Enduring transience: Krishna Sobti’s relationship to writing and to the world

Krishna Sobti, awarded the Jnanpith this year, is unrelenting in her search for the truth, the writer’s truth

November 11, 2017 04:00 pm | Updated 04:00 pm IST

Lust for life: ‘The demotic is Sobti’s weapon of choice.’

Lust for life: ‘The demotic is Sobti’s weapon of choice.’

After she had finished a first completed draft of Zindaginama, her expansive masterpiece set in rural Punjab in the 1920s, when Krishna Sobti read the whole thing aloud, as has been her practice when she finishes a first draft, she felt that the opening was a little weak. Four or five days of internal struggle later she went to her desk and wrote a line.

The set-up she added to it later was this: Vadde Lala, an elder of the village, is pestered by the assembled children into telling a story. Vadde Lala relents and starts his story with a line so simple and yet so resonant that it is clear that it was growing unseen in the writer’s subconscious while she wrote her magnum opus: A Ghalib sareer-e-khaama nava-e-sarosh hai (Ghalib, the sound of the pen scratching paper is the singing of angels) moment if there ever was one.

“Listen, children, every son is an incarnation of his father.”

Depth of empathy

In the spirit of this magnificent line, it is fitting, on the occasion of the Jnanpith award adding to its own lustre by declaring Krishna Sobti the winner for 2017, that we briefly examine what a writer who might himself be stirred by Sobti’s writing might learn of her relationship to writing, and to the world; briefly only because a true tribute from one writer to another cannot take the form of a short piece written as a tribute, it has to be in the form of a deep absorption of the other writer’s thinking, her way of living that finds its ways into the tribute-giver’s own most important work, lying hidden within it to be found by the reader who cares to discover the genealogies of writing, who cares to uncover the layers of meaning that can be uncovered if one believes that every work of literature is descended from other works of literature.

Perhaps the first order of business is to understand the sources that Sobti has drawn on and continues to draw on in her writing. It feels banal to say that her primary source is human life, because isn’t that the source of all literature, but there is a particularity, a positioning of the writer in relation to humanity and its unremittingly interesting and endlessly changing configurations, a particularity that bears examination.

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about the writing of this writer who has created ineffably compelling pictures of societies in the middle of, or on the verge of, major transitions is that its roots are irrigated by what she described to a Rajasthan Patrika interviewer in 2013 as “ nashvarta ka gehra dard jo insaan ki dhamniyon mein barabar behta aaya hai” (the deep pain of destructibility that has been flowing continuously in human veins). It is left for the reader to plumb, to the extent of the reader’s capability, the depth of empathy that must arise from being constantly in touch with the destructibility of life that, for all its tribulations, is held uncompromisingly dear by its livers, a destructibility that the writer, being human, shares.

Beloved, open the door

This sense of enduring transience is perhaps what bestows Sobti’s writing with the power to cut through the knotted skeins of preconception and ideology that have entangled so many others.

But too much sympathy is also a trap and Sobti has repeatedly talked about how she keeps her characters at a carefully calculated distance from herself: not so close that they become echoes of herself and not so far that she cannot feel their pain.

This calibrated detachment applies to her life as well, populated, as she reveals in an essay translated in the Little Magazine, by many acquaintances and few friends. But, and this is particularly instructive to the writer, this detachment also leads her to feel that there is such a thing as too much research. For her important works that are set in a time before she was born ( Daar se Bichudi) or in a time when she was so young that she could not have had any direct knowledge ( Zindaginama ), she has talked about how she did not want to clutter her sense of the time and place with too many facts.

For Daar se Bichudi , set during the Anglo-Sikh wars, she mentions in Sobti-Vaid Samvad that the sight of the battlefield of Chillianwala was all the research she needed. Perhaps, one is pushed to conjecture, for the writer who believes that “history flows like a river through our lives,” it is enough to observe our own lives carefully enough to understand what the lives of the people who came before us were like.

Instead of facts, what Sobti searches for is the truth, the writer’s truth, and it is the process of discovery of truth, coupled with an incessant investigation into the nature of human values, that Sobti believes is the mark of literature.

Unlike art and music, and even cinema, prose literature has never made a convincing effort to declare its independence from the stories it relates. But literature can be art, and the route to art for the writer lies through language. The demotic is Sobti’s weapon of choice. A half-remembered fragment of conversation: “‘Ae piya, khol kivadiya.’ Yeh jo kivaad ko mod kar kivadiya bana diya, yeh bhasha hai” (‘Beloved, open the door.’ The difference between kivaad and kivadiya , that’s language).

Sobti knows well the verdant orchard that flourishes in the space that lies between kivaad and kivadiya , she picks the fruit of that orchard and offers it to the reader, and when the reader bites into that fruit, to use a favourite phrase of Sobti’s, inside him “ ek taraavat phail jaati hai” (this is untranslatable: literally, a moistness suffuses you), a sensation that feels like childhood, even if it is someone else’s childhood.

In touch with ordinariness

At this point in the exposition of Sobti’s use of language, it would be forgiveable to go into a rapture and declare Sobti the queen of tadbhava (a loan word adapted to fit local phonology), but Sobti herself suggests restraint, a kind of restraint that, characteristically of Sobti’s approach to the world, has equal parts of modesty and immodesty. “The ordinariness of a professional writer is rendered extraordinary by the strict discipline of a word culture that engulfs her or him, without and within.”

The importance of the duality embedded in this proposition cannot be stressed enough. The writer must be in touch with his ordinariness to be able to create anything of value. And he must tread the route to extraordinariness by submitting to the discipline of the word culture, and not just any word culture but specifically the one in which he finds himself, by accident of birth, or by circumstances, embedded.

Loving the world

Finally, Sobti teaches the lesson that the writer must submit to the idea that the powerful work has to be given the time and space to grow within. On this, a story. The endpiece of Dil-o-Danish is an astonishing swathe of prose that cuts through the vibrant city of Delhi in the early part of the 20th century, a passage that never fails to make this writer think of a camera mounted on a crane and rising up into the sky out of the convoluted galis of the old town, and rising so high that the whole of the city by the river comes into view.

When being told by a gushing admirer that this piece was one of the most powerful pieces of prose he had read, Sobti told him that she had actually finished the book, even sent it to her publisher, when she awoke one morning and realised that Kripanarayan, the ill-fated Delhi grandee with two households who is the protagonist of the book, is a lawyer, and a lawyer must have a last testament.

Kripanarayan’s last testament, a testament that arose from within the author a little late but before the publisher had done his work, is a desperate ode to the joys of the life he has lived, the life he is on the verge of leaving, tells us all we need to know about how Krishna Sobti has loved the world that all of us live in.

A world that has been fortunate enough to be inhabited from time to time by writers of the spiritual depth of Krishna Sobti. But we cannot end this piece by celebrating Krishna Sobti as an individual, not the Krishna Sobti who once said:

“Given the challenges that face the writer and the act of writing today, it is necessary to reiterate that writing is always greater than the writer. And greater than writing are the values that humanity, against all odds, struggles to uphold.”

The writer is a novelist living in Delhi .

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.