October 17 is the 95th birth anniversary of a writer who has done this hill region extremely proud as she, in a way, set the tone of a literature that emerged in Hindi from here and brought into focus the life of people of this hill area, now known as Uttarakhand. If one is from Uttarakhand and has not ever read a story or novel written by Gaura Pant Shivani, the one seriously needs to rethink about one’s choice of books.
Actually, there is no reader of Hindi literature who has not read or heard about the works of Shivani. Hers is a name which has been held in great respect for the past several decades as a master storyteller from Kuamon.
A lifetime of writing stories woven around the simple, day-today lives of people in the hills was what made the unassuming Gaura Pant the famous writer called Shivani. Thousands of readers across the world know about the Kumaon Himalayas through the vivid and intimate descriptions found in the works of this renowned Hindi writer. In 1923, when she was born, it was the day of Vijaya Dashmi.
As Thomas Hardy lovingly described his beloved Wessex in his novels and Ruskin Bond writes again and again about Mussoorie, Landour and Dehra Dun, Gaura Pant (who took on the pen name Shivani in 1951) has written extensively about Kumaon which is the backdrop of her works and which was her home for many years.
Shivani was born on October 17, 1923 in Rajkot in Gujarat. The family later moved to Rampur and Orchha where her father, a Kumaoni Brahmin, held prominent positions as a tutor in these princely States. Along with her older siblings, Gaura was sent to Santiniketan and studied there for almost a decade until she graduated in 1943. She was strongly influenced by Rabindranath Tagore and the Bengali culture and this is evident in her works like Krishnakali. She wrote till the time she passed away in 2003.
Shivani created her fictional universe from the part of her life she loved best-her childhood and early years. Time and again, she used Kumaon and Bengal as the setting of her romantic novels.
She was a pioneer in giving voice to the Indian women through her writings. Her story, “Lal Haveli”, established her reputation in the early sixties, and in the next ten years she produced several major works which were serialised in famous literary magazines. Her most well-known works include Chaudah Phere, Krishnakali, Atithi, Lal Haveli and Vishkanya. When she began writing, domesticity was the only way of life for women. Before gender and feminism became important and self-conscious areas, Shivani was instinctively writing about them.
Shivani finished her BA from Visva-Bharati University in 1943 and returned to Almora.
She had a BA honours degree in philosophy. Shivani’s younger daughter, Ira Pande, a writer and editor, wrote a loving account of her mother’s life in her book “Diddi. My Mother’s Voice”. Shivani was addressed as “Diddi” by her children. In this book, Ira has told us how Shivani was as a mother, and a wife, as a grandmother. She says, “I am often asked what it was like to grow up with a writer for a mother. Such people imagine that Diddi locked herself away in a room and wrote furiously all the time. The truth is that none of us ever saw her write—she made time for herself whenever she got the chance to. Bringing up a noisy family of four children and two nephews on a small income was work enough. And yet, her most prolific period was the years when we all lived at home. To her writing was something she loved to do—she never cared whether she won plaudits from critics, she was happy to scribble whenever a story came to her. Anything would do when the urge to write came to her —our old notebooks, dhobi diaries, whatever. She wrote in long hand and never kept any copies of manuscripts. And once she had told a story, she went on to write the next one”.
Shivani’s love for Kumaon comes through brilliantly in her reminiscences recounted in “Mountain Echoes” brought out by Namita Gokhale, herself a Kumaoni, in the year 1998.
The entire family would sit around the fire, drinking warm milk sweetened with jaggery and listening to the scary tales told by the elders, she adds. Life in Kumaon was simple when Shivani was a young girl and it was about her life that we constantly read in her works.
As Diwali is around the corner, I would like to narrate her description of Almora’s Diwali, “Spun sugar sweets, popped rice and clay toys brought a gleam to one’s eye, during Diwali. At night, the stars came down to earth with the flickering lamps that dotted the hillsides.
We would stand at our front door and watch the displays of fireworks…Diwali was never noisy; you could even hear the wind, whispering in the trees”.
As Vijaya Dashmi, the auspicious day on which she was born, is around the corner and Diwali is not far too, it will be an appropriate time to pay rich tributes to this highly sensitive and imaginative author who took these hills and dales to readers all around the world. It would be indeed wonderful if the children and youth of our State are familiarised with her works.
