Lounge
Remembering the pioneering legacy of Krishna Sobti at 100
Summary
Sobti was the first major female fiction writer in Hindi. Her search for the human truth remains an inspiration to the generations who came after her
In 2018, during what she repeatedly referred to as her “last interview" (with writer and journalist Ashutosh Bhardwaj), Hindi writer Krishna Sobti said, “Love, sex and death are the defining emotions of this planet. I have always tried to preserve space for them." Great writers, irrespective of language and culture, gravitate towards the Big Questions, holding nothing back. And Krishna Sobti was, by any standards, a literary titan.
Born 100 years ago this week on 18 February 1925 in the city of Gujrat, Punjab Province (Pakistan), Sobti is widely considered to be one the greatest Hindi writers of all time. The author of over a dozen works of fiction and several essay-collections, she produced era-defining novels in every decade since the 1950s—Daar se Bichudi (1958), Mitro Marjaani (To Hell with you, Mitro!) (1966), Zindaginama (1979), Aye Ladki (Listen, Girl!) (1991) and, more recently, the autobiographical Gujrat Pakistan se Gujrat Hindustan (A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There) (2017). She won a Sahitya Akademi in 1980 for Zindaginama and in 2017, a couple of years before her death, she was given the Jnanpith Award.
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Sobti’s books were trailblazers in terms of both form and content. Mitro Marjaani’s titular protagonist was an outspoken married woman, unafraid to explore her sexuality and to demand acceptance on her own terms. The famous scene where Mitro stands in front of a mirror and stares at her own uncovered breasts, remains an intervention of seismic proportions in Hindi literature. The Rajasthani inflections sprinkled liberally throughout the book also showed that her Hindi was a language of addition and accretion, borrowing words and burrowing into her characters’ psyches with unerring aim.
These two traits—uncommon depth of characterisation and being a linguistic savant—would become Sobti hallmarks in the decades ahead. Dil-o-Danish (1994, translated into English in 2005 as The Heart has its Reasons, a suboptimal name, especially considering Wallis Simpson’s memoir had the same title) set in Old Delhi in the 1920s, featured Hindu Kayastha characters bickering back-and-forth in decidedly refined, Urdu-adjacent Hindi or Hindustani, if you will.
Her debut novel Daar se Bichudi centred around a child born out of an inter-religious marriage, during the time of the Anglo-Sikh wars of the 1840s. The Hindi featured in this novel and in Zindaginama (set in pre-Partition, undivided Punjab) isn’t quite a mixture of Hindi and Punjabi—it is Hindi written in such a fiendishly clever way that it has the rhythm and feel of Punjabi (with more-than-occasional loan words, of course).
“She is one of the pioneers of the modern in Hindi," says Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi. “Before her there were two major female writers, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan and Mahadevi Verma. Although Mahadevi did write some great prose, neither of them was really a fiction writer. Sobti was the first major female fiction writer in Hindi—and she had an epic vision. In terms of scale, her novel Zindaginama can be considered a kind of Mahabharat of pre-Partition India."
Among all her works, he adds, Dil-o-Danish is the one he found himself returning to most often, the story of a 1920s Old Delhi lawyer named Kripanarayan who has two families, the “other" one being courtesy the very alluring, very Muslim Mehek Bano. “With Dil-o-Danish she delved deep into the history of Delhi, specifically Old Delhi," Vajpeyi says. “While reading this novel it’s like you were right there in Old Delhi in the 1920s, observing how people speak, how they live, what they eat, the languages that they speak. It is a completely fictional narrative but it is as honest and candid as a first-rate historical account."
This does not mean that Sobti was a research-hound, scouring the archives for the sake of piling detail upon arcane detail. As novelist Amitabha Bagchi noted in a 2017 essay, Sobti deliberately maintained a distance between herself and the characters on the page, even if they inhabited a very different time and place. The mere sight of the Chillianwala battlefield (in Pakistan) was enough for her to write Daar se Bichudi, set during the Anglo-Sikh war fought there in 1849. Ditto for Zindaginama, which seldom delves into forensic detail about life in pre-Partition Punjab but focuses instead on the texture of lived reality—full of bridal songs, lullabies, nonsense verses chanted during rowdy evenings on the playground.
As Bagchi put it, “Instead of facts, what Sobti searches for is the truth, the writer’s truth, and it is the process of discovery of truth, coupled with an incessant investigation into the nature of human values, that Sobti believes is the mark of literature."
Among her non-fiction corpus, perhaps the most notable chunk was courtesy Sobti’s male alter ego “Hashmat", the name she used when writing about her contemporaries during the 1960s and 1970s, including Nirmal Verma and Bhisham Sahni, not to mention younger writers like Vajpeyi (who during our interview confessed his delight at having been written about thrice in the Hashmat years). These columns were later collected in the volume Hum Hashmat.
To readers unfamiliar with the chauvinist politics of 20th century Hindi literature, it’s difficult to summarise how subversive a phenomenon this was. Daisy Rockwell, translator of Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There (2019), has also written extensively about the sociopolitical churnings of Hindi literature, especially in her Upendranath Ashk: A Critical Biography (2004).
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“When I went to Allahabad to meet Ashk and do my research for my PhD in the mid-1990s, it took me a while, but slowly I began to realise what a man’s world the Hindi literary scene was," says Rockwell. “Hindi writers hung out at the India Coffee House, they drank together, they hung out all the time, drove around on scooters and motorcycles together, and when a woman entered their presence, they were formal and not particularly comfortable." Again and again, Rockwell was told of the exploits of Gordon Roadarmel, a male Hindi researcher who had spent time in Allahabad years before her—rode a motorcycle, drank with the male writers and was generally loved by all. The contrast couldn’t have been starker.
“To be a woman writer in that milieu, one had to be tough as nails and impervious to the gender divide," Rockwell says. “I feel that Krishna-ji expressed this through her alter ego, Hashmat, who is always going to the India Coffee House, drinking, hanging out with his dudebro writer friends and having manly thoughts. I’m surprised how few people have read the Hum Hashmat pieces. There are numerous PhD theses in there for anyone that wants them. And the satire is brilliant!"
It’s impossible to estimate just how many Hindi (and, as the likes of Bagchi prove, English) writers have been inspired by Sobti’s works. But it is safe to say that she continues to cast a long shadow. Geetanjali Shree, the International Booker-winning writer of Ret-Samadhi (translated as Tomb of Sand by Rockwell), dedicated the novel to Sobti, and called Sobti her guru in the introduction.
A hundred years since her birth and six years since her passing, it’s fitting to end with these words in the introduction to Listen Girl! (Aye Ladki in the original Hindi): “No, no one is exempt from literary failings. But I believe what’s important is honesty and intellectual integrity, an inner dimension to visualize a touch, a sensation, a dream, a challenge. And finally, a sudden madness, a leap into space, to create a thing vibrant and alive."
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.
