Candid glimpses of a woman less ordinary

Ratna Raman

WOMen’s autobiographies historically form a recent genre. For a long time, the act of writing as self-expression was identified entirely with a masculine world where powerful men controlled knowledge and rationed out learning across cultures and continents. Women writers yearned for a creative space through the ages before they could take on the mantle of writing, inching their way through as poets and novelists. However, only a few got around to penning down their autobiographies. Shanta Gokhale's autobiography adds to a small number of writings by women that give us glimpses into the less known, springing from a confidence that their lives were memorable, noteworthy and significant enough to be shared with posterity.   

Women autobiographers, by acts of writing and publishing their life stories, address the dearth of conversations and the absence of narrative about the everyday lives of women. Books make for great teaching aids and the intimacy that a book provides makes a far greater impact upon the reader since it communicates without censure or intrusion. 

India's first female autobiography was probably Amar Jiban (1876) written by Bengal's Rashosundari Devi. This recent narrative form owes greatly to the traditions of prose writing and memoirs. Echoing the title of Gokhale's autobiography, one can say that while writing autobiographies women are now putting one foot on the ground and after balancing themselves, managing to propel themselves forward in order to ride out towards glorious sunsets.

Gokhale's autobiography challenges Tolstoy's description of happy families as being alike and goes on to draws attention to singularly happy childhood and an unusual and privileged adolescence, that was quite different from the experiences of her contemporaries and peers. Challenging binary readings of the female world that were confined to a life of the body, Gokhale's is a recognition of the definitive presence of the body in human life. Consciously choosing to chart the eight decades of her life through bodily experiences and the roles played by different body parts, she gives us a lively account of her years of growing up, coming of age, adulthood, public life and work, reversing hide bound notions of the body as limiting.

The minutiae of her life as a little girl subject to tonsils and vaccination, her training in classical dance, her love for badminton, her education in England and her study at Bristol University, her good dentistry, her return to India, stints at teaching, subsequent marriage, her life as a naval officer's wife, the birth of two children, her love for reading, the quiet cessation of her first marriage and the next and an extended camaraderie with both husbands are narrated briskly, along with a self-deprecatory humour, directed often enough at her own actions. She has a keen eye for detail, and whether it is the climate in England and her modest means, or the quaint and outmoded medical facilities available to her and her family, each and every account is recorded with great clarity. Shanta Gokhale's personal life is intermeshed with important dates in India's history and she records these in a nuanced and dispassionate manner, whether it is the unrest in Andhra Pradesh, the imposition and subsequent withdrawal of the emergency, the pulling down of Babri Masjid or contemporary India today.

Reading this autobiography , one cannot but marvel at the foresight and generosity of her parents and their disciplined and idealistic lives that provided opportunity and freedom to Shanta and her younger sister Nirmal to make the most of these unusual opportunities, made available to Indian women in newly independent India. This is a life lived fully and well, unusual and out of the ordinary, although in this age of technology, one wonders there are no photographs. Despite her prolific work, her juggling of several jobs as teacher, journalist, public relations executive at Glaxo, features editor, cultural expert, novelist, film script writer, actor and raising two children as a single parent, Gokhale's writing is beguilingly simple as she never rests on her laurels. 

Without doubt she belongs to a small but ever widening circle of extraordinary women in independent India, whose lives and writings continue to raise the bar with regard to women's rights, capabilities and economic independence. Batting with the ailments of age, ranging from glaucoma to breast cancer, Gokhale draws strength from her personal life and her life as a writer. She is also the translator of two excellent autobiographies, one by Durga Khote and another by Lakshmi Bai Tilak, that add to our understanding of women's lives in India. Through her prolific writing and her interest in theatre, art, literature and culture, and her joie de vivre, Shanta Gokhale continues to redefine boundaries set for octogenarians. May her tribe flourish!