A renowned Hindi writer-couple revisit their fragmented marriage in memoirs

It is relatively rare to come across two major writer-spouses covering the end of their marriage in separate memoirs. Two recent memoirs-in-translation by Poonam Saxena deliver exactly this: Echoes of My Past (Mud Mud Ke Dekhta Hoon) by Rajendra Yadav (1929-2013) and This Too Is a Story (Ek Kahani Yeh Bhi) by Mannu Bhandari (1931-2021), both published by Penguin Random House India. From 1959 to 1994, Yadav and Bhandari were married to each other even as they grew into major figures in the Hindi literary world.

Prolific short story writers in the 1960s and 1970s, they were both regarded as leading lights of the modernist Nayi Kahani (new story) movement alongside Kamleshwar, Mohan Rakesh and Nirmal Verma, their middle-class urban characters navigating the complexities of a newly independent India. Yadav’s novel Sara Aakash (first published in 1951 as Pret Bolte Hain) and Bhandari’s story Yahi Sach Hai were adapted into Hindi movies by Basu Chatterjee, Sara Aakash (1969) and Rajnigandha (1974), respectively.

In 1986, Yadav revived the defunct Hindi magazine Hans (originally started by the iconic writer Premchand), where he wrote famously acerbic editorials and championed women and Dalit writers. Yadav and Bhandari even wrote a novel together, a tragic love story called Ek Inch Muskaan (1991), which was initially serialised in the Hindi magazine Gyanoday, Yadav writing from the perspective of the male protagonist and Bhandari writing chapters featuring the two women he is torn between.

In 1994, Bhandari left Yadav after several previous attempts had ended with his profuse apologies. Although they never officially divorced, she started living separately. Yadav’s memoir Echoes of My Past, originally published in Hindi as Mud Mud ke Dekhta Hoon in 2001, does not follow a linear structure. It was written as a series of loosely connected vignettes, reflections on his personal relationship peppered in between recollections with a more literary focus, like the making of his novel Ukhde Hue Log and stories like Pass-Fail and Chhote-Chhote Tajmahal.

In some of its most entertaining and instructive sections we meet Yadav and Bhandari in Delhi in the 1960s and 1970s, their house playing literary salon to the likes of Kamleshwar, Namwar Singh and Mohan Rakesh.

While talking about his development as a writer, Yadav balances plainspeak (“a writer cannot have financial dependencies”) with a philosophical mode (“I don’t run away from life, I run into it.”). Several amusing anecdotes are used to great effect, featuring his friend Mohan Rakesh, with whom he would later fall out. A foundational story about their shared literary ethos, involving the two friends repeatedly taunting a sadhu, is told with admirable self-deprecation, perhaps even self-loathing, as Bhandari later hypothesised in This Too Is a Story.

Yadav is candid enough to admit some of his failings as a husband, not least his disdain towards middle-class domesticity. He barely lent a hand to Bhandari; whether it was in the running of the household or raising of their daughter Tinku (Rachana, who stepped in as managing director and publisher at Hans following her father’s death in 2013). He writes about wanting to lead the life of “a true Bohemian” and that included dalliances with several women, including some who had reached out to him through fan mail. But every time Echoes of My Past threatens to assess the emotional impact of his actions on Bhandari, Yadav pointedly changes the subject with cop-out segue lines like “but that was a separate matter”.

Yet in his artful and mischievous manner (“marvellous wordplay to mask every mistake and flaw”, as Bhandari would later write in This Too Is a Story), he is quick to paint his wife as essentially a traditional woman with conventional needs and desires, someone who could not give him the complete independence (samanaantar or parallel lives) he craved as a man and writer.

This characterisation deeply hurt Bhandari and pushed her to write This Too Is a Story, which was first published in 2008, seven years after Yadav’s memoir. It was also her attempt to rejuvenate her dormant writing career.

Yadav’s many infidelities and erratic behaviour had left her emotionally spent and she had not written much in the preceding 10-12 years (although, as Saxena points out in her excellent introductory essay, one of Bhandari’s best stories Kartoote Mardaan was written during this phase, in 2002).

This Too Is a Story is not narrowly focused at “setting the record straight”. It is a far more complex book than Yadav’s, an ambitious and wide-ranging memoir with quietly devastating observations on Indian society and the Hindi literary establishment.

Reading Bhandari’s account of her childhood in the 1940s as well as her literary career and marriage in the subsequent decades, one realises exactly where the personal met the political. We see how Bhandari and Yadav’s differences, their anxieties and insecurities, were indicative of larger sociopolitical changes in the country.

For instance, Bhandari writes about how, as a teenager in Ajmer, she was inspired by freedom fighters and charismatic academics. After she made a fiery speech at her college, her father—an educated, notionally enlightened English-to-Hindi lexicographer—became upset because women from respectable homes did not make impassioned speeches in public. However, when one of his colleagues praised her, his ire turned to reluctant approval and respect. She writes about the plight of men like her father, ideologically moving towards modernity but unable to come to terms with its manifestations inside their own homes.

Later, we see the same dynamic repeating itself—only this time, the confusingly semi-feudal attitude belongs to her husband, who, like her father, kept swinging between encouragement and disapproval. Yadav is encouraging of her writing, pushing her to finish incomplete projects and accept an editorial job for a Hindi anthology she was going to turn down. Yet, he expresses displeasure whenever her writing takes precedence over her domestic duties. Yadav admits to her his own infidelity while accepting that should Bhandari have an extra-marital affair, he would never be able to accept it. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: such is the fate, Bhandari reminds us at several points in her book, of the modern Indian woman of her generation.

Bhandari’s anecdotes from her professional life as a teacher, too, reveal the role gender politics played in her, and Yadav’s, respective trajectories. Yadav was never really answerable to a boss his whole life, even turning down a job arranged for him by the veteran Hindi writer Sumitranandan Pant. He saw an office job as an unacceptable encroachment on his all-important writerly freedom, happy to let Bhandari shoulder the burden of paying the bills and keeping home and hearth in order.

Later, at Hans, he was his own boss, too, and as the editor, exercised absolute control over every detail in his work life. Bhandari, meanwhile, never had the luxury of choosing—and not just because of her husband’s obstinacy. Being a teacher was one of the few acceptable jobs for an Indian woman in the 1950s and 1960s, an era when working women were still rare and viewed with suspicion. As Saxena points out in her essay, Bhandari, Usha Priyamvada and Krishna Sobti—the triumvirate that formed the first generation of Hindi women writers—all taught for a living as young women.

Towards the end of This Too Is a Story, Bhandari writes about being diagnosed with neuralgia and the physical pain making writing difficult for her from the 1990s onwards, in the wake of her separation from Yadav. At one point she suggests (albeit in a semi-serious tone) that her physical pain was merely a manifestation of the many emotional upheavals she suffered due to Yadav’s failures as a husband. It reminded me of her story Kshay (literally, “slow decay,” but also a synonym for asthma in Hindi), a tragedy bookended by a pair of rattling coughs.

Kunti, the young protagonist of the story, is a teacher and sole breadwinner of her family, struggling with her asthmatic father’s hospital bills. At the beginning of the story she’s engaged in the one thing in the world that’s for her delight alone: playing the violin. But she is interrupted by her father’s pitiable coughing. By the end of the story, she has to resort to corrupt means to get the failing grades of her student (a young girl whose family wants her to matriculate at any cost and marry promptly) reversed. The story’s closing moment sees Kunti’s horror at realising that she has started coughing in a manner much like her ailing father’s.

Reading these two memoirs in conjunction will tell you a lot about the Hindi world. But it will tell you even more about the constant tension between “inner” and “outer” lives in the literary context—and its impact on a marriage over time. By translating these two memoirs with expertise and compassion, Saxena has opened up the life and works of two Hindi titans to a new generation of English-language readers.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.