A Conversation with Kiran Nagarkar
Arnab Chakladar: So between Bedtime Story and Ravan and Eddie there was nothing...
Kiran Nagarkar: Yes. Well, I did write the screenplay, but it got nowhere. None of my screenplays have been made into films. In '91 I started writing the novel Ravan and Eddie again and it was published in '95. By then I had also begun to work on Cuckold. Cuckold is the only book of which I can say with some confidence that it got written pretty fast. It is a much bigger book and I worked on it in three bursts of one and a half months each in three years.
I started out in copy. Arun Kolatkar was already there and Arun was really a fine copywriter also
Arnab Chakladar: Even if we double that estimate that's an incredibly compressed timeframe...
Kiran Nagarkar: Yes, and I'd never been able to do that before and I certainly couldn't do that now. I must have worked off and on for 12-16 hours a day. I don't know how I could have managed it because now I can't sit for an hour or an hour and a half. But to come back to Ravan and Eddie--since I'm giving the dope on things...I used to work for an advertising agency then.
Arnab Chakladar: In copy?
Kiran Nagarkar: I started out in copy. Arun Kolatkar was already there and Arun was really a fine copywriter also...he started out as a visualizer but he had tremendous command of the language...
Arnab Chakladar: I'm sorry to interrupt and digress but that helps me understand something about his poetry, which is so visual...
Kiran Nagarkar: Oh absolutely...you know he's from the JJ School of Art, which at the time was a major institution. He did only one year there--he thought it was a waste of time to be in class, so he did his degree from outside. He went back to Kolhapur, where he was from, and when he appeared for the finals he came first. But he could not be given the prize because he'd appeared from outside. When he graduated he decided there wasn't much room in the Fine Arts to do original work and make a mark, so he switched deliberately to writing. He'd also always wanted to be a writer...as it turns out it wasn't such a bad decision.
Arnab Chakladar: So you were saying about advertising...
Kiran Nagarkar: I was in this copy department and I was the creative director...
This must have registered somewhere in my mind because it did give a very solid anchor to my book: the fact that these two different communities might as well be living on two different planets
Arnab Chakladar: Which agency was this?
Kiran Nagarkar: This was MCM which was at the time the fastest growing agency in India but died an unnatural death because of humongous amounts of embezzlement. It was a crazy place. Every time you went to the pot you were expected to come up with an idea! Some of the finest people from the field were there.
To come back to Ravan and Eddie, I'd always had this image in my mind...well, what am I talking about - not in my mother's womb or something...but you know one of the images in my mind was of a child falling. Since one had done English literature, I knew that a child who fell from a height, had to die. Whatever little I remembered of Aristotle was that art must deal with the probable, not the possible. Children do fall from the 11th or 21st storey and survive but that won't do in art. The consequence of this had to be that someone else had to die.
That was one of the starting thoughts and the other factor that fed into this book was that the department at the agency had a secretary. It was a very compact department, very friendly - even the proofreader who would come in, would play the guitar and sing...a seriously good atmosphere.
Arnab Chakladar: I'm sorry to say that my own experience in advertising was not one of such cultural vitality...
Kiran Nagarkar: You're absolutely right...I don't know how Arun and I lasted and we didn't last very well, we did miserably after MCM closed down...but the secretary of the department called us all over to her house for lunch. She lived in a chawl in Mazagaon. She was a Roman Catholic and it was a complex of chawls, and in all the chawls the 5th storey was occupied by Catholics and the other 5 storeys by Hindus. This must have registered somewhere in my mind because it did give a very solid anchor to my book: the fact that these two different communities might as well be living on two different planets.
I see the majority of us as extras. We are really marginal figures and sometimes we don't even figure
In a sense, without my even realizing it, it also became a study of the tepid coldness with which the Catholics and the Hindus dealt with each other in those days. Perhaps they still do. In between there was some hostility as well...the RSS was giving the Christian community a hard time. Of course now that has quietened down and you find the vamp figure has disappeared from movies and also Catholics are no longer just the extras in the movies. They are now directors, cameramen, but that change occurred later. My Catholics were from that time and since I was trying to do a post-independence take on the two communities in chawls, it was very germane to my book, this opposition within the same building, and without being aware that you did not wish to have anything in common. The book deals with the childhood of Ravan and Eddie but the original screenplay focussed on the two as adults. In the novel, there are asides and meditations on the role of English in India, on the place of the moving image and cinema, the dilemma of the acute shortage of water for the poor.
One of the things that the screenplay deals with, and which is also one of my obsessions, is the extra in the Hindi movie. I see that as one of the central leitmotifs of my perception of human beings...that you might be with the biggest actors, you might have acted in 7 or 10 times more movies than they have-- you were there in the seventh row, extreme left but in the final cut you might not be there. I see the majority of us as extras. We are really marginal figures and sometimes we don't even figure. It is a fairly good metaphor for Kiran Nagarkar also and his career as a writer...
(laughter)
Arnab Chakladar:What was the response to the book like?
Kiran Nagarkar: When the book got written, some Catholics were displeased and the Hindus too were displeased. It's nothing new. But over the years... Ravan and Eddie has gained a fairly loyal following; luckily for me many of them are Bombay Catholics, which is a very heartening thought for me...Hindus, I don't know (laughs), well I'm sure some of them like it as well (laughs)...and then Cuckold came out in '97.
Arnab Chakladar: Could you say a little about that the origins of that novel as well?
Kiran Nagarkar: I'll be brief about the genesis of Cuckold: I did not know I was going to be an occasional writer but when I was young, I had decided that there were two subjects I would not deal with. One of them was incest because I think Indian society, and probably Western society as well, doesn't allow us to look at taboo issues afresh. You can only approach them in a stereotypical fashion, and since I do not want to approach taboo subjects, if possible, I would underline "if possible", in a stereotypical fashion, incest was out for me. And anyway it is too extreme a subject. I know that if I dealt with it I'd deal with it in a different way than someone like Mahesh Elkunchwar deals with it. The other subject that was taboo for me was Meera...
Arnab Chakladar: And why was that?
I've always believed that if anyone is more macho than the Latins, it is us Indians except we're such hypocrites about it and cloud and cloak the issue in high-falutin words
Kiran Nagarkar: Because I thought she was such a bloody bore! She was always wearing white and she always had that ektara and she was always looking inward. Of course I had completely bought into that kitsch myth of her. Which is why I emphasized "if possible" earlier. What I discovered later on was that I was as much a victim of stereotypes as anyone else. I have not learnt much even now, I think.
I used to be an absolute film-freak and watch 6 movies a day and I used to be a film-critic as well occasionally. I was coming back from a late night movie in Delhi at a film-festival. I was with a friend and it was freezing cold in the rickshaw, and being from Bombay I didn't have the right clothes. Suddenly this thought struck me that here is perhaps the most famous woman in India...you know Meera really crosses both state and language borders. I don't think she's a great poet like some of the other mystic poets but her language is on your and my tongue, without our realizing it. Well, here was the irony: This is the most well-known woman in India and we know absolutely nothing about her husband. This was a genuine conundrum for me: how can it be that we know nothing about this man but we constantly represent him as some vicious guy hell-bent on bumping off his wife. The thought struck me and I wiped it out. I wasn't going to write about him. But you know some ideas make you eat your own words. I kept going back to the 'missing' husband and I started doing a sort of desultory reading of Meera. I discovered her husband's name was Bhojraj, and that Colonel Tod himself had got it wrong. He thought Rana Kumbha was her husband. When I finally imagined that I could write about Meera's husband, I thought it might be a 104-page book in bold type. I've always believed that if anyone is more macho than the Latins, it is us Indians except we're such hypocrites about it and cloud and cloak the issue in high-falutin words. Anyway I thought I would make this guy a real wife-beater and so on. Fortunately the book and the characters took over and it turned out to be a very different book. So, this is how far I have come. And now my next book ...
Arnab Chakladar: I'll understand if you don't want to say much about it...
Kiran Nagarkar: It is called God's Little Soldier. Unlike Cuckold it has a contemporary setting.