In her interviews, Shashi Deshpande had made her displeasure felt about being labelled as women’s writer. That’s why perhaps the title of her biography is Listen to me. Which one may think is a misnomer, because Deshpande admits that she is not comfortable drawing attention to herself. But she takes the opportunity that her memoir offers her, to set the record straight.
The author leaves out the dates and years – Memory is famously capricious, unreliable and selective (she writes in the prelude). Instead she writes about the times and the culture she lived in and engaged with on a daily basis and how it all seeped into her writing, consciously and unconsciously. Deshpande writes about the choices she made, often picking out quotes from the authors she read, interacted with, giving one a feel that it’s a novel within a novel.
Yes, there is a larger picture here and that is of the Indian Writing in English. The first three big names were — R K Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao. And, then followed the likes of Anita Desai, Kamala Das, Deshpande herself, Gita Hariharan and others. There were comparisons, which still persist, one of which is the women’s writer tag, the animosity between Bhasha writers and those Indians who chose to wrote in English, getting published abroad or missing deals because there were no exotic Indian elements in the book. This is not true of Indian writers in English alone, Deshpande mentions interactions with an Australian author who had difficulties getting published in USA because there were no kangaroos in her book! When Deshpande returned from Australia, she came back with a clutch of wonderful books written by Australian authors, about whom not much was known in India.
Back to the world that Deshpande, a Padma Shri award winner, has created. She has written 11 novels, two crime novellas, a number of short story collections and four children’s books, a collection of essays too. Three of her novels have won awards out of which That Long Silence got the Sahitya Akademi award. How did she learn the ‘how’ of writing? She quotes Ann Pratchet — ‘Art stands on the shoulder of craft’. ‘The art must be respected..for if you let the mind run loose, it becomes egotistic; personal, which I detest. At the same time the irregular fire must be there’ — Virginia Woolf.
Deshpande writes — Control, yet passion. Control in the crafting, passion in the emotions. Irregular fire. Easy to say, but hard to practise. And it takes ages to learn. For me, the intensity was very important. I could never glide on the surface, I had to drown myself, lose myself in the character’s feelings, emotions. A novel demands even greater intensity and it demands that the intensity be sustained over a longer period of time.
Another lesson which Deshpande swears by is Ernest Gowers’ book on language – The Complete Plain Words. She was introduced to Gowers’ in her journalism class. In the years to come, the writer would be dismissed as someone who wrote in a simple language, or in other words had a limited vocabulary. They little know, those who say this, the difficulty of writing simple language. Gowers knew.
In Listen to me, Deshpande also writes about authors whose works she enjoys reading and who kept her alive as a reader — from PG Wodehouse, Graham Greene, JB Priestly, Daphne du Maurier, to Jane Austen, Emily Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell, George Elliot, Elizabeth Bowen and Anne Tyler amongst others.
Deshpande, who was invited to lecture at universities abroad, had once written an article titled ‘How to Read, or Rather, How Not to Read the Writing of Women’. She made a point, which is still prevalent, that women are considered as lesser humans, their lives less insignificant, consisting as they do of trifles like family, love and romance. She also mentions how Sir V S Naipaul had written some place that Jane Austen wrote sentimental rubbish. The author is sure that Naipaul had never read Austen and must have accepted the contemporary idea of her, of what TV serials and films have made of her — a romantic writer. Far from it! Austen, says Deshpande, was a hard-headed practical woman, the opening of two of her most read novels — Pride and Prejudice and Emma prove it.
Pride and Prejudice: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Emma: Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence...
Austen wrote about money, because she knew how important money was. She wrote of marriage because it was the only career open to women then. It was not a sentimental women’s romance stuff at all, the author writes.
Finally, when Naipaul and Deshpande came face to face at a literary event, where the Nobel Prize winner made some disparaging comments about feminism, Deshpande, responding to a question from the press said, quite succinctly, “...someone who had no idea about what women’s lives were like, would obviously find feminism banal. So do I find the idea of the anguish of exile boring.”
Novel after novel, Deshpande says, I kept hoping that my work would be recognised, not as being about women, but about the predicament of human beings. It never seemed to happen. With Listen to me perhaps, the readers would take note of it.
