Three Lives, Three Memoirs: Manuals For What India Was & Might Still Be in 2021

Memoirs of three extraordinary Indians show us a time when social change was not "outsourced" to politicians.

Three extraordinary people who have lived and been fully alive to a rapidly changing world have written memoirs that appear just right to be read together.

(Photo Courtesy: Arnica Kala/The Quint)

Three books have assumed significance for many reasons this year. At the outset, the memoirs of economist-philosopher Amartya Sen (At Home in the World) and artist-intellectual Girish Karnad’s (This Life at Play) are new, and film star Dilip Kumar’s autobiography (The Substance and The Shadow) while published in 2016, merits a relook, as he died this year.

Three extraordinary people who have lived and been fully alive to a rapidly changing world have written memoirs that appear just right to be read together. Like a message in a bottle, 2021 appears the right time to uncork them and inhale deeply.

Excellence & Artistry Combined With a Commitment To the Outside World

These exceptional lives offer a reminder about how work, excellence, reading, and artistry can be combined with a commensurate commitment to the world outside.

Each one of them spoke out whenever it was essential to lend their voice.

Dilip Kumar writes, “I have always strongly endorsed the necessity for actors to possess a reasonable degree of social responsibility. The actor who is adored by millions of people owes something to the society, which has given him an elevated and highly respected position."

He lived up to it, whether it was the National Association of the Blind or later, a leap further after the Mandal Commission disclosed how like Hindus, backward Muslims led a life blighted by discrimination.

He joined the All India Muslim OBC Organisation for the rights of pasmandas in Maharashtra in 1990. As a part of the organisation, he participated in over 100 meetings where he spoke and drew attention to the issue forthrightly.

Amartya Sen, always alert, even as a precocious child, to the horrors of hunger as a child living through the Bengal famine (1942) at his grandparents’ home, kept the fire of inquiry burning.

His scholarship was directed at economics that had a direct bearing on seeking connections between politics and starvation. He has never hesitated to make a case for empowering and enhancing capabilities of citizens. He carries an Indian passport to date, and intervenes in public debates regularly, disregarding often-orchestrated blowbacks.

Girish Karnad’s memoirs unselfconsciously make clear how central he was to the Indian cultural renaissance in the 1970s.

A year after the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, he was part of a group of artists who went to the site of the demolished mosque to stage a concert, which he compèred.

He was part of a fact-finding committee on Baba Budangiri, a syncretic place of worship in Chikkamagaluru that the Sangh Parivar groups were keen to establish as an exclusively Hindu shrine in 2002.

Months before he died, he attended talks wearing a placard which read, “I am an Urban Naxal” – the pejorative phrase used by PM Narendra Modi and others to try and tar dissidents, with oxygen tubes inside his nostrils.

A Time Before Social Change Was Outsourced To Politicians

These lives precede the "age of professionalisation" where social change and politics were outsourced to politicians and civil society alone.

It serves as a powerful reminder to the India that was before salary became an all-consuming pursuit.

Active and successful people, across diverse fields, fearlessly took up positions that had an impact on society. It is difficult to imagine top billed stars, actors or scholars doing this so openly now, even though honourable exceptions remain.

Two of the three lives under review here experienced the Partition first-hand. Dilip Kumar from Peshawar and Amartya Sen from Wari in East Dhaka, could recall how British India was consumed by the fire of division and how the “horrors of Partition” were experienced by all communities.

They refused to sip from the cup of hate that was brewing and instead believed that the Partition was a reason to do the opposite, that is, to eschew divides. Often this was not the popular view.

Girish Karnad from Dharwad in the South was much younger and was, therefore, shaped by slightly different times. But his forthright battle against Brahmanical orthodoxy (he is a Brahmin himself) was enunciated in his public life.

For example, when he describes his widowed mother’s experiences before she married his father or later, in his work, when they decided to make a film based on UR Ananthamurthy’s revolutionary Samskara. However, this defiance was no cakewalk.

Karnad and his team faced resistance in the agraharams where they were shooting stories of caste oppression. All his accounts are from the battlefield, where he fought centuries-old social dogma that wanted to retain the stranglehold of caste.

In confidently talking about their lives, work and time, the three books are elaborate signboards to an India that was.

The state did not always help them all the way. But it stood by values that did not chime with mob fury.

Kumar’s memoir describes how he refused to bow to bigotry when he was felicitated with the Nishan-e-Imtiaz award by Pakistan, their highest award for excellence.

Powerful groups in Maharashtra, including Balasaheb Thackeray, pressurised Kumar to return the award, but he found a counterfoil and a supporter in Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who wanted to make peace with Pakistan his legacy.

Sen refers constantly to the support he would get from institutions, whether it was the Government of India or in the existence of institutions like Shantiniketan, an oasis which was allowed to flourish for decades after Rabindranath Tagore died.

Karnad and his cohort of progressive film-makers benefitted from the subsidy to Kannada movies shot in the state that Chief Minister Nijalingappa offered. This money allowed for a new wave of Kannada cinema to take off. It remains world-class, in the league of Italian neo-realism or the French wave.

India Beyond Nostalgia

The three books powerfully signal to an India beyond nostalgia, though oodles of nostalgia is a sure side-effect readers will experience.

But what these lives establish is that India’s society and its politics need not necessarily have gone this way, hurtling towards the dark and cloistered alley of ethno-nationalism.

There was tumult, hate, partition and struggle in the past. There is plenty of unfinished business. But a diverse and democratic India did emerge. It was a different time but assertive pluralism was able to set the tone.

Reading these rich and lived lives makes it clear that India’s "exceptionalism" was not set to fail, nor an illusion that has now gone past its use-by date.

The journeys that these three made and the struggles they describe about cutting through hate-fired times need to be heeded. That they were able to draw meaning and build on companionship make it clear that surrendering to sharp descent of divisionism is not the only option in tough times.

They are, no doubt, testimonies to the hard work that was required to get a poor and illiterate, newly independent country to commit to belonging to each and every citizen equally, in defiance of very regressive social mores.

These three books are joyful reads as history books at a time when school textbooks are distorted and plaques are made to vanish.

But vitally, they are manuals for the days ahead – looking back to point ahead, like a rear-view mirror, on doing the hard work to build back equality, liberty and most of all, fraternity. Between The Substance and The Shadow, This Life at Play is a guide, if we must be At Home in the World.

(Seema Chishti is a writer and journalist based in Delhi. Over her decades-long career, she’s been associated with organisations like BBC and The Indian Express. She tweets @seemay. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)