Autobiography as Legacy: Leila Seth's On Balance

Headnote

Leila Seth's autobiography spans colonial and postcolonial history as well as gender relations in a society in transition from tradition to modernity. It hands down the legacy of British India, its language, its various institutions, its houses and gardens to her readers in postcolonial India through the prism of her experience.

Though synonymous with the idea of heritage, the concept of legacy enables us to operate a slight shift in focus by studying texts at a micro-social level (focusing on the individual and the family) while not losing sight of cultural traditions as macro-social input. Following the example of Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie, who uses microhistory to interpret the larger history of France, this article aims at tracing the legacy of British India through the life story of a woman. Leila Seth was the first woman to top the bar exams in London (1957), the first woman Judge of the Delhi High Court (1978) and the first woman Chief Justice of an Indian High Court (1991). Her retrospective narrative, On B alance J seems to underscore the inherent tension between gender and genre by adding 'An Autobiography' as a subtitle. In the words of Vikram Seth, her son, her book is 'about balancing a full, vibrant and interesting family life with a challenging profession quite apart from the fact of the disadvantages of being a woman'.2

More than an exercise in self-writing, autobiography becomes a family book in Leila Seth's hands. It is her penchant for maintaining a hold upon the polarized oppositions between sense and sensibility, home and career, caution and haste that endows Leila Seth's autobiography with a Victorian dimension. It is not so much her losing her father at age twelve or her orphaned husband having to start work in a lowly shoe shop like a Dickensian hero or the references to English flowers and plants, heritage homes, linen, crockery and cutlery that warrant this comparison as the double awareness of the self and society so characteristic of the Victorian age that colours her book. It is a compromise between the Victorian domestic memoir and the professional woman's life story much like Margaret Oliphant's autobiography3 and seeks to reconcile family heritage with personal enterprise.

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