The Hindu Business Line : These roots run deep

SHE never bothers to touch the books in English one has accumulated over the years. They mean nothing to her. She did try to read Swami and Friends of R.K. Narayan, after much urging, but gave up on Swami after the fifth page. "I am not comfortable with the language; in fact, I do not like the language as it is not mine," my wife told me, as she picked up a short story collection of Vaikom Mohammad Basheer in Malayalam. "When Basheer writes out a character I may be able to find a replica on the streets of Alleppey. I can relate to Basheer's imagination. Malayalam writers exist for me like Tamil writers live for Tamils. It is not so with English," she explained, and one respected her for making a valid point. "How much do you know of England or Russia to enjoy a Dickens or a Tolstoy like I do Keshav Dev," Rama asked me in turn.

One had no answer, as there is no way this writer can relate to English writers. One knows little of any Indian language and has learnt of India and Indian writing through the English language. One is aware that one does not own the English language like my wife proudly possesses Malayalam. English language does not course my blood like Malayalam in hers. One realises that one cannot write English like an Englishman or Malayalam like a Malayali. There is something of the deadness of plastic wallflowers in the sentences one strings in English.

For Rama, English writing by Indians is a piece of fashion, a bit of a painful boil on the edit pages of English newspapers. Rama has her library of Malayalam books, which she discusses with me. Every morning she reads the Mathrubhumi newspaper with a cup of coffee, while throwing aside the stack of bulky English newspapers, which are nowadays inflicted on every Mumbaikar.

Regional newspapers, at least, report the regions they belong to; their writing has something of the piece of earth they come from; they are rooted unlike the rootless English press. "A Ramayana or Mahabharata in an Indian language has a different impact on the reader than an English translation. The Sanskrit original makes no sense to 99 per cent of the Indian population, as the language is long dead. You do not need a passport to commune in the tongue with which you were born," Rama argues. But one has to live with the English language admittedly taken on a long lease. "At least, English has given us a good living," Rama admits.

The discussion grew out of a reading of Ira Pande's English book Diddi: My mother's voice. Ira Pande writes about her mother, Diddi or Shivani the Hindi writer. There is more of Shivani's writings (classily translated into English by Ira Pande, her daughter) in the book, with Ira tying up the refrain with some thoughts of her own. The translation reads like an easy chat. One read out some parts of the book to Rama and she liked it.

The work dwells on the cruel, feudal lives of Brahmins in Almora with women being subjects of men; Didi does not condemn the code. "So let me begin with Almora, where it all starts," writes Ira Pande, and the reader willingly goes along.

At Kasoon, in Almora, madness ran in Diddi's family. Bhagwat Da was an "affable lunatic. ...Dressed in rags and feathers, he held a staff festooned with flags and came to play a solitary game of table tennis downstairs in the library. He would chuck the ping-pong ball across the table and solemnly say, `One love,' then cross over to the other side to toss the ball across to make it `One all.' ... .When he had played enough, he went upstairs to chat with my grandmother and drink a glass of tea with her."

Shivani rolls out her tale over 216 pages, and one has read it twice to be as happy as the lady was when she studied philosophy in Tagore's Santiniketan. Diddi finished her B.A. from Viswabharati University in 1943, and returned to Almora; she had a B.A. honours degree in philosophy.

In an intro, Ira Pande writes: "Till the end Diddi's face would light up at the mere mention of Santiniketan and a part of her remained forever the child she was when she first met Tagore." And, then, Ira Pande runs Diddi's piece — How Can I Forget — on those times.

As a 12-year-old, Diddi met her teacher Acharya Hajari Prasad Dwivedi in 1935. "For the next eight years, he was my teacher, guide, confidante - a guru in the truest sense of the word," Diddi says, and adds, "Panditji's style of teaching was pretty unique too.

He told us hilarious stories of his teachers and at the first hint of a raindrop, he would dismiss the class for the day. I must break off to tell you that Santiniketan was the only school in the world where students were given a holiday to soak themselves the day it rained.

So, whenever it rained, shrieks of delight could be heard all over the campus as bands of students danced and sang noisily in the rain, " Diddi writes, and today in Mumbai 2005, this writer can hear the raindrops falling on Shivani.

P. Devarajan

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