Raw Umber: A Memoir

by Sara Rai

The autobiographical essays in Raw Umber are as much about the steady pulse of Sara Rai’s childhood in the 1960s, as they are about the nature of remembering, and the role that memory plays in shaping a writer’s sensibility. It is the unconscious jottings of the mind, and the cadences that enter the ears, the inner life that develops during years of unhurried living in places like Allahabad and Banaras that prepare the ground for the fiction writer.

With the figure of her grandfather Premchand looming over her childhood, and with others in her family—grandmother, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins—also writers, it is hardly a surprise that Sara ‘fell into’ writing. In this literary memoir, some of the characters in the family gallery are brought to life. In chronicling the life and times of one of India’s most illustrious literary families through the prism of her childhood, Sara Rai always keeps to her own remembering of the ever-changing past.

A work of great tenderness and beauty.

Sara Rai is a fiction writer, literary translator and editor. She is the author of five collections of short stories and a novel in Hindi. She has translated, among other books, Premchand’s Kazaki and Other Marvellous Tales (Hachette, 2013) and, with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Blue Is Like Blue (HarperCollins, 2019) which won the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year in 2020. Some of her work has been translated into Urdu, German, French, English and Italian. The Labyrinth, a collection of her stories translated into German by Johanna Hahn and published by Draupadi Verlag, Heidelberg, won the Coburg Rückert Prize 2019 and was nominated for the Weltempfänger Literaturpreis, Frankfurt, 2020.
Sara Rai is Premchand’s granddaughter and she lives in Allahabad.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, India

233 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 3, 2023

Reviews

[Tanuj Solanki · Rating 4 out of 5]

That Sara Rai is Premchand's granddaughter does have its pull. But this memoir (or collection of essays?) has literary worth that satisfies much more than our curiosity about the family the writer belongs to.

An upper-middle-class upbringing in 50s and 60s Allahabad, the cruel patterns in how death visits the family, a writer's push and pull between the different languages available to them, and a reader's neverending education -- all these find ample treatment in the book. The descriptions are clear: we see. And there is an earnestness in the telling that somehow registers as 'mature', or at least without any narrative gymnastics (of the kind we see in the contemporary American memoir). The tendency to lose a hold on significance or to go too deep into excavating memory for the 're-creation' of a space is there, but the reader must regard this indulgence as a necessity, given that these over-remembrances are the a priori condition here. Houses and heirlooms have been lost; words must grant space. I think the writer's sensibility is clear from the lines I present here.

I was charmed by the paragraph that mentioned Rai's meeting with Nirmal Verma: to discuss Proust. In Rai's estimation, Verma had read everything that had been written, and when asked about this 'fact', said: 'But that's all that I've ever done.'

[Madhulika Liddle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sara Rai is the granddaughter of the Hindi literary maestro Munshi Premchand, and one might expect a memoir from her to contain a good deal about her illustrious and very famous grandfather. Raw Umber, however - a memoir mostly put together from essays written by the author over a period of time - only contains one chapter that is devoted to Premchand. The rest is about other members of Rai's family: her grandmother, Premchand's wife; her father Sripat Rai; a brother who died very young; her mother and various relatives on the distaff side. And, very vividly, the two households Rai has known: her home in Allahabad, where she grew up; and her mother's home in Banaras.

I loved this book. Rai really brings the people alive: her grandmother, tiny but strong-willed; her mother, strong-willed and progressive in her own way; the many other characters, major and minor, who inhabit this record of the past. Equally alive and palpable are the spaces, the homes, the areas, Allahabad and Banaras as they once were. Nostalgia is powerful here, and even though I have never been to Banaras and only have a nodding acquaintance with Allahabad, I found myself regarding both towns - as they were - with a fondness founded in nothing more than a deep appreciation of Rai's book.

Highly recommended.

[Parvathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book you want to savour for a long, long time. Sara Rai is the granddaughter of Munshi Premchand. And with her grandmother, mother and aunt being writers too, and her father the editor of a famous literary magazine, she sure has literature in her blood. Her memoir is a series of essays, each of which can be read stand-alone. Together, they weave a rich tapestry of her growing up years in eastern UP. It's a narrow, self-contained world she describes - of the house in Allahabad where she has spent all her life, and the old crumbling mansion in Benaras where she spent her holidays. But that narrow world is rendered luminous with Rai's memories crafting something so very tangible and unforgettable. The houses feel alive, characters in themselves, telling stories of the generations that have inhabited them. Her essay on the Nawab-ki-Deohri in Benaras, is so very evocative, bringing to life a fading Shia family in a crumbling historical mansion. She writes of her family members so revealingly - a famous grandfather she never knew but who casts a long shadow; an influential, successful father who slowly, almost mysteriously, retreats from the world; a brother who cannot find himself; a mother and an aunt - sisters who are so inseparable they share death and almost share a man; a grandmother who wilfully attempts to come out of her husband's shadow. And finally, Rai writes about her own writing and the various influences on it, her struggle to choose the language to write in, her reading and the books she loves.
It's a gorgeous written book of memories, one trying to capture the essence of what makes a person - all the people one encounters and all the places one lives in and all the words one reads.
This will stay with me for a very long time.

[Natasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sara Rai is the granddaughter of the noted Hindi writer, Munshi Premchand. But that is not why you should read this book. You should read this book because it is a set of almost standalone essays where about a world that no longer exists except in memory, and peopled by a set of characters each seemingly more memorable than the famous grandfather who she never met. I found three distinct strands to the essays in this collection- the houses she called home, the diverse set of people who make up her immediate family, and her musings on language- the language you think in, the language you read in and the language you write in. Each of them was, for me, through provoking in different ways.
Though the Allahabad house she grew up in was very different from the government accommodations that I knew as a child, her essays took me back to my own childhood. Her musings on the multisensory experience of reading, has parallels with how when I bite into an unripe guava I am immediately taken back to the Enid Blyton books I obsessively read while sitting on a guava tree and munching on the raw fruit. The descriptions of the plants in her mother's garden could be the description of any well tended home garden or park in north India!
I particularly loved the empathy and humour with which she spoke about her formidable grandmothers (the Kayastha one and the Shia Muslim one) and her mother and aunt (both of whom she considers her mothers). She never met her famous grandfather, and I loved the candor with which describes how other people relate to him. Clearly she loves her brother and father, though the affection she has for them is very different from the one she has for the women from her mother's side of the family!
Her musings on writing and language are ones I will keep going back to. Though I am functionally literate in only one language, it was fascinating to hear of how she chooses the language she uses according to what she is writing. "A talking parrot in a Shia Muslim, Sunni Muslim or a Hindu Kayastha household would have its own distinctive speech. It was more than a question of choosing one language above another." is something that we are all aware of, but it takes a special kind of writer to put it into words.
If you love languages, people, plants or a forgotten way of life, this book is a must read for you.

[Paras]

In India memoirs written in English are rare to come by. I learned of this one - coming from an author I had never heard of - at a literature festival earlier this year; and what a pleasant surprise it was. Its beauty lies in her ability to capture the life and times of three generations of an Allahabad-Benaras family that lived in the twentieth century -struggling and prospering in turn.

That she is the granddaughter of Munshi Prem Chand did help me go hear her speak at the festival but I did start rather sceptically on the book. Clearly a mistake, for it turned out to be a fine portraiture of characters, of her famous grandfather whom she had never met, of her father, grandmothers and her brother. She even tries to explore the complex relationship between her father, her mother and the latter's sister, who if I haven't missed it in the details, stayed unmarried.

A daughter of a Hindu Kayastha father, brought up in less than happy financial circumstances, and a Shia Muslim mother, hailing from a family whose aristocratic moorings from the past are fading away, she writes with great felicity of straddling two worlds drawing their sustennace form adjustments and accommodation. Her description of Allahabad, now renamed Prayagraj, as she knew it, and of Benaras, which despite an official change in its name to Varanasi, continues to be referred to by its popular name, captures interesting nuggets of life in non-metropolitan towns of eastern UP in the last decades of British rule and the first few decades after independence. Her description of the old Civil Lines home in Allahabad she spent her childhood in, and of the decrypt haveli of Benaras, belonging to the maternal branch of her family, slowly coming apart are fascinating. That said description of the Muslim branch of her extended family is rather tedious and largely irrelevant to the otherwise a successful attempt at creating an ambience of acceptance for her diversified lineage.

That families drawing members from the two major religious communities of India could survive the ups and downs of the fraught decades before and after independence, even as they went through with the humdrum of existence not dissimilar to any other "ordinary" family, is a testimony of the syncretic strengths od the Indian society, now once again under severe test.

[Shilpi Choudhuri · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than anything else, it made me rediscover Munshi Premchand and Hindi/Urdu literature. In the book I like the journey through heritage, family , memories and the search for self with all this.