Foreword

IT WAS A typical wintry morning in Delhi as, armed with a set of questions, I waited for Mrinal Pande to arrive. I knew the well-documented facts, of course—she was the chairperson of Prasar Bharati, had been a journalist, editor and television anchor in a career spanning decades, and was a writer whose stories and columns I was familiar with. But none of this had prepared me for the person who arrived (dot on time) and settled herself in a corner of the garden where we were to meet. What struck me immediately was her soft-spoken and calm manner as she answered my questions and acceded to the photographer’s occasional request to adjust her shawl or shift the chair. As the interview progressed, I realised another thing—there were going to be no pat responses and breezy answers from the person who has “a horror of sounding smart and using quotable quotes”. This was an introspective person who took pains to ensure that her responses were well-thought-out. The only way to depict a person like her, then, is the way she talked to me—by telling stories.

Her Mother’s House

IT WAS COLD and dark in the early hours of the morning in Nainital, but one household was already in a bustle as children got ready for school. Mrinal, her two sisters, a brother and assorted cousins were all dressed and gobbbling down the breakfast the lady of the house had got up before dawn to make. Tiffins were packed, bags were picked up and they were sent off. The cycle repeated itself when they came back, hungry once more, and the mother would put loaves of bread and jars of jam on the table for them to eat. Dinner- time would come and the process would begin all over again. Her “rather fastidious and demanding father” was also shown equal attention and care. Similar scenes may have been enacted in homes all over India, but there was one glaring difference—the mother in question was Gaura Pant ‘Shivani’, one of the most prolific writers of womenbased fiction and magazine stories in Hindi. Mrinal Pande’s father was a well-respected educationist who had been a widower with an infant daughter when he married her mother. With Mrinal being born a year later, her mother had two very small children on her hands and practically raised twins. Pande remembers, “My mother was a warm-hearted person and being a writer, was very sensitive,” so the children grew up in total harmony, a fact they took for granted. “We thought everybody’s mother wrote, everybody’s mother sang and also cooked and helped them with home-work. We also thought that everybody’s mother could shell out money whenever it was needed for school uniforms by writing a chapter for some serialised novel. Today, these seem like huge achievements.” She remembers times when her mother didn’t even have rough paper for the first draft of her story, so would write in the margins of her children’s schoolbooks and send them off to the publisher by post. Now that Pande is a mother of two grown-up daughters and a writer herself, her respect and admiration for her mother’s achievements is evident in the way she speaks of her. She had seen first-hand the struggles that creative women who were also home-makers had to face, and these were lessons that would remain with her. Her personality and interests were also being shaped in other ways by the world her parents inhabited. Writers, poets and playwrights were frequent visitors to their house. Anecdotes trip off her tongue as she recalls the visits of some of the best-known names in Hindi literature. One such person was Sumitranandan Pant, a fellow-pahadi and famous Hindi poet of the Chhayavadi school. Even though Mrinal Pande is a grandmother today, she becomes a twinkle-eyed teenager as she recalls his absent-minded habit of using a Vicks inhaler— sometimes forgetting that it was still in his nose as he went about his business! When her parents moved to Lucknow, her mother also befriended Mahadevi Verma, the outstanding poet, freedom fighter and women’s activist. Mrinal remembers being riveted by her compelling ideas, deep voice and mellifluous Hindi as Mahadevi Verma lectured at her college. Sorrow came to the house as Mrinal lost her father at a relatively young age. Her mother was devastated and claimed that she would never write again as she had “lost her greatest critic and supporter.” It was Mahadevi Verma who told her mother, “People may tell you that writing will give you strength. Forget about all that. We must write for ourselves.” Today, Pande looks back at that world with nostalgia and warmth as she says, “The literary scene was so much more humane and warmly interconnected in those days. When my father died, this band of writers (all of whom were as poor as my mother) visited regularly and asked her to begin writing again. Then there was Ashok Agrawal, who was the editor of Swatantra Bharat. When he found out that my mother did not really know where she would live, he asked her to write a weekly column and become an accredited journalist. This made her eligible for a government allotted flat in Lucknow. And that is the only roof that she knew till she died.”

Taking Flight

AS A YOUNG GIRL, Mrinal Pande was withdrawn and introverted, a contrast to her mother, whose forthright way of expressing her opinion had often had repercussions within the family. She remembers her aunts sometimes taunting her and saying that it was not her degree in English Literature, but the roundness of her rotis that would ultimately count. “I used to feel plump, and sometimes that I stood out like a sore thumb. I used to feel that it was sinful to be too bright and stand first in class every time. It’s only when I went to college that I realised that people liked me for who I was—and then I had many admirers and boyfriends”, she says with a naughty grin when remembering those days. But the sensitivities of those earlier years left her with some valuable lessons. In college, she studied Sanskrit, ancient Indian history and English literature. She was also fluent in Hindi, Kumaoni and Marathi. Despite this, she was not writing much. In fact, she never even wrote for her school or college magazine. That was to come later, when a 21-year-old, married Mrinal followed her civil servant husband to a small kasbah called Nimaj on the border between Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. She penned her first short story, Kohra aur Macchliyan, and sent it off to Dharmvir Bharati, editor of Dharmyug, for his opinion. The letter he sent in response is one of Pande’s most cherished possessions to this day. Bharati spoke of her work in glowing terms. The course was set and Mrinal Pande had entered the world of published writers. Over the next four decades, she wrote countless articles and columns, as well as books like That Which Ram Hath Ordained, My Own Witness, Daughter’s Daughter, Devi – Tales of the Goddess in Our Time and Stepping Out – Life and Sexuality in Rural India. She also translated Vishnu Bhatt Godshe Versaikar’s 1857: The Real Story of the Great Uprising from Marathi to English. Mrinal, her mother and sister, Ira Pande, all ventured into a field of potential landmines and hurt sentiments— autobiographical writing. “I cannot deny that it has created a lot of bad blood between me and many family members. Part of it may be envy, but they also feel that I have the facility to write and to be recognised for my writing which they do not, and they also have a side of the story to tell. That is fair enough. But then my reply to them is to just go ahead and write it,” she says. And the negative responses did not stop at family. When she wrote My Own Witness, an account of the world of media, Amita Malik wrote a harsh review and called it an autobiography masquerading as fiction. Thinking back to that time, Pande admits that, “Being a writer you are, of course, hypersensitive and things do hurt. But I have always written very close to the line in any case and you cannot write any other way. There’s a kind of nervous energy that sustains you; it’s like something that has to be done, so you just grit your teeth and carry on.” Her latest work is a collection of her columns called The Other Country, published by Penguin India. She has also compiled an anthology of all her mother’s writings and is hard at work on the translation of Amritlal Nagar’s Gadar ke Phool, which translated loosely, means ‘gathering the ashes of the revolt’. Set 100 years after the revolt of 1857, it is a collection of the local lores and memories of the people in the areas of Awadh that took part in the gadar. Obviously, the writer’s pen doesn’t stay still for long.

In the Spotlight

WRITING BOOKS IS just one part of Mrinal Pande’s life. In her long and diverse career, she has worked on magazines, edited newspapers and even had a few stints on television. In 1984, she launched Vama, a periodical for women readers. From there, she joined the HT Media group, was an editor and anchor on the Hindi newdesk at NDTV for a year and a half and then left to join as chief editor of multi-edition Hindi daily, Hindustan. As her learning curve in various types of news media grew, so did her awareness of another, less noble, aspect—the position and dignity accorded to Hindi news and news-gatherers. From her stint on television, Pande remembers noticing that there was much more professional help available for those delivering the news in English: the autocue only worked in Roman script, the graphics had to be entered by people on the Hindi desk themselves and even the research was often left to the reporters. This frustrated her immensely, especially since she felt strongly that Hindi programming was the way ahead (a fact that the plethora of Hindi news channels has since proven). It was possibly these kinds of frustrations that eventually led to her departure from Hindi news television. As she says, “We have subverted known financial wisdom by putting our mouth where our money is not. That’s happened primarily because media houses are run by anglophiles who are monolingual people and not always tuned in to the market situation. It remains for the foreigners to come and see that. When STAR first came here, it was meant to be an all-English bouquet. But the moment Rupert Murdoch took it in hand, he realised that would not work and overnight STAR turned Hindi.” At Hindustan, it was the same story from a different angle and she got a first-hand look at some of the problems of being a Hindi journalist. As she puts it, “Hindi journalists face more challenges in terms of lower visibility and monetisation, and higher risk if there is a communal or other conflagaration; also in terms of higher bribability at election time and of being treated like rubbish by an anglophile higher management. A lot of these things then become self-fulfilling prophecies.” When it comes to circulation figures, Hindi newspapers run alongside—and in many cases, ahead of—their English counterparts. A larger amount of the population of what is called the Hindi belt speaks the language than it does English. Despite these facts, Hindi publications and the people who work on them are often considered infra-dig. Pande was quite put out when people in her own organisation would come and tell her that they didn’t read the paper, but their gardener, sweeper or driver did. She thought it was unforgivable for them to only know their product secondhand when they were supposed to sell and publicise it. She was similarly astounded when a marketing manager told her that her “personal branding would get compromised” if she put her picture in the publication she was working for. An angry Pande couldn’t help responding with, “So basically you wouldn’t mind having your mug shot on a can of tinned beef, but would hate to have it on a heeng ki dibiya, right?” It would have been understandable if these petty setbacks had demotivated Mrinal Pande, who could speak and write in English fluently, after all. But they had the opposite effect: “People don’t want their mug shots on a Hindi product because that would be demeaning for them somehow; this does make me angry, but also determined to give it back. Now I have more strength than ever before, because I am backed by market studies. The first such study that revealed the growth and the viability of the language in India came from Lintas. Then Dabur followed and they discovered the huge potential of rural markets. But it has taken the rest of the people a long time to understand, primarily because of psychological shutters.”

Where the Personal is Political

“SOMETIMES LIFE CREATES a trajectory where you meet certain people and accept certain assignments that somehow shape your attitudes and responses.” This is how Mrinal Pande explains her beliefs and recurring themes in her work—the lives and concerns of women, the growing divide between small-town ‘Bharat’ and modern ‘India’, and the loss of the mother-tongue. Call her a feminist, and she will deny the appellation, as she sees feminism as an extension of her view of social equality. “I am a feminist to the extent that I am not a male supremacist, but I am also a democrat. I don’t let my feminism interfere with my judgement as an editor; it’s not as though I hire only women or cover up for their flaws,”, says the person whose appointment as the first woman editor of Hindustan had caused initial misgivings in her male colleagues. While they had to accept that she deserved the post (“the management would never waste their money just to support an ideal”), she still had to battle fears that her feminism would make her biased. Added to it was the fact that many considered her elevated social status and upper crust education a disqualification. She remembers they would imply that she couldn’t truly understand the real world. “And I would just tell them to shut up and show them that I had done four tours to every one of theirs, and had known social classes that they wouldn’t know how to exchange four words with. But I found that persevering paid off because no male editor could boast of having a more dependable group of people around him than I finally did. Somehow my presence also answered a lot of their unspoken questions about the women in their own lives—mothers, daughters, girlfriends and working women. So the two sides did a sort of yin and yang movement and answered each other’s questions.” One doesn’t have to dig too deep to know where her sensitivity and understanding of Indian women comes from. Mrinal Pande herself was one of three sisters. Her mother was one of seven sisters, each of whom had a strong personality and was educated. Though her own mother was a writer, she also saw female relatives who had an awareness of their own potential but were unable to put it to use, a fact that often shaped their interaction with the world outside. Then she went to all-girl educational institutions, where she saw women struggle with doing their jobs as well as managing a home and children. Many of her prettier teachers would also try and downplay their looks so that family members wouldn’t say “mauj karne jaa rahi hai.” Once in college, she met girls who came from well-off urban families and had been given the same opportunities as their brothers. As she says, “They had no misgivings and no knots inside them about having been ill-treated and were very pleasant to meet.” But perhaps her deepest involvement came when she was asked to do a report on women in the unorganised sector by the government of India. These were the poorest women who worked at jobs from lifting sand on their heads to working in factories. In 2002, she got a MacArthur Foundation fellowship to do a book on reproductive health in rural women. It allowed her to travel extensively and talk to women about their most intimate experiences. Mrinal says, “That was a tremendous learning experience because not only did one get to see how they lived, one also saw what values shaped their personalities, how the rest of society looked at them and how they judged society in turn.” Through these travels and conversations she also realised that no social problem could be traced back to a single cause and that notions of feminism, rural-urban divide and language barriers were all interlinked. These linkages are evident in the answers she gives to my questions, as one thought flows into the other. “I feel that feminism is a way of asking for equal treatment and also treating your own kind as equals, which is what I feel many feminists are not able to do. This starts with the use of language. The moment you express yourself in a particular language, you are also taking a political stance. In India, using English means that you define yourself at the top of the power pyramid. And when you use Hindi, you are identifying yourself with the bottom. It is a mass vote gatherer and politicians have seen the advantages of using vernaculars to communicate to people. But what they are communicating are often very subversive ideas. At the same time, the class that can see the political game is chattering and criticising the political class all the time—but in English.” While Pande feels keenly that we need to rediscover the best and brightest of Hindi literature, she is not a linguistic bigot by any means. To her, the use of language is linked to the time and people being described. As she says, “English is a language that has been shaped in a very different climate and culture, and I have to be careful in using it to depict our reality.” She admits, though, that there are some things about which she can write more easily in English. For example, when writing the book on reproductive health, she discovered that Hindi and a few other regional languages had lost the capacity to describe sexuality except in ways that made it sound surreptitious and ugly. So she opted for English. I asked her what she thought of J.M. Coetzee’s recent statement that people who speak two languages lead dual lives. Her answer sums up her attitude:“Your life just becomes broader. It takes in more than if you had access to just one language. Duality implies one side shutting out the other—I don’t feel a split.”

The People’s Broadcaster

IN JANUARY 2010, Mrinal Pande was appointed chairperson of Prasar Bharati, (the Public Service Broadcaster and apex body of official Indian broadcast media). In many ways, the timing could not have been worse as the organisation was mired in allegations of corruption dealing with the Commonwealth Games that India hosted the same year. As the head of the board, Pande could be seen across television news stations and in the papers denying all knowledge of what had transpired before she took over. She claimed the CEO had kept her in the dark regarding the financial deals. Circumstances proved her right as the courts and the Shunglu Committee Report held others accountable. The CEO of Prasar Bharati and the DG of Doordarshan (DD) were indicted. Ask her why she accepted the charge in the first place, and her reasons echo the sentiments of generations which grew up without cable television. “I had grown with All India Radio (AIR) and DD and always had admiration and affection for them. They were also the ones who gave me my first break in broadcasting. I thought that if I could make even one per cent of a difference, then why not?” The storm past, Pande just put her head down and got down to work. Hoping to restore a measure of credibility to Prasar Bharati, the board has been expanded and people like multi-talented film-maker Muzaffar Ali and journalist Suman Dubey have been brought on. While they wait for the appointment of a new CEO, digitisation and monetisation efforts are on for both AIR and DD. Citing the example of the BBC vis-a-vis the Fox Network, Pande points out that programming on a national broadcaster is more sedate and straitlaced than private channels, but concedes that quality could be improved. It remains to be seen whether the good ideas tabled before the board can pull the broadcaster of the masses back to its glory days, but there is no doubt that Mrinal Pande is determined to give it a shot before her six-year term is up. “We may not be able to realise our full potential straight away, but we have cleared a lot of cobwebs. I believe that DD and AIR deserve to start afresh.”

Afterword

THE MORNING HAS turned to afternoon, the interview is over and it is time for us to leave. The conversation has ranged from family to feminism, and class divide to corruption. Yet it has been a strangely peaceful time, not least because of Mrinal Pande, who has delivered her strongest opinions with the sweetest of smiles. We leave with the impression of a woman who has positioned herself squarely in the middle of the gulf that separates men and women, anglophiles and ‘hindi-walas’. And we know that she will continue her efforts to bridge that gulf…one word at a time.