Remembering the legacy of Krishna Sobti at 100

The great Hindi writer's search for the human truth remains an inspiration to the generations who came after her

- Aditya Mani Jha

In 2018, during what she repeatedly referred to as her "last interview" (with writer and journalist Ashutosh Bhardwaj), Hindi writer Krishna Sobti said, "Love, sex and death are the defining emotions of this planet. I have always tried to preserve space for them." Great writers, irrespective of language and culture, gravitate towards the Big Questions, holding nothing back. And Krishna Sobti was, by any standards, a literary titan.

Born 100 years ago this week on 18 February 1925 in the city of Gujrat, Punjab Province (Pakistan), Sobti is widely considered to be one of the greatest Hindi writers of all time. The author of over a dozen works of fiction and several essay-collections, she produced era-defining novels in every decade since the 1950s—Daar se Bichudi (1958), Mitro Marjaani (To Hell with you, Mitro!) (1966), Zindaginama (1979), Aye Ladki (Listen, Girl!) (1991) and, more recently, the autobiographical Gujrat Pakistan se Gujrat Hindustan (A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There) (2017). She won a Sahitya Akademi in 1980 for Zindaginama and in 2017, a couple of years before her death, she was given the Jnanpith Award.

Sobti's books were trailblazers in terms of both form and content. Mitro Marjaani's titular protagonist was an outspoken married woman, unafraid to explore her sexuality and to demand acceptance on her own terms. The famous scene where Mitro stands in front of a mirror and stares at her own uncovered breasts, remains an intervention of seismic proportions in Hindi literature. The Rajasthani inflections sprinkled liberally throughout the book also showed that her Hindi was a language of addition and accretion, borrowing words and burrowing into her characters' psyches with unerring aim.

These two traits—uncommon depth of characterisation and being a linguistic savant—would become Sobti hallmarks in the decades ahead.