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JPS 16.2 276
presence in the wider national context. His weaving in of Sant Singh Sekhon‟s
play Kalakar and Himanshi Shelat‟s Gujarati novel Atho-Ma-Rang adds to this
dimension. There are other literary references such as the one to Rushdie‟s The
Moor’s Last Sigh but one feels the absence of Javed Siddiqi‟s Urdu play
Tumhari Amrita, which has had several performances all over India with
Shabana Azmi and Farooq Sheikh playing the lead characters. But while the
influences on her work and her artistic friendships are explored, only marginal
references are there to her younger sister, or later the family inheritance as
visible in the work of her nephew Vivan Sundaram, who incidentally has two
books on his aunt.
Another question that arises as we read the work is that of its targeted
readership. Obviously it is a Punjabi-reading audience but which one? Literary
and art historians, family historians or historians of national reconstruction? Or is
it a wider readership that the work aims at? The writer‟s style stands on a
meeting point between guarded scholarly assessments, balanced judgments and
the free delineation of a life story. The serious reader‟s memory is jogged by
memories of Toru Dutt‟s life in France, her equally untimely death at a young
age and Mary Wollstonecraft‟s struggle, and finally death, arising out of postdelivery
complications. One would also have valued a more detailed reference to
the art movements current at that time in India and Amrita‟s shift from them. A
bolder statement about the gender dimensions of the cultural ethos would also
have been welcome. A young woman who defies normative patterns, who treats
motherhood as incidental (and perhaps dispensable), who travels between
continents and across the subcontinent, who rejects her maternal heritage and yet
marries a maternal cousin is, to say the least, enigmatic. Her life falls into the
pattern of a fairy tale but one which is turbulent and happens to be tragic and
sad; it is a life which would easily lend itself to a great deal of imaginative
reading, especially given Amrita‟s bold acknowledgment of the body and its
desire. But as one reads this agonising tale of an interrupted life, her several
romantic fascinations including one with the handsome young Jawahar
(Jawaharlal Nehru), one needs to acknowledge that Gill has done a splendid job,
pulling the reader into a world of emotional intensity, histories of Hungary as
well as India, personal lineages and art histories all at once, while retaining his
own scholarly balance and successfully resisting the temptation towards over
dramatisation. A rare feat indeed!
Jasbir Jain
University of Jaipur