Obituary: Krishna Sobti 1925-2019

My obituary of a great Indian and a great writer, who was also warm, forthright -- and crucially, great fun. 

A DELIBERATE OUTLIER

Like the tragically rising caste of Indians educated almost entirely in English, the only Hindi writers I had read until 15 odd years ago were those prescribed in my school textbooks. Krishna Sobti was not one of them. Then, in 2005, I stumbled upon her Dil-o-Danish in the cold basement of a Columbia University library, and for the next 48 hours, exam semester notwithstanding, I couldn't tear myself away from Sobti's brilliant 1920s imagining of the city I called home.

Among the most delicious of Delhi novels, the saga of Kutumb, Kripanarayan and Mehek Bano is a universally recognisable love triangle embedded in a very particular Indian social context: the Kayastha patriarch, his lawfully wedded wife (perfectly named, 'kutumb' means family), and his beloved Muslim mistress, with whom, too, he has two children. Sobti captured the fraught but irrevocable tie of the marital, but also the deep-seated romantic attachment of the extra-marital. And she did all this while paying effortless tribute to the everyday cultural life of Delhi, from the making of new quilts at the onset of winter to the poems recited by children at weddings.

In the years since then, I read many more of Sobti's books, slowly realising that part of what made her oeuvre so remarkable was her mastery of language. In novel after novel, she worked to create a different milieu, each brought to fruition by her unerring ear for the multifarious spoken tongues that huddle together under the umbrella rubric of Hindi. The rhythms of rustic Punjabi (Mitro Marjani, Zindaginama) were as much under her control as the urbane Urdu-inflected language of Old Delhi's elite (Dil-o-Danish), or then again the mixture of English and Hindustani in a 1970s government office (Yaaron ke Yaar).

Her outspoken women characters, too, made her unique among Indian writers -- and unlikely to be prescribed in school textbooks. Whether it was the rough-tongued desirousness of Mitro in Mitro Marjani, or the difficult memories and sad-eyed yearning of Ratti in Surajmukhi Andhere Ke, or the many close mother-daughter pairs across her books, from Daar se Bicchudi to Ai Ladki, Sobti's very different women were unafraid yet never invulnerable. Perhaps a little like herself.

Her death yesterday, less than a month short of her 94^th birthday, is likely to generate tributes to the grande dame of Hindi literature, but Sobti spent much of her career as a deliberate outlier. A Punjabi who chose to write in Hindi, she was too outspoken for the hidebound Hindi literary establishment. Her novel Zindaginama will live on among the most astonishing novelistic depictions we have of life in Punjab, but Sobti remained an outsider to the Punjabi scene -- especially after she filed a case of copyright infringement against the Punjabi literary doyenne Amrita Pritam for naming a book Hardutt ka Zindaginama. She was among the rare Hindi writers who wrote attentively, frankly and sharply about her peers, producing a series of magisterial sketches under the androgynous pen name Hashmat. Most of all, she was that rare Indian woman of her generation who carved out a life on her own terms: not succumbing to marital domesticity for most of her life, and only marrying the Dogri writer and translator Shivanath when she was 70.

When I first met her in 2009, Sobti was 84, and told me with all the clarity of experience: “Household chores sap women’s energies. If the family becomes the limit of your world, then you cannot think big.” It is a thought I often return to, and a dilemma that many women grapple with. Krishna ji resolved hers a certain way, but she knew that wasn't a possibility open to most women, especially in India.

By the time I met her again, for a long-form Caravan profile in 2016, she was 91, and practically as housebound as the mother in her Ai Ladki had been. Shivanath ji had passed away some years before, and she was back to living alone, with her trusted housekeeper-cum-assistant Vimlesh. But she rarely lacked for company: whenever she was well enough to see people, there were always writers, journalists or editors lining up to see her. And she loved to play the host, pressing Darjeeling tea and biscuits and namkeen upon guests in her small Mayur Vihar flat. Once I had spent the whole day listening to delightful tales of her Lahore or Shimla girlhood, or her frank, gleefully giggly accounts of scandalising the Hindiwallas, she might urge me to join her in a glass of rum-paani.

Yet there was something undeniably solitary about Krishna Sobti. When she retired to her desk, the world was always with her. But she always knew it had to be held at bay, in order for her to be free to do what she had been born to do: to write. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Jan 2019.