THE BOOK OF SHADOWS

BOOK REVIEW
SUBMITTED TO SUBMITTED BY
NARENDRA SHARMA RAHUL CHOUDARY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Namita Gokhale has written six novels, a collection of short stories, and several works of

nonfiction, all in English. Her first novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, 1984, a satire upon the

Mumbai and Delhi elite caused an uproar due to its candid sexual humour. Gods Graves and
Grandmother- an ironic fable about street life in Delhi was adapted into a musical play. Gokhale

was diagnosed with cancer when she was just thirty-five and her husband died a few years later.

The experience of illness and loss has informed her later books, A Himalayan Love Story, The

Book of Shadows and Shakuntala, the play of memory. Gokhale has written two books of non-

fiction. Mountain Echoes which deals with theKumaoni way of life through the eyes of four

highly talented and individualistic women.[1] The Book of Shiva is an introduction to Shaivite

philosophy and mythology. She had retold the Indian epic, The Mahabharata, in an illustrated

version for young and first time readers.In Search of Sita – Revisiting Mythology, co-edited with

Dr Malashri Lal, presents fresh interpretations of this enigmatic goddess and her indelible impact

on the lives of Indian women. Gokhale's recent Priya: In Incredible Indyaa, resurrected

somecharacters from her debut novel Paro. A collection of short stories, The Habit of Love, was

published in January 2012.

Publishing is Gokhale’s other love. The Namita Gokhale editions, a signature imprint published

in association with Roli Books, introduced some notable titles including Rashna Imhasly

Gandhy’s The Psychology of Love and Neelima Dalmia Adhar’s biography of her father, R K

Dalmia. She has conducted two memorable writers’ retreats in Landour, with Roli Books, for the

Namita Gokhale editions. She is one of the founder directors of Yatra Books which co-publishes

with Penguin Books in Hindi, Marathi, Urdu and other Indian languages including in English in

a ground breaking series.

Namita Gokhale conceptualised the International Festival of Indian Literature, Neemrana 2002,

and also The Africa Asia Literary Conference, 2006. She has worked Translating Bharat,

and Textile Narratives with the literary consultancy Siyahi.

She is a founder-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival along with the author, William

Dalrymple, which started in 2006. She is also festival adviser to Mountain Echoes: A Literary
Festival in Bhutan and the Kathmandu Literary Jatra, a first of its kind literature festival in

Nepal.

She is currently the member-secretary of Indian Literature Abroad (ILA), an initiative by

Ministry of Culture, Government of India, to translate and promote contemporary literature from

the Indian languages into the major international languages, particularly the six UNESCO

languages

INDEX
1. Introdution to the author and the book

1.1. Early life

1.2. Writing Career

2. Major thems

3. Major character

4. Memorable lnes

5. Cnclusion
1. Introduction to the author Mamita
Gokhle and the book the book
shadows
1.1 Early life
She was born in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh in 1956 and spent her childhood between New Delhi and
Nainital, in the foothills of the Himalayas. A Kumaoni by birth, she married to Rajiv Gokhale when
she was eighteen. Gokhale dropped out of college after a conflict over the bias against Indian
literatures in the curriculum. She then published the film magazine "Super" from Bombay in the late
seventies.

1.2 Writing career

Namita Gokhale has written six novels, a collection of short stories, and several works of nonfiction,
all in English. Her first novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, 1984, a satire upon the Mumbai and Delhi
elite caused an uproar due to its candid sexual humour. Gods Graves and Grandmother- an ironic
fable about street life in Delhi was adapted into a musical play. Gokhale was diagnosed with cancer
when she was just thirty-five and her husband died a few years later. The experience of illness and
loss has informed her later books, A Himalayan Love Story, The Book of Shadows and Shakuntala,
the play of memory. Gokhale has written two books of non-fiction. Mountain Echoes which deals with
theKumaoni way of life through the eyes of four highly talented and individualistic women.[1] The
Book of Shiva is an introduction to Shaivite philosophy and mythology. She had retold the Indian
epic, The Mahabharata, in an illustrated version for young and first time readers.In Search of Sita –
Revisiting Mythology, co-edited with Dr Malashri Lal, presents fresh interpretations of this enigmatic
goddess and her indelible impact on the lives of Indian women. Gokhale's recent Priya: In Incredible
Indyaa, resurrected somecharacters from her debut novel Paro. A collection of short stories, The
Habit of Love, was published in January 2012.

Publishing is Gokhale’s other love. The Namita Gokhale editions, a signature imprint published in
association with Roli Books, introduced some notable titles including Rashna Imhasly Gandhy’s The
Psychology of Love and Neelima Dalmia Adhar’s biography of her father, R K Dalmia. She has
conducted two memorable writers’ retreats in Landour, with Roli Books, for the Namita Gokhale
editions. She is one of the founder directors of Yatra Books which co-publishes with Penguin Books
in Hindi, Marathi, Urdu and other Indian languages including in English in a ground breaking series.

Namita Gokhale conceptualised the International Festival of Indian Literature, Neemrana 2002, and
also The Africa Asia Literary Conference, 2006. She has worked Translating Bharat, and Textile
Narratives with the literary consultancy Siyahi.

She is a founder-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival along with the author, William Dalrymple,
which started in 2006. She is also festival adviser to Mountain Echoes: A Literary Festival in Bhutan
and the Kathmandu Literary Jatra, a first of its kind literature festival in Nepal.

She is currently the member-secretary of Indian Literature Abroad (ILA), an initiative by Ministry of
Culture, Government of India, to translate and promote contemporary literature from the Indian
languages into the major international languages, particularly the six UNESCO languages (English,
French, Arabic, Spanish, Russian and Chinese).

Ever since Sigmund Freud discovered that the creative faculty

draws on drives and fantasies that are buried in the unconscious

and that they provide the clues to understanding the imaginative

mind as well as individual works, it created room for a number of

speculations. Literary criticism has been flooded with different variants

of psychological criticism which include studying the work presented

in terms of its characters, the author’s mind and the reader’s mind.

Psychoanalysis is the dynamic form of psychology which

was developed by Freud as a “means of analysis and therapy for

neuroses but soon expanded it to account for many developments and

practices in the history of civilization, including warfare, mythology

and religion, as well as literature and the other arts” (Abrams 1999:

248). Psychoanalytic criticism can attend to the author of the work;

to the work’s contents; to its formal construction or to the reader. The

author’s life and emotions are analysed and the literary work is seen

to supply evidence for this analysis. This is often called

“psychobiography”. A literary text, according to psychoanalytical

critics, hides or represses its real content behind manifest content.

Besides Freud, there have been other prominent psychoanalysts like

Jacques Lacan and Carl Jung. Though they may differ in their

approach in theory, all psychoanalytic approaches to literature have

one thing in common— the critics begin with a full psychological

theory of how and why people behave as they do, a theory that has

been developed by a psychologist/psychiatrist/psychoanalyst outside

of the realm of literature, and they apply this psychological theory

as a standard to interpret and evaluate a literary work. The developer

of the theory and the details of the theory will vary, but the theories

are all universalistic in scope, positing patterns of behaviour that are

not dependent on specific times, places and cultures.

Jacques Lacan

If Freud’s theories focussed upon the relation between authors,

readers or characters in psychoanalysing literature, Jacques Lacan

was responsible for the gradual move away from ‘persons’, i.e.

authors, readers, or fictive characters, towards the text and towards

the reading and writing operations. He “proposed in the 1950’s, a

‘linguistic’ interpretation of Freud” (Suprenant 2006: 206). Lacan’s

most celebrated dictum, “the unconscious is structured like a language”

(1973: 203), implies that psychoanalysis as a discipline must borrow

the methods and concepts of modern linguistics; but he does it from

a psychoanalytical vantage point (Lodge 1988: 61). Thus, Lacan’s

view of psychoanalysis involved the intermingling of human subjects

and language. Lacan also focussed upon topics such as the ego,

transference, psychosis, the death drive, repression and sexuality, as

Freud had. But he argued that Freud “had understood the linguistic

nature of human psychology but that he had simply lacked the

Saussurean vocabulary necessary to articulate it” (Clark 1994: 452).

Lacan’s conception of the unconscious as structured like a language

and the relationship between the symbolic order and the subject

opened up a whole new way of understanding the play of unconscious

desire in the text (Homer 2005: 2). Lacan’s argument lay in the fact

that speech, particularly language was central to psychoanalytic

practice and to any theoretical conclusions that might be extrapolated

from it. Therefore the focus of Lacanian criticism is not upon the

unconscious of the character or the author, but upon the text itself
and the relationship between the text and reader.

Lacan’s ideas and theories were influenced by various methods

and theories ranging from structuralism to linguistic theory. He was

also influenced by phenomenology, psychology, ethology and

philosophy, which are four strands of thinking that are present in

his controversial essay, “The Mirror Stage” (1936). The anthropologist

Claude Lèvi-Strauss and his works had a wide ranging influence

upon structuralism. He, in turn was influenced by Saussure’s

foundational distinction between language and an individual’s speech.

Lacan derived from Claude Lèvi Strauss, the idea that what

characterises the human world is the symbolic-function- a function

that, intervenes in all aspects of our lives

2. Major themes in the book

The conversation began with Namita responding to a question about her quest as a writer: “The
process of writing is a quest in itself; a journey of self-discovery,” she proclaimed. “A writer’s
first book is usually biographical in nature, related to his or her personal experiences. Writing is
directed at returning to one’s own script.”
Next, Namita forayed into sharing the details of her early days as a creative writer, about writing
her acclaimed debut novel Paro: Dreams of Passion. While the kind of receptionParo received
outside India was initially overwhelming for a college dropout like her, Namita was very
surprised by its poor reception in India due to the work’s sexual tones. Even though people
commonly assume Paro is a version of Namita herself, the author begs to differ. She clarified
that the character was actually an amalgamation of two to three women whom she knew.
Namita’s role was merely that of a narrator.

Namita Gokhale
Moving on to her roles in print and electronic media, Namita found instant success with her film
magazine Super. She was later approached by Doordarshan to do Kitabnama. She agreed to it,
given the massive outreach a platform like DD provides. Namita stresses that her enjoyment in
doing the series was derived from the opportunity to leave an indelible imprint on the Indian
literary scene.
The conversation then shifted to Namita’s work which exudes heavier themes, such as The Book
of Shadows. She credits the personal trials that bombarded her life at that point as the inspiration
for this work – being diagnosed with cancer and losing her husband while she was still in her
thirties. Experiencing a certain proximity to death, Namita wanted to capture its essence in her
literary works. Interestingly, she observed that The Book of Shadows disappeared from
bookshelves soon after its release while her first work, Paro, was still having a good run.
Another work, Shakuntala, is known for its vibrant vocabulary. Namita found writing the Hindi
version of Shakuntala to be much easier vis-à-vis writing in English as she could express the
emotions in fewer sentences. Namita disclosed that she intends to make Shakuntala into a film.
When the talk turned to In Search of Sita, Namita referenced empathy for Sita’s quest for self-
assertion and the many ordeals she had to face during the course of her life. Countering the
incredulous reactions abroad to the many versions of Indian mythology, Namita notes that myth
is never static in India.

Mita Kapur listens intently

Namita reflects on her days growing up in a Kumaoni Himalayan town in Nainital as one of the
most enjoyable phases of her life. She admits to using a lot of her childhood experiences in her
work. Coming from her part of the world, psychic experiences were nothing new or
extraordinary. She also credited Ipshita, a psychic she met, as her inspiration for some recent
work. Namita views herself as skeptical rather than rational.
The session concluded with Namita’s thoughts about freedom of social expression, emphasizing
that we live in a time of heightened sensitivity. She maintains that she doesn’t like to
confrontational about issues that people care about, but by the same token, she will not hold back
from speaking her mind about issues that matter to her.
Major character
Namita Gokhale never dreamt that she’d write a sequel to Paro: Dreams of Passion — her chartbusting debut novel
that had her readers gawking with its in-your-face sexual humour. The novel, written when she was just 28, had been
a pathbreaker for that era.
“It stood the test of time and I had left it behind,’’ she shrugs. But then a close journalist friend bluntly told her
that Paro... was the best of all her books and asked why she didn’t go back to it? The idea lingered in the recesses of
Gokhale’s mind.
Eight months later, she was on a long flight from South Africa to Delhi when she had a Suddenly Something moment.
It was Priya again — the slightly detached, voyeuristic, the antidote-of-Paro narrator of her first book — who spoke to
her.
“I discovered that Priya was now in her 50s and — like me — was coping with menopause, ageing and a world that
was changing,’’ she says.

So, Gokhale’s newest novel Priya In Incredible Indyaa (Penguin) — the sequel to Paro... — resurrects some of the
characters from her first book. Paro... told a young woman’s tale of upper-middle class Delhi and Mumbai, replete
with social climbing, adultery and decadence. At a slightly different level, Priya... is a social comedy that relocates
some of the same characters in Delhi's elitist society.
Paro is dead but there’s B.R., Priya’s one-time boss and occasional lover, and Suresh, Priya’s staid lawyer-turned-
politician husband. There’s also Lenin, her radical friend. Priya now has a glamorous new friend, Pooonam — the
three Os have everything to do with India’s penchant for adding extra alphabets to names for good luck – who’s in
hot pursuit of money, sex and Jimmy Choo shoes. Priya, the secretary of ‘Paro’, is now the wife of a junior minister
and on the fringes of Delhi’s power elite.
“The book is a mirror of our times. If Paro... was the first triumphant chicklit of those days, then Priya... must be the
first haglit!’’ says Gokhale smiling.
Given that Gokhale is hugely busy, as an organiser of several literary festivals, she has often had to put her books on
hold for months. Priya was written in “bits and pieces” over three years.
Soon after returning from the International Literary Book Festival in Bhutan of which she is co-director, she
immediately got into the thick of promoting Priya.... She’s also involved in a host of other literary festivals — the
literary festival in Kathmandu as well as the Doon Readings in Dehradun which features recitations by poets and
singers from across Uttarakhand.
In addition, when she gets a breather, she’s going to plunge into another mammoth project (she calls it an
‘adventure’) Indian Literature Abroad (ILA) in collaboration with the culture ministry. She’ll be organising the
translation of works from the 24 Indian languages into the six Unesco languages and promoting them abroad.
And of course she’ll soon slip into the frenetic preparations for the 2012 Jaipur Literature Festival. The festival, which
is now into its sixth year, occupies a large chunk of her life, she says. As its co-director along with author William
Dalrymple, Gokhale’s life shuts down to other things come October and she resurfaces only by February.
Through the rest of the year too she’s in constant touch with Dalrymple, working on the next Jaipur jamboree. “We
represent different interests and views. We agree on a lot and fight quite a lot too. And in the years we don’t fight, we
worry,” she says.

Pix: Rupinder Sharma

But despite her busy life, at 55, Gokhale has authored six novels and several non-fiction works. She also plays
publisher with Yatra Books which has co-published 250 regional language books in the last five years in collaboration
with Penguin.
Currently, she’s also very pleased by the fact that she’s going to be a grandmother soon as her younger daughter,
Shivani, is having a baby. “Both my daughters and sons-in-law are awesomely bright. I’m hugely intimidated by them
all,” she laughs. Her elder daughter, Meru, is a senior editor at Penguin India who is based in UK and is married to
author Patrick French while Shivani, is also into publishing.
Gokhale is from a closely-knit family which stood by her through all the stressful times, especially when she lost her
husband. Her mother is a pillar of her strength. The Book of Shadows (1999) was written when she was struggling to
cope with her husband’s loss. She describes it as “my best book yet”.
Married at 18 (when she was in her final year at college), Gokhale was always into studying Indian writers. Though
she couldn’t graduate (she got into controversy with her college over her choice of papers and wasn’t given a
degree), she went on to publish and edit a film magazine, Super, in the late ’70s.
And then Paro... happened and her journey as author began. Her other well-known books include Gods, Graves and
Grandmother (1994), A Himalayan Love Story (1996),The Book of Shiva (2000) and Shakuntala (2005).
She’s written some short stories and may spend the year writing a few more, or she may go back to finishing a book
that she had begun writing seven years ago but gave up on after 50,000 words. The Things to Leave Behind, is a
family saga spanning a few generations set in Kumaon. “The canvas was bigger than I could handle,” she says.
But she may complete it just yet: “I’m not afraid to bet against the odds.”
 3. Memorable lines
A LITTLE girl peeps from behind a pair of grandma's spectacles perched precariously on her
nose. If you were to walk past her, you would never know her as Namita Gokhale, the author
of Paro: Dreams of Passion, Book of Shadows, Gods, Graves and Grandmothers, and
others.

As an author, "to leave your books behind is important. My novels are very temporary; I leave
them behind like snakeskin. I think the hype around the authors and their books is highly
exaggerated. They are important in that moment of discovery and have irrevocable internal
value but the whole cultural construct around authors is tragic because they start believing in
the hype themselves. What matters is what remains in the literary consciousness over a period
of time; that is the way to survive."

"I'm suspicious of poetry. In the Book of Shadows, Rachita, one of the characters quotes heavily
from Mahadevi Verma, Yeats, Emily Dickinson. My resistance to poetry comes from my dark
side. I admire the painfully individual and honest voices of Muriel Spark and Dickinson."

The danger of being a writer is "people start reconstructing your life for you. I keep reading
about my obsession with life and death; that it comes from my life's experiences. I am an
obsessive person. I obsess over alu ka paranthas and how perfect the shalgam, gobi ka achaar
was. I obsess over life. I love life, I enjoy but I always know what life is. The `momento mori'
works all the time. A small reminder of death in any work of art adds to the pleasure of life. I've
been sitting with death for a long time."

"Every time I write a book, I feel I'll never write again. But before I know it, I've begun again. The
Book of Shadows was a strange book. I was a bit of a ghost myself. A lot of the book wrote
itself."

"I have past life memories. They formed the core of the book in Shakuntala where I have
fictionalised them. The anger, the `paranormal' thoughts on birth and rebirth are not constructs,
they are several dimensions of how I see life. I don't believe in anything but I do sense them
intuitively, that there are things I have deep and prior knowledge of."
Conclusion of the book
Your Book of Shadows is not a journal. You won't write in it every day, unless you are learning
new things about Wicca, spirituality, or magick every day. You won't write everything about
what happened during a ritual. (While it's a fabulous idea to keep note of your processes and
experiences of magickal work, it's best to do this in another book: your journal or Book of
Mirrors.)
It's a good idea, however, to summarise in your Grimoire the key points: what worked and what
didn't, and any ideas you have for improvement. That's important information for the next time
you work with that.
The first thing that should go in your new Book of Shadows, though, is a statement of your
Dedication. (We'll cover this in the next lesson, so save a page in the beginning.)
What Goes In Your Grimoire
As explained earlier, it's your Wiccan reference book. Your Grimoire should contain things you
can look back on to remember things you need to know. Anything that will help your practice
of Wicca in the future is good to have in your Book of Shadows.
Over the years, your Grimoire will accumulate a lot of information and ideas, such as...
 Reference information (like the Elements and their associations, info on the deities, etc)
 Ritual outlines and ideas
 Spells you've learnt or created
 Practices you use to develop your skills
 Recipes for ritual foods
 Tips and techniques you've learnt or discovered
 What works and what doesn't
 The results you achieved and experiences you had
As we go through these lessons, you'll gather information to include in your Grimoire. This will
be part of your weekly actions.

Your Most Important Wiccan Tool

Wiccan newbies always wonder what tools they have to have. They've heard of athames and
wands and such, and wonder if they can be Wiccan without them. (We'll talk about them later in
the course.)
In my opinion, there are absolutely no tools necessary for Wicca. You can be a Wiccan with
only your mind, if that's all you have.
But if there were one tool that I'd say is most valuable, especially for beginners, I'd say it's your
Grimoire. Every other tool can be substituted by other things (like your bare hand). But the
Book of Shadows is where you gather everything you know about being Wiccan.