Kiran Nagarkar burst on the literary scene around 40 years ago with the Marathi novel, Saat Sakkam Trechalis, and has since then emerged as one of the most significant writers of post-Independence India. As he receives the Lifetime Achievement Award from Tata Literature Live, he speaks to Scroll.in about his works, the themes they encapsulate and his life as a writer and observer of the city.
What does the lifetime achievement award mean to you?
I am happy that my work has been noticed and will now hopefully be read and enjoyed by my readers. Now I am waiting for the Bharat Ratna for Zero Productivity and the Nobel for Sloth.
Saat Sakkam Trechailis, your first novel, was a sensation when it was first published in 1974, in Marathi. Yet it did have a mixed reception.
When Saat Sakkam Trechailis first came out in 1974, there were some critics who hailed it, and praised it for having broken new ground and for reinventing the language. I was also asked if I had set out to write a new kind of modernist Marathi fiction. But far from it. I wrote in the only way I knew. And I did think that if I ever have to write again in Marathi, I would have to do something quite unlike this one, something very different, and not use the same kind of language.
But then again, there were some critics who called my effort arrogant. And spent pages asking whether it was proper to have favourable blurbs in one’s publication, though this was all right when this happened with novels in English. They also opined on whether it was really a novel, since the novel flouts literary conventions in so many ways, is fragmented enough to demand a reader’s patience and I hope the effort is worth it.
The book is about a narrator, writing to an unnamed person, “you”, who has been and still is, the love of his life. And yes, some of the themes have been with me in all I’ve written later. It is tragic and has a lot of black humour as well.
The themes in it continue to appear in your later work.
Yes, the words that “you”, the woman Kushank loves, throws back at him repeatedly, “Kya pharak padta hai” (what difference does it make?) was picked on by critics as a way to savage the novel and its alienated and almost nihilistic narrator. Yet Kushank’s [the narrator] response, as a close reading will reveal, has always been a contrary one, it is an emphatic – yes, it does make a difference; she does to him, as does life.
The other thing that mattered to me also was what we consider “patent nonsense”. These are the words a father of a young girl tells Kushank after his exchange of letters with the child. This is over a story Kushank has shared with her, about a boy he knew, unhappy about his passing birthday. Kushank had suggested some ways out: having months only as long as a day, or having every month named after June, so he’d have a birthday every month. Her father, on hearing of this, calls such suggestions, “patent nonsense”, but fantasy, evoking an imaginary alternative isn’t really nonsense. The nonsense Kushank sees is in poverty, starvation and hunger which needn’t be there and are allowed to exist.
Arguably your most popular work remains Ravan and Eddie and the trilogy of the two boys becoming men in Bombay-Mumbai. Did you write it self-consciously and to reflect changes in the city?
I consider myself an instinctive writer, and perhaps that explains the meditations and asides that appear often in the main narrative. I had no clear idea or an outline beforehand as I began the book. The people who appear first in Ravan and Eddie are just what human beings are about – ambivalent, contradictory, and yet managing to live happily or unhappily with all this.
It actually began as a screenplay in Marathi; where the bits about the children would appear right at the beginning, but soon after the titles, it would be their adult lives that would take over. But the screenplay didn’t work out and over time it became something different. I have been conscious of Aristotle’s maxim – Art isn’t about what is possible but what is probable. For of course Ravan and Eddie became the book of the two boys, then young men who became each other’s sworn enemies and this unfolds over the next two novels.
At the same time, I contradict myself, I am also a self-conscious writer. For when it became a novel and led to two others, they showed up the city as it evolved in post-independence years. It shows a Bombay of housing estates, dream luxury projects that are a creation of the nexus between real estate developers, politicians and the mafia, and its water crisis, even as the books follow Ravan and Eddie in their quest for superstardom in a city that recognises little else.
Their true vocation, however, is music. So if I had to dedicate Rest in Peace to anyone, it’d be to all those who gave Hindi cinema its most magical moments in the 1950s – the composers, the lyricists and the musicians. Alas, music in films has declined in these times.
Tell us about the intervening years, the 1980s especially, when you wrote your plays and screenplays, and then about Arun Kolatkar, for you worked with him in your days in advertising.
In the years, between Saat Sakkam Trechailis (1974) and Ravan and Eddie (1994), I worked on several things: screenplays mainly.
Bedtime Story, re-released now after being censored and banned by several political parties who ensured it would not be performed, was written in 1978. This was soon after the Emergency, and the Mahabharata and its stories became the backdrop for me to tell a morality tale of our times. Black Tulip, [a story] of two quintessential Mumbai characters – a thief and a policeman – was written in 2000, and I went back to it in 2014, and both were published in one volume earlier this year.
I met Arun first in Dilip Chitre’s house. And soon after we came to work in the same ad agency: Mass Communication and Marketing. He was already a highly regarded creative director in the industry. From around 1968 to 1975, we, Arun and I, worked as a team, writing copy, and spending nearly 12 hours in the same office. It was a priceless experience till the agency folded up in 1975.
Among all in the firm, it was the two of us, Arun Kolatkar and I, who were left jobless. As freelancers, we were not paid regularly, sometimes not at all, not even rejection fees. Arun had a superb sense of humour and in those days, he had entirely given up drinking. He was also amazingly well-read in a lot of things, and his knowledge of the Indian poetic tradition was vast, and spot-on. He did not teach me anything consciously, but I did learn a lot from him.
I read about your grandfather and how he was in Chicago at the time Vivekananda was there too. Though you may not have known him, has he been, at times, an unconscious influence on you?
I have little information on him, though others in my family, my brother and cousins, do. He, Balwant Nagarkar, was first a madhukari, a boy attached to a temple in Ahmednagar (an arrangement that also entailed that the local families took care of his meals) but his was a life of unconscious rebellion. I am amazed now at what he managed to do and how far he travelled, not merely in a literary sense. From a polytheistic tradition, he somehow moved to the monotheism of the Brahmo Samaj. And the family was not well-off, but he went to Wilson College to study.
On two occasions, he travelled to the United States. First in 1893, when he went to the World Parliament of Religions, and then again a decade later. Later, when I was in Chicago on a shoestring fellowship budget, I went to the Art Institute where I noted the installation of Vivekananda’s speech inscribed on the steps of the main staircase – but nothing on my grandfather. He came back to Calcutta, and worked as a teacher there and in Indore, then a princely state. He was among the first professors, or perhaps the first Indian professor, of English literature at Elphinstone College in the 1950s.
Though I never really knew my grandfather or either of my grandparents, he is largely responsible for the openness, the vibrancy and guts I recognise in Hinduism. He did the spadework and I inherited it.
Hinduism, as I understood it, embraces all kinds of opinions, and had no sense of guilt. In Hindu Colony, where we lived for some years, we were quite apart from other families, with their everyday rituals and rites, but we never felt different. The old temples in India depicted every bit of human life, where the sacred came together with the profane. So it’s disappointing that those speaking for Hindutva offer a version of Hinduism that has really no idea of what Hinduism really is about.
Cuckold in 1997 is an amazing piece of historical fiction. It marks a different turn from Ravan and Eddie and was also innovative in many ways. How did you move towards this work?
Very early on, as a young writer with immense pretensions, I had no intention of writing a book on Meera. There was just so much bogus stuff about her, all the stereotypes and the calendar art. There was her own self-absorption and immersion which put me off.
One winter night in Delhi, at the end of a show at a film festival, I was travelling in an auto rickshaw with a friend, when out of the blue the thought came to me: Meera is easily the most famous person in all of India. Her verses are on everyone’s lips. And yet there is nothing that is known about her husband. All we know is that he was born, he married her and then he died. He had fallen through the black hole of history. And even Colonel Tod, in his 19th century history of the Rajputs, had it wrong – when he equated him with Rana Kumbha.
The thought stayed in my mind. It was from a book in Hindi that Arun Kolatkar gave me that I finally realised that he had a name: Bhojraj, and who then appears in Cuckold as Maharaj Kumar. Of course I had no idea in the beginning what to write about, though there was one clear scene I had in mind of the Maharaj Kumar painting himself blue.
Again, as you wrote this, was the method instinctive or was there a consciousness in how you tried to do certain things, even the subversion of literary convention or how the myths have travelled?
It was after the book was over, that I added in some parts – again the self-conscious writer taking over the instinctive writer – such as Maharaj Kumar taking a second wife, Suganda. And there was the dilemma I tried to resolve, that had for a while engaged me. This followed the criticism I had received from my then editor-publisher on a certain matter in Bedtime Story (its Marathi version written in 1978). He had taken exception to a sharp and very mocking remark I had attributed to Draupadi, one she directs toward the elders as they sit silently during her disrobing. The editor questioned my understanding of the epics, and asked if I really understood what great men, those heroes in the epics, really were about.
This is where in Cuckold, I brought in Bruhannada, the eunuch who sees herself as a descendant of Bhismah Pitamah, for in a manner much like eunuchs, Bhismah too had vowed to abstain from relationships or to commit to marriage. When Bruhannada is later grievously injured by the king’s stepbrother and rival, she refuses to confess all to the king. It is then that Maharaj Kumar asks her if her loyalty lay more to a person or to values and ideals that were enduring and would stand the test of time. It was in some ways, my reaction to what my editor-publisher had raised over Bedtime Story. There were other scenes too where I subverted old received knowledge, like, for instance, Meera – who is never really named in the book – and her cheating at cards.
The book ends ambiguously, and this was deliberate. I presented three different endings, with some mystery as to what happens to Maharaj Kumar. He has believed in the message of the Gita, in the warrior’s duty it encapsulates. He is meditative, reflective and unorthodox, and is able to speak on an entire range of subjects. When he realises that it is Krishna, who his wife is devoted to, that is when the god turns into his sworn enemy. But he has identified himself so much with Krishna, that when he encounters a marble statue of the god, he is in all apparent intent, subsumed by it.
God’s Little Soldier that came in 2006 again happened at an important time. But the book’s themes, especially its explorations of the mind of a fanatic, haven’t been analysed or taken up seriously.
It was an important book to write, especially the backdrop mattered and which appears in the book too. The Satanic Verses had been banned in India first and it was following this that it came to the Ayatollah’s attention in Iran and therein came the infamous fatwa.
But I did want to understand what being a "true fanatic" was all about. What shapes a fanatic, and does a fanatic ever experience guilt? And how does this guilt transform him? So there is Zia, from a fine family, cultured and erudite in every way, and aware of the great Islamic and Hindu influences that make for a composite culture.
Then months after the book was published, a new chapter was added in the paperback edition and in the other editions that appeared, the French, German, and Italian and others. Zia is appalled by the violence that makes many a genuine jihadi in England. He questions that if he is willing to kill in the name of god, and it is god who justifies the killing, then how can he, just a messenger of god’s will, feel guilt?
This guilt makes him feel he is betraying god and this in turn leads him to commit more violence. The cycle and escalation of violence take its toll on him, and Zia longs for some release, to be betrayed in some way, so he is liberated from doing the same thing over and over again.
Yes, I am sad this book hasn’t been analysed or looked at in so much detail. For a fanatic, it seems to me, is close to the idea of god, is god’s most ardent devotee, and so has a desperate desire to prove this.
There is the very evident humour in your work. The adjectives most reviews use for your work – the bawdy humour and ribaldry in them – present such a one-dimensional view. Does this put you off?
Yes, it is funny. But equally so, in how no one deals with it: humour of this kind. And perhaps it does actually offend some people. It’s a kind of Rabelaisian humour – though it might not be correct to call it that – which has been in our tradition, something inherited. It was especially there in our tamasha tradition where everything and everyone became a subject of humour – not gentle but mocking and even ribald. But this, even the tamasha tradition, has all been suppressed by some puritanism.
The humour as it does exist in my novels is tragicomic, larger than life, bawdy, grotesque and equally horrifying in parts. The power of humour is to shock, to question assumptions, to make one aware that life throws back at you options you’ve least expected. In The Extras, Sita, the singer, sleeps with Ravan, while her drunken husband lies oblivious in sleep just by them, and Eddie finds himself in hospital, for all his wild ways.
Do you see any dichotomy between writers now at the forefront of a significant protest as against the crisis of declining readership? Is this in some senses ironical?
The writers who have protested have done an admirable thing. Then there are writers whose writing is preceded by business propositions. I have nothing against that. But writing, any literature, has to mirror the times, talk about it in some measure. But the stance of some writers in this sense who work to a business model – is exactly the same as some people in power in the present dispensation.
It is true that the kind of literature cherished in the past – the rigorous and solid kind of literature – is dying and is threatened. By not being read, by not being written enough. Writers have the duty to delve more into details, talk of present-day happenings and the condition of our earth, but we are not aware of truths like climate change or even blind ourselves to it. The consequences of such change can be devastating for our city. In that sense, literature is one of the most endangered species.
How do you respond to the current climate of intolerance, murders, and the persecution of Dalits?
But this is all in tune with present-day events around us, and writers have to and must speak up. Around 40 eminent writers returning their awards in a wave, beginning first with Uday Prakash and Nayantara Sehgal, is a significant event of our times. The climate is just so inhibiting, with restraint on freedoms – of expression, on the subjects one can write on, and especially, curbs on the freedom of thought. It is all deemed unpatriotic and anti-national.
Especially dispiriting has been the long silence – broken only recently – of the Sahitya Akademi, an institution whose bounden duty it is to speak for and defend freedom of thought – as it should have done early on in the case of Wendy Doniger’s book (and others too) and then its inaction over Kalburgi’s cold-blooded murder.
The Akademi should have spoken up for the fact that differences of opinion are important, even vital for any kind of learning. Censorship of any kind limits space in which one can write or take risks. This doesn’t merely affect writers but creation of any kind, even scientific.
Any stifling of essential freedoms comes at a price, and no one can remain immune or stay apathetic to such moves, oftentimes covert, by whichever dispensation is in power. As I said in my introduction to Bedtime Story, ‘apathy’ and ‘indifference’ on the part of everyday citizens can prove costly. So every citizen must stand up and speak for such freedoms.
Is Elephant on a Mouse your only work for children?
Yes, it is a screenplay for children, written at the time I worked on other screenplays. It had a lot of fun and enchantment, it presented the possibilities of fantasy, and there was no moralisation whatsoever, as did happen with children’s literature once.
Your other solo experience was an acting stint in a film, as Brother Bono in Split Wide Open. You haven’t accepted more offers?
I wasn’t offered any. I played the paedophile priest in that film, which won acclaim and was controversial in equal measure. But the only acting experience I ever had was in school, till the 5th grade. Recently, Tulsi (Vatsal) and I discovered some thin books that I had won as prizes for acting in school. Pity I didn’t do anything more with that early encouragement.
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What does the lifetime achievement award mean to you?
I am happy that my work has been noticed and will now hopefully be read and enjoyed by my readers. Now I am waiting for the Bharat Ratna for Zero Productivity and the Nobel for Sloth.
Saat Sakkam Trechailis, your first novel, was a sensation when it was first published in 1974, in Marathi. Yet it did have a mixed reception.
When Saat Sakkam Trechailis first came out in 1974, there were some critics who hailed it, and praised it for having broken new ground and for reinventing the language. I was also asked if I had set out to write a new kind of modernist Marathi fiction. But far from it. I wrote in the only way I knew. And I did think that if I ever have to write again in Marathi, I would have to do something quite unlike this one, something very different, and not use the same kind of language.
But then again, there were some critics who called my effort arrogant. And spent pages asking whether it was proper to have favourable blurbs in one’s publication, though this was all right when this happened with novels in English. They also opined on whether it was really a novel, since the novel flouts literary conventions in so many ways, is fragmented enough to demand a reader’s patience and I hope the effort is worth it.
The book is about a narrator, writing to an unnamed person, “you”, who has been and still is, the love of his life. And yes, some of the themes have been with me in all I’ve written later. It is tragic and has a lot of black humour as well.
The themes in it continue to appear in your later work.
Yes, the words that “you”, the woman Kushank loves, throws back at him repeatedly, “Kya pharak padta hai” (what difference does it make?) was picked on by critics as a way to savage the novel and its alienated and almost nihilistic narrator. Yet Kushank’s [the narrator] response, as a close reading will reveal, has always been a contrary one, it is an emphatic – yes, it does make a difference; she does to him, as does life.
The other thing that mattered to me also was what we consider “patent nonsense”. These are the words a father of a young girl tells Kushank after his exchange of letters with the child. This is over a story Kushank has shared with her, about a boy he knew, unhappy about his passing birthday. Kushank had suggested some ways out: having months only as long as a day, or having every month named after June, so he’d have a birthday every month. Her father, on hearing of this, calls such suggestions, “patent nonsense”, but fantasy, evoking an imaginary alternative isn’t really nonsense. The nonsense Kushank sees is in poverty, starvation and hunger which needn’t be there and are allowed to exist.
Arguably your most popular work remains Ravan and Eddie and the trilogy of the two boys becoming men in Bombay-Mumbai. Did you write it self-consciously and to reflect changes in the city?
I consider myself an instinctive writer, and perhaps that explains the meditations and asides that appear often in the main narrative. I had no clear idea or an outline beforehand as I began the book. The people who appear first in Ravan and Eddie are just what human beings are about – ambivalent, contradictory, and yet managing to live happily or unhappily with all this.
It actually began as a screenplay in Marathi; where the bits about the children would appear right at the beginning, but soon after the titles, it would be their adult lives that would take over. But the screenplay didn’t work out and over time it became something different. I have been conscious of Aristotle’s maxim – Art isn’t about what is possible but what is probable. For of course Ravan and Eddie became the book of the two boys, then young men who became each other’s sworn enemies and this unfolds over the next two novels.
At the same time, I contradict myself, I am also a self-conscious writer. For when it became a novel and led to two others, they showed up the city as it evolved in post-independence years. It shows a Bombay of housing estates, dream luxury projects that are a creation of the nexus between real estate developers, politicians and the mafia, and its water crisis, even as the books follow Ravan and Eddie in their quest for superstardom in a city that recognises little else.
Their true vocation, however, is music. So if I had to dedicate Rest in Peace to anyone, it’d be to all those who gave Hindi cinema its most magical moments in the 1950s – the composers, the lyricists and the musicians. Alas, music in films has declined in these times.
Tell us about the intervening years, the 1980s especially, when you wrote your plays and screenplays, and then about Arun Kolatkar, for you worked with him in your days in advertising.
In the years, between Saat Sakkam Trechailis (1974) and Ravan and Eddie (1994), I worked on several things: screenplays mainly.
Bedtime Story, re-released now after being censored and banned by several political parties who ensured it would not be performed, was written in 1978. This was soon after the Emergency, and the Mahabharata and its stories became the backdrop for me to tell a morality tale of our times. Black Tulip, [a story] of two quintessential Mumbai characters – a thief and a policeman – was written in 2000, and I went back to it in 2014, and both were published in one volume earlier this year.
I met Arun first in Dilip Chitre’s house. And soon after we came to work in the same ad agency: Mass Communication and Marketing. He was already a highly regarded creative director in the industry. From around 1968 to 1975, we, Arun and I, worked as a team, writing copy, and spending nearly 12 hours in the same office. It was a priceless experience till the agency folded up in 1975.
Among all in the firm, it was the two of us, Arun Kolatkar and I, who were left jobless. As freelancers, we were not paid regularly, sometimes not at all, not even rejection fees. Arun had a superb sense of humour and in those days, he had entirely given up drinking. He was also amazingly well-read in a lot of things, and his knowledge of the Indian poetic tradition was vast, and spot-on. He did not teach me anything consciously, but I did learn a lot from him.
I read about your grandfather and how he was in Chicago at the time Vivekananda was there too. Though you may not have known him, has he been, at times, an unconscious influence on you?
I have little information on him, though others in my family, my brother and cousins, do. He, Balwant Nagarkar, was first a madhukari, a boy attached to a temple in Ahmednagar (an arrangement that also entailed that the local families took care of his meals) but his was a life of unconscious rebellion. I am amazed now at what he managed to do and how far he travelled, not merely in a literary sense. From a polytheistic tradition, he somehow moved to the monotheism of the Brahmo Samaj. And the family was not well-off, but he went to Wilson College to study.
On two occasions, he travelled to the United States. First in 1893, when he went to the World Parliament of Religions, and then again a decade later. Later, when I was in Chicago on a shoestring fellowship budget, I went to the Art Institute where I noted the installation of Vivekananda’s speech inscribed on the steps of the main staircase – but nothing on my grandfather. He came back to Calcutta, and worked as a teacher there and in Indore, then a princely state. He was among the first professors, or perhaps the first Indian professor, of English literature at Elphinstone College in the 1950s.
Though I never really knew my grandfather or either of my grandparents, he is largely responsible for the openness, the vibrancy and guts I recognise in Hinduism. He did the spadework and I inherited it.
Hinduism, as I understood it, embraces all kinds of opinions, and had no sense of guilt. In Hindu Colony, where we lived for some years, we were quite apart from other families, with their everyday rituals and rites, but we never felt different. The old temples in India depicted every bit of human life, where the sacred came together with the profane. So it’s disappointing that those speaking for Hindutva offer a version of Hinduism that has really no idea of what Hinduism really is about.
Cuckold in 1997 is an amazing piece of historical fiction. It marks a different turn from Ravan and Eddie and was also innovative in many ways. How did you move towards this work?
Very early on, as a young writer with immense pretensions, I had no intention of writing a book on Meera. There was just so much bogus stuff about her, all the stereotypes and the calendar art. There was her own self-absorption and immersion which put me off.
One winter night in Delhi, at the end of a show at a film festival, I was travelling in an auto rickshaw with a friend, when out of the blue the thought came to me: Meera is easily the most famous person in all of India. Her verses are on everyone’s lips. And yet there is nothing that is known about her husband. All we know is that he was born, he married her and then he died. He had fallen through the black hole of history. And even Colonel Tod, in his 19th century history of the Rajputs, had it wrong – when he equated him with Rana Kumbha.
The thought stayed in my mind. It was from a book in Hindi that Arun Kolatkar gave me that I finally realised that he had a name: Bhojraj, and who then appears in Cuckold as Maharaj Kumar. Of course I had no idea in the beginning what to write about, though there was one clear scene I had in mind of the Maharaj Kumar painting himself blue.
Again, as you wrote this, was the method instinctive or was there a consciousness in how you tried to do certain things, even the subversion of literary convention or how the myths have travelled?
It was after the book was over, that I added in some parts – again the self-conscious writer taking over the instinctive writer – such as Maharaj Kumar taking a second wife, Suganda. And there was the dilemma I tried to resolve, that had for a while engaged me. This followed the criticism I had received from my then editor-publisher on a certain matter in Bedtime Story (its Marathi version written in 1978). He had taken exception to a sharp and very mocking remark I had attributed to Draupadi, one she directs toward the elders as they sit silently during her disrobing. The editor questioned my understanding of the epics, and asked if I really understood what great men, those heroes in the epics, really were about.
This is where in Cuckold, I brought in Bruhannada, the eunuch who sees herself as a descendant of Bhismah Pitamah, for in a manner much like eunuchs, Bhismah too had vowed to abstain from relationships or to commit to marriage. When Bruhannada is later grievously injured by the king’s stepbrother and rival, she refuses to confess all to the king. It is then that Maharaj Kumar asks her if her loyalty lay more to a person or to values and ideals that were enduring and would stand the test of time. It was in some ways, my reaction to what my editor-publisher had raised over Bedtime Story. There were other scenes too where I subverted old received knowledge, like, for instance, Meera – who is never really named in the book – and her cheating at cards.
The book ends ambiguously, and this was deliberate. I presented three different endings, with some mystery as to what happens to Maharaj Kumar. He has believed in the message of the Gita, in the warrior’s duty it encapsulates. He is meditative, reflective and unorthodox, and is able to speak on an entire range of subjects. When he realises that it is Krishna, who his wife is devoted to, that is when the god turns into his sworn enemy. But he has identified himself so much with Krishna, that when he encounters a marble statue of the god, he is in all apparent intent, subsumed by it.
God’s Little Soldier that came in 2006 again happened at an important time. But the book’s themes, especially its explorations of the mind of a fanatic, haven’t been analysed or taken up seriously.
It was an important book to write, especially the backdrop mattered and which appears in the book too. The Satanic Verses had been banned in India first and it was following this that it came to the Ayatollah’s attention in Iran and therein came the infamous fatwa.
But I did want to understand what being a "true fanatic" was all about. What shapes a fanatic, and does a fanatic ever experience guilt? And how does this guilt transform him? So there is Zia, from a fine family, cultured and erudite in every way, and aware of the great Islamic and Hindu influences that make for a composite culture.
Then months after the book was published, a new chapter was added in the paperback edition and in the other editions that appeared, the French, German, and Italian and others. Zia is appalled by the violence that makes many a genuine jihadi in England. He questions that if he is willing to kill in the name of god, and it is god who justifies the killing, then how can he, just a messenger of god’s will, feel guilt?
This guilt makes him feel he is betraying god and this in turn leads him to commit more violence. The cycle and escalation of violence take its toll on him, and Zia longs for some release, to be betrayed in some way, so he is liberated from doing the same thing over and over again.
Yes, I am sad this book hasn’t been analysed or looked at in so much detail. For a fanatic, it seems to me, is close to the idea of god, is god’s most ardent devotee, and so has a desperate desire to prove this.
There is the very evident humour in your work. The adjectives most reviews use for your work – the bawdy humour and ribaldry in them – present such a one-dimensional view. Does this put you off?
Yes, it is funny. But equally so, in how no one deals with it: humour of this kind. And perhaps it does actually offend some people. It’s a kind of Rabelaisian humour – though it might not be correct to call it that – which has been in our tradition, something inherited. It was especially there in our tamasha tradition where everything and everyone became a subject of humour – not gentle but mocking and even ribald. But this, even the tamasha tradition, has all been suppressed by some puritanism.
The humour as it does exist in my novels is tragicomic, larger than life, bawdy, grotesque and equally horrifying in parts. The power of humour is to shock, to question assumptions, to make one aware that life throws back at you options you’ve least expected. In The Extras, Sita, the singer, sleeps with Ravan, while her drunken husband lies oblivious in sleep just by them, and Eddie finds himself in hospital, for all his wild ways.
Do you see any dichotomy between writers now at the forefront of a significant protest as against the crisis of declining readership? Is this in some senses ironical?
The writers who have protested have done an admirable thing. Then there are writers whose writing is preceded by business propositions. I have nothing against that. But writing, any literature, has to mirror the times, talk about it in some measure. But the stance of some writers in this sense who work to a business model – is exactly the same as some people in power in the present dispensation.
It is true that the kind of literature cherished in the past – the rigorous and solid kind of literature – is dying and is threatened. By not being read, by not being written enough. Writers have the duty to delve more into details, talk of present-day happenings and the condition of our earth, but we are not aware of truths like climate change or even blind ourselves to it. The consequences of such change can be devastating for our city. In that sense, literature is one of the most endangered species.
How do you respond to the current climate of intolerance, murders, and the persecution of Dalits?
But this is all in tune with present-day events around us, and writers have to and must speak up. Around 40 eminent writers returning their awards in a wave, beginning first with Uday Prakash and Nayantara Sehgal, is a significant event of our times. The climate is just so inhibiting, with restraint on freedoms – of expression, on the subjects one can write on, and especially, curbs on the freedom of thought. It is all deemed unpatriotic and anti-national.
Especially dispiriting has been the long silence – broken only recently – of the Sahitya Akademi, an institution whose bounden duty it is to speak for and defend freedom of thought – as it should have done early on in the case of Wendy Doniger’s book (and others too) and then its inaction over Kalburgi’s cold-blooded murder.
The Akademi should have spoken up for the fact that differences of opinion are important, even vital for any kind of learning. Censorship of any kind limits space in which one can write or take risks. This doesn’t merely affect writers but creation of any kind, even scientific.
Any stifling of essential freedoms comes at a price, and no one can remain immune or stay apathetic to such moves, oftentimes covert, by whichever dispensation is in power. As I said in my introduction to Bedtime Story, ‘apathy’ and ‘indifference’ on the part of everyday citizens can prove costly. So every citizen must stand up and speak for such freedoms.
Is Elephant on a Mouse your only work for children?
Yes, it is a screenplay for children, written at the time I worked on other screenplays. It had a lot of fun and enchantment, it presented the possibilities of fantasy, and there was no moralisation whatsoever, as did happen with children’s literature once.
Your other solo experience was an acting stint in a film, as Brother Bono in Split Wide Open. You haven’t accepted more offers?
I wasn’t offered any. I played the paedophile priest in that film, which won acclaim and was controversial in equal measure. But the only acting experience I ever had was in school, till the 5th grade. Recently, Tulsi (Vatsal) and I discovered some thin books that I had won as prizes for acting in school. Pity I didn’t do anything more with that early encouragement.