Here’s a confession. I’d never heard of Sara Rai until I saw a book with her name on it a couple of weeks ago—Raw Umber: A Memoir. But the cover attracted me and when I read the first few lines of the blurb, I knew I needed the book. It’s a series of essays about Sara Rai’s 1960s childhood and I am obsessed with writing set in the period from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, that time when India was birthed and taking her first steps as a nation.
Only when I had the book in my hands did I realise that Sara Rai is the granddaughter of that great writer in Hindi, Premchand. And that she grew up in a family where practically everyone was a writer, editor, publisher or artist of some kind, including her grandmother, her father, her mother, her mother's sister, her siblings and her cousins. And that she herself is a writer in Hindi. What kind of wonders, I marvelled, would I find in the book?
So I turned to the first essay and got lost in time.
Each essay in Raw Umber is separate and distinct. Nevertheless each opens a door to the next. At first there’s an overview of the writer’s childhood. The rambling house she grew up in, in Allahabad's Civil Lines, with the garden from which the young Sara once decided to taste every different leaf (spoiler alert: she survived). The convent school in which the students had to speak only English as long as they were on the premises. Her admission, in the essay titled ‘The Ancestor in the Cupboard’, that she was somewhat embarrassed by being Premchand’s granddaughter, having only read a couple of his stories in her Hindi literature textbooks, which made them far from appealing, while meeting wherever she went people who could recite from memory entire passages from his works.
Then we enter the worlds of her family. Sara had never met Premchand, who had died before she was born. But she knew her grandmother, Shivrani Devi, described in the essay’s title as a ‘Warrior Woman’. Her father, Sripat Rai, was the publisher of a literary magazine who suddenly discovered art, moved to Delhi to live among artists, and just as suddenly gave it up. Her mother, Zahra Rai, was a writer too, as was her mother's sister, Moghal Mahmood. Zahra and Moghal were almost inextricable; they mothered Sara and her four siblings together and years later, Zahra died immediately after Moghal. There’s the story of Zahra’s family and how they came to occupy the haveli called Nawab-ki-Deorhi in Banaras (such complex relationships, some 200 years of unbroken history). There are tales of death and the portent of June. There is Sara herself and her relationship with language, writing and reading. And finally, at the very end, there are four short stories: one each by Shivrani Devi, Zahra Rai, Moghal Masood, and the great Premchand.
Oddly, no nostalgia creeps through the pages of this book. Rather, there’s a sense of scientific detachment. Each essay feels as though the author has carefully composed a picture of the past like an archeologist piecing together shards of pottery, every fragment first examined carefully for truth or imagined truth before being added to the image. Entire milieus are unveiled in these essays. Some so familiar to me they’re almost from my own 1970s Calcutta childhood. Others entirely exotic.
At the same time though, there’s a strong sense of stillness in the book. Raw Umber is a museum of memories. You can look. But you really can’t touch.
Raw Umber: A Memoir
By Sara Rai
Westland
pp. 220; Rs.699
