Why Mahadevi Varma’s prose pieces feel radically modern today

Doing a little too well with a specific mode of writing can often obscure other parts of a writer’s oeuvre. Ted Hughes, renowned for his poetry for grown-ups, also wrote one of the finest, weirdest children’s books ever—The Iron Man (1968)—but is seldom remembered in that light. Stephen King, synonymous with the horror genre, has also written the excellent On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), a manual cited by A-list writers and creative writing curricula around the world. In a similar vein, I discovered the work of Mahadevi Varma as a teenager through her very well-known poetry collections like Neerja (1933), Sandhyageet (1935) and Deepshikha (1942), seen as landmark works, especially in the context of Chhayavaad, a neo-Romanticist movement that refused to be hemmed in by the perceived didacticism of the preceding era of Hindi literature.

I associated Varma with her classical, tatsam language (“tatsam” refers to Hindi words borrowed intact from Sanskrit, with no change in form or meaning), mystical-religious themes that earned her comparisons with Mirabai, and the occasional rousing paean to patriotism and the motherland. It was only much later that I discovered her extraordinary, allusive prose writings, a collection of which has been recently translated by Ruth Vanita, under the title Portraits from Memory.

The book brings together two collections of Varma’s pen-portraits, Ateet ke Chalchitra (Moving Pictures of the Past, 1941) and Smriti ki Rekhayen (Lines of Memory, 1943). These are life-sketches of regular people, not her literary peers. Out of these 18 sketches (most of them run between 10-15 pages), some are of people who were mainstays in her life, like Bhaktin, her trusted maid and confidante of over a decade. Other subjects intersect with her life only fleetingly, like Gheesa, the lower-caste boy whose unforgettable, heart-wrenching story remains arguably her most famous (and frequently anthologised) work of prose.

Anybody who has read Varma’s poetry will tell you about the ingenious ways in which she uses Hindu epics and religious symbols—and you see some of it evidenced in this collection, too. What you won’t see in the poetry, however, is that she’s a seasoned, unhurried observer of people. Barely a chapter goes by in Portraits from Memory without a sharply rendered description of hands, feet, eyes and body language. Rama, the first subject in the book, is the possessor of an “unshapely, thick nose which was like the final mistake of a tired, irritated sculptor”. Binda, a neighbour’s harangued step-daughter, has “the eyes of a caged bird” because of her step-mother’s relentless cruelty. Gheesa’s bony arms, stick-like after years of malnutrition, are likened to the “artificial limbs hung on the one who plays Vishnu in a drama”.

This tactility heightens the emotional stakes for the reader. Even in a quick five-seven page sketch, we are invested in the aspirations, misfortunes and eventual fates of these people. For instance, in Bhabhi, we see Varma as a child (no more than 7-8 years old) innocently latching on to the company of a lonely young Marwari widow in the neighbourhood, calling her bhabhi (sister-in-law) instead of didi (elder sister), the default for a Hindi-speaking girl addressing an elder peer. By the time the reader realises what is truly going on beyond the child’s understandably restricted vantage point, the world and its vicissitudes have claimed bhabhi’s newfound peace. The climactic image of this story, bhabhi’s furious sister-in-law (“her eyes burning like coals”) about to inflict corporal punishment upon the widow, will stay with the reader for a long time.

There’s a moment in Bhabhi where Varma describes the subject’s arduous daily housekeeping duties as “that unfortunate girl’s day stretched out like Draupadi’s garment”. Here, she is referring to the infamous episode from the Mahabharat where Duryodhana and the rest of the Kauravas try to disrobe Draupadi before the royal court. The choice of example isn’t a coincidence—both Draupadi’s and bhabhi’s lives are brutish, volatile and subject to the ego-driven machinations of men.

Similarly, in the chapter Sabiya, we are told that the subject’s name is a variant of the ever-virtuous Savitri from Hindu mythology, who stubbornly refuses to let Yama the God of Death claim her fallen husband Satyavaan (“the truthful one” in Hindi). Only in this story, the husband is a cruel and shameless man who abandons Sabiya, only to return one fine morning with a different woman, one he insists Sabiya will now have to live with under the same roof.

By invoking the myth of Savitri several times across the text, even as Sabiya extinguishes more and more of herself out of a misplaced sense of wifely duty, Varma is making a subtle yet fierce critique of Hindu scripture. Any story that can make a grown woman willingly surrender the last shreds of her self-esteem, is a dangerous story indeed, a linguistic weapon of mass distraction.

However, it should be pointed out that Portraits from Memory has many instances where the author uses scripture in much lighter contexts as well. For example, when Varma is describing the experience of teaching her younger siblings and cousins, she calls herself the Shukracharya of the house. This is funny for two reasons. First, the visual dissonance of a teenage girl being equated to an old sage. And second, Shukracharya was actually the teacher to the rakshasas, or ogres, which makes the reference a humorous takedown of her chirpy younger brothers and sisters.

The allusive nature of Varma’s writing is one reason why the sometimes lengthy footnotes in the text (written by the translator) were absolutely necessary. For a different, more straightforward writer, lengthy footnotes would maybe have come across as a distraction from the main text. But for this book, it is the right decision and I’m grateful that Vanita (who has translated Varma’s work in the past, in addition to Munshi Premchand, Pandey Bechan Sharma “Ugra” and Mannu Bhandari, among others) took this route.

How else would the modern-day reader reconcile Varma’s obvious empathy for her lower-caste students with her repeated usage of the word “Harijan” to describe them? As Vanita explains in the footnote, the writer was an avowed Gandhian and took her cues from M.K. Gandhi, who coined the now-frowned-upon term. Today there is broad agreement that “Harijan” is a condescending word that obscures the lived reality of the oppressed. In the last decade or so, several state governments have passed orders banning the word in all official communication and records.

Even those well-versed in the author’s poetry will find plenty to surprise them in Portraits from Memory. And to those readers who are yet to discover the treasure trove that is Mahadevi Varma’s bibliography, this is as good a place to start as any.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.