One Foot on the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body | Autobiography | Shanta Gokhale |
Speaking Tiger, 2019 | ISBN: 978-93-88874-85-4 | pp 252 | 399

A Life to Call One’s Own

When you pick up an autobiography – the first assumption that one makes is how it would be reduced to a mere tracing back of one’s roots and where one came from. In reading autobiographies written by women; what one inevitably – let’s just say stereotypically assumes are how emotions would overrule the narrative. But we tend to forget that when a woman writes, it is not just about how life has been rather there is an active involvement with deciphering her own experiences. Since the genre requires talking in the first person, it helps the writer explore her life in the sequence in which she desires. Thereby opening up a space to highlight what she considers as important sections in her life that supports her motive to write.

“Our all-too-human condition is the gift of the body we inherit…It is vital then to accept the body in all its beauty, mystery and power; to know that the images we build of ourselves might one day be rudely shattered by its exigencies.” – Shanta Gokhale does not mince her words when she opens up the various paths that life has taken her on. Her writing on her ‘self’ opens up various eras that she has lived through. What makes this autobiography an interesting one is how the most pressing concerns of the day quietly make their way into her narrative without creating ripples and yet making the reader pause to realize and understand the significance of those moments. The tracing of her own life through her anatomy is what makes this recording of the history of the self a very unique one. The chapters have been titled likewise making the reader understanding the connection that a particular part of the body has with the events/the circumstances as well as the relation one has with the world. The projection of one’s sensibilities through these varied parts of the human body transforms the definitions as well of the human body. Her prologue is a sharp commentary on the roles that are expected of a woman. The patriarchal construct that takes its hold at the beginning of the book- seems to start losing its grip and importance as the book unwinds and by the end, is relegated to the borders. It is in the chapter when she experiences sexual abuse that opens up a discussion on how as a child one looks at the whole incident – Gokhale retains the innocence of the child in describing that incident but what comes up is the retention of the horror that as an adult reader one feels. “But people had to be responsible towards the stories they told.” This interjection in the story and likewise several interjections that one comes across in the book is where Gokhale has a conversation with her readers; prepares the reader to meet the writer through her work. It is not a monologue; Gokhale wants her readers to be active participants in her work. She turns to her readers now and then to talk to them directly. It is her chapter titled Food that reminded me of Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days – What one eats and the language that one speaks always has a class and a cultural significance. As Anna Sussman writing on Suleri says and which applies to Gokhale as well that – “…when we eat food, we are not just eating the substance in our mouth, we are ingesting the word, and its mental connotations, as well.”  The chapter on food turns interesting as it also records the transition of the society – England in this case, where identities of people are getting locked up with their culturally specific foods. “…it was parathas and kofta curry, the cheapest dish on the menu at the Taj Restaurant run by an East Pakistani who would be called a Bangladeshi fourteen years later.” The borderless structure of her life gains prominence when she returns home- her comment on the over ruling concept of caste is a very pointed one- “…even when you lose all else in India, you do not lose your caste.”

The other factor that predominates in India is the colour of one’s skin. Gokhale looks at the discrepancies that arise both at home (here I refer to the country) and abroad. For the former, it is a marker of one’s rise or fall especially in the marriage market – “Nirmal and I were born dark-skinned. In Maharashtra you were either fair or dark or wheat–coloured. Fair was best, wheat was acceptable, dark was sad.”  And another quite witty reaction to this obsession with the fair skinned – “In the old days, the Indian Railways used to have four classes of carriage – first, second, intermediate and third. If one were to classify women according to those categories, the ‘dark but smart’ would be the intermediate class; the fair would be the unquestioned first; and the wheat- coloured the second.”  Whereas the exoticization of the Indian skin colour in the West has been mentioned in the book where one of Gokhale’s friends tells her how women in the West consider dark skin as beautiful skin and mourns that – “Back home I’m dark. Here I’m not dark enough.”

The writer sifts through her memories and shares a part of her personal storms that she has been through- how unlike the identity that she carved for herself during her growing up years as well as during her university years blur as she enters her married life. How the struggle to retain one’s identity in a whirlpool of societal expectations is a tough job to handle. Where her love for literature comes to her rescue- thereby opening up a discussion on what keeps one afloat when the world around begins to fall apart. Her archiving of the slow disintegration of her marriage without indulging in any blame games adds that much needed perspective that one tends to lose when opens up a discussion on such lines. Her time when she joined Femina in 1977; breaks open a new lease of life for her where she learns that- “women were allowed to legally retain their maiden names.” And she changes back to her former name. At this juncture one needs to remember the times in which she decides to take a step like this – it is a bold move. She listens to the call that Virginia Woolf writes down in an essay where she mediates on the importance of the need for space in a woman’s life and in order to achieve that to have a room of one’s own.  And Gokhale observes – “The independence to be yourself, complete in yourself, is very heaven.”

At a personal level, I found her chapter on her mother to have been the most moving one as the slipping away of the one you hold most dear and the helplessness in unable to do anything has been captured very beautifully in this section. “Touch remains the last vital connection between bodies. When Mother became physically dependent on me, she said, ‘Now you are the mother and I am the child.’” It is not just the slow physical disintegration of her mother that has been documented but she inserts her own physical disintegration that has started to set in.

“I am old but I would feel silly to rage against the dying of the light, against the natural order of things. I believe the law that applies to all things applies to humans beings too – utpatti (creation), sthiti (maintenance), laya (dissolution). Beyond that, there is only one thing. A neat, clean, elegant full stop.”

There are several full stops at many cross roads that Gokhale witnesses and at times becomes an active participant while at times, a reluctant participant to. What emerges from this autobiography is a life that remains entwined not just to the concept of what constitutes as home but also of the world. The threshold that one creates around oneself has been crossed and crossed in the most fascinating ways. The book can definitely be considered as one of the landmark books of contemporary Indian literature.