I do not know how to write except from what I hear, from what I experience.
I write from what I encounter in life, from what I hear around me.1
This statement is from Maharaj Kumari Binodini Devi, ‘whose novel, short stories, plays, screenplays, essays and lyrics place her as a pioneer among women writers in Manipur and in the ranks of Manipur’s most distinguished literary figures. Churachand Maharajgi Imung (The Maharaja’s Household, 2008) was the last book published by Binodini, as she signed her works, during her lifetime. And what an expansive and astonishing treasure trove of experiences and memories it contains. The household she constructs in this memoir encompasses the king, the royalty, his queens and ladies of the court, princes and princesses, noblemen and other men of distinction, his staff and servants, the wet-nurses, and many others. The publication of this memoir singularly illuminated her life in letters for her wide circle of devoted readers in Manipur. It clearly showed the literary founts of a beloved writer, a writer who could not write except from her real life experience.
The writer who described this vast royal household was the daughter of Maharaja Sir Churachand Singh, K.C.S.I, C.B.E. (1891-1941), the monarch of Manipur appointed by the British in 1891, and his queen, Maharani Dhanamanjuri Devi, the Lady Ngangbam. Better known in the land as Sana Wangol or Princess Wangol, Binodini was the youngest of the five daughters of the monarch who built modern Manipur and the Lady Ngangbam. The mother of Binodini, the queen, did not produce a son.
In this memoir Binodini takes a fresh look, in her later years, at her long-ago life in the royal palace. begins in 1891 when Maharaja Churachand was but a boy, and runs until his death in 1941. Binodini remembers her father’s activities, the sports, dance, music and theatre that played a major role in the building of modern Manipur. The memoir does not only focus on her father. Rather, Binodini looks, through a woman writer’s lens, at important people in the palace and court life, as well as women and common folk. She gives us rich detail about their lives that were so closely intertwined with the royal palace during the reign of Maharaja Churachand.
The Maharaja’s Household offers the reader a precious fragment of history: a princess’ recollection of the fading memories of life in the royal palace. Hers is that rare book that offers us an insider’s view of that cloistered world of privilege, the Manipuri monarchy. The world of The Maharaja’s Household is one that only Binodini could have shown us. But she claimed she does not write as a historian. She wrote as an artist, spinning a thread from the memories that formed her and expressing them with the rhythm and beauty of an artist. Building on her own memories and recollections, anecdotes and hearsay, Binodini produced a work of art using the tools of historiography. The royal lifestyle of Maharaja Churachand, the king of Manipur, until whose time a long tradition of palace events, equestrian sports and elephant hunts was unbroken, but who also built a modern Manipur and stood up to the might of the British towards the end of his life, had become a vanishing world. By delving into the depths of her memory, Binodini shone a light upon a glittering world that had receded into the shadows and showed it to Manipur’s contemporary generations.
From a multitude of celebrations in the royal palace, tales of warriors and hunts, and of inner grief and frustrations, Maharaja Churachand also emerges as the hero of a delicious love story no less delightful than those depicted in Binodini’s fiction. Stripping the king of his crown and the trappings of monarchy, she portrayed Churachand as a young man and brought him intimately to life. The love story of the young man and Ibemcha, the Maid of Ngangbam, whom he falls in love with, ends in tragedy, when in their later life, their separation and the grief that it brings come to a close with the clipping of the bracelets upon her wrists.
Starting with the Lady Ngangbam, the presence of women permeates The Maharaja’s Household. From the queen to other royal women, nurses and other female attendants, and British ladies like Mrs. E.M. Jolly. The author writes from a woman’s perspective and locates women significantly in the work. By taking up her pen, Binodini gave a new presence to childless women who were virtually forgotten in the palace but whose stories were deeply imprinted upon the young writer’s mind: her sisters-in-law, the wives that Bodhchandra took when he was the Crown Prince – Rampyari, the Princess of Borokhemji. and Maharani Ishwari of Ramnagar – and Tampak, Maid of Chongtham, the beauty among her mother queens. Their ‘flaw’, in the eyes of society and tradition, was what left a mark on the writer. These childless women, more specifically women who failed to produce a male heir, had to suffer disapproval and punishment in the rumour-ridden world of the palace. The writer describes, with a woman’s empathy, how even her birthmother the Lady Ngangbam, had to bear this censure despite being the queen.
A distinctive feature of The Maharaja’s Household is its clear account of the ancestral roots of Maharani Dhanamanjuri, the queen of Maharaja Churachand. The antecedents of the Lady Ngangbam are not as familiar as the genealogy of Maharaja Churachand, whose descent from Maharaja Narasingh is well known throughout the land. The vast difference between growing up in the palace and the childhoods of ordinary people is described thus by the writer: When I look back I realize that a family in the palace meant really the respective families of our birthmothers. Even though he was our father, the king was never close to us as a father.2
And so the ancestry of her birthmother becomes important to the writer. She constructed the history of the Lady Ngangbam from stories that she heard from her, as well as from her royal uncles from the House of Ngangbam. For the Manipuri woman, the identification of her birth family traditionally goes together with her identity. And so when Ibemcha the Maid of Ngangbam married the king, she became known as ‘Ngangbi’, the Lady Ngangbam.
The ancient Manipuri manuscript called Chaada Laihui records the ancestry of queens and queen mothers and shows the roots of Manipuri kings through their women. We see that it records not only women’s married family names and clans but also their maiden names and family clans. We see in the Manipuri manuscript called Penlon Tengthaa that the traditional scholars of the land gave importance not only to the kings of Manipur but also to their queens by recording the terms used to address women of royalty. With The Maharaja’s Household the writer adds a new chapter in Manipur’s history by including the story of her mother. By tracing his queen’s genealogical roots and their links to Maharaja Churachand, the writer adds the story of the Lady Ngangbam and brings a completeness that had been lacking in the story of his life. When one reads what Binodini wrote about the Lady Ngangbam and herself, about her three royal older sisters, Tamphasana, Sanatombi and Tombiyaima, whose lives were cut so tragically short, it is as if the reader is looking at a new chapter that had been added to Chaada Laihui, one that had never been written before in our time.
The old manuscript, however, was written under the supervision of the king. So it is only now in these times when a woman takes up the pen, that the story of the royal women – seen from a woman’s perspective – emerges. Her being a woman enables the writer to achingly understand and express the stories of the frustration of a queen who bore no male heir, and who was, as a result, alienated from court life even though she was the queen. Palace intrigues scuttled her plans for her daughter’s marriage, and effectively stopped the young princess from becoming the maharani of the neighbouring kingdom of Tripura.
Binodini places women centrestage within Manipuri society’s traditionally patriarchal tradition. In Preparing for the Elephant Hunt, using the locational distortion that memory affords, the writer tells us about Gunamani, the man from whom she heard about the elephant expeditions and identifies him through his mother. When she writes of Ibohal the Tailor who accompanied Maharaja Churachand and Maharani Dhanamanjuri to the Delhi Durbar of 1911, she does so by showing the link to his mother. By doing this, she subverts the tradition of patrimony in Manipuri genealogy and genealogical writing, where a person’s identity is taken from the father and his patrilineal forbears.
Binodini describes her frustration at the difference in treatment in the royal palace between those who bore sons and those who only produced daughters in Boro Saheb Ongi Sanatombi (The Princess and the Political Agent, 1976). Going against the disapproval of her own royal family members, Binodini wrote this historical novel, controversial at the time, based on Princess Sanatombi, daughter of Maharaja Surchandra. Sanatombi scandalously became the native wife of Major Horatio St. John Maxwell, the first Political Agent after the takeover of Manipur by the British. Binodini braved her family’s disapproval by taking a strand of her family history that had been shamefully relegated to the shadows by the palace, and drew a touching portrait of Princess Sanatombi, ostracized by the palace and the people of Manipur, and described the many qualities of love. And by crafting her story into a novel, Binodini perceptively showed the life of a woman caught within the many bonds of custom. We see in this historical novel the fettered lives of royal women and their inability to participate fully in the politics of the prison-like culture of a vast, splendid palace. And time and again, the writer’s own birthmother, the queen, casts a shadow on the novel, as she moves in and out of the sorrowful thoughts of her writer daughter as she constructs her story.
In The Maharaja’s Household, the lives of the humblest servants amid the splendour of the palace, ignored by history but of immense importance for an artist, also sparkle in the writer’s memory:
Taking shape before me are people and events from the moment I first became aware – no, from the moment I was barely aware – what have been in hiding until now. Stories of various rooms, stories from nooks and crannies, stories about ordinary people, stories the reasons for which I do not know even to this day. Before my eyes are some people who were very important in the personal life of my sovereign father. They are all people who will not be commemorated in history, who will not fit into any story.3
In the mirror of the writer’s memory Landriba, who sat huddled in the royal coal shed, Mukta, the valet, both loved and abused by the king, the village doctor, Tolen, who is ignorant about hot water bags, Maipakpi, the soldier’s wife who wants to control her husband, the Brahmin Parikhya, who whines about becoming a Durbar Member, all make an appearance. In bringing them in, the writer employs her artist’s vision and craft to fashion a meta-narrative that takes the place of a conventional grand narrative. She gives a place to the subaltern. She empowers them, seeing this as a responsibility she must fulfil, for if she does not, no one else will.
The Maharaja’s Household is not only a memoir of court life. Significant episodes from Binodini’s own life alternately emerge and recede as waves upon the expansive sea of her memory. The lucid images of her childhood in the palace, and her thoughts as a girl growing up in Shillong, at appropriate moments, form the base of the story. She is a writer inextricably bound to the larger story of this household. Binodini looked back in her later years at the moments that nurtured her as a writer and said: I realize now that in the few years I spent studying in Shillong, I met many kinds of people as I matured and began to be my own person.4
Previously unseen episodes in the early part of Binodini’s journey as she became a writer are revealed in The Maharaja’s Household. Earlier, what one knew of her was that she was the first woman graduate of Manipur, someone who had entered the realm of Manipuri literature as a woman writer and was able to claim and create a place for women writers where none had existed before. But the publication of laid bare parts of her childhood and early life. It pointed clearly to the wealth of artistic talent that would later find expression in the world of literature. The roots of her later literary work lie in these stories from her early years.
The princess Binodini did not escape the usual pitfalls of growing up to become a writer. She met them head on. While a student at Tamphasana Girls High School, she shrank in disappointment and shame when she was admonished by her teacher, Oja Salam Tombi, after she had showed him a short story she had written called Imaaton (Stepmother)5. The story, which was about adultery, was included in Nung’gairakta Chandramukhi (Chrysanthemum among the Rocks, 1965), her collection of short stories that marked her debut as a writer. The stories in this book, graced with a distinctive beauty in their prose, introduced a good storyteller, with a flair of the dramatic, who often used flashback techniques to vividly bring her scenes to life for her readers. With the publication of this collection, Binodini staked her claim to her place in Manipuri literature, overcoming the boundaries of gender.
Looking at the trajectory of the writer’s life, we see three important threads in her literary journey. First, there was her life as a child in a splendid palace. Next came her interest in art and literature that had its seeds outside Manipur in the pilgrim town of Nabadwip and was nurtured at school and college in Shillong, and which finally came into its own in Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan. Finally, there was her growing involvement in literature and the arts through her meetings with like-minded artists after her marriage.
The child Binodini displayed her in-born talent as an artist, drawing with chalk as she sat under her father’s billiard table and played with her dolls. Her creative imagination took flight as a child. The young Binodini gave distinct personalities to her dolls and lost herself in her fantasy world. Ati was her tattletale doll who instigated the other dolls to fight with each other until, in anger, the little girl tore off her evil doll’s hair and threw it into the palace pond. She loved to hear, from Lilasingh, her attendant and a marvellous storyteller, about the adventures of a family of mice who lived near the palace moat. Often, her imagination on fire, she would lose herself in these fanciful tales. Another attendant, Tapuchan, told her stories from the Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and instructed her about right and wrong even as her horizons were broadened.6 An inquisitive and observant child when she was growing up, the writer built her literary work on incidents she was able to colour and squirrel away in the corners of her young life. Small incidents became fodder to be used later. Not fully cognizant of the etiquette of court life, the young Binodini went around the various royal quarters in the palace, dancing and swirling her arms, bumping and grinding to the drum beat of a young substitute attendant. Once, the king chanced upon the princess dancing in this ‘scandalous’ manner and fired the foolish young man. She turned this incident into a story called Ustadji7 years later after she became a writer.
The period that she spent in Nabadwip was a very important part of the second period in Binodini’s development. The Lady Ngangbam took her daughter with her when she moved to this pilgrim town in Bengal8 and it was there that Binodini lived for about three years. This was when she was in high school. Not only did she learn to speak Bengali fluently there, but her Bengali tutor also introduced her to the works of the great writers of the Bengali Renaissance such as Bankim Chandra, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra, and Michael Madhusudan Dutt. This proved to be fertile soil for the budding writer. It was only after she read Bengali literature that she later came to the works of modern Manipuri writers such Dr. Kamal, Khwairakpam Chaoba and Hijam Anganghal.
Binodini based many of her short stories on her experiences in Nabadwip. In Sinnaramba (The Caretaker) and Iben Rati (Grandmother Rati)9, she uncovered the hardships faced by hapless Vaishnav pilgrims who sought spiritual refuge in the pilgrim town. She peopled these stories with her creations: followers of Gaudiya Dharma who come seeking sanctuary to this most sacred of pilgrim sites, and who want nothing other than to renounce the world and lead a spiritual life, but who discover that it is not easy to expunge the loves and sorrows of their previous lives. The humanist writer showed the reader not the bonds of religion but those of human love.
Binodini, the writer, emerges from the gates of the royal palace and enters the lives of common people – their joys and sorrows, their dreams and disappointments, their innermost feelings – by producing works that touch the hearts of her readers. One may well ask how a royal princess was able to know, with such depth, the lives of common people. It is only when her life as a child is taken together with her life in Shillong that the answer becomes clear. In the royal palace Binodini was not reared by her own birth mother and father, but in their absence grew up somewhat like an ordinary child, closer to her nurses and servants. She got to know ordinary folk and grew up around them. Unlike her other princess sisters, she was weaned on the milk of Tolchoubi, her wet-nurse, and thought of her as her own mother. Later in her life, she went on record to say that if she owed her life to her mother’s milk, it would be the milk of Mother Tolchoubi.10 The youngest daughter of the Lady Ngangbam, who left the opulent spread at the maharani’s quarters to eat with her childhood friends in their ordinary homes in the neighbourhood, met Anjali Lahiri, her Communist friend and future writer, in Shillong. Not only were they to become life-long friends but she also became close to Anjali’s circle of left leaning friends. She went so far as to hide documents for the then underground movement. She wrote a book called Angaang gi Rajniti (Politics for Children)11 in simple and concise language. She secretly read Sarat Chandra’s banned novel Pather Dabi (Demand for a Pathway, 1926). And it was during her days at St. Mary’s College that her professor Dr. Majumdar turned the young student to Sanskrit literature. When she was in college there, she even built her own personal library and got to know, not just the works of Indian authors in English like Mulk Raj Anand, but also Western literature though the works of William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky. The writer recognized the link between this period of her life in Shillong and her later life in literature: This then, is the story of how I led my life in those days. This is what contributed to what made the ‘I’ in my later life.12
For the writer, this then was what threw wide open the gates of her connection to the common people. When the princess who grew up in a gilded palace took up her pen as a writer, it led to a creative process that portrayed the lives of ordinary people. It gave face to characters such as palace servants, the royal wet-nurses, and showed the inner humanity of the unfortunate and the seemingly unimportant in the writer’s very first book, the short story collection Chrysanthemum among the Rocks. With characters such as Tharo, whose husband’s delinquency forces her to become a servant in the palace in Nang’ga Unnaramdrabadi (If I Had Not Met You), or Ngaangbiton, who, in Lamandagi Laiman, (A Vengeance Gone Wrong), comes to work in the palace to win back her palanquin bearer husband who had deserted her for another woman, the writer describes the lives of the many mute servants who lived unnoticed in the vast palace. She gave them a presence and a voice. In Sagol Sanaabi (The White Mare), Binodini draws upon the equestrian culture that she describes so well in The Maharaja’s Household, having been brought up in the palace. But she gives us an understanding of a polo playing, horse-loving people through Mangi, a common thuggish horse-thief and the surprisingly long-nurtured love buried in his heart. From Nabadwip where the writer spent her formative years she drew upon the lives of ordinary people in stories such as Raas Purnima (The Moonlight Dance) and Thourani (The Lady Brahmin). She turned her real life encounters into literature with characters like Durga, the unfortunate lower caste Bengali girl of The Moonlight Dance, who is toyed with like a rag-doll, or Tombi, the Lady Brahmin, who gets washed up in Nabadwip with a broken heart.
Santiniketan’s Kala Bhavan, where Binodini was a student of painting and sculpture for three years between 1948 and 1950, was the next significant period in the writer’s journey. Being in this centre of art, galvanized and energized the writer’s thoughts and emotions. With her foundation in Bengali language and literature from Nabadwip, Binodini dove deeper into the vast trove of Tagore’s literature. Talented from birth, this writer, who had loved to draw as a child, began to see and experience not only the life of an artist, but the limitless expanse of the artistic imagination and its resistance to the quotidian demands of ‘normal’ life. She brought these insights to bear on the character of. Gautam, the artist-hero of her play Asangba Nongjaabi (Crimson Rainclouds, 1967). Not only did this play represent a new stream in her writing but it recalled the time when she was an artist’s muse to Santiniketan’s renowned artist and teacher, Ramkinkar Baij. Ramkinkar’s paintings and sculpture depicting her were included prominently in the National Gallery of Modern Art’s full retrospective of his work in 2012 although a perspective on Binodini was absent.13
In Binodini’s life journey as a writer the period after her marriage was when her commitment deepened and her horizons broadened in both literature and the arts. Her innate talent and the wealth of experience she had gathered began to flower. She married the Manipuri surgeon Dr. L. Nanda Babu Roy in 1950. Even though an eminently eligible groom of the modern age, being the state’s first Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons from Edinburgh, he was found wanting in the eyes of the queen. Just as Princess Sanatombi, consort of the British Political Agent was expelled by her mother Jasumati, Maid of Satpam, the Lady of Ngangbam did not attend the wedding of her daughter. Binodini built a home with her successful doctor husband and their two sons and led an enviable life of great comfort and prominence. But after about ten years of married life, she began to feel an inner emptiness in her outwardly fulfilled life that seemed to lack nothing. At times, she would come to and find herself standing still, having abandoned what she was doing.14 On a visit in Kolkata with Kiran Barua, a close friend with whom she had studied sculpture in Santiniketan, she consulted with her psychologist husband Mrinal Barua about this deep emptiness she was feeling. He recognized that this was the emptiness of an artist who felt bound by the demands of a domestic life. Realizing that her art needed an outlet, he advised her to resume her sculpture.15 Upon her return, Binodini took the plaster of paris she had brought back with her, and even using building materials and cement stored for the construction of her house, she started to sculpt again.
At this juncture when the artist’s creative urges began to find expression again, Binodini came into contact with the creativity and passion of the organizers of the nation-wide Tagore centenary celebration of 1960-61 in Manipur. The writer The National Gallery of Modern Art, 2012. joined the State’s celebration committee. She met other lovers of Rabindra Sangeet and the literature of Tagore. These meetings helped to once again awaken her writer’s self and she began to write. This was also the time when, in 1960, she encountered Roop Raag, a group of innovative artists, both young and old, in performance, art and culture. She developed close friendships with veterans in the arts such as Laisram Gourahari, Ayekpam Lakshman, Nongmaithem Sudhir, and Maibam Haricharan, and emerging young artists such as Aribam Syam Sharma, Gurumayum Rabindra Sharma, Aheibam Buddhachandra, Nongmaithem Pahari and Chongtham (née Ayekpam) Kamala. Many of these artists came from prominent families with long associations with the royal palace. Some even had marriage ties to the royal family and had been known to her father, Maharaja Churachand. Of the artist Laisram Gourahari, a cousin by marriage, Binodini wrote:
Laisram Gourahari was not only a renowned sportsman but also a distinguished artist. He never held any position. The artist Gourahari was nowhere to be found when they looked for him to appoint him to a position. He would go off to study music, or spend his time composing a melody, or playing the sitar. He went off with a group of dancers. Sometimes he would join in as a woman if there was a dearth of female dancers. 16
After Binodini joined Roop Raag, the pavilion in her residence in Yaiskul became the gathering and meeting place for its artists.17 She even took up playing the esraj once again. She writes about this in The Maharaja’s Household – her father had bought this instrument for her during her days in Shillong.18 She played it at Roop Raag’s performances of Rabindra Sangeet and she also sang with them. This was the period when the short stories in the previously mentioned collection Chrysanthemums among the Rocks (1965) and the play Crimson Rainclouds (1967),19 long nurtured, found their mature form and made their appearance.20 She felt a sense of liberation, and she candidly put it: ‘If it were not for Roop Raag, I would have lost my mind.’21
This was the period when Binodini, who earlier had shown her talent in writing, painting, sculpture and music, became Binodini the writer. A young graduate of Santiniketan emerged as her major collaborator from these early days at Roop Raag: the composer, singer, actor and dramatist Aribam Syam Sharma, who was later to achieve international recognition as a film director with the films he made that were based on the screenplays of Binodini. The foundation of her screenplay writing was laid when Binodini began to write more radio plays, a genre that had a special place in heart. She was spurred on by Nongmaithem Sudhir, one of Roop Raag’s founders and leading lights, when he was appointed the new drama director of All India Radio’s Imphal station that opened in 1963. Her play Crimson Rainclouds was first broadcast as a radio play called Shilpi (The Artist). She loved this art form that could entrance listeners by evoking an unrestrained imagery, and requiring only dialogue to bring character, location, and time vividly to life in the listener’s imagination. She triumphed in this form, bringing her cast of characters – usually with a strong woman at the centre and from the highest echelons to the lowest strata – face to face with patriarchy, in these works.
In her radio play Kanaana Keithel Kaabigani? (Who Will Do the Shopping?), Binodini showed how one casually dismisses the challenges faced by a financially strapped housewife. Readers loved how she showed the hooks in the relationship between husband and wife in this domestic comedy. She found that the wasted lives of the trapped beauties in the emperor’s palace in Tagore’s short story Khudito Pashan, with their unquenched desires and their covetousness, so thrummed to her own personal rhythm that she translated it into Manipuri and adapted it into a radio play called Charaangnaraba Nung (Hungry Stones). The writer princess Jahanara, who stood by her imprisoned father the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, struck a chord with Binodini who also shared her royal father’s isolation in his final days. The discovery of the hidden diary of the Mughal princess prompted Binodini to write her celebrated radio play Ketaabtagi Segaikhraba Lamai (Torn Pages from a Diary, popularly known as Jahanara). In adapting her short story The White Mare into a radio play, she renamed it Sribon Chinggi Tamnalai (The Bogeyman of Sribon Hill), reflecting her dramatic shift of focus from the symbolism of the mare to the brutish hero, Mangi. Her highly popular radio play Imagi Ningthem (My Son, My Precious), about Ekashini, a simple housewife who discovers and takes in the abandoned bastard child of her husband not just against his wishes but without so much as a by your leave, was rewritten as a screenplay and made into an internationally acclaimed film of the same name by Aribam Syam Sharma in 1980.22
Binodini also wrote original screenplays for Aribam Syam Sharma, the most lauded of which was Ishanou (The Chosen One, 1990).23 The screenplay drew upon her association with another important arts institution, the Jawaharlal Nehru Manipur Dance Academy that she worked in after the breakup of her marriage. The Chosen One was inspired by the charismatic shaman priestesses of Manipur called maibis that Binodini loved and, as its Secretary, brought into the dance academy when she inducted the dance and music of Manipur’s paramount festival called the Lai Haraoba into the curriculum. Maibi priestesses celebrated for their performance, such as Ima Rajani Maibi and the male priestess Ima Kumar Maibi, came to teach, and because of the presence of their Sana Wangol, the princess daughter of Maharaja Churachand, these feared shamans from another strange world respectfully approached the modern institution as they once had the royal palace of her father.24 It is said that Binodini, whose love of flowers one encounters time and again in The Maharaja’s Household, allowed no one, save these shamans, to pick flowers for their hair from the garden that she lovingly tended at the dance academy. The shaman priestesses also loved her, sensing that Binodini too was an unconventional woman who lived beyond the accepted boundaries and norms of society.
The writer agreed that the artist was like a shaman. Binodini wrote from her emotional core, uncomfortable with the directives of reason. Her knowledge of the world of the shaman, to which she felt a deep connection, led to the success of the screenplay that she based on the story of Ima Rajani Maibi’s own calling. So fourteen maibis, led by Ima Kumar Maibi, appeared in The Chosen One, her story of the housewife Tampha, who breaks free from her marriage and leaves her husband and child to lead the life of the Other, a shaman. With this screenplay, Binodini showed yet another aspect of the life of Manipuri women under its traditional patriarchy, one of the themes we see in The Maharaja’s Household. But this time, she showed it through the dramatic portrayal of the independent life of the shaman who is at once empowered and revered as a medium, and marginalized by her existence beyond the boundaries of gender.
The writer’s vivid visual style that made her radio plays and screenplays eminently successful comes to the fore in the three wordless ballet scripts on animal and wildlife themes that Binodini wrote when she was at the dance academy.25 They reflect the love of animals that is seen clearly in The Maharaja’s Household, a love that is inherited from her father Maharaja Churachand. Keibul Lamjao (1984) was based on Thoibido Waarouhou’i (Thoibi is Disappointed in You, 1973), her personal essay that sparked environmental awareness in Manipur. Written as reportage after visiting Keibul Lamjao, the floating lake home of the rare brow-antlered deer, it was the result of the deep sorrow she felt at seeing the animals disappear. Her disapproval in her essay, of the ascendancy of the rights of human beings and their behaviour, in the name of progress, at the expense of the rights of birds and wild animals was presented afresh in the ballet Keibul Lamjao and then rewritten again, as a screenplay, for the film Sangai: Dancing Deer of Manipur, directed by her collaborator, Aribam Syam Sharma.26
Binodini’s unshakeable stand that it is one’s duty to carefully tend and preserve Mother Earth, and her intense love for animals and wildlife that threads through The Maharaja’s Household, also introduced eco-feminism in Manipuri literature. Just as one cannot live without water, she stated in her story Stepmother that she wrote in her teens, a land and its people cannot exist without its women. In the writer’s view, just as one takes water for granted, the worth of women is as easily dismissed. In an essay called Nong’goubi (The Crow Pheasant, 1974), Binodini subverted the Manipuri fable of the mother crow pheasant who, burdened by the demands of housework and children, ducks out of the communal cleaning of the lakes and rivers. In her essay, the writer questioned the subsequent fate of the crow pheasant when, as the fable would have it, she is punished for her evasion by being forbidden to drink water from lakes and rivers but has to wait for rain. She recasts the fable from a woman’s perspective and asks the land if the penalization of women’s inability to take part in public life is fair, and pleads for an understanding of the lot of over-burdened wives and mothers.
With her personal essays like The Crow Pheasant and Thoibi is Disappointed in You, Binodini attempted a form that did not have a long tradition in Manipur and, building up to the essays in The Maharaja’s Household, she carved for herself a significant place in the field of personal essays in modern Manipuri literature. Essays such as Darjeeling Chat’ngeida (On a Visit to Darjeeling, 1965), on watching the sun rise on the Kanchenjunga in the Himalaya, and Ahong Yumna Hairi (The Tribal Home Tells Me, 1968) on going to the hills of Tamenglong, dramatically brought news of places she visited adding, with a writer’s sensibility, both colour and an artistic touch. These personal essays intimately drew the reader into their world.
It was thus that Binodini breathed life into Manipuri travel writing. An author who always wrote from her emotions, her works in every genre have the force of a deeply felt passion, but one that was not easily awakened. When she felt something deeply, her writing acquired force. This can be seen in both O Mexico! Lamkoi Waari (O Mexico! Travel Tales, 2004) and The Maharaja’s Household. For some considerable time, her experience as Secretary of the dance academy, when she took a Manipuri dance troupe to Mexico, North America and several countries in Europe in 1976, lay dormant within her. ‘It is true there are many people who slumber on unless they are delivered a great shock. I am one among them,’27 she wrote. The terrible earthquake in Mexico of September 19, 1985, delivered just this shock and the essays in O Mexico! flowed out from a deeply felt empathy which reverberated with her readers. Even though these travel essays include the dancers’ and musicians’ experiences of their performance, their highs and lows, and news of what these highly civilized countries had to offer, the writer, always observant of the lives of ordinary people, was loathe to leave behind the forlorn mother and daughter selling fruit in Mexico, the children standing barefoot under the dim lamp posts in Monterey, and she delivered the memory of seeing them as extraordinary reportage.
The song lyric Lairabini Hainei Ima Nangbu Mina (They Say You are Poor, Mother), a contemporary Manipuri classic with music by Aribam Syam Sharma, came to Binodini after she returned from these foreign lands.28 She had come back from this trip across the seas having encountered Western civilization, taken in its skyscrapers, and its polished roads, but rather than being dazzled by these glittering lands, she grew to love even more the denigrated poverty of her homeland. She tired of the wealth and opulence. She remembered the hills of her land and thought she would find calm only when she felt an inner peace.
Binodini reached a wide audience with these contemporary classics that sang of her love of the land, of romance, and also wrote songs for children, spirituals, and lyrics of narrative drama. She wrote Kanaada Sinnani Phiraal Ase (To Whom Do We Pass on this Flag) in the 1960s at the peak of her involvement with Roop Raag when she had started writing song lyrics for its musicians.29 In this song, the flag stands for the writer’s staunch desire to preserve Manipur’s cultural heritage, reputation and identity. When the lyric was rediscovered in one of her diaries in the summer of 2001, it seemed as though it had been written for those who had given their lives in the fight for the preservation of Manipur’s traditional territorial boundaries. The song became the anthem for the tragic events of June 18, 2001, an incident that led to Binodini famously returning her Padmi Shri, the national recognition she had received for her contribution to Indian culture. Her love of Manipur was returned by the people of the land. To them, Binodini was their beloved Sana Ibemma, or Her Highness the Lady, with the younger ones endearingly preferring to address her as Imasi, or Royal Mother, rather than the more formal and socially appropriate Eigya Ibemma.
Binodini’s readers had long hankered for the life story that their beloved and distinguished Imasi never wrote. But even with writing her memories of the palace, she waited till she felt a deep stirring to do so. This came, as she relates in the memoir, in her later life with the discovery of the photograph of Maharaja Churachand’s fourth wife Tampak, Maid of Chongtham. This sparked the memories of a dazzling life in the royal palace that led her to write The Maharaja’s Household. So how did Tampak pry open the long-closed doors to the part of the writer’s life in the palace? It was the image of the childless Tampak, standing by herself among the tumult of life in the royal court that moved the writer. The plaint of her muted voice touched the writer’s heart. The writer heard it, and crying, ‘I have found it! I have found it!’30, she found her starting place for this memoir. The sorrow of a woman thus became the key that unlocked the gates of her palace.
So it was only in her twilight years that the writer wrote episodes from her childhood in the palace, remembered fondly at times and with amusement at others; revealing incidents that were once hazy but now had been brought to light. Many voices and approaches emerge, giving its overall style and structure. The essays ran as a series also called Churachand Maharajgi Imung (The Maharaja’s Household) in a Manipuri daily called Poknapham from October 5, 2002 until October 24, 2007. As they were written and published, one by one, in this series over five years, there is indeed some looseness in the structure of the book. The essays were written discretely, one at a time but with a view to presenting them as a whole. In addition to this, as she was putting this book together, she included two essays that were not in the series but had been written and published before, around 1997–1998. They are The Sportsman Maharaja Churachand and His Sportsmen, the writer’s fond recollection of the athlete Churachand’s games of cricket and his world of sports that she felt were about to be forgotten – along with the names of players, so as not to lose this fragment of history, and My Scattered Memories of our Close Bonds with Assam and Shillong, an earlier version of which had appeared in the same daily.
Even though the writer wrote some of these essays in her own hand when she started out, she dictated most of them to her assistants.31 This was a habit she had occasionally resorted to early on, indulging in her fondness for oral storytelling, delveing into her prodigious memory. She often built her stories by narrating them to her artist confidantes like Chongtham Kamala and Yengkhom Roma.32 But in the case of The Maharaja’s Household, it was also because she was developing a problem with her writing hand. So some of repetitions in the book are a result of her dictating these essays and not writing and rewriting in her own hand as she usually did. Later, she had her assistants gather them together to be published as a book. The last three essays of the 34 in the final book were not published in Poknapham, but were written afterwards to give final form to the memoir. The editing of the book, entailed putting together these essays written and published separately over a period of five years, and proved to be an enormous task, especially given that Manipuri writers do not have the luxury of book editors.
But there is a stylistic reason as well. The writer’s response when her repetitions were pointed out was to say that this was the nature of memory and her manner of their recall: ‘I recall at this juncture that my daughter Roma33 once said, Imasi, your essays have some repetitions every now and then. What she said is true. But I thought to myself, If I remember over and over again, I must write over and over again. And so I will not try to think, I will not try to recall. I will write my memories as they come to me.’34 As Binodini recast her memories into literature, she was not only aware of their nature – emotional, repetitive, unpredictable, searching and demanding – but she incorporated and presented these characteristics openly to her reader. In this way too, she shaped the meta-narrative style we see in her essays in The Maharaja’s Household.
There are two kinds of memories that the writer works with in The Maharaja’s Household: her own, and the stories that were told to her. She incorporated features of oral literature by including stories from her royal mother Maharani the Lady Ngangbam, her older brothers and sisters, Pundit Ningthoukhongjam Khelchandra, and various elders. The writer also brings to the reader fireside stories heard from other storytellers, as for example The Lady in White on her Wedding Night, or the story of the ghost-ship in English Bye in Shillong. These tales had made a strong impression on her as a child. The inclusion of hearth tales such as these to form a common thread also explains the differing moods and voices we encounter in The Maharaja’s Household.
This book was not written to include all the events that took place in the enormous household of Maharaja Churachand. Instead we see those incidents that touched the artist Binodini’s heart at each bend and turn of her memory stream. Just as a river flows, her memory starts with her encounter with her childless mother Tampak and runs through her childhood until the death of her father Maharaja Churachand. Even though the book contains bits of history, having lived close to the core of important historical events, the writer averred that she did not write as a historian. Instead, the core of the book is shaped by the emotions of an artist and her expressions. The writer felt this deeply and brought in Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s perspective into her own realization: ‘But as I opened the door, I discovered that memories are not history but original creations by the unseen artist.’35
This is the moment of Binodini’s epiphany when she recognizes the nature of her own memory, of her essay-memoir and her creative process, through the words of Tagore. She finally sees her book for what it had become, for what it was. It dawns upon the reader that for Binodini, the creative imagination of the artist towers above all. She demanded that she be freed from definitions and identifications, while yet enriching the feminism, leftist thinking, historiography and activism in Manipur with which her literary legacy is sometimes associated. The author of one of Manipur’s most beloved and acclaimed historical novels, the 1976 Sahitya Akademi award-winning The Princess and the Political Agent, and numerous essays on untold, alternative histories, Binodini always said that she was not a scholar or a historian. Yet she is unafraid to boldly break the flow of her prose with lists of queens’ titles, cricket players and palace musicians. She balked at being called a feminist, and was impatient with women who paraded the superficial trappings of feminism, yet founded Leikol, the women writers’ circle of Manipur. She remained left-leaning her entire life but refused to march under any banner. She was a social activist who was dismissive of exploitative, careerist activism. She saw beauty in the weaknesses and foibles of human beings and translated it into the beauty and poised elegance of her prose. Raised in a palace during a monarch’s reign, looking at the world through the eyes of a woman writer, and immersing herself among the people by leading a life as an enlightened commoner, Binodini, the writer, gazed out upon the waves on her stream of memory in her evening years and, capturing a multitude of voices, made a ground-breaking contribution to Manipuri literature with The Maharaja’s Household.
Translated from the Manipuri by L. Somi Roy
August 23, 2014
1. Binodini, Leikol Study Circle, May 22, 2005. Leikol is the acronym for Leima Khorjeikol, the women writers’ circle that M.K. Binodini Devi founded.
2. Chapter 6: Ibemcha, Maid of Ngangbam, p.61.
3. Chapter 10: Maharaja Churachand’s Favored Retainers Landriba and Mukta, p.85.
4. Chapter 25: My Uncle Paramananda when I was Studying in Shillong, p.3.
5. The story was first published in her friend Khaidem Pramodini’s Punsi Meira (Torch of Life, 1958), a collection of three stories by Binodini and two by Pramodini.
6. Binodini: A Writer’s Life (Documentary directed by Aribam Syam Sharma. Produced by Sahitya Akademi, 40 min, 2004).
7. Nung’gairakta Chandramukhi (Chrysanthemum among the Rocks, 1965), collected short stories.
8. Now in present day West Bengal.
9. Chrysanthemum among the Rocks, 1965), op. cit.
10. Maharaj Kumari Binodini Devigi Sahitya Neinaba (A Critical Analysis of the Literature of Maharaj Kumari Binodini Devi). Dr. Bishnulatpam Tarunkumari Devi, doctoral dissertation, Manipur University, 2012.
11. Wakma Maibi amasung Atei Waarengsing (The Shaman Poet and other Essays). Memchoubi, 1999.
12. Chapter 27: My Uncle Paramananda Once Again; p.4.
13. “Ramkinkar Baij: A Retrospective”, curated by K.S. Radhakrishnan.
14. Interview with L. Somi Roy, June 10, 2014.
15. Ibid.
16. Chapter 14: The Sportsman Maharaja Churachand and His Sportsmen; p.72
17. Yaiskul is known as the artistic neighborhood of Imphal. She wrote a fond essay Eigi Sangoi (My Pavilion, 2001) about the salons in her residence.
18. Chapter 25: My Uncle Paramananda when I was Studying In Shillong; p.
19. The English translation of Crimson Rainclouds by L. Somi Roy was published by Thema Books, Kolkata, in 2012.
20. Asangba Nongjaabi was first performed by artists of Roop Raag at Rupmahal Theater on February 20, 1966.
21. Interview with Aribam Syam Sharma, August 3, 2014.
22. My Son, My Precious was awarded the Grand Prix at the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes in 1981. The English translation of the screenplay was published by Cinewave, Kolkata, in 1981.
23. The Chosen One premiered internationally in Un Certain Regard at the 1991 Cannes film festival.
24. Interview with Aribam Syam Sharma, op. cit.
25. Kong Hangoi (The Toad Warrior, 1971), Keibul Lamjao (1984) and Loktak Isei (Song of Loktak, 1991).
26. Keibul Lamjao and its film version which won the BFIOutstanding Film of the Year Award in 1988, reached an international audience.
27. O Mexico! Lamkoi Waari (O Mexico! Travel Tales, 2004), p 2.
28. Interview with Aribam Syam Sharma, op. cit.
29. Binodini’s song lyrics and translations of Rabindra Sangeet were published in Isei Binodinigi (Songs of Binodini, ed. Aribam Syam Sharma and Chongtham Kamala, Imasi Publications, 2014).
30. Chapter 1: ‘My Mother Tampak, Maid of Chongtham’, p.1.
31. Mutum Debola, R.K. Thoibisana and Dr. Bishnulatpam Tarunkumari.
32. Interview with L. Somi Roy, op.cit. Yengkhom Roma, the Manipuri film and theatre actress.
33. It is customary to call unrelated but loved younger associates like Yengkhom Roma daughters.
34. Chapter 24: ‘My Sovereign Father Sends Me to School in Shillong’; p.130.
35. Chapter 34: ‘A Few Words I Want to Say,’ p. 180.