Rereading a work that was important to you in your younger days is like lying on an analyst’s couch, said writer Vivian Gornick. I completely agree. While rereading Shanta Gokhale’s memoir One Foot on the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body (2019), I realised that matters that did not speak to me then as a twenty-three-year-old speak to me as a married woman now. At twenty-five, I eagerly read and jotted down all the literary quotes (her evocation of Donne is outstanding) she interspersed in her writing to give more clarity to the experiences with body – hers and others’.

In my recent re-read, her descriptions of marriage, raising children and caregiving while making a career as a teacher, writer, editor, literary critic and translator stood out. I am sure in my next reread something else will stand out.

Gokhale’s candid and detached writing, coloured by a ‘let’s not get stuck at that, roll on’ attitude, takes the reader through her progressive upbringing in Bombay in the 1950s, her time as a student at Bristol, her marriages, the excellent crop of writers and art critics of Maharashtra she befriends over time and most importantly, her career as a teacher, P R executive, writer and translator- all told through the lens of her body. The chapters are titled as such – Breasts, Buttocks and a Lisp, The Nose, Menopause, Eyes, Fibroids and the Arts. Observing the world, marking a few major events of the country through the female body makes way for rare compelling insights, and the work stands out exactly because of this. Besides giving readymade structure to her writing, the body as a site and lens brings transparency. “We do not openly talk about our sexual organs. We are horrified by nudity,” she writes. 

The feminist bluntness that runs through the writing makes its staunch presence right in the beginning when she describes her encounter with a man who praises his daughter as a modest woman who has never raised her eyes to look at a man. Gokhale asserts that in her younger days, twenty years before this incident, she and her sister were raised in a house where modernity had an upper hand – that they went around town with eyes boldly raised, looking at everything, including men. I also noted the absence of a sarcastic remark against the man and his daughter.

In another instance she describes her father’s horror of her reading The Female Eunuch. “To him the word feminism was like an ugly toad that had hopped into the pretty garden people had spent centuries creating….I was becoming a feminist in theory at least if not always in practice.” (In another instance, the father who expressed horror at the word feminism also asks her why marry at all, “Come stay with us in our retirement home in Talegaon, teach at Pune University, read, write, forget marriage and babies,” he once told her).

From the perspective received from intersectional layered feminist theories and life experiences I know that one cannot always make a feminist act even if you are a feminist. Not taking a feminist stance does not automatically make you a misogynist or a non-feminist. Sometimes it means you do not have the institutional resources that can support you if you dissent from a system, from a set of practices. But writing a book framed through and centering the transformations the female body undergoes itself is a feminist act. And Gokhale speaks in details about each of these experience.

For eg, the chapter Menstruation is dedicated not only to the experience of menstruation but also about the comfort of sanitary napkins over cloth pads. It also elaborates on how she forced her mother to teach her through diagrams why females menstruate. One cannot help but wonder how openly she talks about a subject that is still shrouded in taboo in India.

In the next chapter titled Breasts, Buttocks and a Lisp, she talks about the experience of wearing bra for the first time and comments on the ridiculousness of bra advertisements (‘I dreamed I had the world on a string in my Maidenform bra’ she quotes an advertisement). The memoir is inundated with such dispassionate candid conversations on taboo subjects. 

Gokhale’s outspokenness, tinged with dry humour, about her marriages and goof-ups in life is astonishing. Her acts of remembrance reveals her disavowal to be the ‘angel-of-the-house’: the ideal mother and wife. At one point in her first marriage she describes herself as ‘bloody-minded’. She also states it is not easy being married to her, a person as prickly with principles as her. She brands her second marriage as a tryst with another “unsuitable man”. About her singlehood she sums up: “I needed a room of my own to be the person I was….Rarely are women blessed with such blissful singlehood. The pleasure is not confined only to having my own space, my own work table and my own bookshelves. It extends to having my own cool bed….A body by itself, no move it makes arousing thoughts of possession in another. The independence to be yourself, complete in yourself, is very heaven.”

Women finding time for writing amidst domestic chores have been well discussed by great writers. Virginia Woolf famously wrote that women requires five hundred pounds a year and a locked door to write fiction and poetry. Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison affirmed that she woke up at 4 am, before her sons woke up, to write. Amidst housekeeping, numerous house-moving, taking care of her husband and children and different set of jobs, how did Shanta Gokhale, the two-time recipient of Maharasthra state government’s awards for her novels, find time for her ‘life of the mind’ (as her mother described it)?

She was also part of the Forum Against Rape formed in 1980 against the verdict of Mathura Rape case. She wrote scripts for plays, and in her words “sang women’s songs, danced women’s dances and spoke and wrote about women.” Gokhale speaks, at different points in the work, of her finding proper material conditions – time and space- to write. She writes, “The children were well-behaved and agreed to let me write when I wanted to. Our understanding was that when I said I was not Aai but Shanta Gokhale, they were to entertain themselves and not bother me.” In another instance of finding time to write amidst her corporate job as a PR Executive, she writes: “I had managed to write my first novel Rita Welinkar during the dribbles of time and slices of space available to me while I was married and working full time. I would let chapters write themselves in my head as I travelled to work by bus; then sit under a tree on the lawn at Glaxo during lunchtime, my back to the main gate to dissuade friends from saying hello and rapidly scribble down what I had thought of on the bus.”

Via Shanta Gokhale’s website

One Foot on the Ground abounds with lucid accounts on friendships, many of them with the doyens of Indian literature, some of whom becomes her ‘deus ex machina’ (such as the poet Nizzim Ezekiel): the person who brings unexpected solution, in difficult times. From Satyadev Dubey, the famous theatre director and screenwriter, who encouraged her to try her hand at translations to the renowned playwright Vijay Tendulkar who gently pushed her to write a novel “for herself”, one sees a plethora of friends who saw the potential in her as a writer and pushed her in the right direction. 

While reading the final chapter, Boots for My Bunions, a humorous account of getting the right shoes for her aging feet from a shoe store, I wondered what Gokhale would say about aging gracefully. Obviously she will not rebuff the phrase trending in the present. In her surgically precise language, she might say, “Not my cup of tea. No, thank you.”

To look back at a prolific life, a life full of literary achievements, heartbreaks and endurance, with meticulous detachment and humour: that is what Gokhale does in her autobiography. Judgement-free plain-speak writing of observations (But I feel she refuses to give negative adjectives to describe people who deserve acerbic remarks). Memoirs provide ways for the private selves to negotiate a relationship with social space. They are also sites of cultural memory. By reading Gokhale’s autobiography one gets to know how the raconteur became the person she is, about the transforming literary and cultural landscape of Maharashtra and also the major changes the city of Bombay undergo in the twentieth-century. One can read One Foot on the Ground for Gokhale’s formidable eye for details, the unexpected phrases (“I am particularly looking for unfashionable shoes”) and for the paradoxical pleasure of reading ‘pain’ coloured by razor-sharp wit. 

One Foot on the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body is an autobiography by Indian writer, translator, and cultural commentator Shanta Gokhale, published by Speaking Tiger Books in 2019.