November 16, 2003

As a young widow belonging to a high-born Brahmin family from Assam, life could have taken an unbearable ritualistic toll on Indira Goswami. Instead of securing an indelible place in Assamese literature, going on to become one of the most celebrated authors of India, conformist Hindu traditions would have strapped her to remain just another ‘unfortunate’ and ‘ill-fated’ widow.

But Dr Indira Goswami’s struggle to change her stellar constellation and her predestined status of widowhood earned her the Gayanpith Award in 2000, the Indian equivalent of the Nobel Prize in literature. Two years later, she was selected for the prestigious Padmashri Award, which she refused for personal reasons.

The professor of Modern Indian Languages at the Delhi University, Dr Goswami has been referred to in the Masterpiece of Indian Literature, Vol I, published by the National Book Trust of India, as the greatest present day woman writer in Assamese. And yet with more than 45 books, several research papers, short stories, and international literary awards to her credit, Indira Goswami’s tears were uncontrollable when she held the first Urdu version of her Assamese work in Delhi.

“Originally written in Assamese, the Urdu translation is called, Jang Lagee Talwar. “It’s published by a Pakistani publishing house,” commented Dr Goswami in an interview with Books and Authors.

Looking bridally radiant in a flaming red, silk sari, Dr Indira Goswami was sipping the Assam blend tea in her hotel room in Lahore before going to dinner to Dr Javed Iqbal’s house. She was part of the literary group that had come to Pakistan to help improve relations between the two perennially estranged neighbours.

Somehow, wearing a red sari sent out a very powerful message of a woman not ready to accept oblivion on account of her social stratum. If anything, the red tilak, marked prominently on her forehead, and the heavily rimmed charcoal eyes made the task of remaining unnoticed quite difficult if not impossible. When asked if a widow was allowed to wear such a daring colour in India, Dr Goswami chuckled and replied: “In places like Delhi you can, but not elsewhere. It would be scandalous if I were seen in this colour in the religious city of Vrindaban, Guwhati or any other place in Assam. Even in this day and age, widows can’t wear such colours in small villages. I have long stopped caring about what people would think of me. I live my own life,” said Dr Goswami.

And so she does. Quite unlike the Brahmin widows of Vrindaban characterized in her 1976 publication, the Blue Necked Braja. The book had a tumultuous reception in Assam and Indira Goswami instantly became a controversial name in Vrindaban.

In Uttar Pradesh, on the banks of the River Yamuna lies the religious city of Vrindaban. Some historians claim that in the 12th century BC, Lord Krishna incarnated himself there and devotees believe that he lived in Vrindaban for nearly 100 years.

“The Blue Necked Braja is set in Vrindaban. The plot revolves around the plight, exploitation and miserable lives of the Brahmin widows who spend their remaining years in the holy city in the hope of ‘mukti’ (salvation),” explained Dr Goswami. She said that the anguish and suffering of its main character, Saudamini, largely reflected “my own emotional state”.

It was there in Vrindaban that Indira Goswami began her research work and was awarded a PhD in 1973 from the Guwhati University for her thesis on Comparative Study of Goswami Tulsi Das’ Ramcharitamanas and Madhava Kandali’s Assamese Ramayana. Her voluminous work, Ramayana From Ganga to Brahmaputra was published in 1996, which was personally released by the former president of India, Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma.

She was required to learn Hindi while researching the Ramayana literature. “I had picked up a little bit of Hindi when I was studying at Pine Mount School in Shillong, Assam, but it wasn’t sufficient. Since my topic was a comparative study of the Ramayana by Tulsidas and Madhav Kandali, I had to learn it properly,” said Indira Goswami.

But there was more than research which drew Indira to the great epic poet, Tulsidas. In the words of Amrita Pritam, another distinguished name among Indian writers, Indira was deeply inspired by Tulsidas. She felt strangely drawn to this legendary poet who lead a life of misery and was abandoned by his father because of being born under an unlucky star. In the foreword to An Unfinished Autobiography (2002), written by Indira Goswami, Amrita Pritam wrote, “...I know nothing about the constellation of stars that had influenced Tulsidas’ life and much less about Indira Goswami’s. All that I know is that, like Tulsidas, her life had also undergone a metamorphosis. She has touched upon many social problems... but the intensive manner in which she has dwelt upon the problem of caste in one of her long stories is unique...”

In the same autobiography, Dr Goswami admitted that she was moved more by the life of the poet than his work and drew a kind of inspiration from it.

She too was born under unfavourable stars, or so the astrologers told her mother. In Guwhati, Assam, Indira’s mother began a frantic consultation with the pundits to reverse her unlucky stars. But everybody predicted gloom for her. One of the pundits went so far as to forewarn that it was ‘better to cut her into two and set her afloat in the river than give her in marriage’. In October 1965, Indira married Madhavan Iyenger, an engineer from Mysore and in 1967 lost him to an accident in Kashmir.

Indira’s childhood was a strange mix of depression and delight. Her exceptional relationship with her father brought her great happiness, but at the same time, the thought of losing him and her near and dear ones to death often put her under prolonged spells of mental unrest.

After the death of her father to cancer, the mental turbulence finally drove her to attempt suicide. The failed attempt pushed her further into melancholy, till she met Madhavan. “Many years have rolled by since but the colour of Madhu’s bones has not undergone any change. Only, I have changed several of the caskets in which I have preserved them,” pondered Dr Goswami.

Her only salvation was writing. She poured her gloom on paper, picking the sorrows of others and enmeshing them with her own to produce short stories at first. Her first major novel, The Stream of Chenab, published in 1972, set her firmly as a novelist. The story is set in a construction site for a bridge on the river Chenab in Jammu and Kashmir and deals with the people working for that construction company. A similar subject of workers’ exploitation by the management formed the basis of Dr Goswami’s plot in The Rusted Sword, published in 1980. This novel, written in Assamese, won her the Sahitya Academy Award in 1983.

In 1988, The Worm-Eaten Howda of a Tusker earned her the Assam Sahitya Sabha Award. This novel primarily deals with the socio-economic conditions of Sattra in the South Kamrup district of Assam. The novel was a valiant attempt by Dr Goswami to reveal the feudal decadence of the area and to openly criticize the repression of widows in an orthodox Brahmin society. Later on, the novel was adapted for a feature film in Assamese, which won several local and global awards. “My two main subjects are migrant labourers and widows,” commented Dr Goswami.

For a very long time Indira Goswami wandered around the desire to die or to become a part of spiritual reclusivity practised by the ascetics somewhere in the Himalayas. Had it not been for her supervisor Upendra Chandra Lekharu in Vrindaban, the world of literature would not have had this exceptionally gifted Assamese writer. “My teacher Upendra Lekharu inspired me to be neither a famous writer nor an eminent scholar but an individual possessing human qualities. Nothing measures up to humanity,” said Dr Indira Goswami. And humanity alone is her prime consideration when she sits to write.

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