[Reader-list] posting on indep fellowship

[TARAN KHAN]

Taran Khan 
‘Very Progressive People-Stories of Women and Movements from post-Independence Bombay’
Part I: Conversations with Zehra

Explaining my project to Zehra, I am struck by the degree of amused indulgence with which she treats my explanations. In part, this has to do with our relationship-she is my grandmother and I the eldest grandchild, most prone to getting crackpot notions in my head.  Yet I notice the same trends in my conversations on the phone with Sultana and Shaukat. The same tone of polite incredulity, the willingness to help but the inability see what they could say about those days, other than “halki-phulki baatein”-light, airy things.  

Zehra was the youngest of the three- married to her cousin, she moved into the ‘Red Flat’ a few months after her wedding. Her stories of this time and other times have always formed a part of our relationship, delivered in a characteristic style that combines humour with a glittering edge of mockery. She has the rare gift of perspective, and an ability to see the beauty of an idea or act while simultaneously deprecating it. (This is particularly true when she’s talking about her husband’s ‘achievements’!) Yet my suggestions of documenting these stories amuse her, she refuses to believe someone could have paid me money to do just that. “Hamare paas kuch kehne ko hain thori hi, bas baatien hain” she tells me. I haven’t anything to say, its all just talk. 

Several conversations later I am still trying to convince her of the importance of her talk, when my grandfather intervenes.  “Kahin aisa to nahin hai ki tum apne ideas inn par thope rahi ho?” he asks me. Are you sure that you’re not forcing your ideas onto her?” I am not sure at all –and here is my first dilemma. How much of what I hear is what my protagonists say, and how much of it is my own, fragmented identity junkie self hearing things? Resonance is a good idea, but what if the echo I hear is just me? 

The process of explanation, of introducing the project to my participants thus acquires a significance of its own. It is more difficult than I expected to find the words to communicate a sense of what I see as their significance-even more difficult to find a shared meaning of the term. Zehra gives me a clue to the bottleneck in one of her lectures.  “Dekho”, she tells me, look. Don’t put us on a pedestal. We lived through interesting times, and did so many things. If you like, I can tell you about them. But your job is not to think of it as a golden age—it is to learn from us, but also to criticize us, and to take our lives forward.

She has gone to her home in Mustafabad for moharram. She will be back soon, and then, she has promised me, we’ll talk.