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Journalism of Courage
A diet of the best writing of the West, convent educations, higher degrees from elite institutions8230; the archetypal angreziwallas, right? Wrong. As some of the best Hindi women writers prove, a privileged educational background is no reason to inhibit a connection with the cowbelt.
Meet Sunita Jain, Mridula Garg, Geetanjali Shri and Alka Saraogi. Some of the best-known women in Hindi writing today are women who very consciously choose to spurn their 8216;8216;English-medium8217;8217; backgrounds to write in the language of the heart. 8216;8216;Actually, when we started out, there were very few Indians writing in English, apart from R K Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Khushwant Singh,8217;8217; says Mridula Garg, 65, who has in her oeuvre 18 volumes of poetry collections, plays, essays and novels, including Chitt Kobra, whose alleged pornographic content saw an arrest warrant being issued in 1979.
Growing up in Delhi and as a student of Lady Irwin School and then Miranda House and the Delhi School of Economics, Garg devoured Hindi literature, but was as comfortable 8216;8216;reading English, Urdu, Bengali and French, besides acting in English plays8217;8217;. And although Garg8217;s first published piece was in English for a leading women8217;s magazine, she says she knew even while writing it that she would not be using English on a regular basis.
Clearly, for this generation of writers, Hindi was not infra dig and the conflict between Macaulay and the masses a non-issue. 8216;8216;We belong to the second generation of Indian women to get educated and find a voice,8217;8217; says bilingual writer Sunita Jain, 62, trying to put the subject in perspective. 8216;8216;There were about 20 women writing in Hindi around the 8217;60s and 8217;70s. They were writing not just poetry, like the women of pre-Independence India, but also were looking at other forms, like novels and plays, in search of a larger canvas.8217;8217; And to express that newfound voice, Hindi was the natural, logical choice.
Though there were no political pressures on younger writers, Geetanjali Shri, 45, and this year8217;s Sahitya Akademi award winner Alka Saraogi, 43, claim they have never felt awkward or embarrassed about their choice. 8216;8216;But it8217;s true, people did expect me to write in English and there was a time when I did try to do so,8217;8217; says Shri, who was convent-educated in Mainpuri, UP. 8216;8216;But English just does not have the same connotations that Hindi does for me. It is in the process of writing that I realise I have more Hindi in me than I8217;m aware of. I use words and sentences without knowing their exact meaning, and when I check with the dictionary, I find my usage has been correct.8217;8217;
Similarly, Saraogi, who grew up in Kolkata on a diet of Leon Uris and P G Wodehouse, believes Hindi chose her long before she chose Hindi. 8216;8216;You express yourself best in the mother tongue,8217;8217; says the author of Kalikatha: Via Bypass, who did her doctorate in Hindi. 8216;8216;Your priorities change when you are writing in English.8217;8217; That could apply to a number of writers. Equally at home with both languages, Garg and Shri prefer to use English for their academic papers and issue-based pieces. 8216;8216;But it8217;s not a question of writing in one language because we8217;re better at it, we have to retrieve and re-learn it,8217;8217; emphasises Shri. Explains Garg, 8216;8216;When you use a language creatively, you enrich it each day. If you don8217;t use it enough, you become hesitant.8217;8217;
Ask Jain, she8217;s been there and done that. The author of novels like Boujyoo and Bindu spent 15 years in the US after her marriage. 8216;8216;Though I was already writing in Hindi, in the US I did my Masters and doctorate in English. Reading, writing and teaching in English created a parallel creative track, and I started writing poetry in English. But I noticed I was losing touch with Hindi. So I left my family in America and moved back to India, and consciously returned to writing in Hindi, though I have eight anthologies of poetry in English.8217;8217;
For all four, the language of the soul, so to speak, has always been Hindi. Yet they believe their comfort level with English has helped them develop a bi-lingual approach to their creative work, so much so that they prefer translating their own writings. 8216;8216;My novel Kalikatha: Via Bypass has a multilingual approach, as you can see in the title itself,8217;8217; says Saraogi.
Simultaneously, they acknowledge losing out on the global readership that the likes of Vikram Seth or Arundhati Roy call their own. 8216;8216;I could have been living with my family, earned more fame,8217;8217; says Jain, a trifle wistfully. But for these women the 8216;8216;what ifs8230;8217;8217; are obviously of less significance than the pleasure of writing in the language of their choice.
