed the same into a larger narration which got published in 2017. The wounds of history on her personal self slowly find expression and gather in this book of which she herself is the protagonist, a refugee who was in search of a home after losing it on the other side of the border. “We are like sharpened knives…We have ourselves become weapons”…Having lost everything during the violence of the riots, what seemed to remain in the survivors is a fire for at times revenge and at times to ignite new life; it  lies inside seething with helpless anger. Sobti’s writing arouses the desire to return to humanity. As with Bhisham Sahni’s novel Tamas or Kamleshwar’s Kitne Pakistan and several other Partition writings, there is a compelling humanism and a moral dimension injected subtly and indirectly. Sometimes through the sheer depiction of the gruesome and irrational violence witnessed during the 1947 upheaval, what is evoked is a deep repulsion for such anti-human conduct by men of both communities. While writers such as Saadat Hasan Manto were writing immediately after Partition, many writers wrote about it much later, perhaps to escape the imaginative reliving of the tragedy that happens in the very process of writing.

 

In February 2018, in an conversation with me, Krishna ji spoke about how “distance can create another kind of familiarity. When you are writing”, she said “you have to maintain a distance and yet remain in intimate proximity with what you are depicting; there is a distance but a measured one. If you are too close, you forget about the otherness of the phenomenon. There is thus a collapse of the binary of what is called subjectivity and objectivity. Though the otherness is not that of the writer, it has to be dealt with.” As a writer, she explained, you become an insider/outsider, a witnessing self from the outside but you also remain a participant. She defined this as a very delicate predicament of the writer who can go over the edge. What may be already in the mind acquires a new look in a flash. This moment does not come dramatically though. One needs to recognize such a moment and hold on to it or else it may just slip by. “You are actually disturbed by this flash moment; you have to know how to handle that disturbance or you fail miserably,” she continued “That’s when poetry happens”.   This reminds me of the two lines of poetry she recited to me, written by her as a child in school at Shimla: “Main muskarati si subah, darti hui si shaam hoon; Main mitne walon ka yugon tak rehne wala vo naam hoon.” (“I am that somewhat smiling dawn, I am that somewhat frightened evening; I am that name from amongst the mortals, which will live for centuries”). These lines won her a silver medal!

Whenever Krishnaji talked about her childhood days at Shimla where her family would move with the British to the summer capital in the pre-Independence times, she would slip into the dreamy world of clouds, mountains and the blue open skies. Her eyes twinkling, she described the skating scenes of Shimla with people waltzing delightfully on the glittering white ice ! She’d pause reflecting on the pure blue of the sky, her eyebrows tilting in nostalgia. And then suddenly she remembered how she witnessed the long procession on the Lower Bazaar for the adoption of Hindi as an official language in India in late 1940’s. She added, “there was a protest too on the Upper Mall.” All this was going on while the War propaganda by the British was full on. Her family stayed in Gulshan Lodge when they were in Shimla. “Ha ha , you know what,” she would chuckle, “when I was brought into this world in 1925, that’s when the railcar was brought to Shimla.” Each one, I thought quietly, was unique, and she definitely much more!

Krishna Sobti’s book on Ladakh vouches for the deep love she experienced for the Himalayas. Her book Buddha ka Kamandal Ladakh captures the vibrancy of the colourful rocks of the wondrous landscape of Ladakh in its narration and indeed through photographs. The writer’s ardent love for Himalayas finds expression in both word as well as deed. She would tirelessly share her experiences of trekking on these mountains as also those of Uttaranchal, specially around Mukteshwar. Krishna ji relished the idea of establishing direct and experiential contact with what she admired, the aesthetics of nature. She had no qualms in making bold choices about her travels, both in her mind as well as physically.

 

Soon after she married the Dogri writer Shiv Nath ji at the age of seventy, Krishna ji and I  spent an evening of conversation and celebration at India International Centre. Surprisingly, she had married someone born on the same date and year as herself, 18^th February 1925! It was clear that she respected and admired Shiv Nath ji ardently. They had decided to live together, go through the process of aging together and some practical compulsions led to their decision of sealing this relationship with official stamp of marriage. Reflecting on their decision and the nature of their relationship, Krishna ji felt compelled to explore and articulate her thoughts through the writing of her novel Samay Sargam. In this book, the wisdom and maturity of sharing the process of ‘aging’ finds expression between the covers in a very calm and serene fashion. Vasudha Dalmia does well in translating the title as The Music of Solitude in English. Two solitudes come together, as it were, to sort out their relationship with time. They actually ask of themselves if they are merely whiling off time but then this perspective gets dispelled when they find themselves debating on fundamental existential questions regarding life and death. Very different from each other, they take a journey into self-reflexivity together. Two solitudes create a symphony and live together in harmony despite being so different!

The phenomenal person that she was, Krishna ji’s life and story cannot be confined to a single article. Nor can one “sum up” here. Though she believed in “giving”, she always kept back a lot, deep inside her, conserving her enormous vision and storehouse of memories to be churned out in her writing from time to time. Towards the end, she repeatedly said “Yaar, there isn’t enough time.” She passed away fully live with the urge to give more. Alas, the body cannot live up to the vision of such towering, larger-than-life personalities …

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This text is a chapter from Sukrita Paul Kumar’s book “Conversations on Modernism” published by Vani Book Company Delhi. 2020

 Sukrita Paul Kumar, poet and critic, was born and brought up in Kenya. She held the prestigious Aruna Asaf Ali Chair at Delhi University.

Sukrita in The Beacon