Kiran Nagarkar is an author who generates an extreme level of devotion among his fans. Some, including the author himself, would say that there aren’t enough of them, but if a fan-o-meter were somehow employed, his followers would surely win top prizes for fervency. His play Bedtime Story and first novel Saat Sakkam Trechalis, (republished in English as Seven Sixes are Forty Three ) are both landmarks in Marathi literature.
Of his Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel Cuckold, Nagarkar says he takes no credit. It was an inspired piece of writing where he was just the “third rate secretary.” Nayantara Sahgal has described his Ravan & Eddie trilogy as India’s fourth great epic, after the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the struggle for freedom under M.K. Gandhi. In person Nagarkar is tall and gregarious, prone to self-deprecation and chuckling. Excerpts from an interview.
What kind of home did you grow up in?
I grew up in a poor family but that was because my grandfather died early. So my father had to educate his seven or eight brothers and sisters. I’d always known that my grandfather was a Brahmo Samaji but it’s now coming to light that he went (to America) with Vivekananda in 1893 and 1903. Obviously, he did not make the kind of impact that Vivekanandaji made.
But it’s curious, a friend of mine did some research, and found that my grandfather was asking for independence of India in 1893, at a time when neither Gandhiji or anyone else was asking for it.
So he must have been quite some guy. He wrote a full book on the Fitzgerald translation of the Rubáiyát. It’s a shame that his grandchildren have been so useless starting from me…
You were saying recently that nobody remembers Gandhi or Nehru anymore. Is this why you go to universities and talk to students?
It’s definitely either a chip on the shoulder or something, which obsesses me. I find it appalling that this government is making that Latin American term ‘disappeared’ so valid just now. If there’s something to be happy about in this country, it’s the fact that no other country won independence the way we did. If it is so unique, how come our children don’t know it? The freedom struggle is a complete blank now.
It’s easy to say that Gandhiji was non-violent and all these other people listened to him, but the foot soldiers—and many of the leaders—were beaten extremely badly. They spent years in jail. I would like to ask my people: what do you think they were doing there? Playing golf or something? It’s absurd. And apart from the pride, it’s a legacy of non-violence and we don’t seem to have any idea of how invaluable it is… are we even remotely aware of history?
As someone who has worked with myths, how do you feel when politicians manipulate myths and invoke some kind of mythical past and say things like we’re going to make this country great again?
It makes me nothing but angry. You know, the Ambanis opened one of the most advanced hospitals in India and you remember what he (Modi) said? How even inthose days, of course we knew all about stem cell research and transplantation techniques, and he was talking about Ganeshji! I mean, would you not scream? What is this nonsense? So you know, Kiran Nagarkar, a voice in the wilderness. I’m not going to stop shouting, it doesn’t have any effect, but aur to mei kuch nahi kar saktha.
How would you introduce Saat Sakkam Trechalis to a new generation of readers?
For me, this is a very difficult question to answer. It was first published in 1974. It’s a completely fragmented kind of narrative. It is absolutely the quintessence of disjuncture. Nothing follows from anything else. What holds the book together, I’m told, is the narrator’s tone, the voice, and that he is narrating whatever he’s talking about. It’s a young man’s voice with a tremendous sense of black humour, at times extremely dark, but the protagonist doesn’t have a sense of sentimentality, and he tries to live every moment to its fullest. One of the things that made it rather special, I’m told by many critics, is that I reinvented my mother tongue, which I hardly ever learned. You have no idea how it was slammed and pilloried, but there was a group of very fine critics who said this is a classic, it’s a complete departure from anything that has been done, and that works in English also.
You wrote Bedtime Story as a response to the Emergency. What do you think is the most worrying aspect of the present political reality?
I could go on about this for a year. You know Cuckold is a story of the poet-saint Meerabai’s husband. What I’ve never been able to fathom—and that’s how I got around to writing the book—was that here is, perhaps, the most famous woman in India, how come her husband is a complete black hole, a hiatus in history? It really bothered me that we had blanked this guy out.
And this is what we’re doing to history. I think Hinduism is, at times, a very beautiful religion, it’s all embracing, but Hindutva is its exact opposite.
I’m from the non-existent, senile generation. I completely go along with Gandhiji and Nehru and Abdul Kalam Azad. My whole idea is that if we can’t embrace not just Indians but the whole of mankind, then what are we here for? If we can’t even see who our brothers and sisters are, don’t feel a tremendous empathy for them, and that we should stand up for them every bloody minute of our lives, I fail my own ideas and my own people, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in these ideals.
You had two gurus. Can you tell me about them?
One of them, Professor M.P. Rege, didn’t teach me a single class. He was a philosopher. He studied in Cambridge under Wittgenstein, and Iris Murdoch was his classmate. You could never use the word brilliant for him. It was a different kind of understanding of India, of philosophy. A very reticent, very fine man. I would never be able to say anything in front of him except salaam . Hard to believe (chuckles) .
The other one actually taught me. He was the head of the Department of English, Dr. R.B. Patankar. He had an incredible mind, like the Champs-Elysées on a clear day. You could see forever, and everything at right angles, so you did not miss a damn thing. I never picked it up.
Do you have a sense of your ideal reader?
I’ve not had many readers.
Come on...
I’m not known for my modesty, okay, and I can say things which should not be said. My idea has always been that when the writer writes he can only build half a bridge, the other half has to be built by the reader. That is my notion of writing.
So I value the reader enormously. I’m not going to talk about those guys who sell in crores, god bless them, but we make different choices, and when you think of even Graham Greene or Garcia Marquez, you can have incredible bestsellers. So I don’t want to divide into trashy popular literature and highfalutin literature.
Does it disappoint you that you don’t have more readers?
Disappoint me? No. What it does is make money problems serious. I don’t want to get away from that. Marathi papers will never pay for an article I write. I don’t want to be super rich or anything but I would like a comfortable life. I’ve had, you know, a difficult life, so if now I could have some comfort, it would be nice. But my problem is I obviously have done some things wrong. I never pursued the business of getting the right agent. I don’t have an agent.
Calling all agents…
But what if money weren’t an issue... you’d still want to be read, right?
Make no mistake. I’d sit at Churchgate Station, I’ll sit anywhere if anybody is willing to listen to me. I’ll sit and read. Of course, I want readers, and I’m shameless about it, utterly shameless, otherwise why am I writing?
Are these two very separate worlds: English and Marathi? How have Marathi critics responded to your work?
Marathi is much more… there are exceptions. Where would I have been without my two professors? And some of the other readers who did such intense explorations of Saat Sakkam Trechalis. It’s because the language is truly different. This is the funny part. Without realising it, I was playing with language, and I was not being playful. The intensity of the book even in English comes across because—for the first time in my life, 42 years after I wrote it—I read the book. But Marathi, by and large, doesn’t accept me at all. And critics have said some horrible things about me. (laughs) I’m just pleased it still reads okay and it’s still kind of avant-garde, and it took 27 years to sell either 1,000 or 1,500 copies. As you know, the rumour is that Kiran Nagarkar bought all the copies, so no problem there.
Do you think it’s important for a writer to have empathy?
We know lots of horrible guys who write damn good stories.
Do you still get solace from a book?
I find it very difficult to hold a book these days. I have such an awful opinion of myself. It’s very difficult for me to deal with myself. But after a hell of a long time, I went back to Christopher Isherwood’s Mr. Noriss Changes Trains , and man, I was floating. After such a long time I got such a kick out of it. I mean, when a book works, boy, isn’t it fantastic?
A writer and dancer, the author’s most recent book is The Adulterous Citizen: Poems, Stories, Essays.
