‘MY MEERABAI ISN’T A CLUSTER OF CLICHES’
KIRAN NAGARKAR’S NOVEL, CUCKOLD, MISSED THE BOOKER, BUT WON THE SAHITYA AKADEMI IN 2000
Kiran Nagarkar is perhaps the only major Indian author writing in English to have begun his literary career in his mother tongue, Marathi. After his first novel in 1974, Saat Sakkam Trechalis (republished in English as Seven Sixes are Forty Three), he switched to English completely. He is best known for his novel Cuckold (1997), a work which, despite its initial lukewarm reception, was eventually hailed as a landmark in Indo-Anglian fiction.
Do take us to the time when you wrote your first ‘literary’ sentence.
Dilip Chitre was a leading Marathi poet and critic of the post-Independence era. His father used to publish a highly influential Marathi periodical, Abhiruchi. Dilip informed me that his dad had asked him to edit the next issue. I came back home that night and wrote my first story, That Man, in Marathi. The night after I wrote that story, I started on my novel Saat Sakkam in Marathi. If I had thought a minute about what I was doing, I would never have started writing it.
English to you isn't the language of a colonial hangover.
Kiran Nagarkar is very lucky to know what his roots are. I am neither this or that. My roots are hybrid. I wrote Saat Sakkam Trechalis (1974) and a play Bedtime Story (1978) in Marathi. But I also imagined and wrote the Ravan and Eddie (1995) trilogy and Cuckold (1997) and other books in English.
Your play, Bedtime Story, partly based on the Mahabharata got you into trouble. Your Drau padi, one of your first striking women characters, does not move along expected tracks.
For a 74-page play to have 78 cuts, some of them full page, didn’t make any sense to me. That play was about the idea that anything that occurs anywhere in the world, whether in Iraq or in our backyards, you and me are responsible. I used four stories from the Mahabharata to make my point. I don’t believe that the Pandavas alone were the good guys and the Kauravas the bad ones. To Yudhishtir, the eldest Pandava who is universally considered Mr Right and the moral centre of the epic, Draupadi says: ‘If you want to sleep with me, at least have the honesty to say so. Maybe then I might just consider it.’ As far as possible I have not repeated characters or done the same sort of book again. My Jasoda [also the title of his new book] is not like Draupadi and Draupadi is not like Meerabai.
How did you think of making Meera’s husband, Bhoj Raj, the centre of Cuckold?
The legendary Meera was a puzzle. She is perhaps one of India’s most well-known woman saints. But her husband is a black hole. He has been completely erased from memory. But Meera was just a non-stop cluster of cliches in the public imagination. You also have the Amar Chitra Katha version of her history. In its version, Emperor Akbar gives Meerabai a pearl necklace when in reality they had never met. She predated Akbar and so there was no chance of their meeting.
How were the reviews?
Cuckold took a long time to take off. One of the most laudatory reviews by [poet and professor] Makarand Paranjype ended with the statement that the only problem with the book was the translation of Meerabai’s poems. The fact of the matter was that I wasn’t translating them at all! I wrote those verses which is why a very different persona develops for Meera.
If he won’t come soon,/ Let him come late,/I’ll wait./ If it makes him feel important/ To be inconstant/ Why, of course / I’ll indulge him./ Because Giridhar / Lover / Move over/ I’ve got another.
The Meera we know, from her verses and film songs, on the other hand, is someone who is absolutely crazy about Krishna and she is willing to take the secondary role. In my verses she is an independent-minded woman with a sense of humour.
I believe you did not, at first, like the label ‘historical novel’ that was being applied for Cuckold. Yet, all the characters were people from history. What did you think you were writing?
Caught again as Dylan Thomas would say. I was so involved with that novel, I was certain I was writing a contemporary novel. And so it never occurred to me that I was writing about the past.
Cuckold is also a political novel. It’s about who should lead, at what moment a leader can rise, that power is about being measured and not rushing around flashing one’s sword.
True. In the beginning, Bhoj Raj is a conundrum. But he is perhaps one of the finest students of the Gita and the Gita god. Which is why he doesn’t subscribe to the warrior code of the Rajputs – that you must never be defeated even if you are wiped out in the process. The Maharaj Kumar is a thinker. He’s not above deceit when fighting with his enemy and prefers to fight when the chances of winning are good.
Many consider Cuckold the best Indian novel in English in 1997 not to have won the Booker. But it did get the Sahitya Akademi.
How long will we keep saying that if the West approves, or if the West offers 500,000 dollars for a book it must be good and if a million, then it must be twice as good. Today we seem to take all our cues from the West instead of developing a robust and rigorous spirit of questioning and developing our own critical tradition.
An interesting thing in the novel is that Krishna is turned into a family deity when the house of Mewar considers Shiv or Eklingji the family deity.
That is the source of the palpable tension in the book. The Princess (Meerabai) not only disowns her conjugal duties but commits herself to a god who is not the keeper of the family honour.
What is the story of your new novel Jasoda?
It is the story of a rural woman and her children in a drought-stricken place.
Who are the writers you read?
I liked Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines. Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar is a remarkable understated story and he tells it with such wonderful economy. I also keep going back to Graham Greene.
Have you ever been approached to turn Cuckold into a film?
The most recent offer came a few days ago. Bollywood directors approach you and then ditch you.
What are you working on next?
There is no book till it is published .... unless you are living in fantasy land. At present, I am working on seven, beg your pardon, 77 classics, each one of them Nobel-prize winning.