Child of Light

It does not require an authorised biography to discover the essential truth about Nayantara. For in her companion work to Ritu Menon’s bio, she includes an obituary she wrote about Bertrand Russell, the “Intellectual Giant of the Century”. Of him, she says, he was one “who strove with his whole being to overcome in his personal relationships the painful barriers of personality” — just like Nayantara — and “at the public level to restate and re-enforce his links with humanity” — again, just like Nayantara.

In Menon’s biography, we find Nayantara again and again describing her “deadly detachment” while being caught in “the pursuit of many hungers”, desiring, above all, the “great, unimaginable luxury of being myself”; saying of herself, “I’m not a happy person, you know…”; not being prepared “in my reticence” to give what her husband desired of her — the life of a social butterfly. Menon says of her, at a time when the secure world of a home-maker that she had hoped to weave for herself was unravelling: “She, who kept herself to herself, could now discuss matters close to her heart with someone who simply refused to leave her alone in her shell.”

And what were these “matters close to her heart”? As with Bertrand Russell, these were her “links to humanity” — her poignant nationalism as she pulls herself back from a thoroughly enjoyable student life in the United States: “India (is) a necessary part of me”; she had to “fulfill myself as an Indian”, her attachment to “a glittering aspiration called India”. Menon comments: “she was married to India in some peculiar, passionate and unalterable way, and nothing could change that”. And what was that “peculiar, passionate way”? That she belonged to India’s first political family and her idol was her beloved mamu, Jawaharlal Nehru. That shone through in her very first work of non-fiction, Prison and Chocolate Cake, written in 1954 when she was no more than 27, and a huge hit on the international and domestic market.

Much later, in 2011, she spoke of the interweaving between politics and literature in her lecture at Churchill College, Cambridge. She brought to the fore what her biographer states with clarity: “communicating an idea of India in an idiom inflected with an Indian accent, presenting a perspective that was a counter to prevailing and received wisdoms; presenting, moreover, an account of an alternative politics”. That is what her impassioned political writings have consistently been about: “an alternative politics” — based on what she had seen and learned at very close quarters, and at a highly impressionable age, of Gandhiji’s non-violent struggle for freedom and Jawaharlal Nehru’s ceaseless quest for “civilising a savage world”.

She proclaimed at Cambridge that “because political happenings have so intimately and directly affected private lives in the 20th century as in no other century, politics has become one more area for the imagination to draw on”. That perception too was drawn from something Nehru had told her when she was a very young writer, as recalled by Menon: “In the final analysis,” wrote Nehru to his talented niece, “one writes from one’s experience of life. The richer the experience the better the writing.” Nayantara’s quintessential “experience” was her “link to humanity”.

Nayantara’s writing would be difficult to better even if her own experience is more a metronome beating through her work than a series of revealed personal events. That is why I rate A Time to Be Happy (published in 1960, when she was 33) over everything else she has written (although all of it, except for puritan me, Relationship, to which I shall come in a moment, is to be savoured). Ritu Menon’s description of A Time To Be Happy deserves special mention: “Nothing really happens in A Time To Be Happy, no dramatic unfoldings, no unexpected denouement. Its tone is measured and unhurried, almost leisurely.” It is a novel of atmosphere as “a newly independent nation (and) its citizens (are) caught in a kind of suspended animation while the country tries to arrive at a self-definition that is in consonance with its political ideals”. Nayantara herself is quoted as saying “the whole novel is ‘an ongoing scene’ with no real ending in the conventional sense”, its very “absence of plot” making “its realism refreshing”. All her subsequent novels — lovingly detailed by her biographer — have a more definitive story-line but all are intimately woven with the evolution of India’s contemporary nationhood.

A few months ago, Nayantara sent me a 2008 reprint of her 1994 publication of the intimate correspondence between herself and Mangat Rai titled Relationship, inscribed now to “Mani — with love.” (note the promotion!). It was far too personal for me. Much of Menon’s biography is also devoted to the intimacies of her personal life that, like Bertrand Russell, she is quite open about. I have but glanced at those passages. I comfort myself with the thought that as she tends her lovely garden in Dehra Dun at the ripe age of 87, she has put the turbulence of her personal life behind her and can now contemplate her world with bright shining eyes, “a child of light” as her father, who she lost at 15, wished her to be.

The writer is a Rajya Sabha MP
from the Congress