What people say of North America – the real dark continent -- can be said of Rajendra Yadav, one of the stalwarts of the Nayi Kahani movement, and an institution of Hindi literature. He was monstrous, and he was magnificent.
True to form, Yadav, who was also the editor of Hans (1986–2013), one of Hindi’s best-known anti-establishment magazines, wrote to his constituency in his trademark combative style, with his ribald observations, and his love of the absurd; he kept the storytelling in his autobiographical pieces deliberately ambiguous and rich in literary debates, besides throwing light on the ego hassles with Mohan Rakesh, his partner in the Nayi Kahani movement, and with other writers.
Echoes of My Past, the English translation of Mud-Mud ke Dekhta Hoon, at times reads like a defence, a self-accusation, and, overall, a clearing of the chest of a public intellectual with some weight on his conscience. Yadav, the polemicist, indeed, knew the conventional autobiography would not do in his case. His life, of which he had kept little hidden, was thus released in fragments (first in the Hindi magazine Tadbhav), rather than as a chronological narrative, to interrogate the self – in the process, he also laid open many of his infidelities outside of his marital relationship with fellow writer Mannu Bhandari.
The force of the prose is, however, undeniable. Each fragment in the memoirs is a palimpsest of worlds, milieux, and mohallas that he experienced with his literary peers.
There are many windows he has left open or half-open through which he allows the reader to see, and even judge, the many versions of himself—the man from small-town Agra aware but not devoid of its frailties; the drive to re-make himself in the big cities of post-Independence India as a young man; the thrills of letter-writing with the opposite sex; his shedding of his first love, and its revival, plus the parallel lives with a wife, a platonic Didi, sundry anonymous young women, his readers, he’d meet on a whimsy—as if he wanted to savour the highs and lows of romance before he would try it on his heroes in a Nehruvian and post-Nehruvian India not changing fast enough --; his half-hearted preparation for domesticity and making a hash of it.
It may not be an easy read, but it is a ride.
Scenes from a marriage
Bhandari’s memoir, This Too is a Story (the English translation of her Ek Kahani Yeh Bhi), is a straightforward, linear, but no less engaging account of her Ajmer years and her creative processes. There are also accounts of her early rebellions, including her participation in the freedom movement despite family reservations. She met Yadav in Calcutta of the ’50s after she had written seven or eight stories; he was by then the author of Ukhde Hue Log, a landmark novel documenting the angst of the post-Independence educated youth. Her father did not approve of this relationship. Yadav’s uncertain income, a limp due to a childhood accident, and his bohemianism were perhaps the reasons.
Bhandari is the author of at least 50 stories. Lovers of Hindi cinema, whether or not they read in Hindi, will recall the Basu Chatterjee film Rajnigandha (1974) starring Amol Palekar and Vidya Sinha, based on her story Yehi Sach Hai. She also wrote six episodes of the ’80s well-loved tele-serial Rajni. Chatterjee also filmed Yadav’s novella Sara Aakash (1970).
Bhandari and Yadav became parents to a daughter, Rachana—at present the managing director of Hans— in 1961. Bhandari taught Hindi at Delhi’s Miranda House from the ’60s to the ’90s; she wrote alongside. All the responsibilities of running the home were hers, and all the freedom to be a writer, his. Yadav didn’t consider this “as running away from life” but a “running into it…what is all this setting up house, stroking and caressing middle-class values”…. The sniping continues across the two memoirs.
Both Yadav’s and Bhandari’s memoirs have been translated by senior journalist Poonam Saxena and published by Penguin as companion volumes—a project that took Saxena four to five years to complete. Saxena read both the books almost a dozen times to get the voice right, she adds. Saxena’s decision to do this, in fact, corrects the imbalance created when Yadav first laid bare his personal life in his memoir.
“She [Mannu Bhandari] had been working on her book for years. In the meantime, his book was published. This spurred her to finish her book, and she added the Afterword to give her version in reaction to his book. Once he chose to bring out all those things in full public view, she felt she had no choice but to give the true picture,” says Saxena.
Bhandari had never mentioned Meeta – the woman Yadav had a long-standing relationship with – by name, in her book. But when he wrote about the relationship in his memoirs, she did, too, by giving her point of view in the Afterword.
Saxena’s coupling of the two books also orients the reading of them in a particular way. Read together, or one after another, they constitute a story of the coming together of two extraordinary writers, whose books are still read as examples of the best in Hindi literature, their individual trajectories and struggles, and the disintegration of marriage (but not the relationship) between two mismatched people. [Hans Editor Sanjay Sahay commended the translation, saying it had captured the “soul and temperament of the writers”.]
Saxena points out: “Writing kept them together, and her writing kept her going. Once she leaves him—when they are both in their sixties—she stops writing. Her pen dries up! However, after separation, he was very caring about her.” Apparently, they spoke to each other every day, even as that led to disagreements. In her memoir, Bhandari says: “With great difficulty, we agree 5-7 per cent of the time…but whatever its form, it is an attachment.”
The work life
There are many other fights, big and small, that both books reveal, not always between the couple. This one, for example, is a cautionary tale for editors. Delhi University professor Nirmala Jain, in her autobiography, mentions an article Yadav edited to make it controversial and less “goody-goody”. He was apologetic only when she said she would make the whole thing public.
Nothing, of course, matches Yadav’s taking over Bhandari’s incomplete novel and persuading her to write Ek Inch Muskan as their joint novel. This, in fact, should have been a big fight, but in the memoir, it does not make that much of a noise. “It ceased to be my novel and became our novel…,” she writes.
Saxena points out that she did not consent to it happily. “Wahan tak pahuchane ki daur is a great story of Rajendraji. Mannuji says in her memoir that it’s an idea he took from one of her stories without acknowledging the debt.”
The failure of a marriage always attracts unwanted attention. The failure of the marriage of a well-known couple attracts more. In the ’80s, Hollywood did a black comedy about a couple who grew to hate each other; War of the Roses ends with both characters dying after falling from a large chandelier in their foyer. By writing the memoirs, Rajendra Yadav and Mannu Bhandari have had their go at each other for the last time. It must rest here; we must form our opinion of them through their literature.