Crusade for Freedom

Crusade for Freedom

Much in news, Ritu Menon’s Out of Line: A Literary and Political Biography of Nayantara Sahgal catapults the duo again into the limelight. Nayantara Sahgal the first woman political columnist of India, daughter of Vijayalaksmi Pandit and niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, and Ritu Menon famous writer and publisher of the fame of Women Unlimited, and co-founder of Kali for Women. 

The Political Imagination: A Personal Response to Life Literature and Politics, Sahgal’s latest book, was also launched together with her biography. From the personal stemmed the political and the literary. The political became her truth because of her family’s legacy and literary her passion, a clear paper canvas on which she artistically inked her life in totality. A chronicler of the making of modern India, she opposed Indira Gandhi vehemently during the emergency, through her underground literature and spent a year abroad to escape the threat to her life. She became the keeper of Nehruvian (a surrogate father, her idol) democracy and secularism, when his own kith and kin were embroiled in despotic measures. She yearns for a restoration of the idealism of Gandhi and Nehru – and rests her faith on change, the harbinger of balance and rectitude.

 The title ‘Out of Line’ of the biography could be interpreted as an unusual attempt by Menon to write on a person who has already been written about expansively, and whose writings and interviews have appeared in print extensively; or the ‘out of line’ material that Menon manages to unearth, details{ intimate and personal} of her glamorous life, close to her being, which she divulges now that she is a happy 87 years old. Menon describes Sahgal’s ’writing life’ evocatively as one “in which the personal, the political and the literary were so intertwined as to be like three plyn yarn.” The chapters in the book are titled after her novels: A Time to be Happy, This Time of Morning, A day in Shadow....Rich like Us, Mistaken Identity..........

What ties the two women together, the subject and the biographer is their crusade for women emancipation. Sahgal is foremost a political writer but her fiction is a diatribe against the oppressive forces of tradition and society. Her characters are not so much as products of imagination as real life people in her own society. “In fiction there is no such thing as closure, you keep drawing on your own life and those of many people’s around you. “ Nehru’s direction that she write from her own experience, stayed with her and her political columns in newspapers, non-fiction writings and also fiction became autobiographical. The journey from Maya in A time to be Happy to Ranee in Mistaken Identity is a coming of age story of woman’s determination and self actualisation.

 Two real life events which guided her writing were her marriages, man- woman relationships and the arena of emotions accompanying them. The first turning point was her marriage to Gautam, a businessman. She got married at Anand Bhavan in Allahabad the Pandit’s  family home, attired in a khadi sari. She was at the time quiet taken in by Gautam, his suave intelligence, much like her uncle she thought. . She couldn’t have been more wrong. He was consumed with jealousy; he could not forget or forgive her affair with sculptor Ismat Noguchi and relationships with other men. The alienation and abandonment destroyed her. The unhappy marriage ended in a debilitating divorce in 1967. Thus, the major theme in her works is disharmony and dissolution of marriage. In storm in Chandigarh with a backdrop of the Punjab divide and acrimonious relationships of the chief ministers of Punjab and Haryana she portrays a miserable and discontent female protagonist Saroj who is tortured by her husband for having an affair in college before they got married. She wrote about divorce and freedom of an individual in lieu of a compromised silence at a time when divorce was heavily frowned upon.

The second major event was her decision to live with a brilliant bureaucrat, Edward Nirmal Mangat Rai which she described in her own words, “not an affair but a revolution, a self discovery that life had to be lived more fully in order to be meaningful.” Heroines in her successive novels progressively set out on a path of reflection, and self actualization, heading on a course of liberation and realization of their potential without remorse or guilt or help from any male or female counterpart. It’s as if they came upon the discovery within  themselves, to live full human lives of joy and contentment. Her feminist ideology propels women to seek autonomy and individuality, an assured self, a self- possession fired by an inner flame of shakti.  She delineates male protagonists like Ram, Dev, Inder, who propagate the patriarchal attitudes, and in the process not only victimize the women in their lives, but harm themselves through the oppressiveness and misery of their actions. When we downgrade the other, a part of us remains steeped down with them. She inspires men to rise and evolve to a full humanity.  

She was the first Indian women author writing in English to be published abroad. Ranee and Bhushan  in her last novel, Mistaken Identity, are her most evolved characters. Ranee though an illiterate 1930s queen, refuses to abide by her husband’s third marriage and live a life of indignity and utter disgrace. She abandons the veil and walks out of his house and later lives with comrade Yusuf of her own choice. Without him too she moves on bold and undeterred and does not even take help from her son Bhushan. The latter through his alliances with various women comes into his own and finds himself, for it is only through our relationship with others that we can know and discover ourselves. Each relationship is sacred and a conduit to realise your inner potential , a path to self discovery. She declares: "It takes half of life to achieve personhood but there is no greater glory." True to reflection her heroines Maya, Rashmi, Saroj, Simrit, and Devi act as real Shaktis and achieve freedom, after an initial phase of hesitation and turbulence. Thereafter Sonali, Anna and Ranee are self –realized protagonists who rebel remorselessly and fiercely treading their own paths of emancipation and victory.

Tradition and modernity are intertwined in her writings. The legacy of truth, nonviolence, satyagraha, social justice, prayer, simplicity, socialism, democracy, and progress is our political heritage. But when this tradition extends to interpersonal relationships a play field of ambiguity enters into it.  Her ambivalence to tradition in relationships comes across clearly through one of the characters: “Hinduism was boundless enough . . . to encompass the loftiest of metaphysics, rigid enough to despise the Untouchable. It was goodness and piety and the living light of faith. . . . Yet it was the sufferance of disease and clamour near the temple. It was torpor that accepted maimed limbs, blind eyes and abject poverty as destiny, letting generations live and die in hopelessness, and at the same time it was the majesty of the mind engaged in lifelong combat with the senses. It turned men into oppressors, who have internalized the violence of the patriarchy and in turn directed it outward at their wives. They have been handed down expectations about "husbandhood" and "wifehood" which are incompatible with contemporary reality.” When women like Saroj, Anna, Simrit walked out of their marriges they chose personal fulfilment, and individuality over silence and  obedience, that patriarchy upholds in marriages. The modern over the traditional – their guide being an inner strength and  shakti  which blazed a trail of light for them.

 "It has taken a million years of evolution for a person and his cherished individuality to matter . . . and no terror must be allowed to destroy that. In other words, tradition itself must provide the impetus for change by negating those of its aspects which are inimical to its survival,” states Nayantara Sahgal emphatically.

No doubt, she has been rightly compared to Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing for her crusades in political and feminist thought.