Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It is by my wife and Darlingji is what Nargis and Sunil Dutt called each other. Their love story has its roots in the partition. It’s the story of three generations of singers. The grandmother was a child widow who eloped with a sarangi player and then their daughter Jaddanbai who moves to Bombay and becomes an actress. Her daughter is Nargis and the book is about the obstacles she overcame before she was famous. It is very much from a woman’s perspective.
Your next book, Darlingji, deals with the period of partition between India and Pakistan and is a love story.
Yes. It is by my wife and Darlingji is what they called each other, these people – Nargis and Sunil Dutt. Their love story has its roots in the partition. I met my wife when I was writing my book about Dilip Kumar, and Nargis, a very famous actress, was a contemporary of Kumar’s. My wife did a lot of research for this, looking at the personal diaries and letters and interviewing everyone about how they kept the romance a secret and what happened. Nargis was a fantastic actress.
The book starts before Nargis is born though?
Yes, it’s the story of three generations of singers. The grandmother was a child widow who eloped with a sarangi player and then their daughter Jaddanbai who moves to Bombay and becomes an actress. Her daughter is Nargis and the book is about the obstacles she overcame before she was famous. It is very much from a woman’s perspective.
Your wife helped you with your book; did you help her with hers?
She showed it to me, but I said: I don’t want to co-operate on this – it is your book, and it is from that angle of being a woman. I would have intellectualised it. Although this woman was iconic she was treated like shit by her family and that’s a woman’s condition in India.
Still now?
Well, it gets better generation by generation, as the book shows. Nargis became a member of parliament and her daughter is now in parliament. Politics interact with cinema and with life in an interesting way, you see. The condition of Indian women is always improving.
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Lord Meghnad Desai is a British economist and a Labour politician. He was born in Baroda, India and made a life peer as Baron Desai of St Clement Danes in the City of Westminster in April 1991. He is a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, and the author of Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism, a book that predicts that globalization will lead to the revival of socialism. In choosing five books on India, he marvels at the Indian people’s incredible tenacity for democracy and self-advancement since gaining independence from the British in 1947.
