27 An Introduction to Life Writing in India: Its Forms and Development
Anindita Das
Life writing is a written narrative account primarily concerned with telling the truth, related to the lives of people in historical, political and cultural context. In India, life writing has undergone a lot of changes across the centuries. The country renders quite a critical location for the study of life histories. For several reasons the scholars in India did not give much impetus to life history unlike other regions of the world. Firstly because it was observed that previously the thrust was more on community than individual. The reason behind it was both religious as well as social. It is pertaining to the idealistic nature of the people and also that only a single section of the society produced literary output, as the writers, composers and thinkers were basically Hindus, and that they maintained a low profile. Though there had been a considerable body of literature produced, life writing could only be found in biographical form in the earlier times. Thus, biographical writing began from the time of the Vedas, which is about 8th century BC, while the history of autobiographical writing in Indian literature is merely around hundreds years old. The kind of poetry written in Vedas was also autobiographical. In Ramayana (2nd century BCE) and Mahabharata (4th Century BCE) biographical narration and poetry can be found respectively. The mediaeval poets of ancient India narrated the life histories of princes and incarnations. The Jataka Tales narrating the life of Buddha are considered to be the earliest biographical prose narrative. Moreover, during the Islamic rule in India court poets were engaged to venerate the deeds of the kings. Those were turned out to be socially informative history and can be marked as the beginning of modern Indian biography.
Autobiographical life writing gained recognition in India in the nineteenth century with the development of women’s studies and oriental studies. Though the earliest record of autobiographical writing in Indian literary tradition dates back to the period of 5th century BCE, as the Buddhist nuns wrote about their life experiences in poetic form known as therigathas, only some of those were autobiographical by nature. Those were orally transmitted until several centuries before being written down in the 1st century BCE, and translated into English in the nineteenth century. In this context, it becomes imperative to mention that the women were the first to write about their life and they were also regarded as the earliest women in India describing their reality of existence as women in the patriarchal society. In the later period, a group of saint poets such as Kabir(15th century), Mira(16th century), Surdas(16th century), Tukaram (17th century) and others wrote poetry consisting autobiographical elements to a great extent.
Gradually, the genre of life writing developed in India in different forms. It is seen to be existent in the forms of autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, speeches and journals. While endeavouring to trace the evolution and development of the genre in India, as mentioned before, life histories written earlier reflect more of the society rather than the self. There are various factors contributing to such practise. First of all the structure of the Indian society, which was stringently caste based, had a considerable influence in the literary output across time. The identity of an individual was dominated by caste and religion in such a manner that there was no scope for selfhood. Mc Kim Marriot observes in this connection that a person in India is a “dividual”, being dependent and divisible, not an individual as in western sense of the term, which considers a person as an independent and indivisible entity. Owing to the fact that earlier people in India were more socially conditioned rather than individual beings they used to keep their public and private spheres separate, concealing their personal life. But after the Mughal conquest in the medieval period, writing of lives began to flourish. The autobiographies of the Mughals such as the Baburnama, Akbarnama and Humayunnama comprise the significant events of their life and political career. While in the present times the focus on life writing in the forms of biographies, autobiographies, together with oral histories and stories is directed towards the expression of self, prioritising a person’s life in the broader social and cultural milieu.
Biographical tradition was there to be found in the Indian literature of the ancient times, including Sanskrit. But due to its paucity and irregularity, they could not become a vital part of Indian National culture. Nevertheless, Harshacharitra by Banabhatta is the oldest surviving biography in India. In the Mughal period historians were appointed in the courts to record the lives and deeds of the emperors. However, it is in the decade of 1870s that the tradition of biographies of Indians written by Indians emerged. The subjects in the biographies written in India, who were mostly religious leaders revered by all, have always been models to be followed. They were written to tell the history of the nation through the depiction of the life stories of individuals. Biographical sketches began to appear in collections in the twentieth century of the great leaders of India. The lives and speeches of them were incorporated in the sketches. A few examples of such collection include India’s Nation Builders (1919) by Debendranath Banerjee, Men and Supermen of Hindustan (1943) by Alva Joachim. However, the Dictionary of National Biography edited by S.P Sen and published by the Institute of Historical Studies of Calcutta has been a very important compilation in four volumes, which is being updated time to time. The Government of India, institutes and organisations sponsored the biographies of the great Indian people. Numerous biographies have been written of the nationalist leaders, such as My Master Gokhale (1946) by V. S Srinivas Sastry, The Great Indian Way: The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1998) by Raja Rao, Jawaharlal Nehru(1975) by S. Gopal and the notorious biography of B.R Ambedkar Worshipping False God (1997) by Arun Shourie. The biographies written in this period were critical in nature, primarily based on facts and scientific analysis. Documenting the lives of saints, philosophers and thinkers has always been a preoccupation with the biographers in India. A huge number of absorbing biographies of Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda and Raja Ram Mohan Roy have been written. Biographies of known women personalities such as Indira Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu and Kamala Nehru have also been written. The lives of people having contribution towards society, arts, culture and science have been documented. But very few biographies have been written on literary people of India and among the few which have been written are Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (1962) by Krishna Kripalani, Munshi Premchand: A Literary Biography (1964) by Madan Gopal and R.K Narayan, the Early Years:1906-45 (1996) by Susan Ram and N.Ram to name a few. Ved Mehta, Khuswant Singh and Ramachandra Guha are considered to be the important biographers of independent India.
Autobiography developed as a distinctive genre in India in the nineteenth century, a growth that evolved breaking away with prevalent conventions. Prior to that, in the mid 18th century to mid 19th century, the literature produced in India, specifically poetry, displayed individualism and celebration of self. It in fact was the impact of colonialism that the literary people began to attach value to individualism. Subsequently, considerable numbers of autobiographies were written in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, particularly in Gujrati, Marathi, Bengali and other Indian languages. It needs to be mentioned here two different types of writings which could document the “progressive and personal view of the writers”, and those are Govardhanram Madhavram Tripathi’s Scrapbooks (1957-59) and Rassundari Devi’s Amar Jiban (1876). These are thus the ones which mark the attainment of maturity in autobiographical writing in India. Being a graduate of the Modern English education system, Govardhanram possibly wrote his Scrapbooks in English as it seems that he was preoccupied from within by the colonial surroundings. It is also regarded as the landmark in Indian Self Writing. On the other hand there is Rassundari Devi, a self taught woman who never had any access to education. In order to read the Bhagavad Purana, and tell its stories to the people, she learned to read and write herself. Though she was not a renowned personality and despite of the fact that she did not write her autobiography self-consciously, she becomes the first woman in India to write an autobiography in modern times, not being influenced by the western mode but by following the traditional Bhakti saint-poets.
Moreover, the early twentieth century literature in India exhibited a spirit of nationalism. It was the phase when prose forms gained more social significance. The autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi The Story of My Experiments with Truth is the most dazzling specimen of life writing of the period. It was initially written in Gujrati as “Satyana Preyogo Athava Atmakatha” (1927). It is exceptional for the reason that it encompasses a lot of issues, expressed in a very lucid language with absolute genuineness, also highlighting his spiritual quest to adhere to the principles he set for himself. As Gandhi notes:
Another example is Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography, which is an account of his quest to situate himself in the country as well among the larger human race. His style of writing the autobiography influenced several South Asian writers of 20th century. Many autobiographies were written in regional languages, though they did not draw much readership mainly because of dearth of proper translation. In Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore’s
Apan Katha and Primal Goswami’s Smriticharan in the vernacular language are noteworthy. Among the Hindi autobiographies the most prominent are poet Harivanshray Bachchan’s Nid ka nirman, which stands out for its intensity and Ateet ke chalchitra by poet, freedom fighter and activist Mahadevi Verma, which are sketches from the memories of her past.
The autobiography, written in English, which entailed a lot of controversy, is Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, published in the year 1951. He talks about his anxiety of being in the clutches of two diverse cultures, the British and the Bengali. His dedication of the book ‘To the memory of British Empire’ made him an anti- Indian and a pro-British in the eyes of many. But his aim of writing the autobiography seems to be plain enough when he notes in the preface:
However, the other renowned autobiographies that were published in the 1950s are At the Crossroads: An Autobiography (1950) by Nripendra Chandra Banerji, Autobiography (1959) by N.B Khare and Inside Lahore Fort (1959) by Jayprakash Narayan. A similar mode of writing as autobiography, memoirs have also been written, R.K Narayan’s My Days being the prominent one, written by the eminent Indian writer in English. The basic distinction between the two lies in the fact that a memoir tends to be informal, based on memory, not relying much on chronological order of events, while autobiography is written chronologically, relying strictly on facts.
However, there was a transition from the life histories of the known personalities to the subaltern and the marginalised. The genre of life writing hence gained a great deal of magnitude while trying to understand and study those who are socially marginalised and does not usually raise their voice. The Dalits and the women come under this group. To talk about the Dalits, the earlier upper caste writers have written about them, but without undergoing their experiences it was not possible to understand their plight. Dalit autobiographical narratives have become an integral part of Indian literature. The subaltern consciousness, the quest for identity and the struggle to assert their dignity have been the main concern of such narratives. The Dalit Marathi authors have written their autobiographies, the most remarkable of those are Things I Never Imagined (1975) by N.S Suryavanshi and Baluta by Daya Pawar which marks as a rising in the category of Dalit autobiography. Autobiographies are basically a form of social protest for the Dalits, a way of raising their voice by breaking the silence against all the injustice and suppression they have been subjected to since ages.
On the other hand, women have also been a marginalised group in the patriarchal social structure in India. They have also adopted autobiography as a means to vent out their feelings, to write about their self, confined only to a few things due to lack of formal education. The autobiographies of women mostly deal with their relationships with the people in their lives. Their identity is primarily based on those relationships. Whereas men mostly records their achievements and work life. As K. Satchidanandan observes:
It has been said that for a woman the autobiography is often a means to survive traumas of childbirth, illness, deaths of spouses and children, loss of cultural identity and personal regard, fear of failure, ageing, loss of beauty and strength as well as death, and they struggle to find a voice to express what cannot be expressed by other means. …….. Man enforces a unity and identity across time by reconstructing the ego as a bulwark against disintegration. He thus denies the effects of having internalized the alienating world order.
It thus suggests that men do not bring forth their insecurities and internal conflicts unlike women. Nevertheless, the experiences of Dalit women, being the doubly oppressed group of the society, first as women and then as Dalits, add up to an essential fraction of life writing in India . Shantabai Krushnaji Kamble was the first Dalit woman to write an autobiography. The autobiography of Baby Kamble, who is the first Dalit woman to write an autobiography in Marathi, puts forward the plight of the Mahar community, blending the complex issues of caste, class and gender.
However, diary writing in India, like autobiography, was originated in the west and began to be practised in India in the nineteenth century. For the people of the west, diary is the reflection of a disciplined life, the record of their day to day life. But in Indian Literature, diary writing is a way to put forward one’s thoughts and feelings, practised by socially aware people to document their activities. In the regional sphere we have Durgaram Mehtaji (1809- 1876), social reformer and founder of Manav Dharma Sabha hailing from Gujarat is the pioneer in the field. The lectures he delivered in the Sabha on social and religious subjects were written in his diaries. The initiator of Prarthana Samaj in Gujrat Bholanath Sarabhai (1827-1886) too recorded his activities in his diaries. It is interesting to note that in early stage his diaries were written in Persian, then in English for sometimes and later in Gujrati. Mahadev Desai’s published diary Mahadevbhaini dayari is unique in the realm of Gujrati literature for the reason that instead of the records of his everyday life, he kept the account of Mahatma Ghandhi’s day-to-day activities. Even though the fact that much earlier diaries had been written in India, it obtained a substantial form in the hands of Mahatma Gandhi. One of the excerpts from his diary written while residing in Delhi is quoted below:
He made this entry in his diary on 15th September 1947, which reflects his concern over the stirrings that were taking place after India attained freedom. In the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi there are sixty four numbers of diary entries in the content.
A letter is regarded as a piece of literary work. The qualities of a good letter rest on its probing of a subject, thought, feeling and understanding. It must have informative value as well as aesthetic appeal. Letters in India became a very effective mode of correspondence to exchange views and also to educate. To trace the history of the form in India, the letters written by Ghalib should be mentioned here, which makes him famous as a prose writer also.
His letters were published in two different books Urdu-i-Mualla (1868) and Ud-i-Hindi (1869). It is thus observed that every reader of Urdu literature has praised the letters for their beauty, elegance, naturalness and intimacy. It marks the beginning in Indian literature that the epistolary prose becomes known as a literary form. Ghalib became the pioneer of a new prose form. In the later times, this prose form was found too promising by many Indian writers, without being aware of an Indian model established by Ghalib. Rabindranath Tagore at his young age published Yurop Prabasir Patra in the year 1881. The letters were written in Bengali, which are basically about his travelling in Europe. It is only those letters that Tagore wrote during the period 1885-1895 can be matched up to Ghalib. He wrote the letters to his niece and was published in the year 1912 with the title Chinna Patra. The eminent Indian letter writers like Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Toru Dutt and Jawaharlal Nehru have written letters. The letters highlight a great deal of the happenings in their life, both in personal and public level. In case of Toru Dutt, her letters exhibit a sense of nostalgia for being away from her motherland, while Sarojini Naidu’s letters project her as a woman who always had to maintain a balance between her personal and public life. But there are some exceptions such as Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters to his daughters, which constitute the history of mankind, written in a very simple and lucid language. Those letters were written while he was imprisoned for several times during India’s freedom struggle. Mahatma Gandhi’s letters highlight most of the correspondence he had with his supporters and followers, discussing the agenda of their activities and also to share his knowledge on different issues. They further served as the means to convey his messages and seek suggestions, as manifested through his letters to Hitler and Leo Tolstoy. The fact that Gandhi was very much influenced by Tolstoy’s philosophy is evident from their correspondence and they had a very interesting exchange of ideas through the letters.
The journals always have a specific purpose to serve, either written for keeping personal record or documenting events and as a form of life writing also a journal has a particular significance. For instance, during the India’s freedom struggle, the journals played a very crucial role. Mahatma Gandhi edited the journals Young India, Harijan and Navjivan. They were a means to reach out to the people with his thoughts and ideas. Writing extensively in Gujrati, his mother tongue, had facilitated him to connect more to the people. His views on Hindu-Muslim relationship, untouchability and Satyagraha were the issues he highlighted in the journals. His progressive and modern views reflected through his journals motivated the minds of the people to a great extent.
Furthermore, speeches, which are directly addressed to people, have a huge impact in their mind as words have powerful influential capacity. The speeches delivered by the luminaries of India like Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, S. Radhakrishnan and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam are very inspirational. Many of their speeches have been transcribed for posterity. The well-known speech rendered by Jawaharlal Nehru on the eve of India’s independence after the long drawn struggle against the British Empire is considered to be one of the greatest speeches of all times. An excerpt from the speech has been quoted below:
Similarly, Swami Vivekananda’s speech at the Parliament of the world’s Religion in Chicago, in the year 1893, to introduce Hinduism is the most remarkable one. Through his speech he endeavoured to elucidate the reason of disagreement between different people, sects and religions. Such speeches are regarded as an integral part of literary studies in India and are included in academic curriculum.
Life writing has been established as a powerful means for its ability to enhance the growth and development of a person, which is applicable across region and culture. In India also, though it is a complex and hybrid phenomenon, as it is not possible to define it by particularities of matter and method, it showcase the mystifying variety of a country. However, many of the writers derive their creative materials from that variety itself. The travel writings, interviews and personal essays also constitute the forms of life writing. The recent development in the global technology, of which India is an integral part as a fast developing country, has brought more variety in the genre of life writing. In the present times people use internet to send mails and express their views through the virtual media. It thus grants a scope to consider emails and blogs as forms of life writing.
Introducing the chapter:
- The first module “An Introduction to Life Writing in India: Its Forms and Development” traces the background and prominence of life writing in India. The readers will be familiar with the forms and development of the genre together with a critical analysis of it.
- The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi is the memoir that tells us about Gandhi’s life in connection to his struggle for independence as well as his inner conflicts and self analysis. This module will make an effort to read the autobiography in terms of his transformation an as individual as well as a national leader.
- Select Letters of Jawaharlal Nehru and Sarojini Naidu will make the readers know about the national life in India during the colonial period. It will also focus on women and their spheres in that scenario.
- My Days by R. K Narayan will be interpreted in the light of Narayan’s journey as a writer together with the traumatic experience he underwent and the role of memory that permeates all throughout the autobiography.
- My Story by Kamala Das will make the readers come into terms with a radical autobiography written by an Indian literary woman. The reflection of the writer’s bold assertion of her selfhood, body and sexuality will be discussed in this module.
- Savaging the Civilised: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India by Ramachandra Guha is based on the life of the anthropologist Elwin who studied India’s tribal customs, art, myth and folklore.
- The Imam and the Indian by Amitav Ghosh will be read in terms of the writer’s travel experiences along with his inclusion of history and space in a cross-cultural context.
Points to ponder:
- Trace the development of autobiography as a genre in India.
- Remark on the assertion of self in Indian women’s autobiography.
- Examine letters as a form of life writing genre in India.
- Assess diaries and life-sketches of prominent Indian personalities.
- Comment on the evolution of marginalised life writing in India.
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Reference:
- Arnold, David; Blackburn, Stuart (ed.), Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography and Life History, Bloomington: Permanent Black, 2004
- Chaudhuri. Nirad. C., The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, USA: University of California, 1951
- Gandhi, M. K., The Story of my Experiments with Truth, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing Trust, 1927
- Jolly, Margareta (ed.), Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, USA: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001
- Naik, M.K, A History of Indian English Literature, Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2004
- http://www.isidelhi.org.in/wl/article/2013-04.pdf
- http://www.mkgandhi.org/swmgandhi/chap07.htm