On parental love

IN 1906, Agha Hasra Kashmiri, a Muslim playwright from a family of Kashmiri carpet-makers settled in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh translated King Lear in Urdu, as Sufaid Khoon (White Blood). As an Urdu play, Shakespeare's fearsome foray into the heart of geriatrics was staged to thundering ovation by the Parsi Natak Mandali. This is proof enough that even a translated version of Lear can exert a powerful effect on audiences. Why is it so?

On the face of it, the story is of an ageing patriarch setting tragedy in motion by his excessive demand for love and compliance. In our scriptures too, ageing fathers have often demanded acts of compliance and self-denial of their children. A lusty Yayati grabbed Puru's youth, Shantanu exacted a vow of lifelong celibacy from Bhishma, and Dashrath asked Ram to go into exile. The difference is that, in the fables, the good child is always amply rewarded a contrite parent at the end. But death intervenes in King Lear as in life, and the king dies unreconciled with his noble child.

Lear's last years are rooted in folly and error of judgement. After being betrayed by those who said they loved him, he retreats into madness. The king, caught in a storm with only his jester for company, realises in a moment of madness what he did not when he was sane - how the poor and the miserable must suffer at all times.

A few years ago, when I talked to my very ill, but resolutely self-supportive, mother, she would harangue me about the state of the nation and of the media. No one, she said, cared for the poor and the nameless. And no one wrote about them in the media either, she said in a meaningful tone that seemed to imply my complicity.

My mother was born and educated between the two World Wars, and launched herself into a writing-career without the benefit of a literary mentor or agent, and certainly without any supportive theories about women's rights and capabilities. She became a successful Hindi writer of her generation. Until first her eyes and then her faith in mankind dimmed, she was a supremely confident and capable human being and producer of tremendously successful fiction. In a literary world where the work of women writers were marked by melancholy and gentle beatitude, she remained a happy, loud and heroic woman. Even after her loyal supporter, my father, died, she kept her mind alive by sheer willpower buoying us, her children, when necessary, with her wildly funny anecdotes and asides.

Gradually, as all the prestigious Hindi magazines closed down, she withdrew from her writing and began, like Lear, to talk incessantly of the literary-journalistic world falling to pieces. She had been a masterful presence for over two decades in the literary scene and now she could not seem to find any new Hindi writers or periodicals worth her while. Re-reading King Lear recently, I thought of my mother in her "difficult" phase which ended to some extent when we located part of her problem in her failing health. With her sight restored by cataract surgery, she regained most of her peace of mind, but still raged against new technology and the situation of old and weak parents in the age of nuclear families, non-resident grandchildren and working daughters, none of whom cared for mothers and mother tongues.

Age and Lear forced me to think about communication and the perennial love and inescapable struggle for power between parents and children; also between an older writer and a (relatively) younger one. I am now beginning to see a method in parental madness. Most of us think we have no trouble recognising love, but at the deepest level, the demand for uninhibited love charges a heavy price. As parents, we need to be loved back as intensely as we did, but how much are we willing to risk exposing, to claim that sort of love? Lear cast aside shame and asked: "... which of you shall we say both love us most?"; so did Dashratha, Shantanu and Yayati.

Both Lear and Dashratha paid with their lives to see the answer and Yayati ultimately became a monk. So most of quote philosophy and pretend a noble detachment we do not really feel.

By making a sensitive playwright aware of this smell of vanity and mortality that clings to everyone, Lear may have also got Agha Hasra Kashmiri, a writer of Urdu in remote India, to re- create Lear. Perhaps it was a recognition of obsessive parental love as an unstated fact in Indian society, that stayed the hand of the translator and forced him to change the tragic ending into a happily reconciliatory one. But the tragedy of Lear is too big to be contained thus. As the late Master Champa Lal, an actor from "company days" who played the Fool, told this columnist, this hugely successful play had a strange influence on its audience. People wept despite the happy ending. Some even fainted. Yet they came back to see the play again and again. Tailors sold sewing machines and water bearers sold their water- skins to buy tickets. Who could have thought parental love had undone so many?

MRINAL PANDE

The author writes in Hindi and English and is a freelance journalist.

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