Hindi's Mirror Stage

However, some of the interest of the original volumes also derived from the fact that the author had led an interesting life and had been involved with significant literary people and events. Thus, although he is not very enlightening on the phenomenon that was Madhushala, there aren't that many people who have observed Nirala challenge the delicate and slightly effeminate Sumitra Nandan Pant to a wrestling bout! Bachchanji, it appeared, intended to tell all—and he had a lot to tell, as both gossips and others agreed. Even before he was "adopted" by the Nehru-Gandhi family, and before he became, retrospectively, the father of Big B. The fact that the indefatigable Dr Rupert Snell has made these volumes available in English, albeit in slightly abridged form, is a matter for congratulation and gratitude.

The crucial tension in autobiography is always that between telling the truth and telling the whole truth—ie the truth about the 'whole'. Thus, a certain autobiographer declared that while he would tell the whole truth, he couldn't promise to be telling the truth all the time! It is difficult to decide towards which pole the balance of Bachchan's achievement finally lies. A great deal of the value of the work—particularly the first two volumes—derives from the fact that he tells so much that was true and is already in the process of being forgotten. Thus, the social detail regarding the lives of small-town lower-middle-class Kayastha families in the early decades of this century is invaluable. Despite the intensely domestic and even personal focus of the early volumes, these are much richer in cultural and contextual detail than the latter two volumes, in which the writer consciously tries to write about the public world. In these, one misses both the larger and the local truths.

It was probably an impossible expectation anyway. I would imagine that the disjunctions of his life must have been difficult enough even to live through: going from being a small-town teacher and aspiring poet to becoming the poet of Madhushala is phenomenon enough. He was also, perhaps on the strength of his Cambridge doctorate and his wife's legendary social skills, absorbed into the inner circle of the Nehru dynasty. A suspicious reader looks quickly to see how Bachchan copes with narrating the infamous Emergency and, not surprisingly, he moves nimbly past that sordid history; after all, proximity to the powerful must exact some costs, too. Then, inevitably, he becomes Amitabh's father—touched a little by the pathos of Joseph, God's cuckold, sidelined by the Holy Trinity.

Self-dramatisation is of the essence in autobiography. But the impulse towards such narrative transformation seems to peter out towards the end. Obviously, the sheer effulgence of Big B's stardom shadows and overshadows all—and while that phenomenon itself would be of absorbing interest, perhaps the father isn't the best person for the job. Imposing any kind of shape—the 'whole' truth—on a life as full of violent disjunctions as this was is in any case asking for too much. But the local detail one picks up along the way—even where it skimps a little, or hurries along, or is discreetly oblique—is well worth the price of the ticket.

There is an amusing instance of the kind of difficulty I am trying to indicate. The occasion is one of those numerous Hindu-Muslim confrontations which were once so common; the protagonist, HRB's father: "Father tucked up his dhoti, rolled up the sleeves of his kurta, and advanced, stout hill-walking staff held in his right hand and resting on his shoulder, and his left arm swinging vigorously. He was self-confidence incarnate. The sight of a single man stepping forward to take on a group of 25 or 30 was enough to make even the antagonists stop short. He went up to them and said, 'I haven't come to fight—if I had, I wouldn't have come alone...'" One can't help thinking that he could have learnt a trick or two from his future grandson!

The English reader is, alas, condemned not to know the skill with which Bachchan deploys the music of ordinary Hindi, rich with the lovingly handled, casually bandied accretions of centuries and civilisations—but Snell's skillful, sensitive translation goes a long way towards minimising the sense of loss. There is a particular matter for which bilingual readers like the present one will be very grateful: although Snell has taken courage in both hands and translated not only the prose but also the interspersed verse fragments, and while these translations are by and large efficient, I would've felt quite bereft without the appendixed originals!