In general, it is not a good idea to write a whole book about yourself unless of course your life has been a particularly interesting or difficult one. And an interesting life or life full of challenges is not the only requirement for the writing of a good autobiography. You need to be able to tell the story of your life really well or the impatient reader will toss your book into the fire. To narrativise one’s life is never easy. A good autobiography is, in the end, a story well-told. In this respect, Padma Desai’s autobiography, Breaking Out, makes the grade.
Padma writes elegantly and with total command, chronicling a difficult life with confidence. Growing up in Surat in the 1930s, Padma’s sheltered childhood makes her the easy victim of a seduction by a fellow Bombay university student (referred to as “RB”). The seduction itself and the marriage to RB that must necessarily follow have disastrous personal and social consequences for her. This part of the story is told with an unflinching honesty that I found remarkable. Padma wins a scholarship to America soon after and she leaves India to begin a new life. The marriage itself is not dissolved till years later.
Freedom in America
There is almost always a journey — real or metaphorical — at the heart of autobiographies, a journey that is a watershed of sorts. Breaking Out is no exception. As Padma tells us in her preface: “When I came to America more than half a century ago as a student, I did not know what lay ahead of me, nor did I plan my stay as a one-way trip. As my American journey has unfolded, I have left behind the uncertainties and the fears I had brought with me as part of my Indian upbringing. I realised I was in a different environment. I felt freer, less encumbered by countless traditional rules, relaxed in my relationship with people, and in charge of my daily routine. My American world was less intrusive. It implied that I did not need to be unduly assertive or secretive. I was gradually stepping out of captivity”.
While Padma’s praise of the American environment may seem over the top and somewhat simplistic, one must not lose sight of the provincial “India” from which she had made good her escape. The India Padma left behind was an India in which widows like Kaki (her aunt) — lived a life of deprivation and marginalisation. That India would have had no space for a woman like Padma who chose to live away from her husband and nurture her academic ambitions.
Such things were simply not done at the time. Padma’s rise to academic eminence would hardly have been possible but for that long journey to America.
In India, her ambition would most certainly have been perceived as unseemly in a woman. In America, it is actively encouraged in the American environment, buttressed by a philosophy of individualism. When Padma seeks help from a classmate in solving an assignment, her professor at Harvard tells her, “In this country, kid, you are on your own.” It is a message that Padma never forgets.
Ambitious feminist
Refreshingly, for a woman of her generation, Padma is never coy in speaking of her ambition. She writes: “I firmly believe as a feminist that ambition nourishes a woman, and makes her a fulfilled wife and mother.”
Without this ambition, one wonders if she would be what she is today — a professor and director of the Center for Transition Economies at Columbia University and a recipient of the Padma Bhushan.
Despite her obvious admiration of American professional and social worlds, Padma remains balanced and reflective in the way she tells the larger story of her life. Her ability to stand back and analyse her family and her world is impressive. Her parents, her kaki, her siblings, and Jagdish Bhagwati, fellow economist and, later, her husband — Padma scrutinises each one of them with love and understanding.
Breaking Out does not stop with telling a personal tale. The chapter on Kaki, for instance, segues into a commentary on widowhood: “I grew up instinctly sensing that Kaki ‘unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved’ had a marginal status, and I could ignore her wishes, the signals in the environment turning me into a thoughtless sponger. When I look at her picture, I see in her face Hinduism’s timeless repression of women in her situation rather than the natural ravages of time.”
Padma Desai uses the American lens to explore the question of what it means to be an upper-class, relatively privileged, ambitious young Indian woman stuck in a bad marriage. Whatever one’s quarrel with that particular lens, Padma’s narrative is impossible to resist. From the mosquitoes and filth that plague the Surat of the 1930s to the pressures of being in a joint family, she refuses to romanticise the Indian way of life. Padma is a tad self-conscious at times (the title being a case in point). She occasionally tends to overdo the narrative of personal success. In the end, though, the energy of the story she tells wins us over.
Breaking Out: An Indian Woman’s American Journey, Padma Desai, Penguin Viking, Rs. 500.
