My Beloved Life had been sitting unread on my bookshelf ever since I finished We That Are Young. I’d got the two back-to-back, craving Indian literature, but my disappointment with We That Are Young made me hesitate to pick this one up.
When I finally did, it came as a welcome surprise — a refreshing antidote to the overwritten, overwrought prose I’d struggled through before.
Jadunath Kunwar’s beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. While pregnant, his mother nearly dies from a cobra bite – and this is only the first of many challenges in store for Jadu.
As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, he finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He becomes a historian. He has a daughter who becomes a television journalist and later escapes her marriage to pursue a career in the United States.
And he sees currents of huge change sweep across India—from Independence to Partition, Gandhi to Modi, the Mahabharata to Somerset Maugham—in ways that Jadu is both apart from and can’t help but represent.
~ Synopsis from goodreads
My Review
This is a book written from two points of view – first, the father Jadu, who narrates his life experiences from pre-Independence India right up to Modi times from his point of view. This is followed by his daughter Jugnu’s POV, who narrates her life in modern India, and then life as an immigrant living in the United States.
Since Jadu is a historian and Jugnu a journalist, this book is not just a collection of personal narratives; it also explores the socio-political-economic goings-on of their times.
They both are around some extraordinary people, but they lead ordinary lives. Their lives are largely mundane, but when you put all the pieces together, the sum is a wonderful life. Jadu is the first of his family to go to college. As a teacher later in college, he gets caught up in the political discourse of the time, participates in protests, and even ends up in jail.
A turning point is his Fulbright Scholarship, which gives him more exposure to the world around him.
His daughter Jugnu’s life is similarly ordinary. She grows up, goes to school and college, and gets married. A turning point is when her husband is accused of rape. She gracefully moves on, divorces him, and emigrates to the US, where she continues to work and live an ordinary life.
Both lives are ordinary, but I could relate so much to them – from their early closeness to the natural later life chasm between them – nothing extraordinary or dramatic, just the normal disagreements that we also face in our daily lives. Political differences, parental disapproval over romantic choices, health concerns, all the normal day-to-day things of life and relationships.
Jadu and Jugnu’s stories snake their way through India’s political history from the 1930s to the present and is so pleasant to read. It wanders, takes detours, loses itself in thought till it gently gets back on track.
This is not a fast-paced story. Even though it’s a short book, I read it at a gentle pace over several weeks, putting it down and then returning to it again for a gentle warmth and feel of India. I admit I liked the historical portion of Jadu’s narrative better than the modern one, but overall, this was a lovely, charming, easy book to read.
The takeaways are life-affirming: no life, however seemingly unexceptional is in vain.
