IRA MATHUR
Shanta Gokhale has spent some five decades writing across forms—journalism, theatre criticism, translation, fiction and essays—and across languages, Marathi and English. Born in Dahanu in 1939 in Western India and raised in a large, multigenerational, multilingual household, she developed an ear for theatre rehearsals, to neighbours’ talk, to the arguments and confidences of a joint family. This nuance is evident in all her work, from translating Vijay Tendulkar (a leading Marathi dramatist of postcolonial India) to reviewing a play in Mumbai to describing her own life in this new memoir, One Foot on the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body (Speaking Tiger Books, 2025).
One Foot on the Ground is structured around the body—its illnesses, recoveries and changes over time—but the approach is closer to reportage. The Times of India has praised the book as “a detailed glimpse into each stage of life, written with unaffected clarity”.
One Foot on the Ground opens with her birth told through verifiable detail: names, locations, the layout of Dahanu, the influenza epidemic that took her mother in 1918, and the family superstitions surrounding eclipses. The body becomes the organising principle. Childhood illnesses are logged—who accompanied her, who treated her, who later recounted the event. Through this frame, the book tracks epidemics, childbirth, domestic routines, theatre worlds, journalism and the shifting geographies of Maharashtra and the old Bombay Presidency.
Gokhale has shuttled through professional and artistic spaces. She studied in England, worked as a publicist for Air India, taught at Elphinstone College, and became one of Mumbai’s most respected theatre critics. Her awards—the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the Maharashtra State Award for the novel Rita Welinkar, the Sahitya Akademi translation award, and lifetime honours from Tata Literature Live! and the Ooty Literary Festival—reflect a career built on steady output.
Journalistic restraint gives her memoir its gravitas. When she writes of childbirth or loss, she records what happened, who was present, and how the moment was absorbed into the family stories. The large Behere–Gokhale family appears as a functioning system—people nursing each other’s children, the hierarchy of relationships, and the domestic arrangements of a Gandhian household in Dahanu.
EXTRACT
One Foot on the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body by Shanta Gokhale’s © Speaking Tiger Books, 2025
Reproduced with exclusive permission for the Sunday Guardian.
“It was the afternoon of 13 August 1939 when Indira Gokhale, born Yamuna Behere, aged twenty-six—seen in family photographs as dark and thin with long silky black hair—was taken in a tonga to Cottage Hospital, Dahanu, to have her first baby. Her husband, Gopal Gundo Gokhale, was in Patna, finding his feet as a journalist. Dahanu was then an almost-town, two-and-a-half hours by train from Bombay, touching the border of what was later to become Gujarat State but was still part of Bombay Presidency. It was a seaside place of chiku orchards owned by Iranis and a long, wide pristine beach backed by a stand of casuarina trees known locally as suru. I have no idea who took Indira to the hospital. It must have been one of her uncles who lived with their wives and children under the benevolent gaze of her father, Narayan (Nana) Gangadhar Behere, the eldest brother. Nana was only a matriculate, but endowed with an innovative brain. He was a Gandhian and manufactured rice mills.
“Indira was a tough woman. She had grown up without the protective love of a mother. Hers had died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918, when Indira was five and her brother Ghanashyam two-and-a-half. Her father’s mother took care of the children. Later Nana married Lakshmi Ghanekar, who was only thirteen at the time. Known as Mothi Kaku (eldest aunt), she gave Nana thirteen children in quick succession, two of whom died. I do not know how painful Indira’s journey by tonga from home to hospital was. It is not one of the many stories she was to tell me about her life in later years. What she did tell me was that the labour was hard and seemingly never-ending. I came on a Sunday morning. Dr Nikki, the American missionary at Cottage Hospital, had just returned from church. By then Mother had spent twelve hours trying to eject me. She was exhausted. There was just about one last push left in her. The good doctor knelt by her bed and prayed. I popped out. Whoever was responsible for that emergence, whether divine agency or a woman’s determination, Mother could not stop laughing in gratitude. The doctor said it was a girl. Mother said, “Does she have all ten fingers and toes?” The good doctor counted them off. All ten present. The doctor said, “She’s going to be a philosopher.” Mother asked weakly, “Why?” The doctor said, “She has put her hand to her forehead and is refusing to bawl.” The doctor turned me upside down and slapped my bottom. Philosophy fled. A lusty bawl filled the air. I had arrived.
“But about the toes and fingers. There was, and probably still is, a superstition that says a pregnant woman who is outdoors during an eclipse will produce a deformed child. Mother, like her father and mine, was a rationalist. There was an eclipse during her last trimester. She had come down to Dahanu from Patna where Father was working as a sub-editor on the staff of a newspaper owned by the Maharaja of Darbhanga, The Indian Nation. She happened to have washed her hair that day and was sitting out in the yard to dry it, when half-a-dozen aunts descended on her to shoo her in. “The eclipse,” they cried. “Go in.” Mother said, so what if it’s an eclipse, and stayed put till her hair had dried. But somewhere in the remote recesses of her mind lurked a smidgeon of doubt. It was all very well to stubbornly refuse to follow Pascal’s ultimate play-safe wager. But even then, what if …? With my emergence, fully fingered and toed, she was relieved that rationalism had won.
“I was a healthy baby and Mother had plenty of milk to nurse me. As a matter of fact she had so much, she even nursed my aunt who had arrived seventeen days before me. This was Nana’s eleventh surviving child. Relationships got pretty muddled in joint families those days with everybody who could breed, breeding. Whatever age a child, certain relationships demanded respect. The eldest son’s wife had to refer to his baby sister respectfully as Vansa. She might then be heard exclaiming, “Agabai Vansa mutlya” (Oh my! Respected sister-in-law has peed). There is a picture in the family album of me carrying an uncle on my hip.”
–Excerpted from One Foot on the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body by Shanta Gokhale. (Speaking Tiger Books, 2025)
Shanta Gokhale is clear about why she writes: “I write because I like to write … I write therefore I am.” She writes “to entertain myself”, taking pleasure in “chiselling, making, shaping ideas with words”, and has no ambition beyond “the sheer joy of writing”.
Gokhale lives in Mumbai, where she continues to write, translate and remain an integral observer of the city’s cultural life.
Ira Mathur is a freelance journalist, a Guardian Media columnist and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
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