Irreverent rebel and free thinker

There are two sides to Krishna Sobti who turned 92 this year. One is the fiery speaker and interventionist who is a warrior queen of the intellectual life of the country. Her sword is her pen, and her kingdom, undivided Hindustan, into which she was born at the turn of the 20th century. As the celebrated Hindi writer and critic, Namwar Singh, once said, quoting a Farsi couplet, “Jab sab raaste band ho chuke ho/to zulm ke khilaf talwar utha lena jayaz hai. When all door close on you/you have the right to pick up a sword to fight injustice. “Krishna Sobti ki talwar unki kalam hai.” Sobti’s sword is her pen.

Last year, when Sultan, a beautiful white horse owned by UP police was beaten mercilessly by a goon at a protest in Uttarakhand, Sobti was aghast. “Sultan ko mara,” she told me. Eight months later, at a meeting called to protest attack on intellectuals and minorities, she drove the point home, “Babri, Dadri, phir Hindutva ke naam par bahaduri”. The sword was out.

Talking truth to power is as natural for Sobti as writing about the world she sees, lives hears and breathes, “Koi bhi achcha kalam mulyon ke liye likhta hai, mulyon ke dawedaro ke liye nahin.” Good writers are judged by their conscience (adherence to truth), not by their fealty to custodians of morality. She famously declined Padma Bhushan from the Congress government in 2010 saying, “As a writer, I have to keep a distance from the establishment.”

The other side of Krishna Sobti is the quiet, gentle writer whose corpus of work is impossible to capture in one line. It contains within its words, idioms and metaphors of a century of North India’s tryst with itself, the history that is not and the history that is. To abbreviate her work in terms of her birthplace (Punjab), gender (female) or choice of language is to fall for artificial categories. Some critics, perhaps in envy, have called her work masculine. She’s tickled by it. Ardhanareshwar is closer to truth, she says. She can’t be also bracketed by any of her literary contemporaries. She has evolved her own form and structure of telling stories. She was never a groupie, on the contrary, throughout her life she guarded her freedom as a writer and an individual, zealously. Just as she has lived her life on her own terms. Mostly alone, except for a brief partnership with Shivnath, a Dogri writer she met aged 70 and lost to death too soon.

She’s above all – culturally, socially and politically – a Hindustani writer whose linguistic repertoire of khadi boli (spoken language), and various dialects of Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Sanskrit and Rajasthani sheathe collective will and essence of a people. “Shabd bhasha ka shor nahin, veh arth ko thame hai”. Words are not just sound registers of a language, they hold the world (values). One dry Monsoon day, I ran into her, and there she was sitting, looking beautiful as ever at IIC. With a flick of imagination she dissected a word, “Aaj Monsoon, maun aur sooni kyon hai?” Why is Monsoon silent and bleak, today?

Like Anton Chekov, Sobti’s recreation of our lives – a closely observed humanity and its condition – is born of a space where characters, environment and narratives like a raga have their own arcs, rhythm, linguistic registers – you have to immerse yourself in them to comprehend the splintered truth. Like the roaming Sufi, her work spreads its wings far and wide, within and without, searching with a bemused voice, a humorous bone and a compassionate eye, an answer to a people that are happy and worried at the same time.

One special quality of her writing is its oral vibrancy and virility of prose that re-asserts Hindustan’s soul and rebirths folklores, mythologies, songs, poems, idioms in full cognizance of human intrigues, forces, tendencies and existential assertions. Her work asks to be read aloud. Yet, she holds a brief for no one.

Krishna Sobti’s search for her own roots, a fact which few people are aware of, has made her research on her ancestry. Her family, she feels, could well be descendants from the Greeks, who like Afghans, Iranians, Armenians and many others before and after made the land of river Indus their home. This amalgamation of ethnic identities is what makes Hindustan unique. It is what also makes her uniquely Hindustani.

She writes what she has seen and experienced. Unlike Sadaat Hasan Manto she’s not an angry writer. She finds attributes that redeem us as human beings, but she also does not shy away from delivering truths as they appear. As she herself says of her work, “Meine sab thande dimaag se likha hai,” Whatever I have penned has been written with detachment and clarity. A certain celebrated Trinidad writer, who once declared that women writers are sentimental and hold narrow view of the world, may find, in the long run, that Krishna is more than his match. Only she’s been writing in Hindustani not English, the language of conquerors.