I don’t like being called an icon: Shanta Gokhale

When it comes to introducing an author like Shanta Gokhale to friends, there are a few ways to go about doing that. The most basic way would be to tell them that she is the ‘mother’of art critic Girish Shahane and actor and former host of TV show Surabhi, Renuka Shahane. But that’s like saying that Mt Fuji is some mountain in Japan. The ideal way as her fans and readers would like it would be to introduce Gokhale as the author of two Marathi books, Rita Welinkar and Tya Varshi, of which Rita Welinkar is a book so seminal, it is recommended reading in colleges. She is a playwright – the plays she has written include Avinash, Dip and Dop and Rosemary for Remembrance; a noted translator; has penned screenplays for films and documentaries; and has been a columnist as well. Her most recent work is her autobiography, One Foot in the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body. At 80, Gokhale continues to keep doing what she does best: Write. In an interview she recently gave to TOI, Gokhale spoke about her creativity- filled life:

Your novel Rita Welinkar is studied in colleges today. When it first came out, did the book – with its story about a woman choosing to love a married man – shake up society?

At the time I wrote it, the subject of Rita Welinkar was in a way edgy but it wasn’t, in its manner of writing, in your face because I was just writing how I felt; I was never conscious of opposing something. When that happens, people don’t see a book or its subject as a threat. So no, it didn’t shake up society or anything. People who read it thought it was a different angle, differently written, and it was more or less well-received by the public. But the fact is it has remained on the shelf, people continue to read it even today.

You have said earlier that you had an obscenely happy childhood. Did writing come easily to you as that happy child?

Frankly, yes. It always did come easily to me. It always starts in school with essays and you find that you are topping in class, and you always get very good marks for your essays. And then, an interest in writing is building up. And then you try your hand at various forms of writing and hone in on certain forms that you can do well. It’s not difficult, but it is when you seriously decide that you want to write that the trouble begins because then you are not writing for your pleasure, you are practicing an art and that art has certain traditions, certain demands and if you can’t fulfil them, then you can’t call yourself a writer.

You have written in your autobiography about having parents who thought marriage was not necessary...

Absolutely. My father didn’t even say, ‘If you don’t want to (get married)’. He just said, ‘Why do you want to get married and have babies and all that? Come stay with us. Teach, read, write. Why do you have to get married? ’

How liberating was it to lead a life where getting married wasn’t the be-all and end-all?

We were strictly middle-class and yet, my father had this dream of sending us abroad, to England, to study. I was 16-and-a-half when we went. He sat me down at the time and said, ‘I am spending more than I can afford to on your education because I think education is the most important thing, but I am not going to spend a paisa on your wedding and neither I nor your mother will go around looking for a bridegroom for you.’ You want to marry, find your own man. Later, I paid for my own wedding because I agreed with my father.

As a writer with a repertoire as rich as yours, do you ever look back at all that you’ve achieved or do you just move on to the next project?

I think I just move on. Very rarely do I look back as such. There is always something new to do which I haven’t done before. So that’s something to look forward to rather than look back at what I have already done. It is not overwhelming, and constantly, one is aware of writers who have done so much more. For eg, the writer Vijay Tendulkar wrote 28 plays in all apart from columns, short fiction, journalistic articles. I have not been that kind of writer. I think, also as a woman writer, home and children take up a lot of time. Time becomes a concern, space becomes a concern. Had I been a male writer, I’d have written much more. It is only in these last 20 years or so that I have had time for myself, to write what I like as much as much as I like.

How do you like it when society puts you on a pedestal and calls you an icon?

I don’t like it at all. First of all, I kind of heard that this seemed to be the place I was put into. I was embarrassed and I was thinking, ‘Really? Why? What for?’ But then, over the last two or three years, I have begun to think that by the time you come to a certain age, people who are giving awards are thinking, ‘It is time we gave her an award!’ When the award is given and I am introduced, I hear the list of things I have done, and then I feel ‘Okay! ’ I keep thinking of people who have done so much more and so much better. Yeah, I guess there are people who have done so much less and so much worse, so maybe, maybe… but it embarrasses the hell out of me.