S mritichitre by Lakshmibai Tilak is the gold standard of autobiographical writing in India. You will notice I do not say that it is the gold standard for autobiographical writing in Marathi, or for women’s writing. I’m saying this is the real thing and we must all be grateful to Shanta Gokhale that she has finally given us the whole book.
How does it happen that a woman born a hundred years ago is able to speak to me directly, as if she is sitting next to me and telling me a story on a sun-baked afternoon in Nashik?
The first and most obvious one is that she was the kind of writer who understood without even thinking about it that there was grace to be found in simplicity. This was the time when people began their stories in all kinds of decorative and ornamental ways. They talked about the glory of their land and the beneficence of their deities.
Lakshmibai starts in medias res . She plunges straight into her story but like a good journalist, she warns us. These are stories that I heard, these are things I was told, she tells us. And then she draws a wonderfully detail-rich pen-picture of her father.
Crisp, interesting
His father-in-law was hanged in the Revolt of 1857 and this must have unhinged his mind and brought on a fit of purity that lasted for the next 27 years. In this country, where it is almost impossible to get anyone to talk about their parents without eulogies, paeans and glowing, no, flaming tributes, this crisp assessment is startling.
It only gets better, because Lakshmibai was to lead an ‘interesting’ life, the kind the Chinese wish on their enemies. She was married young to one Narayan Waman Tilak, a poet whose works are still on the lips of school children all over Maharashtra.
Vandana Mishra, the actor, says in her memoir, I, The Salt Doll : “In the fourth standard we learned Reverend Na Va Tilak’s Kshanokshani Pade ( Falling All the Time ). Our teacher recited it through a veil of tears. The girls were crying too. I thought of my mother and I missed her and cried all the harder. The teacher tried to console me. It was a heartwarming sight.”
But Tilak was not only a poet, he was also a seeker. And after much internal debate and external searching, he decided that he would become a Christian. This did not go down well with Lakshmibai. She was aghast — but hold on, here is another place where we are indebted to her for her honesty. She tells us the truth about her responses to his conversion. She is appalled at it, she rails against it but he is resolute. He will not force her to do what she does not want to do but he will not be turned from his purpose either.
And Lakshmibai experiences what it must be like to be an outcast. This may be what humanises her, what makes her such a good story-teller, this ability to know what it is like to be outside.
(The story may well be a way back in; in holding the attention of your audience, you may for a while pretend that you are within the charmed circle again, the one to which you did not even know you belonged until you were cast out of it.)
Thus it is that Daya Pawar says in Baluta , when he is talking about the consumption of beef: “The animal was divided according to the gudsa . This word appears in Lakshmibai Tilak’s autobiography. Who knows whether the Marathi littérateur have heard of it or not? Lakshmibai had heard of it. After all, she knew some Mahar Christians. Unless you know something about that caste, you wouldn’t know.”
Pursuit of agape
On a third level, there is the rich material that is on offer here. Lakshmibai’s experiences were wide and vast. She was a housewife but she was a resourceful one who often had to feed an army of visitors. Tilak did not invite these people home, she tells us. He would not say, “Come,” but if someone said they were coming, he would not say, “Do not come” either. It is a small detail but such a telling one; you get this sense of a man who is working hard at agape , the disinterested love for all humanity that Christianity preaches.
There is so much to relish here. I found myself in tears when I read the account of Lakshmibai looking after her daughter Tara when she contracted the plague.
“We had cradled her on our laps throughout. But that day I put her down. She lay on her mattress quietly. I cooked all the flax seed flour on the stove. I plastered Tara’s entire body from chest to stomach with this poultice. I heated up the castor oil with milk and sugar and somehow got her to swallow it. I placed the stove by her feet. I wrapped her up in a blanket. Then I said to her, ‘Now you are free to die.’ I didn’t want to feel I had left anything undone.”
A love so pure
“I shut the door, left her alone in the room and walked far away into the jungle... I shouted out to God, ‘My Lord, please let this child live. She is not my child. She is Yours. You gave her to me. I only nurtured her. If it is Your will, You will take her but if she recovers, I will stay here to care for other patients.’ Then I let myself go. I howled.”
And also because this is a love story, not one of those maddened loves, not a story of sputtering passions but an enduring love, the kind of love St. Paul talks about in his famous letter to the Corinthians, the love that is not easily angered and keeps no record of wrongs.
Gokhale explains it well: Feminists have had a problem with Lakshmibai’s endurance of her husband’s ill-treatment of her. Viewed in the framework of women’s rights as we see them today, she should have filed for divorce on innumerable counts.
But it is not just that such an act was unheard of in those times, the thought of permanent separation from her husband did not once enter her mind. Because, quite simply, Narayan Waman Tilak and Lakshmibai Tilak loved and respected each other.
Here it is, before you ask. My book of the year. First published in two volumes in 1934 and 1936, but a voice that still resonates with us in the present, in a translation so lucid and loving — and yes, you must love what you translate or else why bother — I can imagine Lakshmibai smiling.
The writer tries to think and write and translate in the cacophony of Mumbai.
