Nobody, the movie moghul Samuel Goldwyn is supposed to have said, should write their autobiography until after they are dead. Indians seem to fell the same way, for very few of them have written accounts of their lives. Indeed until very recent times, only a handful even kept diaries: the only Indian I've heard of who kept one before the 19th century was Ananda Ranga Pillai, an 18th century merchant who became the chief agent for the French in Pondicherry.
Things have changed. Many Indians have written about their lives including two if greatest Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. And although the four memoirs that I write about here are not as well as known as The Story of My Experiments with Truth and An Autobiography, they're all of the first rank.
The first, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN UKNOWN INDIAN, is the story of one our most original, irascible and provocative intellectuals, Nirad Chaudhuri.
Published in 1951 when Chaudhuri was 54, it was his first book and, in the opinion of many, his best. It was dedicated to the "Memory of the British Empire in India" because Chaudhuri insisted, "All that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule." The dedication and some of the content of the book created an uproar and Chaudhuri was denounced as anti-Indian.
Chaudhuri's Indian readers were incensed by his analysis of contemporary India. He claimed that our society had degenerated to near barbarism by the time of the British arrival. Then following a brief renaissance thanks to thoughtful Bengalis like Ram Mohan Roy, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, and Swami Vivekananda engaging with western liberal ideas, from 1951 or so India began to be "re-barbarized" again.
Frankly, I'm not a great fan of Chaudhuri's opinions. But, thankfully, his autobiography has a lot more than controversial ideas. Most of it is a beautifully written and meticulously described account of his life in rural Bengal and Calcutta in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. It also gives a vivid picture of the amazing range of interests of an exceptionally intelligent and erudite Bengali. It's not an easy book to read, but it's well worth the effort. BEYOND PUNJAB is by a man who, unlike Chaudhuri, rose to the highest levels of the Indian establishment. Prakash Tandon was the first Indian management trainee hired by Hindustan Lever and its first Indian chairman, A pioneer of professional market research in this country, he mad the cooking medium Dalda a household word.
Actually, Tandon wrote three volumes of autobiography. Beyond Punjab, the middle one, is my favorite. It deals with the years 1937 to 1960, a very interesting period when, in tandem with the ending of British rule, the once pukka British companies in this country started Indianizing their management.
Tandon is a master story teller and Beyond Punjab is packed with lively anecdotes about his career with Levers. Tandon's description of his complicated relationship with his English colleagues is especially interesting. At work, the relationship was all that he could wish; but socially, it was very uneasy. For example, before 1947, English bosses didn't entertain even senior Indian manages at their homes. Only after Independence, ten years after he'd started working for Levers, did Tandon's English boss invite him home for meal. To his credit, Tandon politely declined the invitation.
Not many Indian women have written their memoirs. But one of the most controversial autobiographies by an Indian male or female is undoubtedly MY STORY by Kamala Das, who was a first rate poet in both Malayalam and English. Its candid recounting of Das's longing for love mostly emotional, but physical too so scandalized middle class Malayalis(it appeared first in Malayalam in 1973) that the author's father, a powerful publisher, tried to get it suppressed.
In some ways, My Story, which Kamala Das herself later translated into English, is a slippery book. Is it all true or is it all or at least some of it made up? Is Das toying with us when describing her so called "affairs"? At different times, Das gave different answers to these questions. But the book is so lyrically written, so faithful of the yearnings of sensitive and warm hearted woman, that whether or not she's stated the literal truth seems unimportant.
Sudhir Kakar's A BOOK OF MEMORY is an intimate a self portrait as My Story, but a lot more analytical about feelings. That's only to be expected, because Kakar the only one of out four authors who's still living is a psychoanalyst. In the course of his work, he has heard innumerable people pour out their hearts to him, and here, he does the same to us thankfully, in a more disciplined coherent, and thoughtful way. And although he describes his sexual encounters at length, there are no salacious details in this intensely serious and earnestly written book, and those looking for titillation will be sorely disappointed.
Comments
Post a Comment