Writer Nasera Sharma at her residence
For many literature lovers, Nasera Sharma is the author of the Sahitya Akademi award-winning novel, ‘ Parijat ’. But as a freelance journalist and researcher, she has also interviewed top West Asian leaders.
In Iran, I was interviewed by many magazines and newspapers,” she recalls, displaying a copy of the article in ‘The Middle East’, a London-based magazine which published the Khamenei interview in 1982. The 78-year-old became a Sahitya Akademi award recipient in 2016 for ‘Parijat’, a richly detailed novel set in Allahabad (now Prayagraj) and Lucknow that’s as much a story of three interconnected families as of the syncretic Ganga-Jamuni culture. The two fell in love and married in 1967.
Because i was marrying into a different culture, “My parents were worried.
“Khomeini in Qom and Khamenei in Tehran,” she says. “I also interviewed Afghan mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,” she says. “A progressive Christian principal, Miss Mary, played a key role in shaping many of us,” she says.
During this critical time, writer Nasera Sharma, then also a freelance journalist and researcher, interviewed both Iranian leaders. The Khomeini interview was obtained with the help of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then chairman of Iran’s parliament. When I replied in the affirmative, it created a connection,” she remembers. Nasera has spoken about the Khomeini interview in the past. Not many know of the Khamenei interview, the first given after the bomb explosion which left his right hand paralysed. “Those interviews created a sensation. As a journalist, Nasera broke barriers. She has written extensively on Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the past three decades, however, literature has been Nasera’s primary identity. Literature was a natural destination for Nasera, who was born in a literary family in Allahabad. Her erudite father, Zamin Ali, taught Persian and founded the Urdu department in Allahabad University. Profiting from a well-stocked home library, she read Shakespeare and Bankimchandra. Nasera went to Hamidia Girls School. Geography interested her. At Allahabad University, Nasera met R C Sharma, who taught the subject there and would later become an eminent geographer. But there was no social uproar. Those were different times,” Nasera recalls.
“Before the interview, Khomeini asked one of his aides if I knew Persian and whether I was a Shia.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who would become the country’s second Supreme leader after Khomeini’s passing in 1989 and would continue in that position till his death following an Israel-US air strike in Feb this year, had survived an assassination attempt in 1981. In the early 1980s, Iran was uncertain. The monarchy was gone; clerics had taken over. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the country’s first Supreme leader. The debilitating war against Iraq had begun. And there was still opposition to the new regime.
Her first story, ‘Butkhana’ — about a small-town guy’s dehumanisation in Delhi — was published in 1976 in the renowned literary magazine ‘Sarika’. Her first novel, ‘Saat Nadiyan Ek Samandar’, set in the backdrop of the Iran revolution of 1979, arrived in 1984. As part of her research, Nasera stayed in Kabul for about 20 days during the time of President Najibullah, whom India was supporting.
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The JNU I grew up with is no longer the same,” she says. The reason, she says, goes back to her school days. Which is why we gravitated towards Hindi,” she says. In recent decades, villages have prospered,” she says. Some Afghans were resentful of this political stand, says Nasera. It was her way of expressing anger against an Indian for supporting Najib, who was backed by the Soviets,” she says. “When I see an orchard full of mangoes, I also think about the lives of its caretakers,” she says. “My son is a real dog lover,” she says.
The couple spent their next three years in Edinburgh, where her geographer-husband was working on his doctorate on the Thar desert under the renowned J W Watson. After returning, Nasera would enrol for a five-year postgraduate course in Persian at JNU. Her husband joined the School of International Studies (which was soon merged with JNU) as an associate professor. For over two decades, the sprawling green campus would be their home. “I don’t miss the people. But I long for the trees. Nasera wrote little in her early years of marriage. But in JNU, amidst the Aravalli hills and the bougainvillea, amaltas, gulmohar and the thorny keekars, the writer in her flowered. Like Shaani (‘Kala Jal’), Nasera writes in Hindi. “The Hindi teachers were encouraging, but the Urdu teacher, a relative of poet Akbar Allahabadi, would taunt us. “I have been to Iran five times and witnessed three eras: under the Shah, Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei. During Shah’s period, cities and towns were more developed. Well-versed in Pashto, Nasera has also written a two-volume work, ‘Afghanistan: Buzkashi Ka Maidan’, which traces the country’s rough and resilient history. She recalls walking the streets of Kabul when an Afghan woman selling bread threw a few crumbs at her. “She also made noises, as if she were feeding dogs. Nasera’s writing, especially her short stories, is informed by an empathy for the ordinary people. In ‘Parijat’, she creates magic detailing the minutiae: guavas of Allahabad, plates used for feasts, the ‘derewali tawaifs’ of Lucknow. ‘Shalmali’, a novel serialised on Doordarshan, is about the dilemmas and struggles of an upright married working woman. The writer lives on the outskirts of south Delhi with her family, including three dogs: Don, a hunter dog of Dogo Argentino breed; Dash, a Jack Russell, originally bred for fox hunting; and Darius, a German Shepherd. During Covid she wrote a poem, ‘Kuttey bahut udaas hain (The dogs are very sad)’. She also penned a questioning poem on journalists which stays relevant. Two lines from the poem go: “Kahan toota hausla tumhara, jo sikhate tthey doosron ko roz jeena (Where did your courage break, you who used to teach others to live each day)? Download the TOI App.