Mahadevi Varma: The rebel in sari

Dear Reader,The other day, while travelling down the road lining the outer walls of an army camp in Bengaluru, I saw something unusual. Because of the high wall, I could see only the topmost branches of the trees inside: on one of them perched a peacock. The sapphire of his neck stood out starkly against the powder blue of the sky as he scanned the horizon, as if looking for someone.His crest looked like a tiara. The king is surveying his domain, I told myself. Or maybe he was thinking of ways to escape the army compound. As my mind got busy concocting stories about the solitary peacock, I felt happy, weightless. The wild had impinged on the ordinary momentarily, sprinkling it with magic dust.Every time I see a peacock, I think not of our Prime Minister but of Hindi poet Mahadevi Varma’s pet peacock, Neelkanth. She tells his story with a singular mix of attachment and detachment in her collection of autobiographical sketches about her pet animals titled My Family, translated from the Hindi original, Mera Parivar, by Ruth Vanita.Varma had got Neelkanth and his companion, a peahen she named Radha, from a pet-seller, Bade Miyan (Varma was in the habit of buying birds from him and setting them free). After bringing them home, she let the two chicks loose in her study. “Once they grew comfortable, they began to manifest themselves, sometimes on my desk, sometimes on the chair and sometimes on my head,” she says. Soon they were too big for her study, and Varma rehoused them in the large wire enclosure where most of her pets (she calls them her “creatures”) lived.Neelkanth soon became the “commander and protector of all those living in the aviary”. In a remarkable incident, he attacked and killed a snake that had tried to swallow a baby rabbit. He was also extraordinarily attached to Varma and would put on a show, spreading out his tail feathers and dancing, whenever she approached the aviary. But his story does not end well.A domestic dispute, created by the introduction of another peahen, Kubja, who wanted Neelkanth all to herself and pushed Radha aside, sickened him so much that he died. Poor Radha was left alone. She lived up to her name, spending the rest of her life longing for her absent beloved. In her perpetual waiting, Radha stayed coupled, Varma says. “In the month of Ashadha, when the sky is overshadowed with clouds, she sometimes sits on the high swing and sometimes on the Ashoka’s branches, crying out with increasing intensity, calling Neelkanth.”Varma was often called the “modern Mira” because of the strains of Bhakti philosophy in her poetry. But personality-wise she was anything but the pining sort exemplified by Radha or Mira. In fact, she was a feminist ahead of her times, choosing to stay single, writing and acting in support of Gandhi’s movement, teaching disadvantaged women, supporting freedom fighters, even carrying messages and food in secret for the rebels. Decades before singledom became a lifestyle choice for women, she took that path guided by her convictions.The reader can make out from My Family that she was in charge of a fairly large household, which included her many “creatures”. The pet-seller Bade Miyan addresses her as “Guru-ji”, which is not a usual title for a woman even today. The article, “Poet Mahadevi Verma and her undiscovered feminist legacy” (published in The Print, September 11, 2019), says: “Author and veteran journalist Mrinal Pande remembers Verma [sic] as a dignified woman who wore only khadi saris and had her head covered at all times. She had an uncharacteristically ‘masculine’ voice and was by no means ‘demure.’”Vanita writes in the notes to her introduction to My Family that researchers have sniffed out unsatisfied heterosexual longings in Varma’s writings. But the Varma of My Family seems to have led a fulfilled life, surrounded by animals who were not surrogates for absent children but dear friends. Varma observes each keenly, allowing them their eccentricities, loving them because of their eccentricities.The impression one gets of Varma from My Family is of a witty, compassionate, cultured woman who was also used to being deferred to and listened to. This is also evident from her Hindi short story, “Chini Feriwala”, which Mrinal Sen famously adapted into a Bengali film, Neel Akasher Neechey (Under the Blue Sky, 1959).The female narrator of this autobiographical sketch befriends a Chinese street vendor. At first, he calls her “Memsahib”, immediately irritating her because she hates this form of address. He quickly switches to the more homely “Sister”. Once a bond is established, he visits her frequently, nagging her to buy his Chinese silk. Each time she resists and then gives in. In all their interactions, it is clear that the narrator is paying for the vendor’s bits and bobs from her own pocket rather than from her father’s or husband’s.When Sen adapted the story, he significantly made the female protagonist a married woman whose barrister husband disapproves of her closeness to the Chinese vendor. The narrator of “Chini Feriwala” does not make up her mind about the man guided by somebody else’s opinion: she continues her friendship with him because her heart tells her to. She even jokes that the connection between them might be fated because people once teased her for looking Chinese.What Sen made of “Chini Feriwala” was largely a melodrama about the humanity that connects us all, irrespective of nationality. The message about humanity is the essence of the original too, but the story is brisk, breezy and humorous: Varma pokes fun at herself, at her Chinese “brother”, whose pidgin is funny and baffling, and, in the end, at “Khadi devotees”.“I’ve spent many of the pieces from Chini’s bundle making kurtas for my village children, but three pieces are still stored in my closet, and the iron yardstick [it belonged to the vendor but he gave it to the narrator when he left for China, sponsored by her] stands in a corner of the room. Once, upon seeing these pieces of cloth, a Khadi devotee objected, ‘Even those who wear pure Khadi outside buy and keep pieces of foreign silk; this does not lead to the progress of the country.’ I could hardly control my laughter.”“Chini Feriwala” and My Family are set in Allahabad (now Prayagraj), where Varma spent most of her life. Later, she built a second home in Umagarh village in Uttarakhand’s Nainital district. Here she carried out her literary pursuits in tandem with her social work: the story goes that her huge family of animals used to travel with her to Umagarh each time she went there to spend the summers. Her cottage is now a museum and a library.On the route to Mukteshwar from Nainital, Umagarh has stunning views of valleys, orchards, and pine forests. One can imagine Varma in her khadi sari, surrounded by her pets and perhaps new adoptees, strolling in Umagarh—a woman in charge who retained a childlike simplicity even in her old age.****This year marks the 130th birth anniversary of yet another Allahabadi littérateur, the Urdu poet Firaq Gorakhpuri. Harish Trivedi pays tribute to him in the essay here. Read it to find out how Gorakhpuri brought together the sensibilities of Hindi and Urdu literature in his poetry.When Firaq Gorakhpuri was working as a lecturer in the English Department of the University of Allahabad, Mahadevi Varma was serving as the principal of Prayag Mahila Vidyapeeth. Their paths must have crossed frequently at literary gatherings and institutional events. It is sad to think that the Allahabad of their time—a hub of literature and culture—is now a city known for sectarian violence and the Kumbh Mela.I will end on that note. See you again soon.Till then,Anusua MukherjeeDeputy Editor, Frontline