Brimming with secrets and whispered asides, family life and homes one has grown up in remain wonderful subjects for writers and readers. Sara Rai’s Raw Umber: A Memoir is a rare minimalist look at both by a versatile writer of Hindi and English prose. It is elegant, acerbic and tells the stories about the two families she was raised in, in sparkling prose. She is both pensive and provocative. In a small and perfectly formed book, Rai creates a hybrid: a bunch of essays written over time, and a memoir. For this, she braids together three generations of the father’s family living under the shadow of one of the biggest names in Hindi fiction, Munshi Premchand; with her mother’s Shia family living in an ancient family mansion called Nawab ki Deorhi. The two homes in Allahabad and Benaras are the two poles between which Rai stretches her delicate appraisement of growing up surrounded by various cultures, languages, family rituals and tragedies.Sara RaiRaw Umber: A MemoirContext (January 2023)There is the home in Allahabad’s Drummond Road built by her father when he came into money, and another ancestral one in Benaras where the family matriarch, Premchand’s widow Shiv Rani devi lives alone. In Benaras, there is another house, inherited by her mother and aunt is “that white elephant of a house… emptied now of most of its inhabitants… still standing on tottering feet, ready for the day when… it would meet dust…”These homes are full of ‘shifting certainties’ where memories play tricks on us. Revisiting the two homes after a long stay in Australia, Rai finds that “in the rooms within nothing has changed but everything feels changed.” The past still exists within the walls and gardens and the air is still saturated with the palpable presence of those who are now gone: her grandfather, his doughty wife Shivrani Devi, her parents and her aunt Mughal Mahmood, and two siblings who died tragically young. The houses themselves stand quietly noncommittal, looking derelict.Sara Rai is a rare bird. She has grown among books and classics in Hindi, English and Urdu. Major writers in various languages were frequent visitors to meet her mercurial father Sripat Rai, who brought out one of the finest magazines of Hindi fiction (Kahani). But he remained just a shadow in his children’s lives. Rai early on created a citadel for herself, with books providing the answers and mentoring she craved. Her dual life as a girl from a mixed family that spoke English, Hindi and chaste Urdu and also, she confesses later, cut her off somewhat from English-speaking school friends and most outsiders. The Shia Muslim background of her mother and the secular Hindu one of her father Sripat Rai and their somewhat cold relationship post several tragic deaths in the family, complicated the cultural matrix more than it should have.Also Read: The ‘Demise’ of Nawab Rai and the Birth of Munshi PremchandWhere does a contemporary immigrant negotiating languages, cultures and homes like hers fit in?“I find myself wondering why I felt the need to write about writing at all… why is it that I chose to do so in English, when my fiction is primarily in Hindi?”Rai’s grandfather, the legendary Munshi Premchand, wrote both in Urdu and Hindi. His novel Godaan is a haunting novel of rural misery, filial tensions and the unstoppable urban migration of the younger generations. As a constantly restless and mobile adult writing in two languages, Sara is justifiably wary of gaining a new identity and a false voice at the expense of a true one. In this thoughtful memoir, she opens up a rare window into a world full of writers, their silently suffering families, of cultural mulatto and travellers to foreign shores seeking themselves and a perfect language to articulate their thoughts in. Writing in various languages is not seen as a burden here but a mixed gift. It helps Sara to occupy a dream-like reality and live permanently in landscapes that seem awash in various tones of raw umber, her father’s favourite earth colour and the first colour known to mankind.As the fifth child of Sripat Rai, writer, painter and successful publisher of Premchand’s works, Sara confesses to having grown up privileged. Like most children from her class, she was sent to an English medium convent school run by nuns. At home, she was becoming simultaneously familiar with both celebrated Hindi authors and contemporary English writing. She began writing in Hindi while very young. Her father made appreciative sounds about her work but remained aloof and uncommunicative. There is a certain curious composure coexisting with hurt when Sara writes about her father. By the time she was in college, he lived away in Delhi – the meeting place for writers and publishers. He came home in his later years, a Lear-like character, only to die. The eldest son was perhaps the one on whom he had pinned his hopes but in the manner of all pampered eldest sons, he broke his heart. Another son had died young in a mysterious accident. The daughters were brought up mostly by their mother and aunt.A tender portrayalMost old and large families have complicated and messy histories into which multiple narratives are fed by various family friends and relatives. It is therefore a high-wire strategy Rai negotiates here. She portrays her parents tenderly. Their gruff and eccentric outward persona she reveals hid much personal loss and yet they remained gifted writers. She has portrayed with a clinical detachment how what may have begun for her Hindu father and Muslim mother with an urgent intimacy of love, by the time she is growing up has morphed into a complex conjugal life.By placing herself as a child of mixed parentage raised in between cultures and languages, by magically evoking half-understood scenes from her past, Rai is breaking many literary and social taboos. There is no denying, however, how she captures beautifully the gruff voices, the smells, and the unspoken love and grief she has been privy to. A brother slipping slowly into alcoholism, the once imperious, rich and aloof father drifting off and living away in Delhi. The aunt and mother talking in a special coded language.Representative image. Ganga ghats in Varanasi, May 6, 2021. Photo: PTIThe book also has delicate portraits of Premchand’s imperious writer wife Shiv Rani Dev, living mostly alone with her goat. Then there are also sharp sketches of various writers, painters and music teachers and Ustads, drifting in and out of their lives. The Benaras home with its Shia parlour for Muharram, dusty portraits of ancestors and magical old glass and silver objects covered in dust and cobwebs, with squawking chickens of a tenant next door romping about in a garden planted by her mother. The garden smells of dust, fragrant bushes and periodically a half-blind Maulvi makes his way into the courtyard to teach Rai and her sister Persian and Urdu. Sara introduces her mother’s family: a beedi-smoking great-grandmother from the family of one Hindu Rai Narsingh Das who had converted to Islam and taken the name of Ghulam Hyder. Then there is the grandmother Munawwari Begum, a great teller of stories.There are evocative images from the Allahabad home, of her playing with siblings and cousins, of photographs of the dead being quietly put away, of superstitions being whispered about some Sadhu’s curses and half-suppressed rivalries among elders to gain elbow room and attention. To provide a glimpse of the writings by members of her family, Sara has appended four stories translated from Hindi and Urdu: by her father, her mother, her aunt and Premchand’s wife Shiv Rani Devi. Through these half-done portraits that refuse to take on a unified tone, most bilingual readers can well sense their own predicament as human and literary mulattos, forever moving from place to place, language to language in search of what Pauline Kael describes as “The Man from the Dream City”. A product of a collective dream dreamed up by a nation tragically threatened with losing its core multiplicity of ideas, cultures and languages.Mrinal Pande is a writer and journalist, and the former editor of Hindustan.
