Still Writing Our Lives

Her novels may belong to another century, but Jane Austen's worlds - full of wit, warmth, frailty and grace - remain astonishingly contemporary in spirit and substance

- YAUVANIKA CHOPRA

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a keen wit and excellent prose must be in want of a publisher. But even if her various novels do not find commensurate financial appreciation from said publisher(s), her legacy may in some cases eclipse her own expectations.

In another December, 250 years ago, Jane Austen was born. Over the course of her relatively short life - she died at the age of 41 - she would write stories whose premises have since become extraordinarily recognisable in being adapted to a dizzying range of popular culture around the world. In India, her renown is enduring. She has a connection to the subcontinent through an aunt who married an East India Company surgeon and an association with Warren Hastings; her books, however, rarely touch upon colonisation or other politics. They focus on family and finance, but do not particularly engage with any extractive logic behind the acquisition of the latter. Nonetheless, Austen is familiar to Indians across generations. Her novels have been prescribed in middle school syllabi and undergraduate college courses. Those who may not have read her work are likely to have encountered variations of it in films like Rajiv Menon's Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000), Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice (2004) and Rajshree Ojha's Aisha (2010).

Beloved to both the general reader and the academic, Austen's novels are humorous in gentle and wry ways, critical of social hypocrisies, and culminating towards domestic happiness. In each, the transformation of character by overcoming flaws of dishonesty or greed or obstinacy or arrogance leads to a healthier sense of self within society. These books are infused with a certain piety, but without any overt self-righteousness aside from their contextual location within a particular time and place.