A Conversation with Kiran Nagarkar
Arnab Chakladar: Could you say a little more about that?
Kiran Nagarkar: I started writing it before the Emergency and finished it during the Emergency. It was an extremely controversial play. And as with most controversial writing, it became controversial mostly because nobody had read it. To describe it briefly: In the early 70's I discovered that Vietnam was not the story the Americans were telling us; nor was Cuba the narrative Time and Newsweek were dishing out. By chance, I read about the Cuban revolution and Castro. My play is about responsibility, and one of the themes is that when anything that happens anywhere in the world, you and I are responsible for it. It doesn't matter whether it is Vietnam or Rwanda.
The play was not allowed to be rehearsed, forget being performed...
I lifted four stories from the Mahabharata, the four basic stories. I'm told it is one of the most violent plays ever written, because the audience doesn't come out of the auditorium alive. It is gassed for not having taken responsibility for what was going on. I have a chorus in the play, a very, very vicious chorus, the kind that first takes you into confidence only to gull you and then make a sucker of you. But he's also the conscience of the play. At the end when Gandhari tells Krishna that she holds him responsible for the death of her hundred sons and hates him and Krishna, as usual, spins his spiel and bamboozles her, the chorus comes on the stage and says something like, "I thought there was one moment of hope when Arjun said I will not fight. I will not spill the blood of my brothers. But did at least one person in the audience support him?".
And even though I'd made the chorus a Nazi and he himself had had to pay for his crimes, the very few people who'd read it claimed that I was trying to be superior to everybody else, even though I was saying that all of us are responsible for the crimes, evil and corruption around us. But by the second rehearsal this criticism too became irrelevant. The play was not allowed to be rehearsed, forget being performed...
Arnab Chakladar: Was that the state government?
Kiran Nagarkar:. The state government in Maharashtra comes into the act prior to the performance--you cannot perform a play unless it has a censorship certificate. In my case the censor board asked for 78 cuts, some of them one page long--which didn't leave too much of the play. But I had a friend, called Professor M.P. Rege and when I walked into the censor board meeting with him, the censors were taken aback. He was a major personality, a kind of guru-figure in Maharashtra, and a genuinely fine person. He was one of our best philosophers and an activist in the best sense of the word. The censors thought he was going to join them and here he was supporting the play. So they asked for 28 cuts instead of 78 because Rege was there and he was defending the play. Finally we did get the censorship certificate. And that was when the extra-legal censorship kicked in even harder.
That's how my screenplay started: the fall of Ravan and the birth of Eddie would take place before the titles. And after the titles both my protagonists were already grown-up.
Arnab Chakladar: And what form did that take?
Kiran Nagarkar: The actors were not allowed to participate in rehearsals. There were only two readings and by the time of the first reading, the play was already controversial. The R.S.S, the Hindu Mahasabha, the Shiv Sena had got into the act....Many well-known directors tried to do it in Marathi. I wrote the play in both Marathi and English--but the English theatre in Bombay at the time (and perhaps even now) was more interested in Western plays. Whether the play is good or not is for the audience to decide.But it is great theatre, and I have no problem saying this because 17 years later when the play was finally performed first in Marathi and then in Hindi, the Marathi actors paid for the Hindi production out of their own pockets. It was not a big production but they had a ball! You know, it's spitfire dialogue, and great fun and great tragedy...(laughs) Bedtime Story was not a happy experience. When the Emergency was lifted, for a time I thought the play had become irrelevant, because after all the play was about responsibility. But then I realized that the play could not ever become irrelevant. We had got a second shot at freedom and life and in 11 months we deliberately lost it. But it did not augur well for me that the play had run into so much trouble.
Arnab Chakladar: Is that when you stopped writing?
Kiran Nagarkar: A filmmaker who is now considered a serious director and has a body of work came to me thinking that since I had written Seven Sixes which has a very melodramatic opening, at least the first half of the opening is melodramatic and then it becomes bizarre and completely goes off the rails...but the director hadn't cottoned on to that and I hadn't realized how different our approaches were. So he came to me and asked if I would write a screenplay for him. And that's how I began writing Ravan and Eddie, the screenplay. And it was going to be my take on post-independence India and growing up in it. Now, I'm a reluctant watcher of Hindi films but a compulsive one--at least I used to be. My structure was going to be based on the standard Hindi film format; you know in those days a lot of movies started with a happy family and then some calamity would occur and the children would get separated from their parents and after the titles the children would be grown up. Chance and fate would bring them together without their realizing that they were siblings. That's how my screenplay started: the fall of Ravan and the birth of Eddie would take place before the titles. And after the titles both my protagonists were already grown-up. But, of course, when that director saw the pre-title sequence, he could not fathom what I was doing--he wanted something shocking and melodramatic. He was no longer interested in the screenplay. That was when I wrote about 60 pages of the novel in Marathi...and then abandoned the project.
It was as if for those two months I'd thought I was betraying my mother tongue and was unable to start the novel in English.
Arnab Chakladar: And when did you start writing again?
Kiran Nagarkar: Sometime around 1991. I got a shoestring fellowship to go to Chicago. It was one of the minor Rockefeller fellowships. But after I got there I realized it was given to me to learn to sweep and swab the floor and to learn cooking--because I could not afford anything else! (laughs) Anyway, it certainly gave me a chance to go back to writing. And that was when I switched to English.
Arnab Chakladar: When you revised the project was there a conscious decision to start again in English or in the intervening years had it become a natural progression for you?
Kiran Nagarkar: I am not at all sure how to answer that question because I don't know what the honest answer is. But I will tell you what happened in the first few months in Chicago. I had begun toying with the idea of writing Ravan and Eddie in English but I would not want to get out of bed. I would get up around 9 or 10 in the morning and would have to fight hard with myself not to hit the sack immediately. When the medical insurance finally kicked in and I saw a doctor, he told me, "you're suffering from depression". And once he'd articulated what the problem was I could go back home and get down to work. It was as if for those two months I'd thought I was betraying my mother tongue and was unable to start the novel in English. Which is strange since English...
Arnab Chakladar: ... is closer to being your mother tongue...
Kiran Nagarkar: Yes, exactly. I went through a bad depression at the time but I didn't touch the medicines he prescribed once he'd zeroed in on the problem.
Arnab Chakladar: Well, this may give your Marathi critics some comfort--to know that you actually physically suffered...
(laughter)
Kiran Nagarkar: Oh, nothing gives them comfort! And you know one of my peeves is that now they cannot stop asking me, "Why did you abandon Marathi?" The truth is when the theatre groups who wanted to produce Bedtime Story went through such hard times, not one of them stood up and supported my Marathi play.
Arnab Chakladar: Had Saat Sakkam been a success in publishing terms?
The question is who do you write for if you have no readers? Besides what can you say when your critics are unable to read a text scrupulously instead of accusing you of being sensational and experimenting for the sake of being different? up.
Kiran Nagarkar: In India the publishers never tell you how many copies they're publishing. Even with the Marathi publisher...there was no contract, and I was never sure how much the first print-run was. They told me 1000 but I suspect it was slightly more than that even though they're a company of integrity. It took 21 years to sell 1000 books. It would appear my book had no readers! And the critics also were totally divided. There was one lot that thought that new ground was being broken--and whether you like the novel or not, new ground certainly was being broken, even though I didn't set out to do that.
And the play too--I was one of the few non-commercial playwrights who was not doing the theatre of the absurd in India. And the theatre of the absurd was a completely derivative activity. I have nothing against being derivative. One of my observations has been that when we in India appropriate Western instruments and styles of music we seem to do it extremely well, you know R.D Burman and stuff like that. But that is not the case when we appropriate theater styles from abroad. There is an extreme self-consciousness...at least that has been my view, you might disagree.
Anyway, the point is some of the critics thought my first novel was a landmark, and the others were busy debating what kind of person would have the gall to put blurbs on the book! They were not interested in the book itself. Out of, say, 6 pages of a review, 4 would be devoted to the impertinence and gall of the writer in having quotes on the jacket. The rest of the critics were busy arguing whether this was at all a novel. Why is he pretending to be a novelist when he is just a sensationalist. The question is who do you write for if you have no readers? Besides what can you say when your critics are unable to read a text scrupulously instead of accusing you of being sensational and experimenting for the sake of being different?