As time passes by, relationships change, What once was feared, now becomes a friend. What once was ignored now becomes essential, The self changes too. The flowing cascade quietens into a gentle river, The taker become the giver, The beauty fades but the wisdom gains an elegance profound, Quieter become the celebrations, gentler become the sounds. Patience is the new bestie, The being bides his time. Knowing that by the end of it all, Every thing will fall in line, The desired gift will be given, but by someone in a disguise, The wealth of the world no longer remains important, The love of those close will suffice. He smiles indulgently at the little ones crying, He gently encourages them, watches them failing yet trying. Their struggles remind him of his own, He marvels at the time that has flown. As the old mountain watches the landscape change and the young ones grow, He realizes what he understands today, Tomorrow they too will know. – Shailaza
She is a Bengali by birth but she loves Jaipur. She sings Rabindra Sangeet, enjoys Durga Puja but is equally at home with the customs of Rajasthan and the urbanity of Delhi. She is an avid traveller and has visited almost all continents of the world. Author, critic and poet Malashri Lal’s life journey has been a symphony of change and she has revelled in all the challenges that have come her way.
Though today she is known across the world as an eminent author, Malashri Lal is still a simple Jaipur girl who loves coming back to her roots every now and then. She loves the city and its people that make her feel right at home. Though Delhi is where her hearth is, Jaipur is where her heart is. Excerpts from a free wheeling tet-e-tat with this Jaipurite:
You studied in Jaipur, then you went to Delhi. What was your experience like? I continue to believe that my home is in Jaipur. Though my blood lineage is Bengali but I identify Jaipur as my home. I have been here since childhood. Even though Delhi has been a happy relocation for personal reasons and work, Jaipur still retains as much of a loved pull, almost like a Maika (parent’s home) despite my parents not having been there for years. The city, the friends, the people all of them being very special for me.
When you moved from Jaipur to Delhi, what was the change like? The first thing I noticed about Delhi was that it was very impersonal space. When I moved to Delhi after my marriage, we were living with my in-laws. So there was no sense of loneliness or non-belonging at home but the city didn’t seem like a friendly place. So, I didn’t know my way around in Delhi so since I was keen to teach, I started looking at jobs in Delhi. This was early 70s so there were jobs a plenty. All the big colleges were advertising, now ofcourse I know them by name but at the time I didn’t know any of these colleges. So to find my way to a place in old Delhi from where we were (my father-in-law was Air Chief Marshal P C Lal, so we were staying at the air house) seems like such a scary thing to do, unknown roads, unknown people, rough language on the roads, auto drivers who drove rashly. I came from a protected environment at home and in a very affectionate social environment of Jaipur, so the contrast of this impersonal, immigrant city, where survival seemed to be the most important ambition in anyone’s life seemed very strange indeed. So, I did go around, I had to deal with it. I was very lucky that I got a job offer from Jesus and Mary College, the day I went there for an interview. I found JMC a remarkably hospitable and warm place. I still remember it was a hot summer afternoon. I had no idea where JMC was (it was in the middle of Chanakyapuri). The auto rickshaw driver also had no idea where JMC was. When I got there, I was late for the interview and I thought I had already ruined it. It was a beautiful building with a lovely garden. I walked up the steps and there was this old nun, dressed in white standing there with a smile. She said, ‘Welcome my dear.’ I apologized and said, ‘sorry sister. I am late.’ She said, ‘it doesn’t matter. You are not late. You are here and that is what matters. She brought me a glass of water. She sat me down and told me to not to get tensed about anything. So I sat there for half an hour till I was called for the interview and enjoyed the sense of warmth and affection even though I didn’t know the people there. And when I went in for the interview, everyone was courteous and gentle. I came out of there saying praying and promising to myself that if they offered me a job, I would take it. Some well known colleges of Delhi University (I don’t want to name them offered me a job and those offers came later also but the day JMC called me that evening or the next morning and asked me if I would be willing to work for them, I said yes. I stayed there for twelve years and I was very happy there. And JMC was a cocoon. Some of my best friends are from JMC even now though I just spent 12 years out of my 45 years of teaching. Then I moved to the main department of English in the post graduate wing. But the contrast was the affectionate, warm, personalized world in which I had grown up in Jaipur and the rather rough impersonal and I would even say brash world of Delhi.
You have seen Jaipur and Delhi changing over the years. How do you find the change in both these cities? I don’t think Delhi has changed very much. It has just become bigger, more impersonal, more brash, more materialistic. I don’t think it has changed at all. It is a city of immigrants and I have understood it better. There are no affections and I believe there is a sense of suspicion of the stranger. So, whether you live in an apartment building or a neighbourhood, people have not friendly because they have no idea who you are and where you come from. Jaipur on the other hand has also grown a lot but my Jaipur is still the Jaipur of my school friends. I meet people through them so I don’t have a sense of strangeness or non-belonging at all. And even physically I have nothing to do with the Jaipur that goes beyond the older areas of Civil Lines or C-Scheme and Bapu Nagar, Tilak Nagar or the University because all my friends and their friends and their children continue to have a long-term relationship.
How was your time in MGD? What were you like as a student? MGD was most wonderful thing that happened to me. When I was very young, I was not a very healthy child. So, I was constantly in and out of school till the age of 7. My paternal grandmother who was a widow and lived with us. She used to teach me at home. Her name was Jyotirmaye Mukherjee. She was a school teacher in Burma. My grandparents had emigrated to Burma which was a part of undivided India at that time. My grandfather was the headmaster of a boy’s school there. My grandmother was one of the first graduates of the Kolkata University. My grandfather passed away quite young at the age of 45. My grandmother decided to bring up my aunt and my father, who were teenagers at the time, on her own and chose not to come back to the family fold in Kolkata. She taught me what has become the core of my feminism that you don’t have to fight obvious battles or be aggressive. She wore white ‘than’, a crisp white sari as Bengali widows do. Though she was a very good-looking woman, she never wore any make up or jewellery. My grandmother and father migrated from Burma to Delhi after the war and bombing of Rangoon (my aunt had already married and moved away by then). They stayed with some relatives in Delhi. My father who was not married by then worked with Delhi Cloth Mills for a couple of years. He then appeared for the Indian Civil Services Examinations (those days there weren’t any written examinations, only interviews) and was instantly selected since he was a brilliant history student. When he was asked if he was okay with being posted in Rajasthan, he said that it didn’t make any difference to him because he didn’t know India at all as he had grown up in Burma. So, in the year 1950 or so, he along with his two Bengali friends and one Sindhi friend were selected in the first batch of IAS and posted to Rajasthan. I was a superbly good student as a result of the foundation provided by my grandmother who taught me all subjects. I was not even fifteen when I graduated from school and was awarded a gold medal. I wasn’t a naughty student at all. I loved all the subjects except the sports period. In fact, the joke was that I would run away from the sports field in the sports period! The head of the school was an English woman named Ms. Luter who had migrated from Burma. She and her secretary Ms. Emma were very fond of my parents. Ms. Emma would occasionally cook Burmese delicacies for my father. They were just very good friends.
Who was your favourite teacher in school? I loved my geography teacher Ms. Meenakshi. She would sit with the globe and show us countries and their photographs. It was then that I developed my love for travel. Fortunately, I married a man who was equally interested in travelling. We have large cupboard which houses souvenir teaspoons from each country that we have visited. There is strict rule in the family that you can only put a souvenir spoon in the cupboard if you have visited the country personally. Now over the years, my son also started collected teaspoons and now the cupboard has 400 teaspoons from different cities which are catalogued extensively. We have travelled to Alaska, most of Europe, Canada, lots of Australia and America, Africa and New Zealand. Except for South America which we have not visited, we have been to every other continent. ….To be Continued
This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on Thursday 25 April 2024
Malashri Lal is not just a daughter of a very successful and renowned man, she is also a respected professor, critic and a bestselling author who is known for fiction and non-fiction books. However, her accomplishments extend beyond the prose. Her recently released book of poems, ‘Mandalas Of Time’, has proven that she is a master of the verse as well.
Once while talking about the IAS officers of Rajasthan origin not going to central government on deputation, the common refrain that emerged was the poor standard of English in the IAS officers of Rajasthan origin was the main cause for the poor representation in the set up in Delhi. There were of course some exceptions like D. R. Mehta, Jagat Mehta and Bhawani Mal Mathur. But of these three, two studied outside and not in Rajasthan. So, when a local lass made it big as the professor and the head of department and dean in the Mecca of English in north India, i.e. Delhi University , it was a matter of exceptional pride for the people of this feudal desert state. It was like a domestic tiny sparrow flying high in the ionosphere on the strength of its wings alone. Beauty, brains and poise- Malashri had everything going for her since her schooling in MGD, graduation in Maharani College, M.A. in Rajasthan University. In the 60s, St. Xavier’s School Fair was the high point in the social calendar of young people, when the girls from MGD used to visit the fair.
Malashri Lal
Remembers Dr. Gautam Sen, the venerable cardiovascular surgeon of Jaipur, probably the first of its kind in Jaipur (he in mid-eighties now and probably a decade senior to Malashri) that Xavier’s boys and alumni used to wait for the MGDians to descent from their bus on to the fairgrounds. Even amongst the 20-30 MGDians who came to the fair, Malashri stood out shining beautiful and poised. The doctor’s reaction was also the response of most of the senior Xavierites of seventh and eighth class onwards attending the fair.
These Xavierites now in their 60s remember most about her after her beauty was charm and poise, she exuded, probably inherited from Mohan Mukherjee, her father who also happened to be the chief secretary of Rajasthan, still remembered for his gentlemanliness, politeness and patience. He was a person to go to for young IAS officers when faced with knotty situations which was often in revenue matters and other administration where laws and procedures were almost copied from UP or Bengal governments and not evolved in the legislative assembly after long discussions and deliberations.
One aspect of Malashri’s personality which probably most Xavierites and Jaipurites were not conversant with is the academic excellence and poetic depth of Mohan Mukherjee’s daughter as is reflected in the ‘Mandalas of Time’, a book of 75 poems she has presented to the literati. Here Arbit is making an attempt to showcase these in its columns. The word literati is deliberately used because though Jaipurites were not fully aware of the academic and poetic heights of Malashri’s pen, but to the literati of Delhi and abroad, it was no secret. In fact, Bashabi Fraser, professor of English and creative writing, Edinburgh, Napier University writes, “Malashri’s poems are a lifetime labour of love, embodying and resolving the dichotomies and different loyalties and loves that the poet has carried with her through her life.”
“One the one hand, the poet has the memory of watching and listening to the Bhopa singers accompanied by the dancing folk epics in her home town of Jaipur in the 1960s, performed by the roving artists against the light of the oil lamps in the Jaipur mela. On the other, there is the deep resonance of her heritage, finding a voice which is steeped in Rabindranath Tagore’s atmosphere of Bengali culture and literature and cultural freedom practiced at Shantiniketan.” As Malashri puts in one of the poems: “The feudal heritage of my childhood Fights with the reformist Bengali lineage, My troubled feminism struggling Between the Poshak and Purdah.” The awareness of today’s threat of climate change as Malashri writes reassuringly , “the moon is so far from the earthly pollution” in spite of the “footprint of human ego.” In the poems, Malashri proves herself to be a consummate wordsmith who combines in her multifaceted self her multicultural identities bringing world’s together through telling imagery in compelling rhythms. The poet recalls the lessons learnt from Tagore: “…I learnt from Gurudev, Emotions have no fixed language. The merit has no physical limits. Music resounds in the open sky, Dance is the joy of a free spirit anywhere” Bashir Fraser writes, “Mandalas of time is the expressive voice of a true free spirit who creates harmony through her voice. These poems sing of “life renewal” affirming a “beautiful certainty.” Another “fellow traveller” friend and well-known literary critique writer Ranjit Hoskote writes thus “The sensuous abundance of the natural world pervades Malashri’s Mandalas of Time. These poems celebrate the arboreal and the floral. They evoke a profusion of trees, shrubs, fruits and flowers. But, nature to Malashri is not a grand theatre that enfolds to its own music offering to delight but rejecting our participation. On the contrary, she approaches nature as an intimate, integral party of a continuum that includes the human realm with all its discontent.” It is a fact even as nature infiltrates our consciousness in subtle ways we exert a claim over nature through language and scientific scrutiny. Malashri’s poems record, intuitively, the process of pull-push that results from this, our own desire to carve and the resistance on the part of the things we seek to name. And yet, Malashri celebrates the colours and flavours, the aesthetic surplus and memorable inner success of Indian culture, she never loses sight of all the elements with the tradition that calls out to be confronted and critiqued. The joy in the textiles, the vistas and the epics of Rajasthan is balance by her elegiac awareness of female infanticide in that region. Her poems never shy away from revealing the suppression of female will and desire that often serves as a foundation for the myths of the feudal patriarchal order. She interestingly asks when the mountains have brought low by global warming, the forests denuded, the rivers poisoned, where can the gods live now? In the same breath her poems urge us to ask: how do we live, by what rules, by what canon of conduct towards others -human and more than human- with whomever we share the planet? Shall be merely survive or could we yet relearn to flourish and learn to flower with, and not flower at the expense of. Let us learn from “the supple leaves” that: “Flat and curved Cradle the flowers that have no other family.” Malashri herself quotes Khalil Gibran when talking about her poetry, “Poetry is a dash of joy, pain and wonder with a dash of dictionary.” She also quotes Andre Horde “ […] Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we can predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change.” “In the larger context of my life narrative, I have come to believe that poetry is a balm for the troubling dislocations that are an inevitable part of the experience. The biographical aspect drowns under the issue of transition and transformation that poetry hopes to articulate.” “Only poetry captures the inner dialogues, the cracked mirror of troubled consciousness, the silent cry of those who travelled beyond tears. Its value resides in principle of integrity, and genuineness.”
Malashri Lal with her husband Robey Lal and friend Sudhir Mathur
According to Malashri, “The inner transition too and these poems are perhaps the most challenging. Every poet and novelist in every language from time immemorial has carved stories from a store of emotions. My personal poems are droplets in the same ocean of desire for an immutable world while coping with the angst of its forfeitures that dawns the realization that bereavement, heartbreak, betrayal is both individual and universal.” She remembers Tagore’s anguished call, “when I stand before thee at the days end, thou shall see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healings.”
Mohan Mukherjee with Y B Chavan, Maharashtra’s first chief minister
Looks come from genealogy and grace and poise from upbringing given by parents. But your achievements are your own, acquired through your hard work, determination and honed talent. One creation of hers that in totality, embodies different aspects of her creativity is called “Ardhanareesvara” The poem shows her philosophical sensitivities, her comfort level with mythology and folklore and her sympathy, sensitivity leading to rebellion against patriarchal society and values. She seeks equality and fairness between man and woman and leads to the ultimate equality i.e. Ardhanareesvara. Ranjit Hoskote writes, “The dyadic interplay of opposites- the dvandva, in classical terms- forms the ground rhythm of Professor Lal’s poetry. Nature and human kind are one such pair; Shiva and Shakti another; Radha and Krishna yet another, each incomplete without the pulsation and presence of the other. Krishna’s flute, cast aside in the Vrindavan of his teenage years as he goes away to Dwarka, adulthood and kingship never to return- Radha picks it up and preserves it as a keepsake, but it will never be played again, a mere reed emptied of affect and significance. Shiva cannot achieve his fullness without Shakti and the poet evokes them as an inseparable composite, the Ardhanareesvara. Such ideals of communion, to be regarded as at once sacred and worldly- for these, too are a dvandva in Indic thought, not binary poles- emerge in Mandalas of Time, from a world of seasonal festivity and cultural expression offered in dedication to the Cosmos.”
//Ardhanareesvara “Indivisible unity, Parvati and Shiva forever entwined. Women and men interdependent, Infused with traits of each other A softer left lineament draped in finery, a muscular right stretched over taut skin Artistry overlaying a deep philosophy of a shared destiny Symbols associative of power and grace But not attributed to a dichotomous gendering. Sages, sculptors, storytellers knew the eternal truth That form bellies essence much of the time Masculinity and feminity are the same word, Read in reverse To denote the other That too is an illusion In Creation there is only One Ardhanareesvara The God who is both woman and man Ubiquitous, limitless reminder of equality.”//
To be continued…
This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on Wednesday 24th April 2024
You said you wanted to be my best friend You said we will be more than friends You said our relationship will be special You said there will be no judgements You said you will always be there You said you will always care My heart thought it had found its mate I thought I could finally thank fates I stopped looking For I believed it to be you. And then you vanished. Long conversations were replaced by a loud silence That laughed at me and said YOU DAMN LOVE SEEKING FOOL!WHEN WIL YOU EVER LEARN? – Shailaza
Those eyes gaze at me With a semblance of a smile Or perhaps it is my imagination She doesn’t speak Everyday we sing to her, we praise her Shower her with flowers In the hope that she show us her power Day after day songs of hope resound on her walls like a prayer Unheard pleas wonder if she is really there? The bells vying for her attention Hoping for a miracle to see life through Some one’s granted wish gives hope anew Time works as her agent it seems Gently weaving desires through reality and dreams She stands there impassive watching over the night and day While laughing anklets dance and tinkle away What does she think, what does she do? Is she different or is she just like me or you? She invites questions but answers come on their own pace The eyes of the seeker arrested by the face Silent tears ask her for peace and solace They promise a lifetime of devotion in return for some grace.
Is war exempted from the list of crimes? First they kill thousands of innocents And then they talk peace? Mass murder and a white flag What good are these? If someone kills someone He is awarded life or death by the law Why are wars exempt? Those soldiers who died Were they brave or they had no choice? Just like those who were killed had no voice. Just come in, bombard and discuss peace once you are done? Kill millions with your bombs, tanks and guns? Is it a game that those in power play? We had war yesterday, let us have peace today? There is no world court for justice Countries bestow aids like alms Rest make money while people pay the price of a false calm -Shailaza
What if I miss out on a relationship? Or have no love in life at all? What if I don’t get anyone? No one to date or no one to call? Fears like these make us vulnerable To predaters, narcissists and many more. Because of this fear, we accept anything that knocks at our door. What if my true love never came? What if I lose the dating game? What if this person is really a good guy? What if love passes me by? These fears take away the patience that we need To sift through abusers and genuine love that is not fueled by greed. Any true love or person has inbuilt patience to let you explore. They have the time to tell you more. A genuine friendship will develop with the right mate. Heaven will give you signs and so will fate. So stop having these fears before it is too late. Wait patiently for someone who wants everything that is you. Genuine, understanding and willing to start something new Wait for true love or nothing at all. Fear or love, now that’s your call.
Somewhere I had read that we as souls Are complete and whole Yet we come to this earth to experience our own light We choose lifetimes, we choose our parents and we choose our troubles and plight. That those who have an easy life now Have had a difficult life before They are merely resting on this planet Before they sign up for more. That those who are experiencing turmoil and strife Want to awaken and experience their own power in this life. That those we meet in our lifetimes as our friends and foes. Are merely playing their part to help us grow. They challenge us, trouble us so that we experience our light So that we realize and know. I heard it from someone very wise Soon this drama will end We all will exit this stage and meet our friends without their disguise And see their faces beautiful and bright.. And remember once again that we all are nothing but light… -Shailaza
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