A NOVELIST OF IDEAS
Vineet Gill’s book on Nirmal Verma focuses on the pioneering Hindi novelist’s essays, travelogues and diaries
NVerma (1929-2005), a Jnanpith and Padma Bhushan awardee, was one of the foremost Hindi novelists who began writing after Independence. The fervid sensitivity, the stark emotional intensity and the deep compassion with which he rendered tense human relationships as well as silent human loneliness have won him a host of not only admirers but indeed devotees in Hindi as well as English. The five slim novels and as many short-story collections that he published in an austere career of nearly 50 years were all promptly translated into English. Verma is, as U.R. Anantha Murthy said, “both universal and intensely Indian”.
But in Vineet Gill’s book, the first on Verma to be published in English, his fiction is mentioned only in passing. Instead, Gill focuses on Verma’s essays and his contemplative—often essayistic—travelogues and diaries. He divides his book loosely and overlappingly into eight chapters forming not a continuous narrative but disjunct discussions; these are titled
‘The End’, ‘The Beginning’, ‘The Insider’, ‘The Traveller’, ‘The Outsider’, ‘The Critic’, ‘The Citizen’, and ‘The Man’.
Gill’s idiosyncratic and self-indulgent procedure is to begin each chapter with a quotation or two from Verma, to embroider on it a few reflections of his own, and then for much of the chapter to display and colNirmal late a variety of opinions on that broad theme by a wide range of mostly western writers whom he just happens to have read. The brew in this book thus comprises one part Verma, one part Gill and three or four parts a magpie collection of other writers, with the whole thing shaken but not stirred to settle into a coherent argument. Randomness is all.
Thus, readers attracted to this book
by its sub-title, Nirmal Verma’s Life in Literature, and by his photograph which fills half the dust jacket, would have every right to feel seriously shortchanged, even betrayed. And yet, Gill has felt compelled to write this book, his first, apparently because he too is a devotee of Verma after his own fashion. He seems soaked in Verma and offers us his eccentric and naively egoistic book as a labour of love.
Nirmal Verma was exceptionally well-versed in what we now call ‘World Literature’ and had discovered writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Halldór Laxness and Milan Kundera before the world did, translating Kundera directly from Czech into Hindi. It is this cosmopolitan aspect of Verma that has the greatest appeal to Gill. One of Verma’s favourite writers was Virginia Woolf; a large poster of her adorned his barsati wall when I first visited him in 1980. Woolf wrote the kind of creative, speculative essays on writers that Gill seeks to write on Verma in each of his chapters. Woolf called her collection of essays The
Common Reader, and Gill ambitiously aspires to be the kind of (un)common reader that both Woolf and Verma were, besides being great novelists. ■