Shailaza's Blog

Tag: Malashri Lal

  • The Pilkhan Tree

    Malashri Lal believes that poems help in healing one’s self because when a poet writes pure emotions. She feels that everyone is a poet though everyone may not be Kalidas or Valmiki. To her, Bhopa singer dancing in Rajasthan is as much a poet as a person who is reciting poetry in the by lanes of Shanti Niketan.

    Malashri Lal has been writing poems for decades. She feels that poems help in releasing all the emotions on to the paper and letting go.

    How does poetry help in healing the heart?

    I have been writing personal poetry for a long time. Poetry helps in healing because you write your emotions out of yourself. When you look for words, it helps and then you need precise words. So, if someone is writing about losing a friend, he will not look for a word like sorrow which is quite common place but he will use words like angst or anguish or trauma. In doing so, I think you actually enter the premises of healing. A prose needs narrative but a poetry doesn’t. It just needs images and phrases. Personally, I think every one is a poet in some way.

    You seem to be very fond of Sita. Many poems in the book talk about her.

    Sita has seeped into my consciousness ever since Namita Gokhale and I wrote “In Search of Sita”. It was the first of our Goddess trilogy books we did. When we were working on our book on Sita and we were looking at her as a figure of strength, intelligence and decision making, she sort of became a part of psyche. We were getting into her mind and thoughts and therefore giving her dialogues, conversations and scenarios. I wrote this poem at a time when there had been a fair amount of discussion in the newspapers regarding Sita’s rasoi which was an area which was found during the excavations in Ayodhya. It struck me at that time that generally we think of rasoi as being the centre and the heart of the mother’s domain. Sita in my mind stood for equality, fairness and justice, I could just imagine her sitting and making rotis not only for her two children but also for a third orphan child who would be a playmate. There was a mix of what I had grown up with that you play with the children your age, doesn’t matter what caste or community they come from. That is what I had seen in Jaipur. The notion of mathematical equality is very different to woman’s idea of equality because emotions always have a part to play and that is what I have tried to portray in this poem.

    //Sita’s Rasoi

    “Maternity calls
    for justice,
    no favourite child.

    Sita’s rasoi, a stone slab on which
    warmed single mounds
    of flour rest.
    Rotis dance into a shape,
    flat, brown-edged, uneven rounds.

    Take one each,
    Little Bakha, you too.
    Be sure it’s an equal share,
    not a morsel must
    exceed anyone’s due.

    What did you say—
    the rotis are not exact rounds so
    what is an equal share?

    That puzzles a mathematical man
    Who may know enough to solve this query.
    Uneven jagged edges, uncertainties they might mull over
    as Father, Priest, Teacher. “//

    But Sita seeped into your consciousness so much that she even followed you to Italy in the poem Bellagio, Italy?

    I don’t find that strange at all. You see, Namita Gokhale and I had a joint fellowship at this place called Bellagio which is a residency run by the Harvard University. It is fully funded, month-long residency. We got the opportunity because we had finished writing our manuscript (“In Search of Sita” and we were now editing it. When you are editing, you need to be together much more. We applied for this residency and we got it. It was a huge, beautiful estate on the banks of Lake Como. So, Sita was with us in Bellagio. It was February, the trees were covered with snow. They had icicles, some of which had melted while some were still suspended on the trees. Sometimes, the sun would sparkle through these icicles. We found a grotto there during one of our daily walks. Interestingly, no one knew what it was or who it was for. It didn’t feature in any of the material that we had read about the place and history. So, we did our own research and came upon the history of this Celtic Goddess whose name was Belisama. She, like many ancient goddesses including Gaia was linked to the earth. It was then that this link happened between Sita and Belisama in my mind.

    //Bellagio, Italy

    “Belisama’s shrine and Sita’s exile,
    Met strangely on the hilltop of an ancient manor house
    Villa Serbolini, Bellagio, overlooking Lake Como.
    “How did I come here?” asked the prisoner of Ashoka Van
    ”Was it the power of a writer’s pen that propelled this journey?”
    “A Goddess lives beyond time and geography,”
    Said the deity of the Lake
    Remembering hoary Roman times
    Celtic chalice of stone and water from secret wells.

    Sita of my imagination followed me
    Through the snow-clad landscape of pines
    Pendent with glistening drops of ice
    Sita murmured to me of her travails and her choices
    Sita was completely at home in what I thought was an alien space
    For she and the Celtic Goddess had a common sisterhood
    In Endurance and in Hope.”//

    Your poem “Hawa Mahal” talks about some latent desires.

    I wrote this poem for two reasons. One it was such an obvious tourist spot. Second, the from the very childhood, I had always wondered why would any one put up a façade with nothing behind it? Then I used to talk to my father about the architecture and purdah since he was history person. Purdah is not just about certain clothes, there are different types of purdahs like there is a Janana Mahal and Mardana Mahal where you have segregated domestic spaces. Then I realized that it was made so that women could sit behind those jalis and look down upon the procession that happened along the Jauhri bazaar road. I imagined this whole idea of a very restricted childhood and adolescence of girl children growing up in traditional Rajput homes. You see all this traditional pageantry, this beauty on the walls of the havelis where there are so many paintings. So, you see a lot of romance depicted around you but it is prohibited in your life till you are married off to someone who you hardly know or don’t even know. A lot of my MGD classmates were Rajputs. So, this whole idea of watching from behind the veil with desires playing up since you are young woman. You dream of romance and see so much of it depicted around you like the Rajput paintings. It is all about of longing and desire.

    //Hawa Mahal

    “Who sits behind those tiered windows
    Arched like Ram’s bow
    Waiting to tremble into action
    For a hunt yet to start?
    A princess in royal blue
    The colour of Diwali
    Peers from the shadows
    Looking eagerly at the carriages below
    Thirsting for a paramour
    Not yet known.

    Cloistered girlhood,
    Guarded puberty,
    Controlled womanhood
    How did she learn to dream
    Of love and desire?
    Was it from the legends of Krishna
    Intricately drawn on the walls?
    Was it her prayers which held hidden meaning
    In pursuing the call of the flute?”//

    Shila Devi to me is a metaphor for migrant identity. Actually, at one time I was seriously thinking of doing a book on the link between Bengal and Rajasthan. Shila Devi is one of the earliest examples of how a stone image from Jessore came to Raja Mansingh in a dream (as the legend says). Along with her came the cooks and the pujaris who were and still are Bengalis. Half our school teachers in MGD were Bengali. Many doctors were also Bengalis. All of these came because of their jobs and settled here. Both the worlds (Bengali and Rajasthani) existed together. Shila Devi came to me as a migrant divinity and therefore legitimizing migrant movement as something that was positive. Personally, I needed that in my life. For a long time, I had a very split identity which I have written about and spoken about where I was from or who I was. Today, I can say that I am from Rajasthan but I am a Bengali. That time, I used to console myself thinking that even Shila Devi came from Jessore to Rajasthan.

    //Shila Devi of Amber

    “Gilded silver doors encase me now
    with a retinue of priests
    who determine my hours
    of shayan, darshan and bhog.
    I think of my freedoms in Jessore

    In a marshy pit, I lay hidden
    When Mansingh found me
    as a black miracle stone.
    I travelled to the golden Rajasthan.
    Honour, glory, wealth was mine,
    but what happened to my companions
    in the marsh?
    The dolorous fish, the raucous frogs,
    the earth-hugging worms?
    Did they find adoration too?”//

    You have dedicated your book “Mandalas of Time” to the poets under the Pilkhan tree. What is your relationship with the Pilkhan tree?


    The Pilkhan tree is a humongous tree in our garden which is three storeys high. Ours is a bungalow in the heart of Delhi. When we were house hunting about eight years back, the tree in this place somehow spoke to me. I don’t claim that I have any mystical connection with objects of nature but I think I am attuned to them in a way. We often organize Pilkhan poetry sessions under this tree with a group of 20 people. We celebrate being together, reading poetry and books and finally we cut a cake and have eats. I believe the Pilkhan tree is almost like a witness to whatever is going on in the house. It keeps listening quietly to everything. I spend a lot of time sitting under the tree.

    //Another New Year

    “The Pilkhan tree nods its farewell to the year.
    Its squirrels scamper looking for nuts left over
    From Christmas festivities
    And the days of social revelry
    The Pilkhan is tired of hearing
    Scandal, gossip, jokes
    Of the young
    The worries and health bulletins of the old,
    The strategic plans of family and builders
    OF knocking down the old house
    For commercial profit.

    The Pilkhan tree thinks of its many years
    Of shedding leaves, bearing inedible fruit, of losing limbs
    But smiles at his troubles being far less
    Thank of unfortunate humans
    Who kill each other in word and deed
    But gather around the tree each Christmas
    With fulsome gifts and vacant smiles
    To bring in another New Year.

    Concluded

    This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on April 28th, 2024

  • The Words And Muse Just Come…

    The poet in Malashri Lal is a quiet observer. She finds her muse everywhere; in her daily life and in the people she meets. Her poems talk to and talk about everything that catches her attention- from trees to lost souls to flowers and even Gulzar Sa’ab.

    How does a poet write a poem? Is it a logical process like prose or is it a play of mind, intuition, experiences? Malashri Lal believes that the process of writing a poem involves more than just words and rhythm.

    There must be some kind of a serendipity and intuition at play when writing a poem?

    Both happen. Serendipity also happens and the accidental development of a poem also happens. I had written a poem about Geeta Chandran, a well-known dancer and a very good friend. I had gone to see Geeta. She was doing this absolutely stunning performance which is on the life of Gandhi. She is such a beautiful dancer and she did that whole thing wearing a stark white saree with a black border. She did not wear a kanjeevaram saree like the dancers usually wear. There were no props, nothing! I was so moved with what she had done with the Charkha and Gandhi using simply light. I came and wrote this poem and sent it off to Geeta and Rajiv. She liked it so much that she shared it with everyone.

    Geeta Chandran

    //In Gandhi’s Shadow
    “For Geeta Chandran

    The dancer’s taut body
    Bent to the bullets of
    Of hate embedded in the history
    Of my country,
    Her body curved into the grace
    Of supple Satyagraha
    Pangs of hunger
    Self-induced silence
    Never retaliating when violated
    By lathi charge, insults, aggression.

    The scavengers bent double
    To scoop up human waste
    While others blocked their nose
    And eyes and ears to the wretched poor.

    Gandhi watched alone
    Stricken to the core by the
    Assaults on human dignity.

    The dancer’s hands wove subtle ropes
    On the invisible charkha
    The warp and weft of
    India’s Independence
    That even today drives us together
    And also apart
    While Bapu sighs, Hey Ram.”//

    Malashri Lal with Geeta Chandran

    It is interesting that you have written a poem on the poet himself!

    I along with some others in a group had worked very closely with Gulzar sa’ab on a project in Chamba in 2010 or 2012. It was about preserving the old history of older women. We had done a conference in the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (formerly known as the Vice Regal Lodge) in Shimla with Gulzar Sa’ab. This building is quite old. It has a seminar room which is quite beautiful. It has silk brocade walls and chandeliers. Gulzar Sa’ab was reading his famous poem “Kitabe jhankti hai band almari ke sheesha se” in that room. It goes back to those old days when boys and girls could not communicate directly with each other and hence they use to hide love notes and petals pressed in these books and meet on the pretext of returning the books. A world that today’s children will never recognize. It struck me that he was reading it at time when digitization had come in and hence, I wrote this poem.

    // A Poet’s Remembrance
    For Gulzar Sa’ab

    In the brocade-lined old hall, the poet read,
    Kitabe jhankti hai band almari ke sheesha se
    And time stood still while images wrote their story in the air
    Resonant with words
    His deep gentle voice and crisp words meld lyric and memory
    Of yesteryears without digital exuberance
    When love was wrapped in dried rose peals
    And modesty was not an anti-feminist term
    Libraries of books have lost their role as mediators in young romance
    The ubiquitous cell phone has abbreviated both love and intimacy
    The poet though nostalgic has a wry smile
    Giving voice to those pages locked behind the glass.”//

    Your poem “Afternoon Serenade” talks about lost souls in search of company.

    Yes. I frequent this place in Delhi where a lot of elderly people come and I have years of memory of older aunts and uncles frequenting that place. You can go there any time after 4 in the evening and they are always willing to give you a coffee and a pastry or a patty. In Delhi, people don’t visit each other’s homes like they do in Jaipur, so a lot of elderly people find company in such places around Delhi. These places are impersonal, affordable, beautiful and you are not obligated to anyone. I used to feel so grateful for such places for these elderly people because had they not been there, they would have been sitting alone in their homes. Whenever I go there, it is a kind of an impromptu companionship where you will meet someone or the other and then have coffee with them or go for a walk with them. Many such people I know live completely on their own. They aren’t financially dependent and have caregivers but where is the human company or the intellectual companionship. These are people who have been government officers, professors, they have had positions of authority; today they are sit and read the newspapers in such places. But the image that I want to convey through this is a positive image because these people still have places like these where they can find company and spend their time nicely.

    Malashri Lal with the Directors of Hawakal Publishers: Kiriti Sengupta and Bitan Chakraborty

    //Afternoon Serenade

    “Lost souls in search of company
    Seek out tables
    Overlooking the pond
    Staring at the water and trees beyond
    Pretending not to hear
    The loneliness within
    That yearns for voices
    And finds it answered by birds
    Longs for movement
    Kindly activated by squirrels
    Hopes for glorious flights
    Then finds butterflies enacting this dream
    In teacups, the images float one into another
    While the afternoon turns to dusk
    God’s creatures steal into their nests and lairs,
    The lost souls wrap blankets of forgetfulness
    Around their frail shoulders
    And quietly doze into the next dawn.”//

    So, when you visit such places, you write your poems there and then? Do you carry a pen and paper with you?

    Yes, sometimes I write it there and then and sometimes the image stays with me and I come back home and write it. These days, I write my poems on my phone and email them to myself. Before the phone, I used to write them in diaries or pieces of paper.

    What is the story behind the poem “Easter Lilies in an Empty Home”? Whose home is this?

    When I shifted into this other house (which belonged to my parents) that we have in Jaipur due to personal reasons, I had bought some Easter lilies that had been in the old house right from my parents’ time and planted them here. I live in Delhi and visit Jaipur every now and then. But now what happens is every April, these bulbs have proliferated. I do nothing during the year. But every April it is like a riot of colours with these lilies. Every year, the bulbs are growing in numbers. I wrote this poem in the April of 2023. I feel lilies are a message from somewhere as if to say that we are still there in your life, don’t worry.

    //Easter Lilies in an Empty Home
    “ ‘Come’ they call out,
    ‘It’s the season of forgiveness’
    A hundred lilies stand tall
    Renewed by the magic of seasons
    The pink stripes may be scars from yesteryear
    The white streaks are healing balm
    To be washed by the dew
    The supple leaves
    flat and curved
    cradle the flowers that have no other family
    Some do, maybe three lilies on a stem
    But they squabble like siblings
    Pushing for space
    They calmly grace the garden of a silent home
    The owners alive only in obituaries
    The lilies don’t worry on that count
    Buried bulbs know they will creep upwards in season
    Life’s renewal is a beautiful certainty.”//

    There is another poem in which you talk about your mother.
    I wrote this poem when I was abroad visiting my son and daughter-in-law. We were on a vacation somewhere and I was looking at the sky changing colours in the evening. Somehow this poem came to me. I lost both my parents in a tragic car accident. I was very close to my parents. They were my friends, teachers and mentors. I had a very open relationship with both of them. They had a very complimentary relationship with each other. My father never went to the kitchen. Not that he didn’t want to but he made such a mess of it that my mother told him to stay out and let the cook handle everything. Today, there are these talks about feminism and equality. My concept is somewhat different. A relationship between a husband and wife should be more about complimentary rather than division of labour.

    Dreaming of Ma by the Sea
    You live somewhere between the black night and the bright star,
    Free of body and its temporal limits.
    In green leaves turning to red in a mellow autumn
    I catch a glimpse of the saree pallav on that day
    You knew life was short and might become shorter.
    In the shimmer of an unsteady wave on the lake
    I recall your tremulous smile when you whispered trying a hopeless cure,
    In the rough hewn rocks that line the harbour,
    I remember your will to fight an uneven battle with the rouge cells.
    Here, on shores unknown to you and me,
    We meet again.
    When the dark sky rests on the sparkle of stars,
    Living and dying are no longer apart.
    ..To be continued

    This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on Saturday 27 April 2024.

  • Of Poem, Poet and Life

    Malashri Lal’s poems from her book “Mandalas of Time” are like a string of pearls. Each distinct and yet each one is a part of narrative that speaks of the experiences, perspectives and the emotions of the poet. Malashri says that when she writes, her poems flow on their own.

    Malashri Lal’s childhood was a riot of different cultures. Her experiences in Jaipur’s Parda clad world were starkly different from those in Shanti Niketan where music and art were made to flow freely for everybody. But such contrasting worlds have only helped shape and enhance her poems and her perspective. In this candid chat, she talks about her connection with Tagore and more.


    What is your connection with Rabindranath Tagore?
    My father’s side of the family is from Shanti Niketan and some what linked to Tagore. My mother’s side of the family is from Kolkata, they are very urban people. My father’s uncle, Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee was a very well-known scholar. He was Tagore’s disciple and official biographer. Much of the Mukherjee clan had settled in Shanti Niketan right from the time Shanti Niketan had been set up. They had rows of plots in one particular area of Shanti Niketan. My uncle was very fond of my father and had kept aside a plot for him. He wanted him to relocate to Shanti Niketan after retirement. However, my mother flatly refused as she was a total urbanite who loved parties and beautiful clothes jewellery, fun and games, travel. She certainly enjoyed the good life. My father on the other hand was this scholarly, serious man who was nicknamed ‘the walking encyclopaedia’ who just knew everything.
    It is believed that children are a combination of their parents. How much of your father and mother are you?
    I think I am a bit of both. Like my father, I was a good student and I continue to keep my reading and writing as my principal occupation. I have written about 21 books. I enjoy studying for the sake of studying and not because some one will give me something for studying. Like my mother, I thoroughly enjoy a good get together and party.
    What were your growing up beliefs?
    We are Bramho Samajis which is mostly a reformist Hindu Samaj. It believes in women’s liberation, education, equality. So we grew up with a very liberal environment at home which was deeply rooted in culture but also great respect for all other cultures, religions and places. I have a very homogeneous bunch of friends who come from different backgrounds.
    Where do your poems come from?
    A lot of my poems come from this fragmented identity that I have. At one time I used to worry about it because if anyone asked me where was I from, I never had an answer. People would say, they are from Rewari or Ajmer or Udaipur but I never had an answer because I couldn’t honestly say that I was from Jaipur. I was in Jaipur because my father was in Jaipur. I couldn’t say Kolkata or Shanti Niketan because I had never lived or studied there. So, I would say I am from India. But Delhi helped me a lot. It was in Delhi that I realized that every body was from somewhere else. I started feeling far more comfortable in Delhi because there no one would say the kind of things or answers that I would get in Jaipur. If someone would ask a person from Delhi about where they were from, they would reply without a qualm that their grandfather was from Pakistan but then they shifted to Amritsar and now they are settled in Delhi. So, it was in Delhi that I developed a multiple identity like the people there. But my poems are a lot about this fragmented identity, so somewhere I talked about the Poshak worn by Rajasthanis and the ‘than’ worn by the Bengali widows.
    When did you start writing poems?
    I started writing poems from the age of 12. I used to write them in the back pages of my notebooks and never showed it to anyone. I wrote poetry for years and this is my first collection of poetry which has come out just when I am 74 years old. I have learnt that it is never too late to begin. Slowly I started showing some of my poetry to my friends who were amazed with it and wanted me to publish them. Then something happened during COVID, when I started collecting my poems which were written all over the place, on napkins, pieces of paper, back pages of the books. When I put them together, I realized I had over a hundred. I showed it to a young friend of mine whose judgement I trust. She wrote back to me and urged me to publish them because they had such a lot of values in them. She made me see things that I had not seen in my own poetry. I chose 75 of those poems for publishing.
    What made you write this poem “Crushed”?
    This was a very brief poem. I had written it for a friend in America who is a painter and a writer. She was doing a digital exhibition and needed very short poems. So, I sent her this poem which was mostly about how young women are supposed to be.
    //Crushed
    “Words crushed into silence
    Lips sealed against utterance
    Eyes hooded guardedly
    Body cringing into wrinkled tightness
    Is this what elders called
    ‘Maidenly virtue’?”//

    You have also written another poem “Escape” on similar lines.
    We were the first generation of women who actually started working outside home. Our mothers were homemakers, not that I look down upon the home makers but our generation was the first were women who were going out of the house. So, there were assumptions that the women had to not only work outside the home but also tend to the kids and take care of the house hold too. In our generation, there were two sides of a working woman’s life. One was the excitement of earning your own money and doing whatever you wanted to do with it and the other side was also the challenge of doing a professional job with respect and dignity. So, in a way it was an escape from domesticity and all the assumptions that went with it. At another level, it came it with its own demands. So, I don’t have an answer to why or when that kind of an attitude changed but I do know that in our generation (I am talking of the generation that came into teaching in the 70s- 80s in Delhi University) there was a certain assumption that the women can only do this much and many of us were fighting that assumption at a cost to ourselves no doubt. Whatever it was, it also meant educating the men. Many of the men were perfectly unaware, nobody had bothered to explain these things to them. I thank my stars that I was very lucky in this regard. I had an extremely supportive husband and very understanding parents and in laws.


    //Escape
    “The toxic air of a false home
    Turns oppressive again and again
    In about four weeks;
    Unseasonal yet so predictable
    So much of a pattern.
    She runs away, yet hardly moves,
    Packs and leaves her home
    The sorrow of neglect lodged in a dark room
    Struck dumb by the quiet controlling powers.
    Then she returns
    Unlocks the suitcase while shutting her heart
    Sends clothes to the laundry
    Lifts the empty case to the upper shelf
    Her soul secretly yearning
    For the next great escape.”/

    What made you write Bougainvillea? Is this poem also about migrants?
    No, Bougainvillea is a metaphor for colonial control over India. When I wrote it, I didn’t imagine it would get so much of attention. I wrote it because I used to see bougainvillea all over the place. Of course, I am interested in flowers and trees. When I looked more at the bougainvillea, I realised it was an imported plant. How did it spread so much? When I wrote the poem, I didn’t consciously create it as a poem about colonialism but that is what it became. It often happens with most poems. When I write a poem, I am not intending to writing it in certain way or suggest a certain thing but it just flows. The ending of the poem “A traveller who landed, on our shores and conquered it with careless abundance,” is not just true of the bougainvillea but is also true of the British. The colonial rule suppressed a lot of our local culture, belief and practices.

    //Bougainvillea
    “Bougainvillea cascades in parks, shops, homes, Metro, fences,
    Clawing, creeping, clinging
    To surfaces
    Crushing them under a weight of thorns.
    Disguised as flowers
    The Bougainvillea is a migrant tree, blossom and thorn
    That took root in our land
    And spread its deception
    Of beauty.
    The barb is hidden
    The leaves play with colour
    Branches spread wantonly
    Our land is host to this migrant
    And its imperious authority,
    The gentle chameli vine is shattered
    The harsingar is pushed to the corner
    I gape at the invincible Bougainvillea
    A traveller who landed
    On our shores and conquered it with careless abundance.”//

    To be continued..

    This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on Friday 26 April 2024.

  • A Bengali Flower

    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

  • Decoding Mandalas of Time

    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