SPOTLIGHT

The past in pieces

Published : Mar 23, 2023 10:35 IST - 7 MINS READ

The author is a granddaughter of the writer Premchand whose influence still echoes in Indian letters.

In one of the essays collected in On Art and Literature, Proust says that the writer leads an ordinary life but uses it for a special purpose. So, when an acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and literary translator like Sara Rai publishes a memoir, the reader can be forgiven for approaching it with some expectations, especially since there are at least two aspects of the writer’s life that are not ordinary. For one, she is the daughter of a Muslim mother, herself a writer of short stories, and a Hindu father who was a successful publisher and abstract artist, born not long after Partition. Secondly, and more remarkably, she is a granddaughter of the writer Premchand whose influence, it can be argued, still echoes in some form or shape in Indian letters close to a century after his passing. This is a heavy load to carry and, unfortunately, Raw Umber crumbles under it.

Raw Umber: A Memoir
By Sara Rai
Context
240 pages
Rs.699

Although advertised as a memoir, this book is actually a set of essays that broadly fall into three categories: pieces on the author’s family, descriptions of the two old houses the author grew up in, and discussions on the development of the writer’s sensibility. Naturally, these categories overlap and feed into each other to some extent but let us look at them one at a time.

The family members in the essays include, of course, Rai’s famous grandfather Premchand, who died long before she was born. Premchand’s wife, whom the author knew personally, and the author’s mother and aunt, all of whom also wrote short fiction at some time or the other, also feature in the book, as do the author’s father, the well-regarded publisher Sripat Rai, and her older brother whose tragic life is laid out for us in the manner of a long-winded tale told at a family dinner about a distant relative. The most disappointing of these pieces is the one on Premchand.

By all accounts, Premchand lived a life that appeared to be the life of an ordinary provincial on the surface, but his sensibility, fired by Gandhi’s thinking, transformed that life into a wellspring of powerful and unprecedented literature. When we read today about a writer as well known and well studied as Premchand, we look for the hidden currents that link his ordinary life to its special purpose.

Some hints do appear, but when the essay ended, I could not believe it was over and actually turned the pages back to see if I had perchance missed something. Even the ruminations on why Premchand is revered today and that too by people who are unlettered do not offer any new insights.

The most engaging piece that focusses on family members is the one about Sripat Rai, who emerges as a mysterious person, capable of making a big fortune as a publisher and then losing it, picking up painting on a whim, excelling at it, and then stopping suddenly.

A suspicion emerges in the reader’s mind that the author feels a deep connection to her father, in the innermost parts of her sensibility, but, again, there is something of a holding back and we do not quite get to know the contours of that connection. The emotional charge tantalises from behind the curtain, the essay ends, and the reader is left wondering what to do with the set of facts he has just been presented.

The fact that several of Rai’s older women relatives are writers is also interesting in itself. But again, while we get an engaging account of some specific lives from a bygone time, we come away with just a few commonplace insights on the development of their literary sensibilities.

The essays that focus on the two houses of the author’s childhood are attractive in parts, possibly because Rai sometimes lets her fiction writer’s voice have its play. For example, writing of the Allahabad bungalow with its spacious grounds, she says: “...it was a large place with dark shadows alternating with brilliant sunshine, with pigeons settling on skylights, thieving tree-pies with their long tails–threading the air in search of a nest with eggs or fledglings–dusky ravens and koels calling from the dust-coloured mango trees.”

Saratchandra Jayanti committee members paying floral tributes to writer Munshi Premchand on his birth anniversary in Patna, a file picture. 

Saratchandra Jayanti committee members paying floral tributes to writer Munshi Premchand on his birth anniversary in Patna, a file picture.  | Photo Credit: PTI

But such occasional novelistic flourishes have to be sought out in large tracts of prose that describe but do not evoke. Or, to be precise, it is quite likely that the reader who has been in or is interested in such spaces or has had an intimate relationship with such places will find the descriptions evocative, but the rest of us are left with precious little to take away.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says: “Rooms and houses are psychological diagrams that guide poets and writers in their analysis of intimacy.”

But the jumble of registers employed in Raw Umber—one moment novelistic prose, the next moment architectural description, some casual history telling, an anecdote here, another there—prevents any single mood from building, prevents us from feeling that intimacy.

Writing in Hindi

The most vexatious aspect of this book is the part that deals with the development of the author’s sensibility. There are key questions left unanswered. The author says that she took to writing in Hindi because she felt it would be inappropriate for Premchand’s granddaughter to write in English, but we never learn why things came to such a pass that most of Premchand’s granddaughter’s primary literary sources, whether as a child or as an adult, are Western. The divergence of paths of India’s English-speaking and Hindi-speaking intellectuals is, to my mind, an important historical development in post-Independence India’s history. The emotional history, to use Pankaj Mishra’s phrase, of this divergence could have been told in this book. And who could be better placed to tell it than Sara Rai?

“The jumble of registers employed in ‘Raw Umber’ prevents any single mood from building, prevents us from feeling that intimacy.”

Apart from the historical aspect, there is an interesting tension between English and Hindi, and even Urdu, that sometimes shows itself in this book. For example, at one point speaking of the desolation caused by the death of family members, Rai uses the phrase “wind blew through the empty house” which appears to be almost a direct translation from Urdu.

In the foreword, the author talks about how the “language question has always dogged [her].” This memoir was an opportunity to present, in language itself, some answers to the language question. But what is easily done in a memoir is not as easily done in a collection of essays.

Perhaps it was Shrilal Shukla who once wrote in the preface of a collection of his columns published in book form that it is best to resist the temptation of taking pieces written at different times and publishing them in book form. There are several exceptions that prove this rule. Proust’s On Art and Literature comes to mind. Raw Umber, unfortunately, is not such an exception.

Amitabha Bagchi is a novelist.

Highlights
  • Although advertised as a memoir, this book is actually a set of essays that broadly fall into three categories: pieces on the author’s family, descriptions of the two old houses the author grew up in, and discussions on the development of the writer’s sensibility.
  • The essays that focus on the two houses of the author’s childhood are attractive in parts, possibly because Rai sometimes lets her fiction writer’s voice have its play.
  • The most vexatious aspect of this book is the part that deals with the development of the author’s sensibility. There are key questions left unanswered.
  • This memoir was an opportunity to present, in language itself, some answers to the language question. But what is easily done in a memoir is not as easily done in a collection of essays.

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