Even before Kamal Desai’s two Marathi novellas Kala Surya and Hat Ghalnari Bai were published together as a single volume (Mouj Prakashan, Mumbai) in 1975, she was recognized as a serious writer. These two novellas reinforced her place as an outstanding feminist voice. Both these novellas were translated into English by Sukhmani Roy in 1999 (Stree-Samya, Kolkata) under the titles, The Dark Sun and The Woman Who Wore a Hat. The book, therefore, has been extensively reviewed in both Marathi (over fifty years) and English (well over twenty-five years).
I have therefore had the unusual privilege of thumbing through the opinions of earlier critics to help me understand the nuances of what has been considered an important milestone in Marathi literature in general and feminist writing in particular.
The story begins with a bunch of old friends assembled in the house of Rajani Mehta, the Principal of a local college, and a Professor of Psychology. Although the ‘monstrous, prehistoric octopede’ of a drawing room bears no resemblance to Harry Hope’s seedy bar in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, the setting puts one in mind of the play.
The heroine of the novel arrives at rich businessman uncle Vaikunthlal Mehta’s premier shop while Rajani is around. ‘Full of weighty purpose. Past thirty. A hat sitting on her head. Flowers woven around the hat. Carrying an enormous file under her arm.’ In a voice ‘clean and sparkling, like a tender stream’, she tells the uncle, ‘I want to make films like Walt Disney’s. I have selected some fairy tales. And a few Ragas…. I have the whole project with me.’ She wants him to invest around two lakh rupees to get it going. The hard-headed businessman, however, laughs uproariously and gets her hustled out of the shop. Author-critic Sanjay Arvikar writes, ‘If we read this as a dialogue between capitalist money-power and pure creative instinct personified, we realize the puniness of our cultural life and the humiliation that falls to the lot of a creative artist’ (‘Ek Bandkhor Phulrani’, p. 281, Mouj Diwali issue, 2025).
Rajani follows her out and gets into conversation with her. He is astonished to learn that she has no memory at all of her past life, no idea of how this amnesia came about either. All that her head is flooded with is the irrepressible passion for making movies. Seeing that she has nowhere to go, Rajani takes her home. He is completely mesmerized by her. He leafs through her enormous file that contains the entire filming plan of Balkavi’s poem ‘Phulrani’ (The Flower Queen). ‘It contains maps. Pictures…. He feels something wondrous is unfolding before him. Amazement enters through his nose and mouth and makes his body grow still. This must happen. That is it. It needs to happen.’
Ram and Rajani take the woman to meet ‘silver-haired’ Kailash Sheth, a philanthropic tycoon who has ‘often poured money into [Gandhiji’s] movement’. He owns an ‘ultra-sophisticated’ studio which would be perfect for shooting ‘Phulrani’. The first meeting results in rejection. However, messages through body language are exchanged between him and the hat-woman. The next day, she returns to Kailash Sheth, when he makes her an offer. She can have the studio if she agrees to be his mistress for a year. She agrees ‘without a moment’s pause’. He installs her in a beautiful bungalow with a retinue of servants. Sheth is now totally besotted with the woman, and he wants her all to himself. However, as days roll by, he finds that she is hardly available for him. She is either at the studio, or in conference with her co-producer, Ram. He is so enraged that he threatens to burn the film and goes on to do just that.
This brings about a profound change in her. The author creates a series of surrealistic images running into two and a half pages that include references to the episode of Ahilya in the Ramayana.
Meanwhile, Ram has poured in the money that he had set aside for his daughter Anju’s wedding and made a new film, ‘even more beautiful than the earlier one’. It is to be screened in the studio the next day. However, the studio catches fire that night and the hat-woman dies of burn injuries on the way to the hospital. Ram gets burnt too in an effort to save her. The Ram-Ahilya throwback suggests that the hat-woman is not ready to hand over her creation to just anybody, because any polluting touch to the values on which she has created it is unacceptable to her. Who burnt the studio and the film has been kept hazy, but the thrust of the novel suggests that she herself would have set it on fire. Writer-critic Prakash Deshpande-Kejkar writes, ‘The heroine of Hat Ghalnari Bai mortgages her body for giving shape to the movie of her dreams; this freedom of body is a noble culmination of women’s freedom. This is a great journey of women’s liberation from petty compromises towards an idealistic goal and from freedom from reality towards the abstract world of art. This is an epic leap’ (Khel, November 2014, p. 49).
The reviewer has relied heavily on Arvikar’s book titled Samvaad: Sadeh Fantasyshi and his long article, Ek Bandkhor Phulrani. Yet, for all the light that he and the other critics have brought to bear on the novel, a few seemingly contradictory pictures remain unresolved, a few images remain too diffuse for the reviewer to see their contours clearly enough, and the sequencing of a few episodes remains befuddling.
In Shanta Gokhale’s translation, the book flows well and reads well. A few terms like ‘tender stream’ (for ‘kovali dhaar’), ‘Upperworld’ (for ‘aparsrushti’) and ‘beware’ (for ‘khabardar’) sound a bit too literal. But that, perhaps, is an albatross a translator is doomed to carry.
Nadeem Khan retired as a teacher of English in 2010. He was the founder-director of the Western Regional Centre of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication from 2011 to 2018. He has translated from Marathi into English. He was given the Valley of Words 2020 Award for The Story of Being Useless (Ratna Books) by Avadhoot Dongare.