A Country called childhood Deepti Navals autobiography, the down memory lane journey
Photo by : Incredible India Info
A Memoir with literature value, full description of the period of social, cultural and political aspects and no-nonsense filmy gossips
A Country called childhood – Deepti Naval’s autobiography, the down memory lane journey
A Memoir with literature value, full description of the period of social, cultural and political aspects and no-nonsense filmy gossips
Deepti Naval, one of the finest actresses, India has, started her career with veteran filmmaker Shyam Benegal’s Junoon in 1978. Shashi Kapoor produced film Junoon had an ensemble cast, where Deepti’s role was quite small but through her acting skill, she made her presence felt by the film lovers. As a result, within two years, she has been casted in the lead role for the film Ek Baar Phir directed by Vinod Pandey, and since then, along with Smita Patil and Shabana Azmi, Deepti Naval also became the lead actress of Indian parallel cinema. She has given amazing performances in the films, since last forty-four years constantly.
Deepti Naval along with another incredible actor Farooque Shaikh, made an iconic all-time favourite on-screen couple on the 80s with the films like Chashme Buddoor in 1981 and Katha in 1983, both directed by Sai Pranjape, Kissi Se Na Kehna, Rang Birangi, both in 1983 directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Saath Saath in 1982 directed by Raman Kumer and Faasle directed by Yash Chopra in 1985. Then Hema Malini, again reunite the pair after almost three decades in her film Tell Me O Kkhuda in 2011. In 2013 they did the last film Listen... Amaya, the year Farooque Shaikh died.
In her career Deepti Naval also acted in some remarkable films, which will be written on the golden words of the Indian Cinema. Gulzar’s Angoor, Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s Mohan Joshi hazir ho, Jagmohan Mundhra’s Kamla and Bawandar, Tinnu Anand’s Yeh ishq nehi asaan, Prakash Jha’s Damul and Hip hip hurrey, Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Andhi Gali, Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala and Holi, Amol Palekar’s Ankahee, Arbind Sen’s Nasihat, Sudhir Mishra’s Main Zinda hoon and Inkaar, Tapan Sinha’s Didi, Girish Kasaravalli’s Ek ghar (also in Kannada version Mane), Subhash Ghai’s Saudagar, K. Hariharan’s Current, Freaky Chakra by V.K. Prakash and Ziba Bhagwagar, Goutam Ghose’s Yatra, Nandita Das’ Firaaq, Sanjoy Nag’s Memories in March, Zoya Akhtar’s Zindegi na milegi dobara, Navdeep Singh’s NH-10, Sekhar Suman’s Heartless and Garth Davis’ Lion. She has also acted in Zoya Akhta’s web series for Amazon Prime, Made in Heaven and Rohan Sippy, Arjun Mukherjee directed web series Criminal Justice: Behind closed door.
Deepti Naval also written and directed a very popular women-oriented television serial Thoda sa asman, where Dr. Sriram Lagoo and Nadira acted in the pivotal roles. Her directorial debut feature film is Do paise ked hoop char aane ki barish, acted by Manisha Koirala and Rajit Kapoor, which has been critically acclaimed and awarded in many film festivals.
Besides her successful acting career, she is also an avid trekker, who loves mountains, photographer, quite busy making beautiful paintings and regularly showcasing in various art exhibitions, maintaining the Deepti Naval studio at Kullu in Himachal Pradesh, travelling around and constantly writing. She has been published her Hindi poems collection Lamha Lamha in 1983, in English Black wind and other poems in 2004 and The Mad Tibetan in 2011.
Deepti Naval came up with her fourth book A Country called childhood: A Memoir, published by the Aleph Book Company. She always wanted to talk about the unknown phases of her life. Most of us we know about her successful filmy Career. Even many of us know about her personal life also, that she has been married to noted filmmaker Prakash Jha, the divorced though but still they maintain a very friendly relationship. They have adopted a baby girl and their daughter Disha Jha is helping her father on film projects. Later on, her relationship with Pt. Jasraj’s nephew Vinod Pandit, or her brief relationship with actor Nana Patekar, almost everything is on public domain. But her childhood days was completely unknown to the people. The beautiful memories very articulately penned down by the veteran actress, also wanted that there should be some literary value to her writings.
In the introduction of her memoir, she has mention that, “When I started to write about my childhood, I thought of it as not just a regular book where I tell people about all that I lived through. Rather, I wanted to recreate my childhood for the reader, I wanted to take you through those corridors of memory, setting up things the way I remember them. In that sense it is not a typical memoir – it is more like a screenplay. This book could simply be titled, ‘Stories from my Childhood’. And it would be apt. Because I fell life is all about stories; that I am the sum total of all the stories that impacted me since I was a little girl, stories from my early days. It is stories that fill me up with life -make me what I am – stories that make me look at life the way I do, stories that make my world come alive. If it were not for the stories that come down to me from my mother, my father, and all the people around at the time I was growing up, then who would I be? What would I be without the stories that crept into my heart, found a nesting place, and stayed in there forever?
Stories… I don’t nurture them, they nurture me”.
Talking about her grandparents, she described how difficult life can be for some people, as her maternal grandparents become refugee twice in their lifetime. First time when they had to leave Burma or Myanmar, left behind all their belongings. They were quite prosperous families in those days. Then they have settled down at Lahore, but unfortunately, they had to leave Lahore also, as because of the partition of India – Pakistan in 1947. But every human has possessive of something or others. Her Nani (maternal grandmother) brought her gramophone all the way from Burma to India. Though she has to pass through very difficult terrain of hills, dense forests but she kept her gramophone all the time along with her, one of here priced and passionate possession.
Some memories are not personal experience but we accrue them from our parents or close relative, which passes from generation to generations as oral history. Deepti Naval has learnt from her mother that when she was born a very stormy and disturbed night on 3rd February 1952, at the V. J. Queen Victoria Jubilee Hospital in Amritsar, her mother was all alone with the new born baby, it was raining like cats and dogs, the water was leaking from all over the room of the red bricked British structure, the floor was logged with the lice cold water, where chilling wind was coming in from the slit of the window, then at the wee hours in the morning, when it was till dark outside, a Sadhu (Godman) came and knowing the door constantly for some time. But her mother was unable to got up, as she doesn’t have enough strength to stood up and open the door. But at the end, the sadhu cursed her mother and left. Deepti used to get fascinated every time she used to hear the story from her mother, all the dramatic elements the freezing cold, the dimly lit corridors, the deserted ward, the deluge, the ominous sadhu, and his curse, she has asked her mother many times, what was the curse about, every time her mother used to say, that the curse was for her only not for Deepti.
She has also learnt about the India – Pakistan partition from her father, whom she used to call ‘Piti’, short from of Pita ji. In 1947 there was a news came that Amritsar will be in Pakistan and Lahore will be in India. So, the Muslims started burning down the Hindu’s property – houses, shops, killing them and throwing them out from the walled city of Amritsar. In fact, the house, Chandraavali at Katra Sher Singh, Hall Bazar, just beside the Khairuddin masjid in Amritsar, which her paternal grandfather bought from a Muslim barrister, was set by fire by the maulavi from the mosque next door, not once but twice.
Her father shared a heart wrenching incident to her, that during that trouble time, when almost every Hindu house were burning, there were no breeze, that time, they were leaving their house, with her bling grandmother in a toonga, and her father following them in a bi-cycle, on their way they have been chased by a group of Muslim men, showing knifes, her father thoughts, that they all are going to be killed now, but meanwhile there was a bus came with a jattha (huge group) of Hindu refugees from Lahore, so, the group of Muslim men changed their direction towards them, and meanwhile, their toonga speeds away.
Dr. Uday C. Naval, Deepti’s father, who was an English Professor at the Hindu College and then migrated to America along with his family and has joined the City University in New York, where he used to teach students from across the world, mostly immigrated to USA from their native places. Dr. Uday C. Naval experienced migration through his own life once from Lahore to Amritsar, which was not carrying sweet memories at all and hen to USA from Amritsar for the better prospect of himself as well as his family members. His academic observation came as a book Striped Zebra: The Immigrant Psyche in 2008.
Her mother, Himadri Naval was a prolific painter, art and culture loving person. As Deepti Naval reveals that, her father always wanted her to become a painter like her mother. In the memoir, A country Called Childhood, where at the back cover page one can see the painting made by her mother. Both the parents inspired Deepti to towards English literature, art, and culture, photography, acting, dance and of course to become a self-independent good human being.
The book also revealed that, after school, as Deepti wanted to be self-sufficient, so she has quietly applied for the air-hostess job at the Air India. When she got the call for an interview, she then has to show the call letter to her parents as well as her Didi (elder sister). So, they have agreed to send her to Delhi to attend the interview. Now she doesn’t much recall what questions were been asked there during the interview, but finally she got an appointment letter to join Air India, few months back. But destiny has other plans for her. By the time she has received the letter, her family has decided to migrant to USA permanently for good.
A Country called Childhood is finished, where Deepti attains womanhood, here she has described her stories from her childhood days to teenage, till nineteen years of her early life.
As Deepti Naval described, that she was enjoying her life in the New York quite nicely. She was studying fine arts at the Hunter College in the City University of New York. Along with exploring the various opportunities available in the international big city like New York, compare to the small town like Amritsar. She was perusing lot of extracurricular activities, hobbies in New York. But then the realization come, that those immense childhood memories of the walled Amritsar city, friends, cousins, relatives, the by-lanes of the city, the little shops, people, lifestyles, culture, traditions, all those aspects were also good. From that realization the concept of the book A Country called Childhood came alive.
Her both the parents were very much supporting, liberal and broad minded. When Deepti approached her parents, they never objected to her choice at all, on top they tried to help her out to find her preferred way. When finally, she became an established actress, her mother told her once, that she is very proud of her, as she also wanted to became an actor but never had the guts to approach her father about her dream, but “you have done it, I was so scared to tell my father to pursue my dream, where you have showed the courage to directly told your father”.
From where she gets so much energy to have the power of multitasking? The veteran actress candidly agreed that the Hindi film industry in Mumbai never ever consumed her fully and she always have been choosy about selection of her films or roles. Though that doesn’t mean that she is claiming that she never did any bad films or the films completely negligible or unimportant to her. She is aware that her contemporaries have been acted in more than two hundred, three hundred films where she limited herself to about one hundred films only so far. Which curved out lots of time for her other creative hungers. So, she used those times for travelling, trekking to beautiful mountains, doing photography, painting and of course writing. So never deprived by the joy of life.
The book is incomplete without ‘THAT INCIDENT’. Even Gulzar Saab was also asking Deepti Naval, that, “have you mentioned ‘that incident’ in your childhood memoir? If you don’t mention ‘that incident’ then you are not honest to your childhood memoir.” I was very curious to know what is ‘that incident’? Then, Deepti Naval cleared the suspense, “at the age of thirteen, I left home for the hills without telling anyone at home. I was always fascinated by the hills, since my childhood I am very much fascinated by the beauty of the hills. So, at the age of 13, I felt that I am mature enough to travel alone to the hills, so I left home without telling anyone about my plan, but my plan was not fulfilled as I have been caught at Pathankot station,” said the veteran actress and started laughing. She has also added that, “everyone at home and relation was quite shocked, and started saying that, she looks like such innocent but she is a devil inside,” signed off the veteran actress.
Text by SANTANU GANGULY
Profile: Santanu Ganguly is a Delhi based Film Festival Curator, Filmmaker, Producer and Freelance Writer. He is working for various national and international film festivals since last two decades.
Related Articles
