‘I left India as I was irritated with the status of women’

NEW YORK: New York, it seems, is in the grip of all things Madhur Jaffrey at the moment. She is publishing her memoirs, giving talks and promoting her new film Hiding Divya which is the centrepiece of the upcoming Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival.   

Jaffrey’s memoir Climbing the Mango Trees moves smoothly but halts too quickly at her childhood in India. But the ageless 65-plus actress was disarmingly honest about her reasons for “holding back” at an event in the Tamarind Art Gallery. 

“My life is messy and not so wonderful in every area. I certainly don’t want to reveal too much. But I was asked many times so I gave in and said I would write about it but I would not go beyond 18 years. Till then, it is sort-of not so bad,” said Jaffrey wryly whose surname was Bahadur before she got married. 

She married Indian actor Saeed Jaffrey who she divorced in 1965 for being a skirt chaser. They have three daughters. In 1969, after a messy divorce she remarried violinist Sanford Allen and they live in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Jaffrey’s book talks instead about growing up in India as part of an extended family and her vivid memories of food.

She grew up in a large family compound where her grandfather often presided over dinners at which forty family members would eat together.

“The book is about me growing up in Delhi in a city that no longer exists. It is another Delhi now, but this is a city that I loved,” said Jaffrey, who left for London at the age of 19 to study drama at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

A free-spirit, would Jaffrey have had the kind of career she has had if she had stayed in India? “I would not have had a full-blown cooking career in India because the cook would have cooked which is the way things go in India but I would have been interested in food,” said Jaffrey who has written 15 best-selling cookery books. She taught herself to cook from recipes her mother sent her in air letters when she was a student in London.

Jaffrey, now famous for her roles in James Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah, The Guru and Heat and Dust, said she left to chase her dream, “I wanted the Marlon Brando kind of strong Method acting. I wanted honesty, intensity and all those things that Bollywood cinema in the mid-1950s did not offer.” 

“But among the things that propelled me to leave India was the whole position of men and women in society. I come from such an old Delhi family that I would have constantly heard that, ‘Certain things are done this way.’ Even though freedoms were given, you still had to conform. I just didn’t want to do that,” said Jaffrey. “I left because I was so irritated by the position of women in society. That made me want to leave regularly and I left with pleasure.”        

Jaffrey hated the gender divide but she loved her Indian roots. “The longing for family, people you love, the smells of your city — it is all evoked through the food. Food brings it all back and you want your food back because then that way you get your memories back.”