IRA MATHUR
Ritu Menon began writing after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. Gandhi, India’s first woman prime minister and one of its most powerful political figures, was killed at a moment of deep national rupture, followed by widespread violence in North India. The events of that year prompted Menon to examine how political upheaval is absorbed and remembered, particularly by women.
Menon’s first book, Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, grew out of that reckoning. It returned to the Partition of India to trace the lives of women shaped by displacement, loss and erasure, and asked how citizenship and belonging are understood when history is written without them.
“I wanted to write about what happened to women. A feminist reading of history … about whether women have a country.”
Born in Delhi, Menon was educated in Delhi and in the United Kingdom, where she studied English literature, before beginning her professional career in publishing. In 1984, Menon co-founded Kali for Women, India’s first feminist press, and later established Women Unlimited. Through these presses, Menon published writing by women across history, politics, literature and feminist scholarship, helping to establish feminist publishing as a sustained practice in India.
Menon has written history, biography, travel writing and political non-fiction. Her books include Out of Line: A Literary and Political Biography of Nayantara Sahgal, Loitering with Intent: Diary of a Happy Traveller, and India on Their Minds: 8 Women, 8 Ideas of India. Menon was awarded the Padma Shri in 2011, one of India’s highest civilian honours, given for distinguished service in the arts, literature and public life.
Menon’s biography, Zohra! A Biography in Four Acts, published by Speaking Tiger Books in July 2021, examines the life of Zohra Sehgal (1912–2014), a dancer, actor and theatre practitioner whose career extended from Indian modern dance and the early years of Prithvi Theatres to British stage, film and television, marking one of the longest working lives sustained by an Indian woman in performance across two countries.
Excerpted from Zohra! A Biography in Four Acts by Ritu Menon (Speaking Tiger Books, July 2021), exclusively for The Sunday Guardian.
“Kameshwar died in 1959, Prithvi Theatres closed down, and Zohra stopped acting. For three years she lived in a kind of suspended animation, bereft of all the resources, relationships and activities that had sustained her. Kameshwar’s death, the more or less simultaneous closure of Prithvi Theatres and Uzra’s final departure for Pakistan marked the kind of turning point in her life from which there would be no going back.
“A subtle transformation was taking place within her – she realised that the only skills she had were dancing and acting and that, thus far, she had simply, and conveniently, attached herself first to one celebrated artiste and then another, ‘basking in their glory’. She was on her own now, single, the sole breadwinner, not just for the time being but for the foreseeable future. And she was forty-eight years old, with two very young children to look after. A stocktaking was necessary.
“There was nothing impulsive about her decision to seek work as an actor in England, just a practical reckoning that any experience gained on the London stage–should it come her way – could only be to her advantage. She needed to work as an actor but also to earn a living, and so she arrived at the second critical decision in her current situation: she would take whatever she was offered with regard to both. She would suppress her ego as an actor and, as an individual, relegate her aristocratic lineage to the background. She would, in a manner of speaking, make herself over. Acquire a persona. Present another face to the world. A dresser at the Old Vic, a glorified ayah? Why not? No one knew who she was in London, and, looking on the bright side, she could see as many plays as she liked at the Old Vic. A seamstress at Pettits? A new skill. Manageress at the Tea Centre? The better to entertain her friends and co-workers at the BBC with. Waiting for her luck to turn, recalling, at every low point, Kameshwar’s adage: ‘If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.’
“In the beginning, all her roles were fillers; her screen presence was often no longer than a few minutes. Producers would send their scripts to agents with a breakdown of the characters, and if the agents had clients who seemed to fit the roles, they would send their details on and hope they were called for an interview. ‘With Zohra, people came to us because they wanted Zohra,’ said Jill Williams, ‘and I don’t remember her ever turning down a job.’
“Zohra told Roshan Seth, ‘I’m more than fully aware of my shortcomings.’ But she persevered. ‘I didn’t,’ said Roshan. ‘I gave up, returned to India, she didn’t.’
“Madhur Jaffrey, too, gave up her acting career for want of good roles and developed as a TV personality, focusing on food. Rani Dube moved into production, Jamila Massey slowly branched out into writing, and Indira Joshi retired early. Zohra waited. Used her voice initially to good advantage on BBC’s ‘English by Radio’, ‘Look, Listen, Speak’ and ‘Make Yourself at Home.’ She accepted bit parts whenever an offer came her way, made herself available, and kept her body trim.
“Her mantra:
Eat a good diet.
Do all things in moderation.
Exercise every morning.
Keep happy.
“The roles she got were like that of the Ayah in the Kipling series – and that, too (as she told her cousin Muneeza Shamsie), ‘because Waris Hussein stood by me’–but she didn’t discriminate (unlike other Indian actors in London at the time) because, as Roshan Seth said, ‘to discriminate was a luxury, and she didn’t have that. She never turned anything down–she needed the money, she needed the work, and she needed to be seen’.
“She needed to be seen, and to be seen by as many people as possible, for which television was the perfect medium. She loved theatre, believed that the best training for an actor is the stage, and always maintained that ‘[the] stage is like a sari, the TV screen like a rumaal. You can make a rumaal out of a sari, but not the other way around.’ But she also knew that television was far more likely to have an opening for her than the West End and also likely to be much better paid.
“Through the hard times that continued for several years and gave little indication that they would end soon, or for long, Zohra never looked back or retraced her steps. ‘It was a kind of one-way street,’ recalled her nephew Babar, ‘because she had burnt her bridges. She never dwelt on her adversity.’ Indeed, adversity, it almost seemed, brought out the best in her. Although she herself thought she was bad-tempered, selfish and impatient, no one (other than her children, obviously) ever recalled her being so on any occasion.”
–End of Extract
Menon continues to write and publish on feminism, independent publishing and women’s history.
Ira Mathur is a freelance journalist, a Guardian Media columnist and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
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