Shanta Gokhale is a Sangeet Natak Award winning doyen of Marathi performing arts and a highly accomplished translator and writer. She’s to Marathi literature and culture what Girish Karnad was for Kannada literary world. With the persistent prodding of novelist Jerry Pinto, her long time collaborator, she has come out with this unusual, yet gripping, autobiography. She tells her story through the events of the body starting with her birth in 1939.
‘She’s going to be a philosopher’, the doctor said when she popped out from her mother’s womb. ‘Why?’, her mother asked weakly. ‘She has put her hand to her forehead and is refusing to bawl’. The good doctor then turned the just-born upside down and slapped her bottom. “Philosophy fled. A lusty bawl filled the air. I had arrived”.
With effortless humour and candour, Shanta Gokhale recounts her life story from childhood and youth to middle and old age through chapters focused around the events of her body. This probably provides her with a writerly space and sequence for telling her story. Gokhale’s early memories are of the ‘great injection chase’ - of having been chased by doctor with a loaded syringe - and of being hoisted on operation table for the removal of the innocuous tonsils. She learns lessons in the girl child’s anatomy after having been groped by the manservant. The author remembers thinking it was no fun being a girl when faced with her first periods.
By the time Gokhale was in seventh standard, her body - and of the other girls in the class - started blooming in diverse ways. Some girls were heavily endowed frontally, attracting untoward male attention, while others had not much to show. “I regarded myself critically in the bedroom mirror to assess my standing in the breasts race. I was, I told myself brutally, amongst the stragglers”. But, “if breasts put me among the stragglers in the race, buttocks put me way ahead” !
The early chapters, aside from the candid humour, quite capture the angst of growing up as female of the species in India.
Shanta Gokhale’s father held one of the top editorial positions at The Indian Nation, a newspaper owned by the Maharaja of Darbhanga and published from Patna. The progressive father had cherished to send her daughter(s) to the UK for studies. Aged seventeen, the author set sail for London in 1956, remained there for five years, and completed degree in English language and literature from Bristol University. England was where she got into her grooves and was sumptuously exposed to literature and performing arts. And it was here that she almost had her first love in Otto, a Norwegian student. The guy’s love for her was total, hers was tentative and petered out eventually.
Back in India, Gokhale married an Indian Navy Lt-Commander Vijay Mohan Shahane and settled into quiet family life. After two children - actress Renuka Shahane and Rhodes scholar turned journalist Girish Shahane - and one-and-a-half decade later, she came out a bitter person from marriage. In filmmaker Arun Khopkar she found her second mate, but the man’s infidelities led to the disintegration of her family life twice over.
The book charmingly chronicles the bitter-sweet journey of a single mother bringing up her children. She traverses the road with aplomb as a teacher of English literature, and also as an editor of Arts pages at Femina and TOI, as a translator from Marathi to English and vice-versa, and as a novelist. All along the journey she accepts her body in all its mystery and recounts her story from menstruation to menopause, from fibroids to full-blown cancer, from glaucoma to cataracts while valiantly facing, and surviving, them all.
And through her bodily memories, emerge others to engage and entertain the reader. Sitting contentedly on the cusp of her eighties, Shanta Gokhale has regret though. The regret is about the curiosity of death that Samuel Beckett had expressed so well: ‘If I was dead, I wouldn’t know I was dead. That’s the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy death’.
(The review has been done by Ajay K Singh, who is a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand. Singh is a bibliophile having a voracious appetite for reading)