Lifting the veil on life as an Indian woman, unattached
Hindi novelist Usha Priyamvada turns 90 this year, and the quiet lives of unusual women remain at the core of her work.
Young, attractive Sushma is a lecturer in a Delhi women’s college, the only financial support of her parents and younger siblings who live in Kanpur. Then one day Neel walks into her life. She falls in love and for the first time, begins thinking of her own happiness. But when he asks her to marry him, she is torn: Should she be ‘selfish’ and think of herself? Or should she think of her obligations to her family? Eventually, she chooses duty over love.

This is the story of Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein, a novel written almost 60 years ago by the wonderful Hindi writer Usha Priyamvada. It became an instant success, was made into a TV serial and is probably her best-known work (the ‘pachpan khambe laal deewarein’ is a nod to Delhi’s Lady Shriram College).
But a few years later, in her novel Rukogi Nahin Radhika, the heroine, recently back from the US — where she had been a live-in relationship with an American — did the exact opposite: she left her lonely widower father for a future with Manish, the man in her life at the time.
There is a thread that unites the two novels though. Both are about single women grappling with difficult, emotionally explosive decisions.
Priyamvada turns 90 this December, and is one of the few Hindi writers to have consistently and sensitively chronicled women’s lives as they were in the 1950s and ’60s. She continues to write, incidentally, and her last novel Alpviram came out just last year.
She is best known for her intensely moving 1961 short story Vaapsi, about a man who retires only to find that his family now has no use for him (which I translated into English in the anthology The Greatest Hindi Stories Ever Told). But I have always been struck by the number of single working women who feature in her short stories — unmarried, abandoned by lovers or families, sometimes separated from their spouses by choice. It is a cast of extraordinary women who, almost always, pick themselves up and get on with life, no matter what it throws at them.
The married state was the default norm for girls of the time, but there were women in every family who were not married — because their families couldn’t muster up the dowry, because they couldn’t find appropriate ‘boys’, because the ‘boys’ wouldn’t (or couldn’t) have the girls, because the girls had the shadow of a past scandal clouding their lives. But there were also women who chose not to get married and preferred to strike out on their own. Priyamvada’s stories are about such women.
When they had to fend for themselves, most became college lecturers or schoolteachers. Teaching was one of the few professions open to women at the time — and certainly the most popular and acceptable.
Priyamvada’s own life in India found echoes in her stories. She grew up in Lucknow and Kanpur with a young widowed mother who faced neglect and humiliation only because she had no husband. The quiet, introverted Usha seethed at this injustice, and found solace in reading. Years later, when she started writing in earnest, Usha took her mother’s name — Priyamvada — as her surname.
Priyamvada says that she devoured authors like Saratchandra Chattopadhyay and Bankimchandra Chatterjee, and was influenced by their self-sacrificing heroines; this influence is reflected in some of her early stories. In Bikhre Tinke (1953), Mani is a schoolteacher living alone in a small room rented out to her by the Mishra family. She was jilted when pregnant, turned out of her house by her parents and eventually left her baby in an orphanage. Mani is trying to live her life quietly and with dignity, but her past catches up with her and she’s thrown out of the Mishra household. She silently swallows the insults they hurl at her, packs her bags, calls for a tonga and heads for the railway station.
But there are happy endings too, as in Phir Vasant Aaya (1961), where schoolteacher Chhaya, who lives as a paying guest, is reconciled with Vinayak eight years after he left her because of his family.
Priyamvada also expertly examines the loneliness of lives outside the socially comfortable zones of marriage and motherhood. Chhutti Ka Din (1969) describes the solitary life of Maya, who teaches Hindi at a college in a small town. Wondering how to spend a day off, she goes to a film alone and then, not knowing what else to do, drops in to see a cousin. The visit turns out to be dismal — the cousin’s wife is unwelcoming and the lunch is meagre and tasteless. Maya goes back home, lies down on her bed and falls asleep weeping. When she wakes up, the sky has turned dark and she sees the pile of copybooks on the bed, waiting to be corrected.
In Koi Nahin (1962), Namita is dumped by her boyfriend after he gets into the Indian Foreign Service, and she wearily accepts her lot as a college lecturer, a mundane life punctuated by exams, sports convocations, yellowing notes and petty hostel scandals.
But Priyamvada’s women are not always at the receiving end; some reject their husbands, and since they are not perfect, they sometimes do so without good reason. In Maan Aur Hath (1953), the beautiful, newly married Amrita leaves her wealthy husband because he’s not good-looking. She gets a job in Poona, where she lives for eight years and finds herself increasingly alone and longing for a child. That’s when Mukul comes back to her, and Amrita finally accepts her lost, broken husband. In Drishtidosh (1960), the modern club-going Chandra leaves her loving husband Saamb because his family is too traditional for her.
Priyamvada herself studied at Allahabad University, where she found herself in the midst of great poets and writers such as Firaq Gorakhpuri, Harivanshrai Bachchan, Sumitranandan Pant and Sripat Rai. She then got a Fulbright scholarship and left for the US — never to return. “I could have stayed on in Allahabad as a full-time Hindi writer,” she writes in the introduction to her volume of collected short stories, Sampurna Kahaniyan. “There were many poets and authors living only on their writings; but their daily survival was a battle; I never wanted to be in a situation where I didn’t have a roof over my head or food to eat… Marriage was an option, but an arranged marriage was unacceptable to me, and there was no one in my life with whom I could contemplate spending my entire life... No one in my family was pleased at my going to America; but for the first time I disregarded the wishes of family elders and decided to go and live and study alone in a far-off country… I didn’t think I was being selfish, nor was I being an escapist, I went for my intellectual advancement…” (It’s a different matter that she now says not coming back to India was the wrong decision.)
Her years in America affected her writing profoundly — her later stories, often set in the winter, amidst snow and ice, take a poignant look at the lives of her immigrant women characters. The women are freer, less shackled, have relationships with men who are not their husbands, but they are also restless, filled with an ache that comes from being outsiders and from leaving their families behind in India.
Sambandh (1971) is a good example. After her father dies, Shyamala takes on the job of a college lecturer and looks after her family. Once her younger brothers have completed their education and her sisters are married, she leaves for America, leaving her mother behind to live in the cramped house of a relative. When her mother complains about her situation in her letters to Shyamala, she writes back, saying, “Don’t keep whining and complaining”. The letters stop. Her sister Kumud writes that their old, wizened mother’s eyes fill with tears at the mention of Shyamala.
Now, a younger brother wants to come to America for a journalism course. Shyamala thinks, I have done so much for my family, why should I continue to carry the burden even now? She lives alone in America and has an arrangement with a rich, successful married surgeon. Whenever he can get away from the hospital, he calls her and asks if he can come over. When he does, they make love. The commitment-phobic Shyamala wants this arrangement to continue as is. She wants nothing more from her lover. It’s why she hasn’t even replaced the shabby, old curtains in her cottage, because that would mean a commitment to staying on in it.
Many readers believe Priyamvada’s stories set in the US are autobiographical; the writer asserts this is not so. She says they emerge out of her observations of people’s lives and of events that unfold around her. Some critics and readers are unsettled by how her women characters now live their lives. But as a 2017 entry in Priyamvada’s blog points out, “My characters are individual, living in the modern world they have their own definition of morality, where the dictates of heart weigh more than the conventions.” Duty has finally given way to love.