by Sudha Ratnam
Extracts from a diary maintained almost a hundred years ago by Savitri Amma, a young woman belonging to an orthodox Tamil-Brahmin family, throw light on her skilful wielding of the English language and her passionate love for writing and literature. Sudha Ratnam shares her findings from her grandaunt’s diary.
I consider it my immense good fortune to have chanced upon a diary that my grandaunt, Savitri Amma, maintained close to a hundred years ago. The diary carries her thoughts about her life, her joys and profound disappointments, her love of books and her passion for writing, in impeccable English. She was hardly twenty-eight when she wrote the diary and it was the period when she lost her brother’s young wife and continued to live in a large joint family. It features much more than jottings of day-to-day happenings of a busy household, and I found the sweep of her gaze amazingly wide and mature.
Her diary is a fascinating compendium of not only familial events but also a detailed insight into the position of women of that era. Its pages are fragile and dotted with termites, yet one can’t miss her strong, flowing and legible handwriting in pencil. Through her writing, she dwells on her passion to learn, read and write, interspersed with her travails of a fractured personal life. But she never lets go of her one goal – to become a writer of merit. The sheer brilliance of her mastery of the English language is astonishing. Savitri Amma’s pen flows mellifluously, revealing some chapters of her life which she perhaps shared with none.
She begins the diary with the words, ‘The streets were almost deserted and there was occasionally a car on the road. It appeared like a lull before the advent of a storm. Even the sun seemed to cast a pale light as though he was obscured by an eclipse.’ Her picturesque description at once captures the sombre mood of the day. Savitri Amma lived a cloistered life in the heart of Madras as it was then known, at the turn of the twentieth century. Her school-going years were a bare four to five and at thirteen, she was a child bride. She lived up to ninety and mastered three languages in her lifetime – English, Tamil and Sanskrit. Reading an English classic, she remarks in another entry, ‘More than the thrill the story gave me, the fine, lucid style in which it was written made me enjoy it as if it were my own mother tongue.’ Such was her love for the written word and she tirelessly worked to attain perfection in the art of writing, expressing a dread that she perhaps would ‘remain only a woman of promises till the end of my life.’
She was entirely self-taught and remembers her father, an erudite and renowned lawyer of yesteryears, whose large library of books fostered in her the love of languages and ignited her undying passion to write well and meaningfully. Describing her father, she says, ‘It is a rare thing in this self-centred world to hold sincere and generous views about others and rarer indeed to tell them out with equal sincerity and generosity.’ Aged just twenty-eight at the time she wrote these lines, her maturity of spirit was far beyond her years. When she touches on many situations and people, the notes in her diary show her keen analytical ability as well as her efforts to understand the world she lived in. The death of her dear sister-in-law, a competent and vibrant woman, at the young age of twenty-seven and leaving behind five children, was a blistering blow to the entire family. Savitri Amma’s reminiscences of her are generous and poignant. ‘I wonder whether she can find peace in her resting place with all her unfulfilled dreams and desires on earth!’ She also ponders over the meaning of life and death. ‘How frail are the life of mortals! Even as we build wonderful castles in the air and plan for a great future the imposing edifices come tottering down like a pack of cards and our future becomes a mockery!’
Her life took a turn when she got married. She had to face many personal and familial constraints, and they bestowed on her little happiness. Limited by the age in which she was born and the community to which she belonged, she learnt to bear her condition with utmost dignity even if it tortured her inner being. Time and again in her diary, who was her intimate companion, she bares her heart. ‘A continuous life of meekness and submission will deprive me before long, I fear, of whatever faculties I might have possessed…Diffident people mar their own careers. It is a curse of life, a worm in the blossom!’ Her similes are almost Shakespearean even if she professed her partiality for Jane Austen. The Victorian authors and the romances they penned exercised a mesmeric influence on her. She often analysed the characterisation in the famous novel by Jane Austen, ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ and this perhaps influenced her, prompting her to compare the Hindu marriage to a Western one. She, a young woman of thirty, writes thus: ‘No Western wife ever thinks of losing her rights in the married state. She will not be a rare and delicate creeper waiting for support. The Hindu conception of the ideal of marriage is based on the ultimate good of the society at large, whereas the West concerns itself about the convenience and happiness of the individual.’
In her diary, she refers just once to her disappointment at not being a mother. She writes as she crosses thirty, ‘Sometimes the thought comes to me that I am getting past the age of begetting a child. I am seized with a miserable consciousness that finally ends in a vague hope, hope which sustains and nourishes people in the worst circumstances. Where would frail humanity be without it?’
Savitri Amma began writing her diary soon after her sister-in-law’s death and realised with clarity that this was her vocation in life and one that would bring the greatest peace and joy to her. So, in the years that followed, turning away from her personal life, she spent considerable time writing on various topics at home. She was equally at ease writing in both Tamil and English and from her fortieth year, began penning a number of articles and short stories for magazines and newspapers. In spite of her mastery of the English language, she wonders in one of her diary notes if it can ever take precedence over our own native tongues. ‘The English language,’ she writes, ‘getting as common and mixing itself so much with our mother tongue naturally robs us of our birth right.’ She bemoans that we, as a result, have only a ‘slender knowledge of the genius of our own mother tongue.’
Savitri Amma turned to full-fledged writing when she was forty-five, following her husband’s death. She was an acclaimed translator too and her translation into Tamil of Shri. Srinivasa Shastri’s ‘Lectures on the Ramayana’ won several accolades for its precision and style. In her collection of Tamil short stories, Kalpakam, she touches upon the predicament of women who lived a hundred years ago, their resourcefulness and intelligence as well as their indigence and helplessness. She voiced the need for education for women and donated a large part of her wealth to start The Savitri Ammal Oriental School in Chennai in 1958. The school now has over 1,500 students, mainly from the economically-weaker sections of our society.
As one of her grandnieces who spent her charmed and unforgettable childhood and adolescence in the company of her grandaunt Savitri Amma, I instantly decided to translate her collection of stories, ‘Kalpakam’, into English. I had her diary that I discovered was most certainly a precursor to many writings that followed later; I extracted suitable sayings from her diary that serve to complement each story in Kalpakam. Needless to say, I was absolutely thrilled when a well-known publisher of women’s literature very happily undertook its publication. The book was released in June 2019 in Chennai where Savitri Amma had lived all her life.
Sudha Ratnam, Savitri Amma’s grandniece and translator of her grandaunt’s collection of short stories in Tamil called ‘Kalpakam’ did her M.A. in English Literature from Madras University. Some years later, she went to Italy to study Italian language and literature and taught in JNU and the Italian Cultural Center before she moved to Bangalore in 2005.
