Ramachandra Guha: In Mannu Bhandari’s memoir, an unflinching spotlight on Indian patriarchy

In the year 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered a lecture to women students in Cambridge that is still widely quoted. Here, Woolf highlighted the dominance of male writers in the history of English literature, which she attributed to gender biases, not in artistic merit, but in how society had thus far been organised.

She argued that for women writing to flourish as much as men’s writing had over the centuries, they needed both political and economic independence. As Woolf famously said, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Virginia Woolf herself had economic security and social status, as well as something else she does not tell us about. This was a deeply loving husband, who, though a writer himself, recognised that his wife was infinitely more gifted than him, and thus heroically worked to help her realise her gifts more fully.

The one thing Leonard Woolf could not do was cure Virginia of her bipolar disorder, and so she finally took her life in March 1941. Yet, in her departure note to Leonard, she told him that “you have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good,” that “you have been in every way all that anyone could be,” and, finally, that “everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.”

I remembered both Virginia Woolf’s manifesto and her marriage when reading the Hindi writer Mannu Bhandari’s memoir, This Too Is a Story. The book has just appeared in English, skilfully and sensitively translated by Poonam Saxena. Bhandari grew up in Ajmer with a scholarly, bookish father and a selflessly serving mother. She writes movingly of an early mentor, a Hindi professor named Sheela Aggarwal, who gave her books to read and then discussed them with her.

Of this teacher, Bhandari writes that “Sheelaji gave me courage, and confidence, gave me a direction in life and gave meaning to my life.” (These lines deeply resonated, for I was likewise fortunate to have had such a mentor, the Calcutta sociologist, Anjan Ghosh, who took a young, confused student in hand and gave him the intellectual wherewithal and self-belief that he could one day become a scholar too.)

Mannu Bhandari’s memoir pays proper attention to the literary life: to the stories and novels she wrote; to writerly feuds, rivalries, and cliques; to the role of visionary editors and literary magazines. Of her debut in print, she says: “Seeing my first story published in a magazine thrilled me to the core. I’ve never felt a similar thrill again, though many other important events have happened in my life.” Other first-time writers can testify to this experience, for, as the great 19th-century Russian writer, Alexander Pushkin, once remarked, print has a magical quality all its own.

Some parts of Mannu Bhandari’s memoir would appeal to students of literature and literary history. Other parts are of wider interest. This is especially true of the portrait of her marriage, which sheds an unflinching spotlight on Indian patriarchy. While living in Calcutta (as it then was), Mannu fell in love with an equally gifted writer, Rajendra Yadav. No sooner had they become husband and wife, that Rajendra told Mannu that they would henceforth pursue what he called “parallel lives”. While they would live under the same roof, said Rajendra, “our lives would be our own – we will not interfere with each other, we will be independent, free, separate”.

He wished to be free to spend hours away from Mannu, gossiping with his male friends, or having affairs with other women, which he continued to do throughout their marriage. As Mannu writes, with justified bitterness, their marriage was to be marked by Rajendra’s lies and deceit, even as he sought to justify his dissembling and adultery by “sometimes invoking modernity, sometimes in the name of his writing and sometimes some other concocted bit of philosophy that could prove him right”.

Mannu Bhandari and Rajendra Yadav moved to Delhi, then the centre of the Hindi literary world. They both continued to publish novels and stories to wide acclaim. After Yadav became editor of the celebrated literary magazine, Hans, young writers flocked to him because he had power and influence, neglecting Bhandari, because all she could give them was love and affection.

That didn’t hurt her unduly; what she found particularly galling was Rajendra’s lack of responsibility as a family man, disappearing from home when she was seriously ill, doing the same when their little daughter fell sick too. Of their married years Mannu writes that “even as all the tension, lingering pain and distress continued, so did our everyday life – with an effort to show that everything was normal and fine on the outside.”

Bhandari acknowledges that her husband “motivated and encouraged me as a writer; the literary environment and gatherings that I became privy to because of him were a great source of inspiration.” It was Rajendra who gave the titles to both Mannu’s novels and many of her short stories.

Yet, as Mannu remarks, at the same time “as a wife, I was at the receiving end of Rajendra’s constant negativity and onslaughts, and it was the writer in me that bore their brunt. The setback in my writing, a result of the continuous battering of my self-confidence, eventually led to a full stop.”

Mannu sardonically writes that “for someone who thought of himself as singular, Rajendra’s ideas of the role of a wife were not just unique, they were truly startling. According to him, a wife should be like a nurse whose job was to serve her husband without expecting anything in return.” Elsewhere she says that, having focused obsessively on their own careers in their prime, “as soon as these writers cross the age of 60, their neglected wives suddenly become indispensable to them”.

Moral hypocrisy

Of the moral hypocrisy of the famous male writer, Mannu Bhandari observes: “A writer is a deeply sensitive soul, he pours out all his compassion for those scared, unhappy souls whose suffering disturbs him so much. But why does this sensitivity dry up when it comes to his wife’s anguish? Forget feeling his wife’s pain, he’s the one heartlessly causing the pain.”

Elsewhere, Mannu says that “the truth is that no one can be in Rajendra’s inner circle of intimacy and love except Rajendra himself, because love gives the other person a right over you… The reality is that Rajendra, always self-centred and in need of gratification, has never loved anyone in his life except himself…” (As a male writer, I certainly recognised myself in this description, although it might be the case that male artists may be even more heartlessly hypocritical and monumentally egotistic in this regard.)

On several occasions, pushed beyond her “limits of endurance”, Mannu decided to separate from Rajendra, but hesitated in view of their child and his claims to behave better from now on. Eventually, after some 30 years of marriage, when it was starkly clear that he was incapable of redemption or reform, Mannu chose to leave her husband.

Mannu writes witheringly of Rajendra’s sense of outrage and incredulity when told that his wife had decided to leave him. As she puts it: “Men know what it’s like to throw their wives out of the house or at best, they arrive at this decision jointly with their spouses. But for a wife to take this decision on her own because she wants it and for the husband to accept it without demur was impossible, even for those men who championed women’s equality or made loud public pronouncements about their rights.”

Mannu Bhandari’s portrait of her marriage rings true of most, if not all, middle-class marriages of her generation, whether “love” or “arranged”, with this caveat – few Indian wives have the economic means, or willingness to defy convention, to leave their husbands even when they might be more arrogant, more selfish, and more unfaithful than Rajendra Yadav seems to have been.

In this respect, Virginia Woolf herself was luckier than Mannu Bhandari, luckier than other women writers, and luckier than almost all Indian wives past and present. If more husbands in India and elsewhere were cast in the mould of Leonard Woolf, the world would be a much happier place. And with more great literature too.

This article first appeared in The Telegraph.

Ramachandra Guha’s latest book, Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, is now in stores. His email address is ramachandraguha@yahoo.in.