एक यहूदी स्त्री लेखक – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

–गोविंद प्रसाद बहुगुणा-
जर्मनी में एक यहूदी परिवार में पैदा हुई थी लेकिन अमेरिका और इंग्लैंड. में ही रही और वहीँ लेखक भी बनी लेकिन एक भारतीय पारसी परिवार के वास्तुविद Cyrus Jhabvala से शादी करने के बाद वह भारत में आई और रहीI मुझे उनका लेखन पसंद आया, वह खुलकर और खुलासा लिखती हैं- ऐसे बहुत कम लेखक मैंने पढ़े हैं । एक बात इसमें यह भी देखी है कि यह स्त्री होने के अहसास से कभी ग्रस्त नहीं रही।

उनकी एक किताब Heat and Dust भी कुछ इसी विषय को लेकर लिखी गई है , वह भारतीय न होकर भी एक अलग किस्म की भारतीय लेखक थी । उनकी इस किताब में भारत के बारे में कुछ दिलचस्प टिप्पणियां यहां quote कर रहा हूं –

“When Indians sleep, they really do sleep. Neither adults nor children have a regular bed-time — when they’re tired they just drop, fully clothed, onto their beds, or the ground if they have no beds, and don’t stir again until the next day begins. All one hears is occasionally someone crying out in their sleep, or a dog — maybe a jackal — baying at the moon. I lie awake for hours: with happiness, actually. I have never known such a sense of communion. Lying like this under the open sky there is a feeling of being immersed in space — though not in empty space, for there are all these people sleeping all around me, the whole town and I am part of it. How different from my often very lonely room in London with only my walls to look at and my books to read.”― *Heat and Dust *

भारत के आध्यात्मिक/धार्मिक चिंतन और व्यवहार पर उन्होंने कोई टिप्पणी नहीं की बल्कि एक सामान्य व्यक्ति की नजर से जो कुछ महसूस किया वह लिखा –
I only really woke up in India. It was my first experience of plenty, strangely enough, because everything in England was rationed. I loved sweets, but you couldn’t get them; then there was this marvelous mitthai ( मिठाई ) – I went crazy……India was a sensation. It was remarkable to see all those parrots flying about, the brilliant foliage and the brilliant sky. It was a tremendous pageant. I never noticed the poverty……Once a refugee, always a refugee. I can’t ever remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don’t give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you’re living in……I never really had any close friends in India, and I felt a terrible loneliness and isolation for many years. Westernized Indians don’t like my books and I tend not to like westernized Indians – so we’re quits……I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel – till I am – nothing. As it happens, I like it that way…..All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people’s backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability….”