Shoba De

Dr. B. Parvathi

Shobha De, now a very popular name in India, came to fame as the founder and editor of three popular magazines Stardust, Society and Celebrity. She was consulting editor to Sunday and Megacity; she is a free lance writer and columnist for several newspapers and magazines including The Times of India, The Statesman and The Sunday Observer. She has been a successful many-in-one-editor, freelancer, columnist or rather anti-columnist, TV serial producer, woman, wife, mother and a popular figure. She has become so popular that within a few years of fiction writing she published three novels which became part of the curriculum of the Bombay University and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

One cannot but wonder if all the attention that her first work Socialite Evenings got is well deserved. Published by Penguin, priced rupees fifty; the blurb on the cover says it is “an accomplished first novel by a remarkable writer”. Like western popular fiction writers who write about people and events in very high places, Shobha De writes about the ‘very rich’ in Bombay society. In one of her columns she mentions that a journalist found among the reviewers of the book, men like Mulk Raj Anand, Khushwant Singh being very favourable and women not favourably disposed at all. Her Socialite Evenings is a work of considerable length and dubious depth about which it is difficult not to be heavily critical. All fictional works operate within a frame work of plot, character, and structure and outlook which determine, guide and define their content. The book is an uncritical beading of characters and events which are continuously adrift.

Socialite Evenings is a record and a memoir of Karuna who rises from her dull middle-class status into being a celebrity and a success through a series of frustrations in personal, married and social life.

In a work which is essentially about the aimless, ambitious, idle and rich world of the affair - ridden women and the busy moneyed men, the reported success of a lonely aspirant Karuna to personal achievement should be considered as the focal point. In this book, marriage has no meaning beyond money, sex or indifference. The only marriage which lasts is that of the middle-crass parents of Karuna. Beauty is skin deep, friendships fleeting, drift and diffusion is what one sees here. Socialite Evenings is both superficial and ambitious. It begins on a grand and poignant note and collapses within a few pages as the content fails to support the intent. It is a poor work.

Starry Nights, De admits, “was an unabashedly sexy book. And I enjoyed writing it”. She says that it is “a dirty book” because it is about a dirty business: “The dirtiest if you don’t include politics. How could I have written a deodorised, d-sanitised version about the Bombay film industry...? It is the story of Aasha Rani, a small town girl with a scheming mother who pushes her into the crass world of Bombay Cinema, No comments.

Sisters is a comparatively better organized and focussed book, where the writer is familiarized with the craft of fiction writing. The scenario here is confined to the lives and homes of two half-sisters, Mallika Hiralal and Alisha. Sisters is certainly more readable when compared to Socialite Evenings. This rich idle alien world is devoid of any principle of religion and morality. For all the focus on female sexuality, Shoba De does not write like a feminist because the larger issues do not appear to be clear.

Shooting From the Hip, Shobha De’s selected writing, a big book, is surprisingly and refreshingly more easily readable than her fiction. Forced on to take the garb of people, her ideas fail to find a more simple and direct presentation here. Dedicated to her readers who made her what she is, the book gives her personal opinions expressed most informally regarding politics, media, stars and celebrities, gender issues, India and her people, Bombay etc., not as a serious critic but as a lay person.

The contents of Shooting from the Hip under various headings are straight, informal and personal views of Shobha De about men and matters and gender issues. Her admiration and affection for Khushwant Singh, Maqbool Fida Husain, Vikram Seth, Sunil Gavaskar and Imran Khan, her regard to J. R. D. Tata and R. K. Lakshman become quite evident in these sketches where she also sizes up princesses, actors, actresses, producers and films - Diana, Rekha, Shabana, Amitabh, Om Puri, Mira Nair, Salaam Bombay and the City of Joy.

Shobha De pronounces sweeping judgements – on fitness freaks and compulsive joggers who crowd five star health clubs, who later wolf down five layered sandwiches and wash it down with beer, who do all that “to be seen doing the fashionable thing at the right place; she says: “I am angry about Bombay parties where five hundred people are invited and everybody hates everybody else, and the men drink too much, the women flirt too much and a rotten time is had by all but the host and hostess who have been too busy recording the event for posterity on Video - to notice that their guests are about to commit collective hara-kiri with the Kabab skewers.” In another instance Shobha De remarks that all the people came on to the stage “more to be photographed with the legend (J. R. D. Tata) for posterity than anything else.” Conclusions such as these often mark and mar her writing, being totally subjective, opinionated and prejudiced.

The section on “Gender Issues” is certainly the best as Shobha De writes with feeling and insight. Indian men strike her as being ten paces behind women who seem to be ready for any challenge, and they, the men, think oftheir supremacy in the most adolescent terms. She says: “Women the world over are given a raw deal. A rotten one. For this, second sex second class citizen status has always been the system.” The working woman, an economic reality, in the Indian middle class can surrender her pay packet to her mother-in-law and feel guilty - about the smallest personal expense. Yet her observation is that the voice of militant feminist groups is muffled in the “overall macho din”. She says that women’s shakti is destructive as well as creative and the maintenance of the equilibrium between the two opposing forces can lead to creative and dynamic harmony; she remarks: “The very concept of the sexes locked in eternal battle is negative and destructive.” She makes the interesting and truthful remark that there will be complacent, placid women and meek, docile men; the quarrel is not to reach the top of the human heap and stay there but about the race being run in fair terms and without weighted handicaps. Women’s Shakti should be harnessed and put to good use, “to ensure a more beautiful, creative, and productive world for ourselves.”

Shobha De’s understanding of the “Cultural gap” in the growth of some generations of Indians, her defence of India and defiance of blind power groups and prejudiced groups who ought to quit India, are certainly view points which need to be considered.

The contradiction between her personal preferences and her fictional exercises becomes harder to be explained because of the obvious glee she, finds in writing them, as she confesses. It appears that she is a better columnist than a writer where her ability to sympathise with the vulnerable, desperately self-seeking, women like Pamella Bordes and the hunted, haunted, condemned people like gays, is quite touching and bold.

REFRENCES: - All the quotes are from “Shooting from the Hip”.