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| Sheela Rohekar |
A new book was released in the Hindi language by the only Jew speaking the Hindi language, according to press reports in Israel.
By Dr. Navras Jaat Aafreedi
Tazpit News Agency For
YourJewishNews.com
Sheela Rohekar, the only Jewish writer of the Hindi language, has launched her latest novel, Miss Samuel: Ek Yahudi Gatha, which is her first novel to depict the life of her Bene Israel community in India. The official launch took place on March 30, 2013 at the prestigious Sangeet Natak Akademi (the Academy of Dance and Drama) in Lucknow. The event was organized by the Lucknow Book Club.
This new book is a significant moment in the history of Indian and Jewish literature, as it was fifty-two years ago, in 1961, that the only other Hindi novel portraying the life of India’s smallest religious minority, the Jewish community, was published. The only other Hindi novel portraying the life of Jewish community got published in the form of Meera Mahadevan’s Apna Ghar .
It never occurred to Rohekar before that the Jewish society in India could be of any interest in a nation where people are hardly aware of the existence of Jews, in spite of their presence in the country for possibly two millennia.
Most of the Indians are either ignorant of Jews or know them only through secondary sources and not as a result of any direct contact because of their small numbers in India. She says, “I felt ashamed and embarrassed when I was asked by Professor Heinz Werner Wessler of Uppsala University in Sweden if I had ever written any story or poem or essay or novel with Jewish characters or a Jewish theme in my literary career in Hindi and Gujarati spanning over a period of forty years.
The question “why?” repeatedly kept echoing within me. Was it my apprehension that nobody would be able to understand the concerns and sensibilities of a community as small as mine in this huge sea of humanity? However this question kept troubling me and now my [latest] novel Miss Samuel: Ek Yahudi Gatha has the story of a Jewish family as its theme.”
Rohekar began her literary career in 1968 with the publication of a Hindi story in the prestigious Hindi literary journal Dharmayug and a collection of short-stories. Her first Hindi novel, Dinānt (1977), won the prestigious Yashpal Award, named after the great Hindi writer Yashpal. This followed by her second novel, Tavīz, in 2005. It is the story of the developments that take place once Révā, a Hindu woman, marries Anvar, a Muslim, and the saga of the interreligious and inter-communal relations.
Maybe it was Rohekar’s own interfaith marriage with her Hindu writer husband that inspired her to weave a story around a Hindu-Muslim marriage. Interestingly Rohekar’s only child, her son from her Hindu husband is neither Hindu nor Jewish, but a practicing Buddhist, though Rohekar herself continues to be Jewish.
Talking of her marriage, Rohekar says, “I got married to a Hindu Kayastha (a caste). To tell you honestly I felt scared after the marriage. I was well aware how I would be chastised by society. And that is exactly what happened. The elderly lesser educated women in my husband’s extended family accepted me reluctantly but refused to accept even water or food from my hands.”
The Lucknow Book Club was faced with opposition to their endeavor to organize a function to release the Hindi language’s second novel on Indian Jews. This opposition is a testament to the growing anti-Semitism among a section of the city’s Muslim population, a recent example of which was an anti-Semitic illustration printed in The Lucknow Tribune.
The Lucknow Book Club was determined to organize the book release function in the face of this anti-Semitic opposition and despite the lack of appropriate funds. Nitin Prakash, its Secretary, Dr. Manoj Singh, its President and other members like Shinjini Singh, a Cambridge Scholar and Siddhartha Rastogi, a management studies professor, have been bravely countering the opposition on the social networking site Facebook and elsewhere.
Rohekar’s Miss Samuel: Ek Yahudi Gatha comes across as a much bolder novel than Mahadevan’s Apna Ghar as it also indulges in a critique of the Indian attitudes towards Jews, which Apna Ghar does not, though both novels do acknowledge the absence of anti-Semitism in India.
Maybe it is the twenty years of diplomatic relations between India and Israel and the success of Esther David, the best known Indian Jewish novelist who writes in English, that emboldened Rohekar to write the way she did, unlike Mahadevan who published her Apna Ghar in 1961 at a time when there was neither any other Indian Jewish novelist in any language nor any relations between India and Israel, and it was to remain so for the next three decades.
The author is an Indo-Judaic Studies Scholar and a Muslim-Jewish Relations Activist, employed as an Assistant Professor of History at Gautam Buddha University, Greater NOIDA, India.