Bhairavi Read online

  BHAIRAVI: THE RUNAWAY

  BHAIRAVI: THE RUNAWAY

  Shivani

  Translated from Hindi by

  Priyanka Sarkar

  FOREWORD

  Bhairavi is perhaps the darkest of my mother’s novels. It was first serialized in the popular Hindi weekly Saptahik Hindustan, and published soon thereafter in 1978 by Shabdkar Prakashan. Once that publishing house closed down, it was published with most of Shivani’s books by Saraswati Vihar Prakashan and ultimately by Radha Krishna Prakashan. They have published Bhairavi in both hard cover and paperback editions.

  The late 1980s were a strange time in Independent India’s history. The vernacular publishing industry had come of age and Hindi writers had found millions of readers across the Hindi belt. But at the same time royalties remain poor and publishers skittish. Also a new backlash of social conservatism was becoming visible on the horizon. It was hostile to women who had grown up in Gandhi, Tagore and Sarojini Naidu’s liberal India, particularly those who wrote or performed on stage. Our tiny Kumaoni society of Chauthani Brahmins was no exception. Shivani’s own family did not fit the joint family pattern, but the Brahminical ideology of the basic patrilineal system Brahmins in the hills lived by, eyed the Shantiniketan-educated Gaura Pant ‘Shivani’ with certain misgivings as an aberration. They were mystified and upset in equal measure by her prolific writing skills that made her into a great literary phenomenon with no help from either a literary mentor or the family. They criticized her in low tones but all read her work avidly as soon as it saw print. Later their mutterings that filtered down to us, courtesy of various aunts and uncles, were tinged with both a deep disapprobation and envy.

  Some ideas are not new, but need to be affirmed by creative writers. Freedom of expression for women was one such. For our mother it meant not just continuing to write, but also sending all three of her daughters to college and introducing them to the world of creative writing, music, fine arts and of course numerous well-known writers.

  By the time Bhairavi was published, Shivani’s two older daughters had married into socially certified ‘good families’ to enviably promising young men. Another daughter and her only son were away in college and doing very well. But as in Bhairavi, behind this façade of joy darker shadows lurked unseen. Her son had just entered the IIT, the youngest daughter was to be married next year into a good family. But her husband who was about to retire, was quietly struggling with an illness he tried his best to downplay, but no longer could. Joy surrounded the house as the young engaged couple shot in and out, tailors and jewellers and aunts and uncles sat and made lists of chores to be completed, but one look at my father’s steadily shrinking frame and mother knew this joyous occasion for her would be a precarious perch at best.

  Bhairavi, written under these circumstances, has been both praised and attacked for its odd fangled and ambivalent approach to young life and the dark phenomenon of death, for the oddly mixed cultural background this saga presents the Hindi readers with: romantic love and sudden bereavement, ritualistic restraints of a middle-class life and the loosening of bonds among simple noble tribals. Tantra and sex among wandering bands of male and female Aghori ascetics people had long whispered about, but they were seldom reported in literature, least of all by a woman. Death, Walter Benjamin said once, is the sanction of everything a writer can tell. It confers upon a writer the responsibility to tell it like it is. And in Bhairavi Shivani did just that.

  As a child I had noticed our mother’s strange and simultaneous fascination for and revulsion from death rituals and cremations. If we were walking together and came across a group carrying a dead body draped in white on a bier, she grew pale and sat down wherever she was. A while later she’d gather herself and yell at us to get a move on, not gape at her like dimwits. It was much later when I re-read Bhairavi as an adult, that I realized how death that had stalked Mother’s life, had shaped this book. Like Velazquez’s court dwarfs, she and her siblings and their mother had had a ring side seat at the spectacle of worldly power and great wealth marred by death again and again.

  While still in her teens Shivani lost her father, her eldest brother-in-law, and a few years later, her brother and mentor Tribhi. Her father’s death had diminished their fortunes, complicated their lives and forced Shivani’s large family to move to the hills where they faced a hugely conservative and judgemental community of high-bred Brahmins. After a few harrowing months there, they moved back to a better life in the royal palaces of Orchha, where the eldest son Tribhi was appointed the Prime Minister to His Highness of Orchha. Her brother and mother, however, saw to it that Shivani who was a brilliant student, graduated from Shantiniketan. Soon after this, a furious search was mounted in their own community to find a groom for, in my grandmother’s words, ‘this stubborn and powerful filly’. Shivani, then Gaura, was thus married off to my father, a widowed school teacher still mourning his beloved wife, and moved first to the tiny town of Jhansi, then back to the hills. All this had the effect of bringing Shivani’s writings to focus steadily on the constantly shifting boundaries between cultures, between affluence and a genteel poverty, between the holy and the unholy and profane. She also realized how in her own life, the dead would never quite die but walk alongside as living memories, and often articulate their unfulfilled and angry desires through the living ones.

  In Bhairavi, the young protagonist Chandan becomes a prism through whom Shivani the writer observes, watches, recognizes, listens to all this. What happens to an innocent fatherless young girl when Fate suddenly catapults her into a landscape totally exterior to her, not just once but again and again. Like the writer, Chandan has grown up far away from her natal community in a border town among children of the tribal Shauka people. This carefree innocent young girl is quite unaware of the big world outside, or her mother’s reasons for her self-exile. Suddenly married off into a rich modern family far away in the plains, she tries hard to adjust to an entirely new life. But just when she is settling in, an accident throws her into another new world: a world free of sexual hierarchies, where a wandering band of Aghori Tantriks performs strange secret rituals in dark cremation grounds and forests. Male sexual prerogatives, prescriptive heterosexuality, women’s inequality or the linking of sex with procreativity, all that Chandan had known, have all been discarded here amid the fumes of Ganja and Charas and alcohol deemed Prasad.

  The road already travelled curls up behind Chandan, rolls up like a film as she stands ragged in ochre sari, amid burning pyres and a Ganja-smoking guru and his dubiously androgynous female chelis puffing away at their chillums. Bhairavi encapsulates the peculiar vital wisdom we dub as ‘experience’, when suddenly one’s past is behind her and counts for nothing. Yet neither she nor her creator judge or turn a cynical eye. Chandan becomes a compassionate witness-cum-narrator of millions of unknown lives that are lived in this vast land, on the edges of the known society. Life thus revealed is an enigma. It fits no known social norms of the traditional society where each new encounter ends with a question mark and any answer immediately uncovers another question. Standing amid burning pyres, holed up in distant hovels with the guru’s Dhooni and strange coming and goings at midnight, Chandan observes life as life might observe itself as a series of confessions and memories, interspersed with fragments of autobiographical fantasy.

  To understand the timeless appeal of Shivani’s fiction across decades her new readers must allow an ambivalent space for a woman writer’s experience of life half a century ago. It is a world in which Chandan is sometimes Shivani, and at others not Shivani at all. But in her is enshrined a strange taste of freedom for women who got to live their life again and again by default as it were, with their past wiped clean.

  My father passed away a year af
ter Bhairavi was published. My mother was widowed with meagre savings, a son who was still in college and with no roof over her head. She, however, kept her head high and for the next thirty odd years lived in a flat rented from the government and continued to write. As her reader and daughter, I meet her countless admirers all over the globe. Among them there are simple housewives and professional men and women, school kids, and a surprisingly large number of diaspora Indians from India’s Hindi belt, who confess they developed a taste for Hindi after reading Shivani’s books . All of them confide how their mother, or grandmother or even great grandmother had first introduced them to Shivani’s writings and once into it they were hooked for life.

  Women writers who have this sort of strange freedom thrust on them, mostly resolve their tensions in laughter and in prose and in doing so they will, almost inadvertently, confer the gift of free thinking on their daughters. I learnt from Shivani both as mother and reader, that women leading socially secure lives as mothers and wives are not morally more credible or more capable than those who are without family or child. Till the end, Shivani remained a kaleidoscopic character for me: outwardly traditional but bold, perverse, un-beholden and totally free when she puts pen to paper. Reading Bhairavi and the strange composure and compassion in these pages that co-exists with pain and hurt, I feel it is not the moralist’s why, but a humane what, that the writer ekes out from life, holds tenderly and finally redeems from oblivion.

  Mrinal Pande

  24 May 2020

  PREFACE

  It was the summer of ‘97. I was all of 14 and restless, guilt-tripping my single mother for yet another summer vacation wasted in the sweltering small town of Udaipur when we could have had gone somewhere exciting and cooler. Exasperated, Ma pushed a copy of Shivani’s Surangama into my hand.

  I knew nothing about Shivani at that point but Surangama drew me in. Her story spoke to me at a personal level though there were parts of the story that were beyond my understanding at that time. I gave my copy to my closest friend, convincing her to read it, and went back to raid Ma’s library and read whatever I could find by Shivani. I was drawn into her small-town world of the hills, a world I was somewhat familiar with. Her heroines were all beautiful, independent, talented and strong-willed. They fucked up or life fucked them up but they persevered. I wanted to be them.

  Twenty-three years have passed since then. I got out of the small town, got a college education in the big city, then went on to work in publishing, living a life more or less on my own terms. At a personal level, I realize that I got to do and be a lot of things that Shivani’s heroines didn’t even get the chance to do. She was writing between the 1950s and 1970s. Times have changed somewhat—I am living in a big city and have many freedoms—though that is probably the oversimplification of the century.

  Gaura Pant urf Shivani’s stories, characters and the situations they find themselves in still resonate for me; at times they can even be triggering. What makes her stories so powerful other than her characters, is her vivid writing that had made her a household darling in the Hindi-reading belt of India. Her readers were primarily women. That could be because she was writing about the home and the hearth and the sense and sensibilities of those within it.

  One of the reasons she wasn’t as celebrated and fêted like her contemporaries were, despite being to every Hindi-reading woman in the country what Uttam Kumar was to Bengali women, was that she was seen as a writer of ‘love stories’ and not a chronicler of society. We know how Jane Austen was regarded by her contemporaries and how ‘chick-lit’ is viewed by the literati today. Stories, no matter how authentic the accounts are, about women coming from a certain class and born with certain privileges, have often been disparaged by the largely male literati of different eras, and Shivani’s experience was no different. She received a Padma Shri almost towards the end of her life. Even now, very few courses in universities include her works in their syllabi.

  Shivani’s stories are set in the locale she was most familiar with, the Kumaon hills, and her characters are mostly a product of their situations or middle-class conditioning. Her stories have some stock characters, the strong female lead and the wimpy, privileged love interest to whom you would want to give a good walloping. Then, there are one or more nemesis, mostly women, and they are largely a product of society and its expectations. There is a focus on the characters (mostly the men, all handsome but ‘lily-livered’) not being able to cope.

  In Bhairavi, her fourth novel written in the 1960s, we meet such people too. Chandan begins as the perfect embodiment of what patriarchy desires from a woman. So meek that the narrator keeps calling her a ‘cow’ (translated as ‘lamb’ in the text), so virtuous that she is willing to risk life and limb every time her virtue is at risk, her beauty, rather her ‘fairness’, a mirror to her heart. However, this wet dream of every Indian man, though dutifully married off, is not rewarded at the end and instead ends up lost. Almost as if the author were saying, women can keep trying, but what options do they have in reality?

  Then, there’s Chandan’s mother, Rajrajeshwari who for me is a far more interesting character. One youthful trespass and she has to live through hell— an emotionally abusive marriage that makes her so bitter that she wants to control every aspect of her daughter’s life. This control leads to Chandan growing up in a claustrophobic, sheltered existence nobody should envy because it would do anyone more harm than good. Many parents continue to be guilty of this even today and perhaps Bhairavi can be seen as a ‘how not to parent’ guide for them. Shivani, with her ironic sense of humour, could well have been doing precisely that.

  There are many other interesting characters in Bhairavi: the dark-complexioned, orphaned Charan for one, who has lived a life very different from Chandan’s and manages to make the most of it. She along with her mentor and mother-figure Maya Didi educate Chandan about the ways of the world. Chandan’s husband is credited with ‘educating’ her in the novel, but her real education begins only in the ashram, which is no less than a gothic manor, complete with fearsome pets and a handsome devil of a lord. There are funeral pyres, skulls and bones, snakes, dead bodies and a whole lot of hocus-pocus. In some ways, Bhairavi is Shivani’s Northanger Abbey. Apart from the Austen vibes, Shivani was also deeply influenced by Daphne du Maurier, the queen of the modern gothic, as her daughter Ira once told me.

  The real horror, however, emerges in the novel from the realities of life. A woman who has to eat food from a plate that her husband has spat in. Another who watches in horror as the man for whom she left everything behind turns out to be a potential violator, and hence spends her dying breaths trying to save another woman from him. Or the end of the story, where our heroine is left all alone without any support or shelter and in the grips of an addiction. The penultimate question that Chandan asks herself is really for the reader. Where really can a beautiful, young, addict of a woman without much of an education go?

  However, there are certain issues that will be bothersome for a 21st-century reader. The constant equating of fairness and beauty, and therefore with a purity of character, at times grates on our nerves. Women who smoke, dress in western clothes and are sexually active are shown as being weak in character. Considering how the writer problematizes Rajrajeshwari and gently mocks the judgements about values and clothing emanating from her, one wonders whether Shivani problematized her own judgement of other characters. However, the novel stresses on Rajrajeshwari and Chandan being paragons and the other women being simply incompetent, so perhaps Shivani too had a blind spot.

  While retellings of Western classics are much in vogue in these times, through cinema and animation, we have almost none for the works of popular Indian writers. If I were doing a retelling of Bhairavi for today’s readers, I’d probably have had Chandan move into the devilishly handsome Guruji’s bat-cave of her own volition and make exciting, slightly BDSM-y love with him, and then focus on the larger problem, of earning her own keep. Maya Didi could have bee
n the ultimate dominatrix, she sure has that vibe about her. Or to go further back I would have made sure that Rajrajeshwari did not have to live her entire life paying for one mistake, and instead perhaps she could have had her mother shield her.

  Charan is my favourite character though. The wild child could be re-imagined as a fantastical superheroine, an Amazonian warrior. Daughter of the forest and night, she battles trolls, gnomes, goblins, djinns, hunters and poachers alike. Her mad friend’s ‘special tea’ is actually a potion that sharpens her skills. Her name is anathema to anyone who tries to profit from the forest. She is the reason why their neck of the forest is still as thick as it was in the 1950s. Our Chandan gets besotted with her and joins Charan as a fighter and lover.

  The guru’s charms have gotten old by now. Mystique can only take you so far, after all. The rejected lover goes back to Maya Didi but she rebuffs him and tells him that she has taken over his ashram and practice. She has her posse of submissives, so thanks but no thanks. He leaves for the shamshan and takes Samadhi there. That would have been my modern retelling.

  I feel like I owe Shivani a debt for how her characters have shaped me. Shivani’s spirit would have haunted me, in keeping with the theme of the story, had Ira Pande not let me anywhere near any of her mother’s writings. Or had both Ira and Mrinal not helped me immensely by sharing material on Shivani’s writing that wasn’t available anywhere.

  Or if Arpita Das, editor extraordinaire of Yoda Press, and their publishing partner Simon and Schuster had shoo-ed me away. Or later, Sangam House and Arshia Sattar (the conversations with her were a big help!) had not allowed me to darken their doorstep where I worked on this translation.

  Or had Anish Chandy, Dibyajyoti Sarma and Saumya Agarwal not supported me through the process of being an editor-translator. And if my own mother had disowned me for not being able to do justice to the original work. But they did not, dear reader, so I can offer this translation for your delectation, and sleep peacefully at night.