Girish Karnad - This Life At Play: Memoirs

Dharwad, 1973

Aayi (my mother), Bappa (my father) and I were having lunch. My first film Samskara had won the Presidents Gold Medal. My second, Vamsha Vriksha, had had a successful run and won the National Award for best direction. My latest film Kaadu was in the final stages of production. I was a Sangeet Natak Akademi awardee. And I had just been named the director of the Film and Television Institute of India. The air at home was thick with self-congratulation.

Then Aayi looked at Bappa and said, And we had thought of not having him.

Bappa went red in the face. After some stammering, he managed to say, That was all your idea, not mine. Why bring this up now? and hid his face in the plate in front of him.

I had to know more. I asked Aayi, and she explained: I had three children already when I became pregnant with you. I thought that was enough, so we went to a doctor in Poona named Madhumalati Gune.

And?

She had said she would be at the clinic, but she wasnt. We waited an hour and returned.

And then?

And then, nothing. We never went back.

I was stunned. I was then thirty-five years old. Still, I grew faint at the possibility that the world could have gone on without me in it. For a while, I sat there unaware of my surroundings, considering the idea of my non-existence. A thought struck me. With some bewilderment, I asked about my younger sister: Then, what about Leena?

Aayi said, somewhat coyly, Oh, we had stopped thinking of all that by then. She burst out laughing. Bappa remained engrossed in the contents of his plate.

Had the doctor arrived at the clinic as promised, these memoirs and their narrator would not have existed. So, I dedicate this autobiography to the memory of the person who made all this possible: Dr Madhumalati Gune.

Girish Karnad

Bangalore, 19 May 2011

Prelude

My mothers name was Krishnabai. Krishnabai Mankikar. But she was Kuttabai to the elders in the family and became Kuttakka to those younger than her. In 1984, when she was eighty-two, my sister-in-law, Sunanda, persuaded her to write her autobiography. It is about thirty pages long, written in Konkani, jotted down in an old diary of my fathers, in spaces left blank after he had scribbled his daily accounts. Until we read that narrative, my siblings and I had struggled to come to terms with the many anxieties and nightmares that had disturbed our childhood nights. Her autobiography helped resolve these fears by bringing them out into the open.

Kuttabai was born in Hubli in 1902, but while still a child, moved to Poona with her father, who worked for the Madras & Southern Maratha Railway. At the time, Poona sizzled with social and artistic ferment. The Marathi language was confronting the challenges of modernity with a literature that explored new areas of social experience and an energetic journalism that demanded that Maharashtrian society prepare itself for independence. Then there was Marathi theatre, at its peak commercially, with actors like Bal Gandharva and Keshavrao Bhosale, but also being hailed by the elite as representing the essence of Marathi culture. Kuttabai was a voracious reader, and these years in Poona were some of the happiest in her life. What excited her most were the opportunities the city held out for education. Maharashtra had a vigorous movement for womens education, led by missionaries, social reformers and the government, and the opportunities opening up were unthinkable a generation ago. One Sarlabai Nayak had even got an MA, she remembers seventy-five years later.

But when she was nine, and in the third Marathi standard, her father was suddenly transferred to a small town named Gadag, where Kuttabai faced the first of many disappointments that were to confront her over the next few years. The language of instruction in Gadag was Kannada, which she had to start learning from scratch, and its literature had not yet begun to emerge from its medieval moorings. In fact, those enamoured with the Marathi milieu openly sneered at Kannada culture as backward. Gadag was socially conservative and there were no facilities for educating girls.

She writes: I went to my headmistress and wept. I dont want to go to Gadag, I said. I want to learn a lot and become a BA. There is apparently nothing there except Kannada. The headmistress and her sister, who taught in Huzurpaga [a well-known school for girls], came to our house together and pleaded with my father: Krishni is hungry for education. Leave her behind. She can stay at the Huzurpaga hostel. You dont have to spend anything on her education. The government will bear all the expenses of her boarding and lodging. But my parents would not agree.

The fear was that, if left behind on her own, she would be converted to Christianity. So Kuttabai had to move to Gadag and join a Kannada school in which she was the only girl in class. Nearly half a century later, tears welled up in her eyes as she recounted the event to me.

When she came of age, Kuttabai was still unmarried. And the family, after desperate attempts at concealing this shameful fact from relatives and neighbours, and pretending from month to month that everything was normal, ultimately found a boy for her from the Gokarn family.

She was married. A son was born to her: Bhalchandra. And within a couple of years, her husband died of anaemia and malaria. Her parents-in-law did not bother to visit her. She writes: Except for the jewellery given to me by my father, I did not possess a penny. There was a life insurance policy, but that too had lapsed, as no one had bothered to pay the instalments.

Aayi

Thus, Krishnabai and her infant son came back to Gadag to live with her parents. She had no future to look forward to.

All this was and continues to be the common fate of widows from the more deprived sections of the middle class in India. Fortunately, by the 1920s, the Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmin community had abandoned the custom of shaving their widows heads, so Kuttabais long hair, which when loosened tumbled down to her knees, was spared the barbers scissors.

Even in this desperate situation, Kuttabai was determined to educate herself. She wanted to achieve something of significance in her life and, if possible, even become a doctor. Though Gadag was in the backwoods of the Bombay state, Poona and Bombay were no more than a days journey away by train. But no one in her family had the inclination or the time to accompany her to either of these cities and enrol her in an educational institution.

The one person who came to her help at this moment was Mangesh Rao Sashittal, her elder sister Shantas husband, who was a mamlatdar a revenue official in government service. First in Haveri and then in Dharwad, his house was like a huge orphanage. Apart from his own seven offspring, he and his wife sheltered several orphaned children, often only distantly related.

Mangesh Rao was obsessed with ensuring that this entire brood was properly educated and cultured. A teacher would arrive early in the morning to provide tuition in Sanskrit. Then again, even as the children reached home from school in the evening, another teacher would present himself at the doorstep. Besides, Mangesh Rao himself was a keen and enthusiastic teacher who loved to spend his hours at home revising their lessons. This hectic training schedule helped Kuttabai educate herself. She writes: I sat down to study with the children. Since I loved studying, I reached the English class-four level within five or six months. Algebra, fractions, time-work-and-speed, etc. There was a subject called Sanskrit translation, which I mastered. And I decided to appear for matriculation from home. In those days, it was enough to be a matriculate to get admission to the medical college and I was desperate to become a doctor.