A lifetime of writing stories woven around the simple, day-to-day 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 whose 90th birth anniversary falls today.
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 on Vijaya Dashmi 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. Alongwith her older siblings, Gaura was sent to Shantiniketan 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 almost 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 serialized in magazines. Her most famous 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 Viswabharati 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” which was published in 2005. 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. Recalling the long winter evenings when the entire family sat around the fire she says, “I feel nostalgic for those days, for the long winters when we sat huddled indoors by the ‘Saggar’ (iron grate) fire. We were warned not to go out after sunset, when fairies and wood satyrs were supposed to take possession of the bodies and spirits of nubile young girls.”
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".