Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History (review)

Although Indian religious texts, literature, and history are full of life stories, life histories have not been a subject of study. Many scholars employ these narratives as sources; fewer have used first-person accounts to write about individuals and their times. Belonging to this category are books as different as Ketaki Dyson’s A Various Universe: A Study of the Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian Subcontinent 1765–1856 (Delhi: OUP, 2002), which examines British travel writing, and Judith Walsh’s Growing Up in British India; Indian Autobiographers on Childhood and Education (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1983) on the memoirs of the new Indian professional elite. An imaginative departure is Antoinette Burton’s Dwelling in the Archive, an examination of three Indian women’s memories of house and home to reflect on “who counts as a historical subject and what counts as an archive.” (Oxford and New York: OUP, 2003, 141)

David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn’s Telling Lives in India is an extremely readable collection of analytical essays about life histories. The editors consciously use the term “life history” to include oral histories as well as biographies, autobiographies, and accounts that do not fit any of these categories. These nine essays, focused mostly but not exclusively on the twentieth century, were written by scholars belonging to a range of disciplines from history to religious studies.

The essays are arranged according to the extent to which they fit the model of Western autobiography. The first section, on modern life histories, includes essays on prison memoirs by David Arnold, Mahadevi Varma’s writings by Francesca Orsini, and Sibnath Sastri’s autobiography by Sudipta Kaviraj. The next section, described as more traditional, includes essays about life history writing that do not conform to a Western model of autobiography. Included here are essays that range from Barbara Metcalf’s discussion of Muhammad Zakariyya’s life story to Sylvia Vatuk’s hybrid life history, David Shulman’s analysis of Ananda Ranga Pillai’s Sanskrit biography, and Stuart Blackburn on telling Tamil tales and legends as narrative strategy. The third section is more homogeneous and includes spoken lives, translated and presented by the scholars who recorded them: Kangra women by Kirin Narayan, South Indian dalits by Josiane and Jean-Luc Racine, and Chhattisgarh Satnamis by Jonathan Parry.

In a thoughtful introduction, Arnold and Blackburn reflect on the wide appeal of life stories, their relative neglect in South Asian studies, and questions about cultural relativity. One of the objectives of this project was to “question the view that Indian society is dominated by collectivities” (specifically caste, kinship, and religion), and look for demonstrations of human agency and notions of the self (19). They also ask whether life histories illustrate an Indian uniqueness, and if so, what can we learn about India from them.

I liked so many of these essays it is difficult to select one or two for special comment. Francesca Orsini’s “The Reticent Autobiography: Mahadevi Varma’s Writings” is a brilliant discussion of Mahadevi culled from non-autobiographical poems and essays. I found Sylvia Vatuk’s construction of Dr. Zakira Ghouse’s life from three sources: her writing in a family newspaper, her published memoir, and interviews with Vatuk, imaginative and instructive. Each of the last three essays contains gems for anyone interested in history and memory. Kirin Narayan pays attention to the age, experience, and social status of her informants, as well as the setting for the telling. The lower-caste women, influenced by television and movies and talking to her away from families and prying neighbors, told stories that were more frank and dramatic than higher caste women speaking in their own homes. Racine’s Viramma referred to herself as a Paraiyar rather than dalit, and explained her hardships differently than either her husband or son, both more exposed to the outside world and aware of their rights. In studying Somvaru...