KRISHNA SOBTI
A GUJARAT HERE, A GUJARAT THERE
Translated by Daisy Rockwell
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There
Afterword
Footnotes
Introduction
Glossary of Selected Historical Figures and Terms
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
Introduction
A lady clad all in black was ordering a Coke. Upon inquiry, he learnt that this was Madame Sobti.
As this was the first time he’d seen her at such a gathering, Hashmat tailed her for further investigation. What really lay beneath that audacious facade? He must know what she was made of. Sturdy timber and genteel conversation, as it turned out. Hashmat quickly realized her persona concealed a vanity of terrifying proportions. She seemed to view everyone as her subjects. He was of a mind to run over and whisper in her ear:
‘The princely states are no more, Your Majesty! Do modify your behaviour accordingly!’
—Krishna Sobti (writing as her alter ego, the slovenly male chauvinist author ‘Hashmat’)1
I. Sobti Magic
Krishna Sobti is a magical being. Everyone knows this. From her experimental prose to her legendary parties to her unique sense of style to her male alter ego, the writer ‘Hashmat’, everything about her is deeply considered and infused with her special warmth. I myself only had the opportunity to meet her in her nineties, but I consider myself much improved as a result. Perched on one of her sofas, strategizing when I might start asking her the meanings of particular words I wasn’t able to find in the dictionary that no one else seemed to know, stuffing myself with the never-ending delicacies emerging from the kitchen, worrying that I would not be up to the task of translating her novel, I suddenly started to understand the answers to my questions without ever asking some of them at all. To sit in her presence is to open the Sobti lexicon and immerse oneself in Sobti logic. Complex turns of phrase, confusing references, it all made sense once I was there. Translating Krishna Sobti and learning from her made me understand how to use my instincts and creativity to translate things that seemed untranslatable before, and it also taught me how read Sobti style.
II. Krishna Sobti Is Not Here to Tell You Stories
Yes, Krishna Sobti tells stories—interesting ones too—in her writing, and in conversation, but she has an equal if not greater interest in language and style. Her preferred forms have been the novella and the essay, and this is perhaps because she has sought to boil sentences, phrases and entire narratives into the smallest number of words possible. She claims she has never been a poet, but her prose resembles poetry more than anything else. She will often use the fewest words possible in a sentence, sometimes just one, if she can find the perfect fit. The words are carefully considered, weighed out and often very difficult to define or translate into English with just one equivalent word. Sobti’s use of language is experimental and central to her writing, and unlike many women authors, she is not terribly bothered if you don’t understand what she means, or if you cannot entirely follow the story. She is not writing to help you understand, she’s writing to reveal and learn what language can do.
In the section of A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There that most resembles poetry, Sobti talks of Partition in a stream of words and phrases, interspersing her own family’s experiences with observations about refugees and migrants. In these particular lines, so spare and elegant, Sobti enters the minds of the mobs, the migrants, those fleeing and those chasing, those attacking and those under attack:
Who’s the sinner?
Who’s the criminal?
Who is witness to the crime?
One dagger-plunging hand. Another, match-striking, lighting an oil-soaked rag.
One stands far off, gathering a crowd.
A clutch of terrified men and women holding their breath in a jungle of half-dead, frightened voices: They just came—we just went—we just died—don’t make a sound. Let them pass by.
Piles upon piles of corpses, mounting ever higher.
A wake of vultures roots about.
Rings on hands grown cold; necklaces encircle throats.
Where other authors have spilled buckets of ink writing histories and novels about the Partition, Sobti attempts to use the smallest amount of ink possible, to cut the story of migrancy and violence down to the bone. Even Manto rarely managed so few words in his Siyah Hashiye (Black Borders), his ultra-short stories of the Partition.
In the present volume, we see an array of styles, experiments and genres. Think of it as a palimpsest: what Sobti is laying before us are fragments of her memories from seventy years ago. Memory is always fallible, and yet most of us can agree that certain events and episodes from our early twenties are indelibly inked in our imaginations. But it is also true that these get rewritten, overwritten and erased over time. The fragments that comprise the present volume represent all different genres: some are clearly poetry, some feel like memoir, others have the narrative structure of a novel. Some are in the first person, most are in the third—the name of the protagonist shifts with the contexts in which she finds herself: the Governess, Miss Sobti, Kishni, Bai ji, Ma’am. The fragments are arranged for us in the form of a book, but sometimes feel like a multidimensional work of art: an installation, if you will. I imagine a jumpy film reel, a sheaf of letters, an old photograph album, a diary stuffed with poems.
Sobti is not here to hold your hand: it is up to the reader to make her own connections, draw her own conclusions, find her imagination sparked and go out and create more layers of text for the palimpsest. A translator spends more time with a text than almost anyone else. A translator must turn every word inside out and shake it upside down. At times when I was immersed in this text I would ask myself, Why did she put this here? Or that? Or that? What is she telling me? Sometimes the answer is simply this: She remembered it. It felt significant, so she recorded it. In this book, Sobti is more mystic than storyteller, more abstract painter than realist. At the end of the section on her visit to Bombay, for instance, she speaks briefly of the brother of the famous film star and singer
K.L. Saigal:
She recollected the brother of Kundan Lal Saigal who lived next door to Kashinath Uncle. His face and manner were identical to those of his movie-star brother. When he had come to meet her, he had said, ‘I wanted to hand-stitch a hemmed kurta for you myself, niece, but there’s not enough time. Next time you come, I’ll show you my skill.’
Great Uncle brought out a kurta from his almirah.
‘Krishna dear, do look at this, the fine hemming this man is capable of!’
I was confused by this passage and wondered if I was missing something. Had I misunderstood the word turpāī? Did it not mean ‘hemming’? Why had she put it there? When I got up the courage to ask her, she replied simply, ‘Well, he did very fine hemming.’ And smiled: in an end-of-story kind of way. Some memory fragments are like this—we hold on to them, because they feel important. A major film star’s brother sits at home beautifully hemming garments. Do not let me forget that, no matter how many decades may pass.
III. Historical Context
This novel occupies a very specific moment in Indian history: it stands at the crossroads of Independence, Partition and the accessioning of the princely states by the central Indian government. When the protagonist gets on a train to Sirohi, she is a half-refugee: her immediate family already lived in Delhi, but she was in college in Lahore at the time of Partition, and her ancestral home was in Gujrat, Pakistan.2 Both of her grandmothers and many of her aunts and un
cles are refugees. Sirohi was a small princely state on the border of the states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, and at the time the novel begins, in about 1948, there is a struggle underway between the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat to lay claim to Sirohi, which includes the desirable hill station of Mount Abu, home of the Amba ji temple, among other key attractions. And despite the fact that Sirohi is being accessioned to the Indian government, there is also a struggle underway between two factions laying claim to the throne of Sirohi.
When the young protagonist becomes the governess of Tej Singh, the child Maharaja of Sirohi, she finds herself standing at the site of multiple fissures and contested territories. She is a migrant (from Delhi) and a refugee (from Lahore and Gujrat), newly arrived at a border in the process of being drawn (between Rajasthan and Gujarat), charged with the education of a maharaja whose legitimacy is being contested. Everything is in a state of flux, and no one knows quite where they stand. She is treated as an outsider because she is not from Sirohi, but also because she is a woman who has left home for employment, and additionally because she is viewed as a refugee. The Governess is made of stern stuff, however, and she stands her ground as long as she can, even as she copes with a sense of what has been lost with Partition.
IV. A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There as a Feminist Partition Novel
The Partition was a time of brutal violence towards women, as has been the case around the world with many other sectarian conflicts and civil wars. Rape and abduction play a huge role in most literary works about the Partition, and Krishna Sobti has not shied away from the topic either in this book or in her other writings. When the protagonist is ‘haunted’ in A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There by her childhood friend Beembo, she learns from her of the mob violence that killed her on her wedding night. It is an incident that Sobti has carried with her through her life, first writing about it in her short story, ‘Fear Not, I Will Protect You’ in 1950.3 Writing as a young woman, in the more conventional style of her early years, Sobti is already experimenting with brevity and focusing on single words as she describes the young bride’s murder:
The head spun, eyes spun, earth spun, sky spun . . . and in this whirl, those eyes saw that sweet, fragile form in the hands of the murderers. Alas! A blade glistened. The fair arms, heavy with gold, were slashed, falling to the ground.
Interestingly, the story is written from the groom’s perspective, focusing on his sense of failure in protecting his bride. In the present volume, written nearly seventy years later, Sobti still does not identify with the victim, and never identifies herself as a victim. This was literally true, as she was not a victim of Partition violence but also a part of her feminist self-image.
Sobti does not like being considered a ‘woman author’, in the sense that adding in the word ‘woman’ somehow makes one a woman more and an author less. Indeed she regularly wrote essays from the perspective of Hashmat, her male alter-ego, as noted above—a method, perhaps, for shedding her lady-author identity. In A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There, the protagonist faces sexism and prejudice against refugees through what we would now call constant micro-aggressions. Yet these make her indignant. She never sees herself as weak, and it is that sense of strength and self-confidence, and not being a woman-hyphen-anything, which keeps her focused and protected throughout the narrative. In this sense, the book echoes other Partition writings that depict a fissure in the status quo in the aftermath to the violence and upheaval that allows women to step outside traditional roles and into positions of financial independence and other forms of autonomy.
This is most dramatically the case with Yashpal’s Tara in the 1958–60 Hindi novel Jhootha Sach (This Is Not That Dawn, Penguin, 2010). Tara is abducted, raped and imprisoned before being liberated by a government-organized repatriation team. Once in India, she manages to find work and slowly makes her way up the professional ladder in the refugee services bureaucracy. She is able to stand firm and independent and reject an abusive family with regressive values. Tara ends by marrying a progressive and esteemed intellectual who respects her deeply—tying up the novel in the neat bow of a progressive fairy tale.
Women’s writing has been less tidy about the post-Partition fates of strong female protagonists: Khadija Mastur’s Aliya, from the 1962 Urdu novel Aangan (The Women’s Courtyard, Penguin, 2018), manages to find a secure job, financial independence and a home of her own. But she is left caring for her sour mother who still mourns the loss of the family’s lands, wealth and status, and Aliya feels she will lose her independence and integrity if she consents to marry anyone. A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There, written fifty years after either of these novels, does not concern itself with romance in the slightest. Sobti does not write of choices between marriage and employment, and her parents are portrayed as completely unconcerned on this front. Instead the focus is on independence, the self-reliance of the protagonist mirroring that of the new nation. The flux of the historical moment, including the displacement of Partition, embolden her to set out and find her own way. Though she is haunted by what has been lost, the sense of mourning gives way to a feeling of lightness—to a nimbleness and lack of encumbrance with ancestral baggage. By the end of the novel, she is able to pivot from her initial sadness to a patriotism-tinged optimism for the future: ‘Our forces! Our pride!’ she thinks to herself as she sits and waits for a job interview with a major general.
V. Notes on This Translation: Idiolect and Punjabi-ness
Krishna Sobti’s writing is very difficult to translate. It can also be very difficult to read in Hindi. Think James Joyce or William Faulkner, only with brevity. Sobti writes in an idiolect and each word she chooses is carefully weighed and seems to hold a special meaning for her. She is creating and bending language and seeing what it will do for her. Though her language is often Punjabi-inflected, it is not Punjabi. ‘What made you choose not to write in Punjabi?’ I asked her once, because it seemed like the right sort of thing for a translator-researcher to do. ‘Oh, I don’t know Punjabi!’ she said with a laugh, and changed the subject.
This possibility had never occurred to me, and it might not even be entirely accurate. It is true is that her education was in Hindi, Urdu and English, never in Punjabi, and she grew up in Delhi and Shimla, only visiting Punjab, but not living there. She attended college in Lahore, and can probably speak Punjabi to a certain extent, but does not know it as a literary language. Nonetheless, Sobti has a knack for making people feel like they are reading Punjabi. This is tricky for a translator, because she will spell Hindi and Urdu words using Punjabi phonetics, making them hard to look up in a dictionary for a translator (like me) who can’t always guess how a Punjabi speaker would pronounce them.
Sobti’s idiosyncratic technique for creating a simulacrum for Punjabi-ness in her Hindi is, needless to say, almost impossible to convey in translation after one has decoded it. Add to this the Sobti idiolect—her special words and phrasings—and much texture can get lost in translation. On the other hand, other challenges are surmountable: finding that one perfect English word to replace the perfect Hindi word. Finding ways of conveying experimentation. Finding methods for boiling down language to essences and disappearing unnecessary verbal flotsam and jetsam. Carving from English the beauty of certain unusual images: luggage cowering beneath a seat, hills as wrinkles, her internal dialogue with her feet that are hoping to turn about and flee back to Delhi rather than continue on to Sirohi.
Sitting in Sobti’s living room, amongst her friends and well-wishers, her entourage and her fans, I threw out words and phrases I did not understand, hoping for help. It was heartening to see the confusion, and helpful to walk through the difficult patches with an entire committee. Sobti herself can no longer read due to cataracts clouding her vision. She felt detached from the book and content to let others do the work, tossing out crumbs of guidance here and there when she saw fit. For better or for worse, the novel will most likely be much easier to read in English than in Hindi: for worse, because of the lost
textures of the Sobti-lect; for better, because a broad audience may now have access to this marvellous palimpsest.
A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There
1
Strike up the band, heave-ho!
Oh, my brother, heave-ho!
We’ve earned our keep, heave-ho!
We’ve shed our blood, heave-ho
We’ve gone to the gallows, heave-ho
We’ve been martyred, heave-ho
Strike up the band, heave-ho!
We’ll rule now, heave-ho
Wear the crown, heave-ho
Get our government, heave-ho
Strike up the band, heave-ho!
The words of the patriotic song sent a shiver down her spine as they echoed through the dreary afternoon. Perhaps the singers were dragging the round electric transformer down the street. She was the middle daughter, just arrived from her hostel in Lahore. She placed the scissors she’d been using to cut out pictures of leaders from the newspaper on a cushion and lifted the curtain to peer out the window. Suddenly the clip-clop of horses’ hooves mingled with the deep receding cries of ‘heave-ho’ and came to a stop in front of Qureishi Uncle’s home next door. She peered across the lawn.
So they were leaving too. The luggage was being loaded on to the tonga. The Public Works Department chowkidar stood at the ready to fix a lock on the door. It must be leaving today—the Pakistan Special to Lahore. Qureishi Aunty placed a foot on the running board of the tonga and turned once to look back at her home and wipe her eyes. She went outside and touched Aunty’s hand and began to cry—just as she’d done back when she’d left her hostel and walked out to the front gate. She’d turned and looked back at her room once more through brimming eyes, then run and stood by the door. She’d muttered to herself, ‘Flowing breezes, remember: I once lived here.’ When she’d returned to the gate, she felt as though the room was already gone—far, far away, forever.
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