SPOOKY WEEKEND
a sub-genre within a small but growing genre in Indian publishing: crime. Ten years ago, Liddle says, most Indian publishers were reluctant to publish anything other than literary fiction. Now, that has changed. The festival, back for its third year, includes two jampacked days of conversations around crime with over 30 speakers, including novelists, journalists, lawyers and filmmakers. Publishers’ appetite for crime writing is growing, according to Mita Kapur, the festival’s co-producer. “They are all developing a good, hefty crime list,” she says, adding that the genre is still young among Indian writers in English but it has a health tradition in Hindi and Urdu: writers in both languages have been telling stories about crime for 200 years now.
But the genre isn’t short of diversity. Kapur says the festival includes writers of true crime, white collar crime, legal and political thrillers and pulp novels. Last year’s edition had discussions about Bengali and Urdu crime fiction, Agatha Christie and Hindi pulp author Surendra Mohan Pathak. “It was a cracker,” says Kapur.
And that’s just fiction. The first festival, in 2015, featured Husain Zaidi, an investigative journalist who has reported, and then authored books, on the city’s mafia and the infamous life of gangsters such as Abu Salem and Dawood Ibrahim. This time around, Sandeep Unnithan, a journalist who reports on national security, joins crime novelist Uday Satpathy and Norwegian crime writer Thomas Enger to talk about the role of the journalist as “crime solver.”
Unnithan’s Black Tornado tells the story of the operation launched by India’s National Security Guard in response to the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai. He says the book is a crucial, meticulous record of a mammoth operation that few know about, the desperate chaos that preceded it and the startling characters at the center of it all.
“Most of the time, the truth is much more bizarre than fiction,” says Unnithan whose stories of terror plots, espionage and investigation are far removed from Liddle’s charming mysteries set in Mughal Delhi. And yet, they are connected.
“It is the genre of genres,” says Namita Gokhale, writer, publisher and festival director. She believes that if you were to read across the crime writing of a culture, it will likely give you more insight than literary fiction. Given that it encompasses every aspect of life, from art to gender to money to psychology, Gokhale says, the crime writing genre is greater than the sum of its parts.
The love affair started young. As a child, Gajwani could be found, at any hour of the day, copying images from newspapers and magazines while school assignments sat neglected. When he discovered Dharmyug, a popular Hindi political and literary weekly magazine, which carried paintings, poems, stories (Mohan Rakesh’s Aadhe Adhure was first serialised in it), it opened up a new world for the 11-year-old.
Originally from Sindh, his family had migrated to Delhi in 1947 and like most well-meaning Indian parents, his too wanted him to study medicine or engineering. “I used to get beatings for it (sketching all day)” remembers Gajwani, now 78.
“At that time a career in art was unheard of, at the most you could end up being a drawing teacher in school or a billboard painter. My parents very reluctantly let me join an art school,” says Gajwani who graduated from the Delhi School of Art in 1959. He held his first show in 1966 and then diversified into film-making (he has made nine short films since 1973), photography, illustration and design.
He has returned with a solo show of 57 abstracts titled Meditative Silence, which carries forward his life-long romance with abstract art. His last show was in 2006. Meditative Silence, Gajwani says, has been curated from nearly 100 works of art by him since 2007.
In these 10 years, he says, he has experimented with different media and sizes: watercolours, charcoal works, a mix of charcoal and watercolours and a mix of acrylic, charcoal and watercolours.
Colours — bright and sombre — and shapes — squares, rectangular patches, lines, sometimes just splotches — interact differently on each canvas.
The strokes and the hues, all abstract patterns, impose no interpretation. Instead, they have the effect of evoking memories and emotions, unique to each onlooker.“I don’t pick any colour in particular, but have a vision in mind when I start working,” says Gajwani, who has held 23 one-man shows of his work in a career spanning five decades. His two sons are also designers while his daughter is a designer and a writer.
His passion for art helped him support his first love while he worked as a designer with the American Center for 29 years. A self-taught cartoonist and caricaturist, he also illustrated for SPAN, the US embassy’s bi-monthly magazine. He used the money from his job to buy material and then he painted at home. “You have to sur- vive when you’re not able to sell anything,” he says. “Painting is not cheap. It is very expensive.”
Though he is adept at drawing figures, sketches and caricatures, Gajwani says he has chosen the abstract form for his paintings to stay true to an inner inspiration. He also has a set of dos and donts in place when it comes to his art. “When my heart is heavy or I’m unwell, I don’t paint.”
“I paint when I am absolutely happy,” says Gajwani. “I know a lot of artists who say a particular work is a reflection of a difficult personal or financial period. I don’t do that,” he adds, the effervescence in his gentle demeanour belying his age.
“We are all ageing with every breath, but work should never age. It should stay vibrant and young.”
When my heart is heavy or I’m unwell, I don’t paint. I paint when I am absolutely happy.”