Gajra Kottary, screenwriter and author, balances the demands of Indian television with profound novels and short stories, challenging social norms and exploring layered characters across diverse narratives. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri writes…

Photography: Vinta Nanda

Gajra Kottary, an Indian screenwriter and author, brings a depth to storytelling through her diverse works. Known for creating iconic television characters in shows like Astitva and Balika Vadhu, Kottary explores challenging social themes like generational trauma and same-sex love with bold sensitivity in her novels, including Girls Don’t Cry and Not Woman Enough. Her short stories, filled with wit and insight, offer fresh perspectives on gender roles and relationships, establishing her as a significant voice in Indian literature and television. Kottary’s compelling narratives not only entertain but also push readers to question societal expectations, leaving a lasting impact on contemporary storytelling.

The Toll of Daily Television Writing

I have always wondered what the act of writing an episode every day for years – often to the dictates of the dreaded TRP and marketing honchos who decide what is working with viewers (that amorphous entity whose fickle preferences, if channel heads are to be believed, are responsible for the bottom-of-the-barrel stuff that is Indian television soap) – can do to a writer. Unless one is in it purely for the money, it can well be soul-crushing. And for the discerning viewer, unwatchable. Few writers have been through the grind like Gajra Kottary, with 668 episodes of Astitva over four years, 2167 episodes of Balika Vadhu over eight years, and countless others. So much so that sometime earlier this year, this much-feted writer called a halt to writing for television citing the impossible scenarios she was being called upon to craft. It takes a rare courage to be able to do that with your cash cow.

Creating a Sustainable Creative Outlet

More importantly, few writers have created a fallback option like Gajra Kottary. With two collections of short stories, one that brings together all her short fiction in one volume, and four novels, Gajra has kept the creative juices flowing in the midst of the mind-numbing banality that television writing can entail. One of the reasons Gajra managed to break new ground in her television narratives might have something to do with her training as a journalist. As someone who graduated from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, she says, “IIMC was a tough course to get into and we had a few fresh graduates like me, and a whole lot of older and established professional journalists from other non-aligned countries studying with us, a great mix.” It provided her with a grounding in fact-based narratives while polishing her skills as a writer, of which she had provided glimpses in college, when two stories she wrote got published in Eve’s Weekly, along with two fiction-style middles in The Times of India. “The IIMC stint helped because as I have observed over the years, I have more respect for the sanctity of facts even while taking my flights of fancy than others in the business. I take fewer creative liberties than others. I have done more realistic shows on television which helped forge a distinct identity for my writing.”

Exploring Fiction Beyond Television’s Limits

If IIMC shaped her in some ways, her experiments in writing fiction have played a big role in keeping her relevant and motivated. Her debut collection of stories, Fragile Victories, was followed by another collection, The Last Laugh, and the novels Broken Melodies, Once Upon a Star, Girls Don’t Cry and Not Woman Enough. These helped her to keep to a discipline that could go missing in the never-ending juggernaut that is the TV soap opera. They also are testimony to her willingness to push the envelope when it comes to narratives and characters.

Her debut, Broken Melodies, like a lot of maiden works of fiction, draws from her personal experiences growing up in 1970s and ’80s Delhi. It is an accomplished debut with passages of haunting beauty – “Niyati thought of the lucky tanpura. Then she thought of Mummy. Mummy and the tanpura, the tanpura and Mummy…like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that belonged to a whole but whose edges did not fit into each other,” she writes – interspersed with the ache of a young girl coping with the turmoil of growing up in a dysfunctional family. In Niyati, Gajra crafts one of her memorable characters, one who is grappling with the complexities of the world that grown-ups inhabit. A legendary musician father whose extramarital involvement takes a toll on the family dynamics, a mother perennially weary and careworn, an elder sister, Nisha, she looks up to till even Nisha takes a decision that Niyati cannot reconcile herself to, given what she has seen of her warring parents – all these are seen through the eyes of Niyati who cannot fathom why adults do what they do and why Nisha goes the route she does despite having experienced the hell their parents’ life is. There’s also a sharp eye for the nosey Delhi aunty who wants a slice of neighborhood gossip. It’s obvious that here was a writer to look forward to, one who had a feel for the minutiae of human relationships. The only aspect that one wishes she would address a little more is the mother’s take while the ‘judgement’ against the father – the book’s blurb itself condemns him as a ‘philanderer’ – could be a little more nuanced. But that I think is understandable given that the narrative is primarily unfolding from the POV of Niyati.

Measured against the standards she set with her debut, Once Upon a Star falls a wee bit short. There is no doubt about the veracity of the world she creates and the characters that inhabit this world. There are sharply drawn montages too. However, for someone who inhabits the world she is writing about – Mumbai’s famed entertainment industry (like quite a few of Gajra’s stories which draw upon real life for inspiration, Once Upon a Star is reminiscent of a well-known film family) – there’s little insight into the working of the industry that is unknown. Yes, the emphasis is on the women – Simran, Sia and Aashima – but none of them manage what Niyati did. Be a character one can relate to, identify with. Maybe some of that is intentional – characters inhabiting tinsel town operate in the grey zone between reality and illusion. However, reading Once Upon a Star, one cannot help the feeling that here is an opportunity, of a grand book set in Mumbai’s film industry, lost.

Experimenting with Narrative Complexity in Later Novels

It is with her two following novels that Gajra comes into her own as a writer. Girls Don’t Cry is a deeply moving and insightful novel that explores the lives of women across three generations. The writer is on a surer ground with Amala, Disha and Veera than she was with their starry counterparts in the previous novel. Her sensitive portrayal of these characters and her nuanced exploration of themes such as identity, generational trauma, and resilience make this a must-read. It is a story that resonates on many levels, encouraging readers to reflect on their own lives and the lives of the women around them. Gajra’s writing here is both gentle and powerful, and she has a way of making her readers feel deeply connected to her characters. Girls Don’t Cry is a testament to the strength of women, to their ability to endure, and to their courage to break free from the chains that bind them. She also uses symbolism effectively throughout the novel. The title itself is a form of symbolism, representing the expectation that women should not show weakness or vulnerability. The recurring motif of silence is another powerful symbol; it represents things left unsaid, emotions repressed, and secrets kept hidden.

Gajra pushes the limits further with Not Woman Enough, in my opinion her best work. The way she explores the pitfalls of same-sex love in our deeply patriarchal society is nothing short of stunning. Not only does Gajra address what is still taboo among large sections of society – and has been among the headlines in recent times with court judgments – she has the audacity to set it in rural Rajasthan as opposed to an urban setting, where it would have probably been just another story. She has the perspicacity to understand that the stakes are so much higher for first-generation characters experiencing the forces of social liberation while battling age-old customs. It is the same acuity that she brings to bear upon her iconic TV shows, which have time and again shown what is possible in a medium that allows little leeway for out-of-the-box thinking. In Devi and Ishwari, the former in particular, she has the best character she has created in her oeuvre so far, Anandi notwithstanding. It’s unfortunate that the book is available only as an e-book. This should be in print and has to be part of everyone’s reading list.

Short Stories: Showcasing Versatility and Depth in Compact Narratives

Despite her novels and the thousands of episodes of award-winning TV episodes, it is in her short stories that Gajra really excels. That might have something to do with the fact that I came into her world of fiction with her short stories. However, that bias disclosed, I find her writing skills most suited to the short story. It is in her shorter fiction that she shows the courage to experiment more than anywhere else. It is her short stories that also give a glimpse of humor, often wicked, often pitch-black, that is lacking in both her long-form writing and in what she creates for television.

If there’s one aspect that Gajra’s print writing lacks, it is probably the art of describing a scenario, a character. She is very good with the plot, the narrative arcs, the dialogue exchanges, but somehow, I often keep looking for a pointer to the setting, the landscape. This is true to an extent even in Not Woman Enough. That again may have something to do with her writing for TV where I presume most of the landscape and the character is decided by the director and the people manning the art department. She works primarily with the narrative and the dialogue.

Free of those constraints in the shorter format, Gajra delivers, in her shorts, surprises that her long-form writing often does not. There is, for example, the terrific finale to “A Decision at Last”, which begins with the telling lines, “It has become a part of your cultural DNA; you suffer from an almost pathological wish and need to be dominated” – which in one sentence says a lot about the way women often are, often allowing the man to decide while hankering for that right too. There is the unforgettable Anjana in “Insane and Able” and the terrible vengeance she unleashes on her cheating husband. Or the twisted Ritu in “Return to Innocence”. The violence she visits as a response to her unrequited love takes your breath away. Mrs Nair of “Waxworks” is one of the unforgettable women Gajra has ever created – that she manages to do it in a story all of four pages long is testimony to the economy she brings to her short fiction. And very few of her long fiction boast of words as spine-chilling as “Her banshee-like laughter melded with their screams of burning horror.”

Then there are the playful, fanciful takedowns of gender biases, most prominently in “Virginal Fantasy” whose darkly comic overtones (a woman playing with her husband’s expectations that she could not have had sex with anyone before him) and the way it climaxes are a delight for any reader looking for something out of the box. Or for that matter in “The Perfect Switch” where Gajra picks on ‘partner swapping’, beginning with the perfectly innocuous sentence “Who doesn’t like a good love story?” before going on to create a wonderful montage that is as much funny as it epitomizes the way we are conditioned to think:

“As Aditya stared at a bubbly Ayesha telling him about her boring meal with the hoity-toity ladies that afternoon, Aditya realized that it would be a very bold step. He asked himself if he was ready to share his wife with another man and the answer was a resounding no. The entry of another man and woman in their marriage would change the equation. If he were honest with himself, Aditya would have really enjoyed sleeping with another woman. It would not even be like he was cheating on Ayesha since she herself would also have the freedom to sleep with another man. And that is where the problem lay. The fact that she would also sleep with another man.

“Won’t you share your dessert with me, Aditya?” Ayesha’s question jolted Aditya out of his reverie.” The punch comes in the way the wife uses the word “dessert” here – definitely not the dessert the husband is fantasizing about and wants to share. The only reason “A Perfect Switch” cannot top, say, “Virginal Fantasy”, is its conventional ending. Which brings me to the one criticism I have about Gajra’s writing: Her unwillingness to push the envelope a bit further.

There are times when one can almost hear her conventional morality or love for neatly wrapped feel-good relationships come in the way of her craft and art as a writer. Do her choices of favorite characters, and the reasons thereof, in the section “Gajra’s Picks” say anything about her own preferences and how they play out in her writing? It is almost as if she is willing to take on a subject that is taboo or bold – but develops cold feet and holds herself back to craft a happily-ever-after scenario. Stories like “Couple Goals”, “A Performance at Last”, “Moving On” (how much more interesting and real this would be if Rachna’s world had not “built itself afresh” as she puts it). As she mentions in a recent post, “Women make the choices and believe in them” – it is almost as if in these and other such instances Gajra makes the choices for her characters and their relationships and will have us believe in them, while she is not sure of the same herself.

If only she were to address that, set herself free of the fear of conventional morality at least for the characters she creates, and move out of her comfort zone – in terms of the upper-middle-class well-to-do Tony neighbourhood people she writes about – Gajra Kottary’s second innings as a writer, in both print and visual mediums, could well see the birth of one of our finest contemporary writers.

Gajra’s Picks: Five women characters you find inspirational in films you have seen and books you have read. Why?

1. Kasturba Gandhi or Ba played by Rohini Hattangadi in Gandhi. The film itself moved me. I saw it many times, but what fascinated me about Ba was her journey and evolution from being slightly rebellious to a true believer in Gandhian principles and her ability to gracefully accept sharing her husband with the whole world. To come to terms with being taken for granted – that is something I understood about her character only after seeing the film.
2. Pooja played by Shabana Azmi in Arth. Here again it is the journey of a weak character to strength that made it so real and endearing to me. I was happy because the character rejected a comfortable dependence and embraced her newfound strength even at the cost of loneliness, which, incidentally, a lot of people back then weren’t very happy with. For that time, it was a very profound statement to make. Of course, it was essayed with great sensitivity by Shabana-ji.
3. Jackie in Stepmom played by Susan Sarandon. The actor brings out the pain of the somewhat rejected first wife and a character who has to say a graceful goodbye to the world and her kids so poignantly. That’s every woman’s nightmare come true.
4. Della in O Henry’s short story “Gift of the Magi”. It’s rare that one remembers characters from short stories, simply because we spend much less time with them than the characters of a novel. But Della stayed with me, not just for the love she had for her husband Jim, but for her ability to let go of her vanity to buy her husband a gift. She had so little going for her and her hair was her pride … but there you are.
5. Jo in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott is so lovably flawed. And the fact that she is the closest character to the author of the novel makes her more fascinating to me. Whenever the author seeps into a character it shows and that happens with me too. It makes the character a tad more effective and those shine through in Jo March’s character.

Five women characters in the works you have created that you are proud of. Why?

1. Radhika, an older and somewhat possessive older sister in my first television series for Soni Razdan. Even when she is middle-aged and ill, her love and protectiveness and her irritation with her younger sister Ruchika are evident. Radhika was a very real character, and I was able to prove to myself that real characters can work on TV, they don’t have to be dumbed down to be appealing. It was a lesson well learnt.
2. Dr Simran in Astitva was to me an amazing mix of being a very strong and competent character, and yet she was vulnerable and not very rational – to have fallen in love with a man ten years her junior and from a media profession, so different from her world. The acceptance of such a bold character, that too way back in 2000, was heartening for me and gave me the strength for many years to create characters and worlds that I could relate to and believed in.
3. Of course, Anandi in Balika Vadhu. The name itself tinkled with joy, incidentally it was my late mother-in-law’s name. I loved the fact that we could make the character this full of energy, naughty kid who loved food rather than a pretty and perfect kid. The fact that she evolved and grew through so many stages of life makes her a memorable character for me.
4. Biji in “Two Gold Guineas” from Autumn Blossoms. She is a grandmother who has been through many vicissitudes of life and pain. She understands both her daughter and granddaughter and gives them unconditional support. We all need such characters in our life but don’t necessarily get them.
5. The hotshot journalist, Maithili, in a short story titled ‘Broken News’ in Autumn Blossoms. She thinks she is invincible in her exploits until she makes a dangerous mistake that nearly ruins an innocent man’s life … the point is what happens after the mistake. Owning up and sticking one’s neck out no matter what the price to pay, is something I often think about and it means a lot to me. So thematically, I love the story and my Maithili.