Paper short abstract:

In 1977 Krishna Sobti in an autobiographical essay, Sobti Meets Hashmat, described herself using the figure of her male alter ego, or Hashmat. The paper examines the text as a distinct auto-narrative focusing on performing the self through a construct of heterogeneous, multi-layered persona.

Paper long abstract:

Krishna Sobti, one of the most widely acclaimed Hindi writers, authored three volumes of her reminiscences (Ham Haśmat, 'Me, Haśmat', published in 1977, 1999, and 2015) to portray some figures of the Hindi literary scene. She willingly bestowed the authorship of these volumes on her literary male alter ego, or Hashmat. Adapting the strategy of inferring her self-narrative by retelling the narratives of others, Sobti, interestingly, ends the first volume of these literary portraits with a sketch entitled Sobti Meets Hashmat (Mulākāt Haśmat se Sobtī kī), where she describes herself and her creative works using the figure of literary male persona created by her. In this paper - inspired by the application of the 'narrative self' theory, which opens a possibility of individualised approach to life writings - I would like to close-read this text as a distinct auto-narrative to examine various individual strategies of performing the self through a construct of heterogeneous, multi-layered persona. The authors of life writings have been always accommodating various identities and thus expressing diverse 'shades' of the self, Sobti's essay is an exquisite example of this phenomenon.