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INDIRA Goswami, as I re-member her, always had anaura of immense, even star-tling, vibrancy. It began with

her rebelliously curly hair, theringlets bursting out of any at-tempted restraint or regulation.Then the smile, a curved bowwhich could reach across acrowded room like an arrow. Thecolour red in her bangles, in hervermilion bindi; the colour ofstrength, of Shakti. We met oftenduring her years in Delhi, duringseminars and readings, or at theIndia International Centre, andshe would always come up witha warm, double edged compli-ment that would leave me smil-ing too. This sense of vitality andengagement marked all that In-dira Goswami embarked upon.As a scholar, an academic, a trans-lator, a poet, novelist and activist,she brought passion, belief and

engagement to all that she did. Popularly known as Mamonibaideo or Mamoni RaisomGoswami to her Assamese ad-mirers, she was born in Guwahatiand remained true to her rootseven though her writing was in-spired by and located in the manyother places she encountered inlife's journey. Her first story waspublished when she was thirteen.With an admitted tendency to de-pression, she lived on the knife'sedge as an adolescent. Her hus-band, Madhavan Raisom Iyenger,was killed in a car accident justeighteen months after they weremarried. She began writing seri-ously, and published Ahiron andChenabar Sot (The Chenab's Cur-rent). Her experiences as a wid-ow, and a research stint in Vrin-davan, led to the publication ofNilakanthi Braja (The Blue-

necked God), which interrogat-ed the position of widows in Vrin-davan and in Hindu society.Goswami's interest in Ramayanastudies led to a comparative ex-amination of the Tulsidas Ra-mayana and the medieval Ax-

amiya Ramayana of MadhavaKandali in Ramayana from Gan-ga to Brahmaputra. It was after this phase, while In-dira Goswami was the head of theAssamese department at DelhiUniversity, that our occasionalbut illuminating friendship be-gan. Both widowed young, bothwomen writers, we shared an un-spoken sympathy. I read DotalHatir Uye Khuwa Howdah (TheMoth Eaten Howdah of a Tusker)when it appeared in English trans-lation. She was by then recog-nised as a serious literary figure,and received the Sahitya Akade-mi award in 1982 and the Jnan-pith award in 2000. Mamoni re-fused the Padma Shri in 2002 forreasons of political conviction. In2008, she was conferred the Prin-cipal Prince Claus Award, a ma-jor honour to a unique writer, ac-tivist, and political mediator. In 2009, Dr Malashri Lal and Ipublished the co-edited anthol-ogy, In Search of Sita – RevistingMythology. The book included adialogue with Indira Goswami on'Ramayana, The Human Story'.In the conversation, she spoke ofher early interest in tantra, andin Sufi poetry, especially the workof Mullah Masiha, who lived andwrote in Jehangir's time. Shespoke of the books she was work-ing on - The Journey of Ravanaand Thengfakhri, the story of aBodo woman who was appoint-ed as a tax collector by the British,gathered from oral narratives.Before that, Indira Goswami hadspoken forcefully at the first

Neemrana International Litera-ture Festival on Assam and As-samese writing. To quote: “Mystate, Assam, had produced somevery beautiful writings long ago.Outsiders are very ignorant of As-sam... Historical writings flour-ished in Assam from 1224. Thesehistory books are like fiction, inthe sense that there are narrativesabout kings and queens, includ-ing one queen, Phuleswari, whowas a temple dancer. In the Ra-mayana which was translated intoAssamese in the 14th century,Rama is not a God. He is just a hu-man being; he is a very good king. “Khushwant Singh has said thereare no writings on nature in Indi-an languages. But I have writtena novel about rhinos. You will besurprised to know that once upona time, the Assamese people usedto plough their land with the helpof rhinos. Then I wrote a novel onthe elephants. In my childhood, Ihad an elephant as my playmate.Gradually he ran amok, killed avillager, and was shot dead beforeour eyes. The howdah of the elephant became a symbol in my novel...” The last time I spoke to my friendand fellow writer was two yearsago, to invite her to attend theJaipur Literature Festival. Sheagreed, but then backed out be-cause of her ill health. “I wish I wasbetter, Namita,” she said, “then Iwould have come.” Writers live, travel, and continueliving in inexplicable ways,through their books, throughtranslations, through metaphorsand refracted images. Their jour-neys do not end easily but con-tinue, always, in strange and un-expected directions. So will Ma-moni Goswami’s. �

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WHILE Indira Goswamiwas at Delhi University,our friendship began.Both widowed young,both women writers, weshared an unspokensympathy

Writer NamitaGokhale speaks

of theempathetic

friendship sheshared with

Indira Goswami

IHAD vaguely heard of Ma-moni as a novelist in thelate eighties, and frankly,

was not very curious abouther work, as no noted schol-ar or critic in Assam men-tioned her with seriousness.Then she came to meet meone day to present a copy ofher collection of novelettes,Mamore Dhora Tarowal. Af-ter dinner, as the stillness ofthe night enveloped the uni-versity campus, I idly turnedthe pages in my bed andcame to the title story. Afterreading one or two pages Ibecame so absorbed that Isat down on my bed behindthe mosquito curtain andread on breathlessly, caughtin the powerful onward rushof the narrative. The story ofcruel injustice and pitilessexploitation of a group ofdalit construction workers,their helpless anguish andimmense suffering, their un-ending struggle to survivewith the endurance and re-silience that reminded oneof the condition of wild ani-mals, was told with such pas-sionate empathy that long af-ter midnight the faces of thecharacters and the scenescontinued to haunt me. Par-ticularly harrowing were thedetails of treachery by self-styled labour leaders. The im-pact had been something likethat of Malamud’s The Fix-er, though the latter, in spiteof its vividness, had the air ofa fable. Towards dawn I putdown my impressions on apostcard to Mamoni andmailed it early in the morn-ing. I had no doubt that af-ter Birendra Kumar Bhat-tacharya the Assamese nov-el had found a new exponentof genius but with a firmergrasp on the darker andstarker realities of life.Later I came to know thatshe had already been appre-ciated in translation by read-ers outside Assam, and Am-rita Pritam herself had trans-lated some of her stories intoHindi. I knew Mamoni as achild, as she was a sister ofmy schoolfellow Satyabrat(Montu), and had no ideahow, brought up in the com-parative affluence and secu-rity of an upper-middle classfamily, the daughter of a xat-tradhikar, with all the tradi-tional prestige and charismaof a monastic head in ruralAssam combined with feu-dal privilege, she had devel-oped such empathy with andinsight into the hopeless painand unrelieved suffering ofthe wretched of the earth. Butfrom her autobiography Ad-halekha Dastabez and bitsand pieces of her life she re-vealed through casual anec-dotes I learnt how she freedherself from an emotionaltrauma and fits of depressioncaused by it through the re-peated cathartic ritual of ob-serving and imaginativelycapturing the pain of others.She told me during one of mynot infrequent meetings withher that she regarded herwriting as an act of worship.Every day she would have a

shower early in the morning,put on clothes and, im-mersed in the fragrance of afew joss-sticks, write furiouslytill a late breakfast.In the early nineties I visit-ed her at her home in Shak-ti Nagar, not a posh area pre-ferred by the elite but sur-rounded by characters whofigured in her novels and sto-ries, like the dealer in wastepaper, the auto-rickshaw dri-ver, and the tall, stately, com-passionate Sikh movingamong the rows of cots in thestreet, who had lost hisspeech after the agony ofwatching his beloved daugh-ter and his wife raped andkilled before his eyes duringPartition riots. It was like atypical mohalla of Delhi inits outskirts, and Mamoniwas evidently held in high re-gard and affection by neigh-bours. Somehow I wish shehad never left the place andtaken up residence in theuniversity campus with itsambience of petty jealousiesand ruthless careerism. ButI could also feel that wher-ever she moved she carriedwith her a native nobility,grace and goodwill for all.Crowds of people, mostly

students, came to meet herwith their personal problemsranging from emotional to fi-nancial scrapes and to mywonder she offered themsupport with inexhaustiblepatience and sympathy.The original inhabitants ofDelhi were vastly outnum-bered by victims of Partitionand, while the governmentdid a lot to improve their con-dition financially, the woundsin the mind were not easilyhealed, and she must haveheard countless stories ofcruelty, violence and horrorfrom such people uprootedfrom native soil. These min-gled in her mind with talesof gruesome massacre andrapine by successive hordesof invaders who waded liter-ally in rivers of blood in by-gone times. Delhi thus be-comes an epitome of man’sinhumanity to man in herfantasy, as though layer uponlayer of mad violence andhorrifying atrocities layburied in its dry and dustyground. The gloom of Tej AruDhulire Dhusorita Prishtha(Pages Spattered with Bloodand Dust) would have beenunbearable but for the per-vasive and profound pity.

Her magnum opus, ofcourse, is Dotal Hatir UyeKhowa Howdah (The Worm-eaten Seat on the Tusker’sBack), a gripping story of de-cay and dehumanisation ofan entire human communi-ty in rural Assam, ruled byrigid norms of feudal hier-archy and ossified custom,which ruthlessly stamp outall hopes of rejuvenation andrenewal. The unfulfilledlonging of Indranath, en-lightened heir to the monas-tic seat, and Ilimon, lusciousin her youthful beauty butfrom a low-born Brahminfamily that cannot match hispedigree, is etched with un-forgettable sensuous andsensual power. Cast in thesame pattern, the unfulfilledlife of the young widowGiribala, ritually barred fromall the good things of life, butinstinctively rebellingagainst all such meaninglessbrutal restraints, who offersherself to the British mis-sionary who is likewisebarred by vows of celibacy,and upon discovery of herattempted liaison by a scan-dalised mob, immolates her-self in the ritual fire that wasmeant only to purge her ofimpurity, becomes a burn-ing image of feudal denial ofessential humanity towomen. The rich tapestry ispunctuated by searingglimpses of lowly monks de-graded by incurable opiumaddiction that reiterate themessage of doomed hopeand promise. The Commu-nist-led rebellion by op-pressed tenants who mis-take the honourable inten-tions of Indranath and killhim and gain little in the endis the finale to the dirge ofdesperate frustration. Thestory is dipped in the folk-lore of the countryside, nowsalty and earthy, now deso-late with immemorialpathos. There is no techni-cal wizardry here, but poet-ic realism that turns everyitem into a reverberatingsymbol, like the river Jo-goliya that weaves throughthe story sometimes bathedin the joyous radiance of thesun, and at other times atreacherous, sinister pres-ence. Beyond doubt a mas-terpiece of contemporary In-dian fiction. Mamoni’s other passion inlife is the Ramayana and var-ious versions of Ramkatha,but neither my interest normy knowledge emboldensme to make any remarks onthis aspect of her life.It is painful to think thatthis vibrant creative per-sonality is now no more,that she lay for so long onthe hospital bed solely de-pendent on a life-supportsystem and unable to re-spond to anything in hersurroundings. It is my beliefthat she nearly drownedherself in a placid-lookingenvironment that had vi-cious undercurrents. Herfriends and admirers, ofwhom there are a legion, willmiss her a lot. �

The passion of her pityNoted intellectual Hiren Gohain reveals howher own suffering helpedMamoni Goswami empathisewith the wretched on earth

IT was Shelley who de-fined so beautifully apoet or a writer: “They

learn in suffering/what theyteach in song”. In MamoniRaisom Goswami too, thiscame painfully true. Thedaughter of a well-estab-lished, enlightened familyof Assam, she took to penand paper quite early in life- even as a school student.Soon her themes came tobe the suffering of the weaksection of humanity – thestruggling, suffering hu-manity in which we see theauthor herself. While thissuffering of the weak andthe hapless is caused in heroeuvre by the powerful andconveniently placed in so-ciety, in her own life, thissuffering was the cause ofher own individual feelingsthat wanted to go the rightway but faced the power ofblind tradition and socialand religious customs. Andthe pangs she felt withinherself took the form of hernovels and short stories thattranscend her personal do-main and acquire the quality of the general andthe universal.As a writer who started towrite as a school child, hername even at that stage –Mamoni Goswami (actualname Indira Goswami) –became familiar to the lan-guage newspaper readersof Assam. The time was thefifties of the twentieth cen-tury. The budding writerthen wrote only short sto-ries, though today we knowher better as a novelist. Buteven as a short story writer,she was later to write the short story ‘Sanskar’ (trans-lated into English as ‘Off-spring’) which came to berecognised as not only oneof her best short stories but also as one of the most powerful Indian short stories.Starting her novelistic ca-reer in the sixties and tak-ing to publishing her nov-els in book-form from theseventies, her early novelswere set in central, northand north-western Indiawith characters picked upnot from the mainstreamsociety of those regions butfrom the periphery – menand women, half-starvedand deprived – living onlysub-human lives. And inpainting them in highlyemotive terms and a star-tling-suggestive language,she touched the hearts of

her readers. At the sametime, handling a fictionalcraft rich in symbols andimagery, she could also ap-peal to the aesthetic senseof the readers. Her novelsof the first phase, ChenaborSot (1972) and NilakanthiBraja (1976), are instancesin point. Later, in her nov-els like Mamore DhoraTarowal (1980) (for whichshe won the Sahitya Akade-mi Award) and Dotal HatirUye Khowa Howdah (1988)(which won her the Jnan-pith Award), her telling be-came plain while retainingstill her early richness of artand craft. In these novels,like Dotal Hati or Chin-namostar Manuhto (2001),her bold social themes ofprotest come out moreovertly, though without los-ing her artistic appeal. In-deed, in the whole gamutof her fictive works, Ma-moni always comes out asa protester – a writer with astrong but silent protestagainst the oppression ofthe weak by the situation-ally better placed. It is thusthat she went to the indus-trial working class outsideAssam, the suffering wom-anhood in Assam andMathura-Brindavan, themeek and the mute birds,animals and other creaturesin the sacred precincts ofKamakhya or Brindavan.And all along, we see in her pages a humanist witha bleeding heart with dazed eyes fixed on these sufferings.Then what sort of a per-son was this Mamoni Rai-som Goswami? A smilingface and a heart always fullof warmth yearning alwaysto make others happy withher sympathy for the needyand empathy for all. Awriter who always had timefor her endless visitorswhether it was in her Del-hi or Guwahati home. Shewould never allow anybodyto leave her home withouta cup of tea over her sweetsympathetic words. Andyet, hers was a woundedsoul beaten very cruelly byfate in the very prime of herlife leaving a scar through-out. She married an engi-neer from Karnataka out oflove and went out of thestate with him, but he losthis life soon after in an ac-cident. Her love for him re-mained all along a haunt-ing shadow in her life andworks. She did not go back

again to normal worldlymarried life tied to anoth-er. Rather as one who al-ways wanted instinctivelyto break the trammels oftradition and custom, shecame out to live togetherwith a Parsi engineer whowas sympathetic to her inher unexpected miseries.The story of this life hasbeen narrated movingly byher in her unique autobi-ography AdhalekhaDastabez (1988) that readslike a novel. Her bold liv-ing together with anotherwas a harmonious unitedlife of mutual understand-ing and sympathy outsidemarriage. By this time shecould earn a position oflecturership in Delhi Uni-versity that gave her themuch needed economicassurance of a comfortable

living needed so much forwriting. Her research in Ra-mayana was an outcomeboth of her life of stormand calm.Though beaten badly inlife, Mamoni RaisomGoswami never lost faithin it and always looked fora better, happier societywhere nobody would beoppressed and all wouldbe able to live with humandignity. If someone asksme today what or how wasMamoni Raisom Goswamias a person and to write asI knew her from her writ-ings as well as from myclose association with her,my answer would be: hu-mane, humane. Yes, shewas a humanist par excel-lence even while she was aprotester against all sortsof oppression. �

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IF someone asks me today how MamoniGoswami was as a person, my answerwould be: humane. She was also aprotester against all sorts of oppression

Critic and writer Gobinda Prasad Sarma gives us aglimpse of the pain and suffering that created the writer

and humanist, Mamoni Goswami

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SHE told me once that she regarded herwriting as an act of worship. Every day shewould have a shower early in the morningand, immersed in the fragrance of joss-sticks, write furiously till a late breakfast

Chenabar Sot. About her experiencesin Jammu and Kashmir.

Nilakanthi Braja.Her experiences as awidow and researcher in Vrindavan.

Ahiron. Expresses empathy for the un-derclass.

Mamore Dhora Tarowal.Deals withthe plight of the workers of a channelconstruction site on the river Saai inRae Barelli district of Uttar Pradesh.

Dotal Hatir Uye Khowa Howda.A novel of protest against oppression of women in Brahmini-cal society.

Tej aru Dhulire Dhusarita Prishta.On the anti-Sikh riots inDelhi in 1984.

Ramayana from Ganga to Brahmaputra.Study of Tulsidas’ Ramayana and Madhava Kandali’s.

Chinnamastar Manuhtu. On animal sacrifice at the Ka-makhya temple.

Buddhasagar, Dhushar Geisha aru Mohammad Mucha. Acollection of novellas.

Dashorothir Khuj. Set in Mauritius. Based on Ramayana sto-ries.

Sanskar, Udaybhanur Choritro Ityadi. Collection of some ofher best short stories/novellas

Journey of Ravana.(Unpublished). On the personality of Ra-vana, his good and bad qualities.

Adha Lekha Dastabez. Autobiography.

Pain and Flesh. Poetry on various themes from the griefcaused by the Brahmaputra to animal sacrifice.

Brittor Poridhi Bhangi. Her last book, released 2 November 2011

The person and the persona

Literary worksThe colour of Shakti in her

N O V E M B E R 3 0 , 2 0 1 1

POSTmelaneeSEVEN SISTERS

Dastabez UNFINISHED

Dasarath Deka

Dasarath Deka

Subhamoy Bhattacharjee

Bitopan Borborah