Krishna Sobti shuns regimentation. She allows freedom even to her characters, so they can speak out her silences.
FOR Krishna Sobti ("70-plus," she whispers evasively), politics stems from language. "Can you imagine," she shudders, "the horror of the word adhyaksh mahoday? I would always use sahib-i-sadr. And what about that other abomination, padhariye? Awful. Krishna Tashreef rakhiye, on the other hand, is generous, lofty." She gestures grandly towards the snow peaks that surround the sudden Gothic beauty of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS) in Shimla, where she is a national fellow.
Sobti's an unlikely eminence grise; she looks like a purple-clad goblin bouncing up a flower-lined path. Yet she's the author of over a dozen novels and a Sahitya Akademi fellow who has held several university chairs in Hindi literature. "Sobti's a writer of the first rank," says poet Namvar Singh. "It's a pity that someone whose language is so refined and consciousness so urbane should not be known outside the Hindi world."
She did hit headlines recently though. When the newly-appointed chairman of the institute, G.C. Pande, suggested that the institute had become "another JNU" consisting of rootless Leftists propagating anti-Bharat research, Sobti was outraged at this typical "Hindi-belt backwardness". Writers of fiction, the chairman told her at a seminar, are after all simply engaged in building their own name and fame and don't deserve institutional support.
In an open letter to the press, she stated that the institute was in danger of a political and intellectual takeover illustrated by the fact that for the first time a political leader—Murli Manohar Joshi—was being invited to address the Radhakrishnan Memorial Lecture, once delivered by scholars like K.N. Raj and M.G.K. Menon. "I've never liked regimentation. I don't like thought control, I don't like the new culture the BJP is trying to create. Most of all I don't like their language," Sobti declares. Why is it, she asks, that whoever opposes them is branded a Leftist? "I'm not a Leftist, I'm just saying that 1,000-year-old shastras don't work anymore."
"The problem with the BJP," says she, "is that it has no sense of humour." The truly educated, she says, can always laugh at themselves. "I mean just look at this chairman, he wants to ruin these lovely big rooms by putting up partitions!" She was once offered an award by the Delhi government, and the offi-cial letter requested her for a shwet aur shyam (black and white) photograph. "Shwet aur shyam, I ask you?" she expostulates. "Can you imagine such a horrible phrase?" She rejected the award forthwith. Sanskritised Hindi, she says, is no fun, and is a metaphor of the joyless prurience of the cow belt. Sobti's language, says Namvar Singh, is experimental, with a lot of "Punjabiyat", informal, but always stylish. "Have you noticed how Hindus can never be happy? They are always melancholic," she pronounces.
She swishes around the institute, darting under portraits, peering for ghosts in its spooky wood-panelled interiors, "communicating" with the Dhauladhar and Chudhadhar peaks as they loom mystically over the velvet slopes, all the while sensing the presence "of He who has a copyright on the sunset" among the autumnal chinars.
In matching cap and flowing gown, Sobti's the incorrigible litterateur. She laughs loudly, swears sometimes, designs her own clothes and refuses to wear the national dress. "I like clothes I feel strong in, that give me a powerful walk, even if official bodyguards don't approve of them," she announces.
Sobti belongs to the Partition generation, for whom religious nationalism still means violent personal loss. She was born in district Gujarat (now in Pakistan)—"the heart of Punjab"—on which her acclaimed book Zindaginama is based. It is a peasant book, she says, visible and audible. "The noise and dialects of Punjab rang in my ears at that time." Her family lived in a brick haveli in rural Gujarat; her horse-riding, barely-literate mother was role model and chief adversary. Sobti never married and lived with her mother until she died. "I became close to my mother only when she was dying, when her authority as a mother was fading." Her book Ai Ladki is based on the interplay of their mutual neuroses. They suffered terribly in 1947 and her book Daal Se Bichdi is the tragedy of a woman left behind. "But I hate self-pity," she shouts out, setting her cap more jauntily on her head. "Sulking and suffering just isn't my thing."
HER tumultuous colourful life make her impatient with convention and timidity. She trekked to Ladakh alone at the age of 65, went drinking with officers of the Indian navy while visiting Port Blair. In Mount Abu she worked as a governess to the Prince of Sirohi, Tej Singh. "He was a lovely child but used to vomit a lot," she recalls. In Delhi, she worked as an editor in an adult literacy project. "My office was in the Old Secretariat, but I spent most of my time at the Oberoi Maidens!" She swung in and out of restaurants and wrote furiously at night. "Oh those Delhi restaurants in those days!" she sighs. "I grew up with them. Volga and Laguna, Alp's and Gaylord's, the Milk Bar in Scindia House, my favourite ice cream was Dusty Road!" Her book Dil-o-Danish on Delhi life is about life in Dariba, about days when poetry and friendship reigned in place of five star brittleness.
Outside her cottage, the sun dips into blackness and the institute's walls are bloodied by its last rays. The chinars whisper with a chill breeze as Sobti pours herself a mighty peg of Aristocrat and puts on the lamps amidst her crazily clashing interior decor: purple cushions, pink curtains, a random garland.
She says a little sadly that Hindi will always be considered "vernacular" because it will probably never be read by the elite. But she's determined to write as much as she can. "Krishna Sobti is not only iconoclastic, but a fluid readable writer," says author Mrinal Pande. "And it's significant that at a time when most women of her generation were writing about love and loss, she always chose remarkably different themes."
Her book Yaaron ke Yaar is about the seedy underworld of babu intrigue. The free use of words like "mother***" and "sister***" led to the book being called "obscene". "Can I help it if some of my characters are abusive?" she asks incredulously. "I never interfere with my characters. They have their own logic!" Mitro Marjani, a book about a passionate Punjabi woman married to an impotent man, was also criticised by some. But Sobti says she's never followed the conventions of a "woman writer". "I am a writer who happens to be a woman. But for me writing is not gendered. It's a bisexual act. When I write I'm conscious of two personas, man and woman."
She returned from a party one evening in the '70s and and found herself writing a column under a male pseudonym "Hash-mat". "It's odd that when I began writing that column, my language changed and became masculine." Life for her is not just about romance but a hundred other shades. Don't call her a feminist because she doesn't believe in hostility between men and women. "The magic of the world is that only a man and a woman can procreate!"
Why did she never marry? "When I write, I write with vairag bhava!" she beams. "You can't write as a hobby. You can only write when you don't have other responsibilities." She hops over to fetch another drink and holds forth suddenly on the garara and why she'll always prefer it to a sari. Seconds later, she darts into her bedroom, comes out wrapped in a golden robe with a matching hat. "Of course I wear this only in the evenings," she says. "I'm half my size in the day. In the evenings I'm myself. That's when I listen to my silences." These silences will now speak in her new book. They'll talk about ageing and family breakdown. The themes may be familiar, but from the pen of this 'true-blue eccentric' (as Pande describes her), it will, rest assured, be rendered quite original.