TRANSPARENCY AND DEPTH:

AN INTERVIEW WITH KIRAN NAGARKAR

Cristina María Gámez Fernández

Universidad de Córdoba

Photo © Joel Kuortti.

TRANSPARENCY AND DEPTH: AN INTERVIEW... 139

Kiran Nagarkar, one of India most respected writers, was born in 1942. He
is best known for having published in Marathi and English. In 1974 he published
his first novel in Marathi, Saat Sakkam Trechalis, which was later translated into
English as Seven Sixes Are Forty Three. The play Bedtime Story, written in 1978, took
him into trouble with the Shiv Sena among other political organizations. Besides,
the text was highly censored and the performance banned. His production as play-
wright continued with Kabirache Kay Karayche and Strangers Amongst Us. He has
acknowledged his obsession with cinema and this has led him to write some scripts
like The Broken Circle, The Elephant on the Mouse, or The Widow and Her Friends.
His next novel was written in English and published in 1994, entitled Ravan and
Eddie. He was awarded the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in English in 2001
for his novel Cuckold, published in 1997. His latest novel, published in 2006, is
God’s Little Soldier. It has been translated so far into German, Spanish, Italian and
French.

REVISTA CANARIA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES, 62; April 2011, pp. 139-148

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 The voice recorder was on for a bit more than one hour, but this interview
took longer than that. With the first question we, supposedly at work, were still
unfocused, as Nagarkar joked here and there. The students, attending the interview,
and I would burst out laughing. What made him so comical was that he was all the
time making fun of himself as a supposedly important writer who must create arti-
ficial boasting around him.
The beginning of the interview soon led me and the students to discover
hidden nuances in Nagarkar. Through his commentaries he revealed his very expe-
rienced and thought-out views on literature, the world and their close relationship.
He openly talked about his problems with the censorship of the Maharastrian po-
litical authorities as well as the fierce rejection he suffered from the Marathi literary
establishment, and overtly expressed his considerations on the Iraq war and other
worldwide conflicts. When both engaged in conversation with him or at reading
any of his novels, one appreciates the harsh reality which is brought to the fore
thanks to his humor, a corrosive sense of irony and hilarity which almost reaches
absurdity. But Nagarkar does not write to give messages, he has never done. Instead,
he contents himself with confronting readers with that nonsensical reality we some-
times happen to live in.
However, the final version of the interview was later tempered by Nagarkar
himself through a fluid email interchange.1 His dedication to the interview was
flawless, as he thoroughly reviewed the transcription despite being hospitalized. His
amendments permeated the text with his natural wisdom, allowed him to remove
too narrow and local references and to leave only the most significant ones. This
interview made his writing more transparent to me in the sense that it permitted me
to better appreciate the crystal clear depth of his aesthetics. It is the reader’s decision
CRISTINA MARÍA GÁMEZ FERNÁNDEZ 140

now to ponder upon both, transparency and depth to his art.

CG: What is the reason why you started writing? Did you feel that as a need? Or maybe
you understood that your writing was necessary for society?
KN: There are, as you know, two reasons why writers of fiction, plays or poetry
write. Because they have a message or wish to improve society. Or they wish
to entertain. I belong to the second category. Which is not to say that I have
not occasionally written a play to give a message. But that is an exception.
CG: What kind of writer do you see yourself as?
KN: I am a story-teller. I trace my lineage to Homer and the people who wrote the
great Indian epic called the Mahabharata. Homer was an oral story-teller.
Nothing more than that. But look at the kind of stories that he told. Two and
a half thousand years later, we’re still re-telling stories. Because they are not
mere stories. Embedded in them are eternal archetypes. That is why Freud
makes such generous use of them. Because they tell us something fundamen-

1
I want to thank Rosalía Villa Jiménez, Nitesh Gurbani and Laura Sánchez Ceballos for
their help at transcribing the audio files.

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 tal about human beings, their relationships and why they behave the way
they do. It’s the same with the Mahabharata, the longest epic in the world.
The people who are responsible for these epics are such damn good story-
tellers, what they do first of all, is to grab your attention and then in the
telling itself various resonances arise. On the face of it what you are reading
are engaging stories and nothing more. But underneath the surface they are
dealing with the primal issues of life and obliquely offering invaluable insights.
My aspiration and endeavour is to make the story the product, a compelling
product and the insights and the deep questioning by-products.
CG: But in the past these resonances have been causing you troubles... I remember that
you were saying at your conference that if you have some time offered a message,
immediately afterwards you thought that you shouldn’t have done that. Maybe
because of these troubles or...
KN: Oh, no, no, no. Troubles have got nothing to do with that... No, as I have said
very often... I’m a complete coward.
CG: What do you mean? Is it that you feel guilty?
KN: No. I really have no desire to go to jail. I have no desire to be beaten up. If
some of my fellow-countrymen don’t understand the nature of what is be-
ing said, and deliberately misinterpret it that’s not my problem. But while
I’m a coward, all I can say is that so far it has not prevented me from writing
whatever I want to. The play which got me into so much trouble is called
Bedtime Story. And even though it has a message, it is a very different kind
of message. The message, as I’ve said again and again, is about responsibil-
ity. You and I can’t sit here and say: “But we’re in Spain, so we can’t do a
damn thing about the Israelis killing the Palestinians or the Americans kill-

TRANSPARENCY AND DEPTH: AN INTERVIEW... 141

ing the Iraqis.” I genuinely believe that you and I are responsible for the
deaths in Iraq. Just as, if something terrible happens in India, Americans
and everybody else in the world...How many years is it that the Palestinians
are not even sub-citizens? Israel is the only country in the world which has
got no borders. Every other country, if it is to join the U.N., has to declare
its borders. And the saddest part is that the Israelis themselves, the Jews
have suffered so much. And to use a sentence from one of my novels: The
one thing that experience seems to teach us is to make the same mistakes again
and again. But like most people who have suffered so much the Israelis have
not learnt a damned thing. You would think that their own holocaust-
experience would have taught them never to treat anybody the way they
were treated. But they’re doing exactly the same thing. If you come to India,
you will find that, for example, if I want to get married in the orthodox
manner, then in the arranged-marriage sequence, my bride’s mother and
father have to pay me money, the dowry. Because the implication is that
from now on I’ll have to look after her. She may be my wife, I may be with
her, and she will beget my children and she’ll look after me when I’m ill and
stand by my side through thick and thin but she’s still a burden. But do you
know that once she and I get married in India, sometimes though not al-
ways, I will start making demands. Her parents then will borrow money

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 and I will get a small car. Post-marriage I will start torturing her because my
rapaciousness knows no end. I want more and more. The funny thing is
when my wife becomes a mother-in-law herself, she will treat her daughter-
in-law exactly as she was treated. I’m not making this up. When I wrote my
Bedtime Story, the Vietnam war was going on and I was deeply upset about
it. It was their country, what was America doing there? So I wrote a play
about responsibility. Have you seen the Chinese play table-tennis? You can’t
see the ball because it flashes past. In my play, when it was performed fi-
nally in an underground fashion, the dialogue moves like that ping pong
ball. The actors liked the play in my mother-tongue, Marathi, so much that
they paid for all the production costs when it was done in Hindi.
When we tell children stories, Indians always want to give a message. They
always ask: “What is the moral of the story?” I’m not interested in stuck-on
morals. Stories are a basic human need. But package the story as a moral
and you’ll put off children and even adults for good. Bedtime Story is a very
violent play. I think it’s the only play in the world where the audience is
killed at the end of the play for not taking the responsibility for what is
happening in the play. In it, I use the Mahabharata. I take stories from the
epic because most Indians know them intimately. Then I play changes on
the stories, which come as huge surprises, sometimes very unpleasant sur-
prises. The idiom and language of the play are contemporary. For instance
in the game of dice that the two cousins play in the great epic, in my drama,
they bet Microsoft, they bet Airbus. It’s that kind of contemporaneity. So
the play has an immediacy and reality that we can identify with.
CG: Then, is this not a humorous story?
CRISTINA MARÍA GÁMEZ FERNÁNDEZ 142

KN: Oh, there is tremendous humour in the play, you should have seen the actors,
they just had a ball... Ravan and Eddie is supposed to be my funniest book
to date though Cuckold too has humour, but of a different and subtle order.
CG: What about the last book, God’s Little Soldier? The scene with the Saint Kabir
has humour but is it the kind that will get you into trouble for making fun
of God.
KN: The book is humorous off and on but not on the same scale as Ravan and
Eddie. The scene between God and Kabir which I read out at the seminar is
a very funny scene. And there’re some other funny scenes in it also, espe-
cially in the Kabir section.
CG: Do you think you’ve been modifying your humour, then? The kind of humor you’re
using in your writings?
KN: No, no. I think that’s a very important point about my writing. I don’t take
external decisions generally. God’s Little Soldier took eight years to write. I
wrote and re-wrote it and re-wrote it because initially I thought I was going
to make it a funny novel. I am known for writing ribald stuff. I like to be
bawdy and sex plays a big part in some of my novels. And that’s what hap-
pened in the beginning, in this God’s Little Soldier. But then I realised that
if I was going to write about an extremist character, he would not be open
to humour.

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 In my earlier novels, even when my characters did dreadful things, they still
came across as very human. For instance, the protagonist of Cuckold, the
Maharaj Kumar, who is the heir apparent, is responsible for the death of ten
thousand enemy soldiers but both male and female readers identify intensely
with him. He’s considered one of the most memorable characters in litera-
ture.
But when I started writing God’s Little Soldier I knew that the protagonist,
Zia Khan, was a character who was going to be very difficult, that people
might even hate him. So I was afraid that I was going to lose my small
constituency of readers. My initial impulse was to humanize him by intro-
ducing humour. And I did just that: he sleeps around and some of those
episodes are very funny. But as I wrote and I finished my first draft of 840
pages, handwritten, I realized that something was wrong. By the time I
wrote the third or fourth draft, almost all the sex had disappeared from
God’s Little Soldier. Because Zia is not that kind of character, humour is
alien to his character. He’s an extremist. He’s a really good man to start out
with but everything he does, he takes to extremes. In the final version, he
doesn’t fall in love too often, actually just once. There’s something deeply
ascetic and intolerant about him. His intentions are almost always honour-
able. He wants to make the world a better place and he is willing to lay his
life on the line for it. But when he sets out to do good, he takes it to ex-
tremes. Idealists are so hard to come by today. Ironically, till the Muslim
fundamentalists took centre-stage in the last decade and a half, we were
ashamed to feel passionately about anything. We were afraid to use words
like noble or virtuous. Compassion had already fallen on hard days in the

TRANSPARENCY AND DEPTH: AN INTERVIEW... 143

twentieth century. But after the neocons in America began their talk of
compassionate conservatism, it became synonymous with hypocrisy and
everything that is fraudulent and self-serving.
Like all these fine qualities, idealism is something that we have lost. How
many of us today want to do something for our country? And I do not
mean patriotism or fighting wars. How many of us want to do something
for the poor, for the elderly or whatever? But Zia is that kind of person, if he
takes it into his head, he will do his utmost. The problem is he’ll push so
hard, that he’ll subvert the good work he’s doing. As his brother tells him...
you’re a good man gone terribly, terribly wrong. So then, by the time I
finished my last draft, most of the humour was gone, though fortunately
there are still some very humourous bits in the book.
CG: Why then is it that your writing is so little known?
KN: I have no answer to that. When my book Cuckold was written... my British
agent thought it was going to be one of the biggest books of the decade.
Nothing of the kind happened. There is a review of the book by Makarand
Paranjape which says that this is a book which people, publishing houses
and critics don’t have the equipment or the capacity to understand what it
is trying to do and its worth.
CG: Do you think it is a question of time? That maybe in ten, fifty years’ time...

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 KN: I’m not interested in time. My close friend Arun Kolatkar, one of our most
remarkable poets, is no more. What’s the point of his being recognized as
one of the Indian finest poets after he’s dead? I don’t know. But other people
think there is one of the things that really make me furious beyond words.
Think of Van Gogh, his paintings for sixty million dollars but when he was
alive, he barely got sixty cents. It’s obscene that anybody will pay a million
for a painting. But what difference does it make to Van Gogh?
CG: No, what I meant to say is that, is it not a question of time? What I wanted to say
is people are not aware or not prepared to appreciate what you are trying to do.
It’s maybe that you’re telling a story for a ten year-old child and we’re still four
year old child. That’s why many critics may fail to appreciate the value of your
work and communicate its worth to readers.
KN: I don’t know. But I don’t think so. I’ve been saying again and again that chance
plays an immeasurable role in writing or anything we do. We underesti-
mate the power of chance and luck. Cuckold is located in the sixteenth
century story. But I have written it in a language which is very contempo-
rary. I mean just as you and I are talking, except that there’s no slang. I had
no idea about the beginning of my novel, and so I started with this Small
Causes Court where the main character, the Maharaj Kumar himself is the
judge. All the plaintiffs want justice. Somebody has grabbed a neighbour’s
plot of land; somebody’s wife has run away with something... Authors make
out that everything written in their work is so deeply thought out. Hardly.
Some of it is happenstance and sheer luck. Cuckold came out at the same
time as Arundhati Roy’s stunning debut novel God of Small Things. The
latter took off like a rocket. Cuckold was a slow starter but a fairly steady
CRISTINA MARÍA GÁMEZ FERNÁNDEZ 144

one.
CG: Do you think that critics can do anything to help?
KN: If you read the reviews of God’s Little Soldier in Germany, many critics have
said it’s the best book of the year. Others have maintained that it is the most
profound meditation on the spiritual roots of extremism. Let’s hope that
helps.
CG: How is that it has done so well in Germany and not in England?
KN: I have no idea.
CG: But anyway, it’s great it happened in Germany. For example, here in Spain, hardly
anybody reads English. Are some of your books translated into Spanish?
KN: God’s Little Soldier will be the first one to be translated into Spanish. And then
next year, God willing, Ravan and Eddie will get translated. France too will
publish God’s Little Soldier this year.
CG: Have you written in any other language apart from English?
KN: Yes, I wrote my first novel, Saat Sakkam Trechalis (Seven Sixes are Forty-three)
in my mother tongue.
CG: Marathi. And was it translated into English?
KN: Yes. It sold much more in English than in my mother tongue. Much, much
more. I think it’s gone into the seventh or eighth edition now. In Marathi,
it’s considered an avant garde experiment and not necessarily in the happy

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 sense of the phrase. Many critics think it’s difficult read. But if you are used
to seeing movies, if you’re used to flash-backs, then there’s no problem at
all. Except that the language is very different from normal Marathi. Some
critics, who like the book very much, have said that Seven Sixes reinvented
Marathi for the first time after eight hundred years. It’s a very different
jagged kind of language. And it moves very fast. You have to have the pa-
tience to go along with the book. Because there’s no narrative thread in the
conventional sense, a beginning, middle or end. The narrator is talking to a
woman whom he has lost. He is not necessarily talking about their own
lives. He just recalls simply different things from the past, some things,
some ok things, some exuberant moments. That’s why the book moves
back and forth, back and forth. If you have a little patience (and don’t want
to know who the murderer is on the first page), then it works perfectly.
CG: How is it that you decided to start writing in English after having written in
Marathi?
KN: No, the question has to be the other way around. Why did I write in Marathi
when I had only four years of education in it? The rest of my studies were in
English and for better or worse, English has been my lingua franca for most
of my life. And I also come from a westernized family. So Marathi was the
surprise. I really wish my father and mother were around to find that their
son had actually written in his mother tongue. They would find that hard
to imagine.
CG: So it keeps being sold in Marathi, you said.
KN: No, no, no. In Marathi the sales are horrendous. I told you I am in the Guin-
ness book of records for the worst sales of a book ever... I am making this

TRANSPARENCY AND DEPTH: AN INTERVIEW... 145

up. But it’s that kind of situation really. Seven Sixes is supposed to be a
milestone, it’s a landmark in Marathi and in Indian literature. Seven Sixes is
full of spirit and hi-jinks and terrific fun and terribly tragic at times. But
even Ravan and Eddie which is a very funny book, still has a tragic under-
current.
CG: Is there something that a reader should know about your books before reading
them?
KN: No.
CG: So, the point is to just enjoy them.
KN: I don’t go very often to seminars and academic discussions. I went to the
Cambridge seminar and there were authors there, big authors, at that time
I was a nobody and people asked me was John Fowles there or Rose Tremaine
or Hillary Mantel, God, how much time did you spend with them? And I
said not a minute, why should I want to spend time with the author, I want
to read his books. How can you get to know anybody, let alone an author in
one passing meeting? Books are so much better, they tell you something
very revealing about the author. Sonia was asking me if I had written any-
thing autobiographical, like the work of many authors. My first book is
partly autobiographical. Now that I have written other books I find I expose
myself, perhaps I always feel naked when I don’t write about myself. It sounds

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 paradoxical but you know what gets exposed is your mind. I really feel
vulnerable in front of people when they are reading God’s Little Soldier or
Cuckold. In the former Amanat says: “There is only one God, and her name
is life. She is the only one worthy of worship. All else is irrelevant.” He is
telling this to his brother who becomes a terrorist. Amanat writes a fictional
book about the poet-saint, Kabir and these words come are put in Kabir’s
mouth. For Amanat there is nothing as reverential as life, for him life is
God. But certainly not the God who expects you to take life in his name.
CG: Are you an eclectic reader? Who are the authors who have influenced you?
KN: Spanish authors. French and English authors.
CG: Which Spanish for example?
KN: Don Quixote, I mean Cervantes and others. The Latin Americans.
CG: In your conference you mentioned Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo.
KN: He’s completely unknown in India and I think he’s fairly unknown in Europe
also except in Spain. And Vargas Llosa, García Márquez and Fuentes,
Cortázar, Borges but that was a long time ago. I was heavily into American
authors at one time, Eugene O’Neill, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Toni
Morrison. And of course Camus, Sartre, Louis Ferdinand Céline. I don’t
think that we realize what an incredible influence he has had on us. You
cannot imagine twentieth century literature without Céline. I recall Coleridge
saying that you have to be a stone not to be influenced by others. The
question is whether the influences become so overwhelming that your work
becomes and remains imitative. If you are worth your salt, you’ll assimilate
the influences and find both your own individual voice and yourself. I have
little doubt that I too have been deeply influenced but I do not know who
CRISTINA MARÍA GÁMEZ FERNÁNDEZ 146

my influences are. My writing is so different from the people I have just

mentioned. Many Indians were influenced by Rushdie but I started writing
much before he did. I don’t know in what way Céline, Graham Greene have
affected my writing but I suspect these things work in a subtle and oblique
fashion.
CG: I get the impression that you read great stories, you’ve been reading great writers,
who wrote great stories, like Dostoevsky, with amazingly long narratives. You
were saying the other day that you considered yourself not a writer who sets out
to be different. But a story-teller and... I’m not being clear, maybe. Let me...
KN: No, I take the point. What you’re trying to say is that I don’t consider myself
somebody who wants to be an original writer or playwright. Someone who
has set his mind on doing something totally radical and different. I’ve no
desire to theorize and reinvent the novel, for instance.
CG: A post-modern writer... hiding yourself so that nobody can know who you are
really or something like that.
KN: Tolstoy is a great story-teller. Dostoevsky is superb but they do it so casually
without being precious or self-conscious. And yet there he is, Dostoevsky
telling you a story about a man who has committed a murder and yet what
you get is a deep meditation on guilt, the need to confess and absolution.
CG: Yeah, that’s my point.

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 KN: A great story-teller manages these wonderful things almost glancingly.
CG: Yes, because you imply more than you say. You’re not telling people what to think.
You’re telling people that story and leave it to them to extract the meaning.
KN: That’s why ambiguity plays a very big role in my writing. I like to be ambigu-
ous...
CG: Humour is ambiguous in a way.
KN: Yes. When you think of Dostoevsky, I’m thinking “My god!” Crime and Pun-
ishment is something else. Jesus! Here is this man who murders a guy for the
money. And then, the police commissioner says all we have got to do is wait
and watch, he will come to us and he will tell us everything. That’s an
amazingly insightful story. It’s of little importance to me whether what you
write is postmodern or in the vein of Borges; whether you are orthodox or
daring; whether you are the very first one to do it in a particular way or not.
What matters is whether an author makes it worth the reader’s time. Whether
he can pull off a difficult task without making a fuss about how great he is.
CG: Do you sometimes read poetry? Do you like poetry?
KN: It’s one of my major failings. Occasionally I’ve had to write poetry for my
characters but I’m uneasy doing it. Every once in a while I’ll respond to
some poem or poet and then it’s a wonderful feeling of being transported to
some other world.
CG: Okay. What style would you say is specifically yours?
KN: I hope none. It’s the content that should dictate the style instead of the style
being detachable from the content and form. There have been always two
schools and they come in cycles. People write more and more difficult lan-
guage. Sometimes there is a need to write it because the concepts are so

TRANSPARENCY AND DEPTH: AN INTERVIEW... 147

intricate and convoluted. It was not Derrida who mucked up the whole
scene for most writers, critics and theorists but his disciples. They thought
that the only way to write great philosophy is to make oneself completely
incomprehensible. And they thought that was an indication of depth of
thought.
When I was young I went to Kashmir (in those days you could go to Kash-
mir) and I felt very sick. So all my school mates and the priest who was
shepherding us had to leave for the next town because I was so sick. It was
a very, very lonely time. Because there were nobody there and I was alone in
an attic. Every once in a while in the evening the doctor would come up.
When I recovered, I travelled towards a much higher altitude. The bus
stopped and there was a pond with a marble railing around it. And I looked
and I asked in Hindi: how deep is it? It was just blue water, absolutely blue
with lots of fish swimming there. You can go down there forever and not come
back. It’s that deep. That has stuck in my mind. That if I want to, if you are
really any good, then the more transparently you write, the deeper you can
go. You can’t see the bottom at all.
As one of my Professors used to say if you don’t know your subject, then
you obfuscate it, you cloud it, in that sense transparency has a major role in
my writing, because if you are any good then on a clear day you can see

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 forever because of the language you choose to use. We degrade language
because we don’t know the value of words. Take a book and you see the
back cover. The blurbs will tell you it’s a masterpiece, fantastic, great. The
only language we know is hyperbole. Which is why we have forgotten that
there is such a word as good any more. You no longer say it’s a good book.
It has to be brilliant, awesome and so on. You can’t use the word because
there’s no punch. People don’t seem to understand that there are various
registers in language to describe and evaluate any work of art.
Only you know the Dostoevsky is up there. Márquez, Vargas Llosa and
Louis Ferdinand Céline who is such an awful human being but a terrific
writer are there, then, the rest of them can’t fit in that category. They must
find their own level and there is no shame in that. All of us can’t be
Shakespeares and Cervantes.
CG: Thank you, Kiran. I hope that readers enjoy this interview as much as I have.
CRISTINA MARÍA GÁMEZ FERNÁNDEZ 148

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