|
 I
could have never tolerated a suffering prig of a husband like Yudhishthira,"
says Meera Ramachandran's Shilpa, "and all the Sitas and Draupadis
that have made Indian men so ssssmug." Shilpa could be her popstar-medical
student daughter Varsha or her pupils at Delhi's Maitreyi College, who
deride "those men with dumbbells hanging from their ears" in
B.R. Chopra's Mahabharat. But it is the "bloated men" and their
stories of immaculate conceptions, formidable penances, transorganic conversions
who have whetted Ramachandran's appetite for allegories. And made her
critical inquiry into drawing contemporary analogies rigorous without
being fatalistic.
In Ramachandran's first book, In their Shadows... (Srishti)-an anthology
of four "long" stories inspired by her facetious daughter-the
old stereotypes are reborn. Through emotions that are quintessentially
human, Ramachandran tries to bridges the gap between the past and present.
"We've got to recognise the contemporaneity of the virtues in the
epics," she says, firm in her belief that in the global world, children
look for distinctiveness and "knowledge of the mythological heritage
may give them exclusivity".
Sitting at the coffee shop at the India International Centre, Ramachandran,
54, looks every bit the academician member of the intellectual clique.
Only that she also runs around the capital's murkier backlanes-as president
of the Indian chapter of the Inner Wheel Movement, the second largest
women's organisation in the world, she started a slum welfare centre-besides
taking out time for books and crosswords. She picks out Vikram Seth for
his firm sense of entertainment, but is influenced intensely by William
Faulkner-her doctoral work was on his novels-for "internalising"
his characters. As for syntax and phraseology, it's Jane Austen that she
counts on. The "language sensitive" author will be turning to
them more often when her next writing project, a novel, gets under way.
But that's only after she gets over the thrill of seeing her shadow work
in print.
—Mridula Chettri Singh
 
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CURRENT
ISSUE APRIL 15, 2002
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