Book: ASIDES, TIRADES, MEDITATIONS: SELECTED ESSAYS
Author: Kiran Nagarkar
Published by: Bloomsbury
Price: Rs 699
Kiran Nagarkar had stated, “I am not very fond of people who preach. I prefer to tell stories.” His writing creates the enchantment that comes from a person who feels deeply about the subject he is writing about. Reading through the 36 essays in this collection is like walking through the corridors of the author’s mind. There are many doors, each leading to a different issue he felt deeply about, from libraries, storytelling, cinema, and Bombay to terrorism, elections, and the climate crisis.
In the opening essay, “Clueless: An Occasional Writer’s Journey”, Nagarkar talks about his writing process, the reception of his (translated) works in the Marathi literary scene, and the nuances of human existence. He was deeply influenced by the openness of ancient Indian architecture, Tamasha, the folk theatre of Maharashtra, and the mystical poets across the world. These influences made his writing simultaneously bawdy and lyrical. Even more interesting is the reception of his works; it includes a woman asking for advice to fix her marriage upon reading Cuckold as well as a group of people wanting to start a terrorist chapter in India with Nagarkar as its leader based on a review of God’s Little Soldier where he was called a ‘literary terrorist’.
He questions his role as a citizen of the world but doubts his place as a writer. In his essays, “Ghar (Home)” and “How Did We Lose Tomorrow?”, he strongly asserts Earth to be a home, an investment, an inheritance, and notes people’s negligence towards it. Furthermore, he calls out the distorted priorities of world and State leaders. In “Shiva’s Blue Throat: A Personal Vision of the Artist’s Role in the 21st Century”, he portrays Shiva as a role model for artists. Describing the destroyer’s experience of living with the poison, he asserts that writers, too, have to live with the consequences of their actions. He wrote, “The first requisite for an artist is clarity: Do you want to write a novel or a research paper? If you opt for fiction, then you owe it to your characters to get inside their heads and not merely use them as a vehicle to showcase your research.”
This posthumously published collection showcases the iconoclastic figure that Nagarkar was in the modern Indian literary scene. It would arouse curiosity to read his celebrated works of fiction among readers new to Nagarkar and a desire to revisit his works among those familiar with his writing. The book is supplemented by an Introduction by Salil Tripathi, who critically analyses Nagarkar’s values and views expressed in his works and mentions that in 2018, a year before his death, three journalists had accused Nagarkar of sexually inappropriate behaviour. The collection ends with an endearing Afterword by Nayantara Sehgal who portrays him as she knew him, a tender friend.