Smart and sassy; writer, designer, and political and social commentator, Shobhaa De has worn many hats in her decades-long career. With DW she talks of her first love—writing...In 2013 French champagne brand Veuve Clicquot honoured author and columnist Shobhaa De with the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year Award. Regarded as the ‘Oscars’ for female business leaders...
...Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year Award, celebrates entrepreneurial women who have made a substantial contribution to business, society and culture. De happens to be the only other Indian woman to be honoured with this award. An interesting trivia here; the very first Indian woman to be honoured ever was Bengaluru-based entrepreneur and Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw. Well, that’s Shobhaa De for you. In her sixties, the writer seems far from ever slowing down. Indeed, her energy would rival a bunch of teens on caffeinated drinks. She continues to surprise everyone with her ventures while continuing to casually shrug away “comments” about her.
I remember a long time ago, an acquaintance (posh but generally alright) had casually remarked about meeting Shobhaa De at a party. As I quizzed her about the ‘meeting’, it turned out that it was never much of a meeting—rather a brief nos. I needed to know more—was De, well, all De? My acquaintance seemed confused by my interest. Perhaps because I am what I am—a stumpy and bespectacled journalist proof editing copies on sanitation—who should not show interest in “the glamour set”? However my interests in De had never been about “glamour” of being De. She has always cut a fascinating figure. You see, it is hard to not like a woman who is unapologetically herself in every situation. When we are done merely talking about gender, identity and feminism (which is about freedom to choose our words, our wars, careers, education and our lives), when we finally sit down to think, isn’t it exactly what we are telling our children to be? Be yourself? Anyhoo, about the acquaintance, she did use a few words to describe De (some favourable, some not), and two stuck for good; positively electric.
If you have been living under a rock, we should introduce De. She is an author of bestselling novels, a socialite, a former beauty queen and a model, a widely read columnist, a designer, the writer behind popular television serials; and, allegedly, the “Jackie Collins of India”. (I do not have a clue if De likes this comparision but she might be amused?) De is an icon for innumerable female fans both here and abroad. She is all these while also being a wife and a mother to a rather large family of seven. And in 2013, she became a woman with a vine named in her honour at the Veuve Clicquot Vineyards at Reims which is in the Champagne- Ardenne region of France. Yes, the lady simply makes the rest of us look lazy.
What sets De apart from the rest of her ilk—though does she really have any peers who have achieved this much and more?—is her incredible passion for writing. De popularised the Hinglish style. In other words, if you are reading the accessible, easy-peasy Indian authors or you love Chetan Bhagat, then thank De—she carved the path to plain Indian English that these boys and girls later followed.
Those of you who are wrinkling your noses right now, after the Sea of Poppies was released, author Amitav Ghosh conceded that his tone and language in this particular book owed something to the style used by De in Stardust years ago. Oh yes! De was also the youngest editor at Stardust. She was all of 23 years. She started as the writer of Nita’s Natter, giving readers a glimpse into the Hindi film industry. De re-invented Stardust and made it into the sensation that it was. In one of her earlier interviews, De admitted that like her, “Stardust broke all the rules” and that even today she is proud of her baby. “You can take the woman out of the magazine but you can’t take the magazine out of the woman,” she had said.
Perhaps it was because of her obvious successes that there were as many critics of De as there were admirers. Let us admit right at the beginning that Indian media went all creative when it came to criticising De. She was the Maharani of Malice, the Empress of Erotica and the Princess of Pulp (what’s with the alliteration?). But the mocking seemed to roll off her like water on duck’s skin. When asked about generally scathing reviews her books seemed to garner always, she commented that the reviews were “so predictable”—“Regardless of what I write, the reviews read the same” she believes. Guess having a hefty pay cheque at the end of the day really serves as a salve?
“I feel like, if what I am doing is not serious enough, then surely the world’s universities wouldn’t be studying me and surely there wouldn’t be over a 100 doctorate theses and dissertations on my work which are available in libraries around the world” she says, adding emphatically, “But all that is not my concern, for me it is as simple as if this is the book I want to write, than is this the book I want to write.” For those uninitiated, De’s novels are featured in the postgraduate popular culture curriculum of the University of London. Her dozen-odd novels all begin with the alphabet S, except one. Allegedly, she loves the sound that words with ‘s’ makes. Her novels include Shobhaa at Sixty: Secrets of Getting it Right at Any Age, Sandhya’s Secret, Superstar India , Strange Obsession, Socialite Evenings, Snapshots, Starry Nights, Spouse, Speed Post, Surviving Men, Selective Memory: Stories from my Life, Second Thoughts, Small Betrayals, Shooting from the Hip, Sultry Days, Uncertain Liaisons and Sisters. Yes, the S-obsession is serious. The author has also been on the list of ‘50 Most Powerful Women in India’ a number of times and has graced several literature festivals across India. De is not non-conforming to make a statement. It is simply the way she is. “In my process of writing there is no self consciousness, it is not a performance, and it is not an affectation. This is the way I write. This is who I am.” De was born as Shobha Rajadhyaksha in Maharashtra on the January 7, 1947. She completed her graduation from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and obtained a degree in psychology. But soon after she started off working as a model. In her sixtieth year, De released Superstar India, her 15th publication. Superstar India was a celebration of India’s booming economy. But it was not a La Vien Rose homage to the boom. As she said in an interview, “I have seen a lot of change, some good, not all of it good. The book is a truthful reflection of that change. Some of it pains me, others actively hurts me. What I know and am writing about are these things which we should do. Why aren’t we doing it”?
In the 2012 Tata Literature Live! festival in Mumbai, De released Sethji, her seventh novel, about the travails of a corrupt old politician from Delhi—which seems to be one of the interests that De has written extensively about. Though her most famous novels have been pulpy chronicles about the Hindi film industry and its socialite circles, Sethji represented a departure. While De’s fiction never tackled national politics, her journalism and commentary frequently concerned itself with the vagaries of power. “Power equations, the way they are changing and how they affect our landscape intrigue me,” she says in an interview. “I use fiction as a way of exploring that.” “Skills as a storyteller come to your help when you write about anything. Just like you don’t have to have travelled to the moon to write science. The world of politics has always fascinated me. More than the life of a politician, what fascinates me is the use, misuse and the application of power in today’s India. And you can’t do a preachy little book about power; no one will read it. I prefer to use fiction as my way of exploring that. You do not put your books into a weighing scale. You write the book you want to at the time. And I write in torrents; it gushes, it’s cathartic, it’s exhilarating. This was definitely one of those books— when I was keying it in sometimes I was so impatient I’d make mistakes. I was just trying to keep up. And this is the first book during which I had tendonitis. I had to have it surgically addressed. I wrote the first third of it in longhand, as I do all my books, but I had to switch to a laptop because I couldn’t hold a pen.”
One of the most prolific writers in English language in India, De seems to breathe and live her passion for writing. “It’s what I look forward to the minute I wake up and it’s what I take to bed. I write 1,000 words everyday. Just like your voice becomes more muscular if you do your riyaaz everyday, you get more confident about your range. Your voice acquires a certain quality over time. That doesn’t come if you’re lazy. And writing is my treat, by the way. When I feel really good, I write an extra 500 words just to reward myself.
Once readers actively hated De’s frank depiction of sex. But today there are more and more writers who are candid about not only their character’s sexual lives and sexuality— but also of their own. Does De believe that this is a welcome change? Well, for De, it is a bit of a double standard as the sentences may have changed but attitudes have not.
“When I began to write my intention was never to shock in the first place. There are two novels which have perhaps explicit sexual content. The rest are more suggestive about how a woman feels about her body. It’s not erotic in the classical sense of the world at all. But if you go looking for it, honey, it says something about you. But I think more than even writing about sex, it’s women with attitude, who speak their minds, who know what they want, are far more threatening. Humour, satire, sending yourself up; it’s never understood.” Like several other writers, De has her own modus operandi while writing. “When I write a book I avoid reading fiction altogether. It can get very demoralising. I’m essentially a magazine junkie: I read a lot of newspapers.”
At 60, nothing seems to have changed for Shobhaa De. She is vivacious, beautiful, outspoken (nay outrageous), and one of India’s biggest success stories. The critics love to hate her, but she remains one of India’s icons. Her columns have appeared in almost every Indian newspaper and magazines (Putting Sex in the Sensex led to a twitter storm). Personally, I hope I have the chance to meet her at a party with the “glamour set”. It would be a treat to hear what she would have to say.