ONE AND THE OTHER
THERE WERE ALWAYS MANY KIRAN NAGARKARS WHO COEXISTED WITHIN THE SAME PERSON
The first time I met Kiran Nagarkar, it was to interview him about his 2006 novel God’s Little Soldier. He spoke about the book’s themes, about the dangers of certitude (“we must never stop holding our beliefs up to the light”), about the need to learn as many languages as possible, “to open up the dead pathways in our brains”.
Our last meeting was at a literature festival where, now in his mid-70s, he was anguished about growing intolerance but also a bit unsure of his own relevance: did he have something of value to say, was anyone willing to listen? Even when we discussed cinema, I was embarrassed by how deferential he was to my views, genuinely keen to absorb what this muchyounger person felt—he seemed miles removed from the man his long-time friend Manjula Padmanabhan had once described to me, giving her stern lectures about good and bad films.
It was poignant to see this side of Nagarkar, also reflected in the deeply felt yet rambling introduction he wrote for the 2015 re-publication of his play Bedtime Story— jumping restlessly from fundamentalism to climate change, as if trying to condense all of the world’s dangers into a few pages. Watching him on literature festival panels—including when he took on audience members who denounced Nayantara Sahgal as a “Congress stooge”, raising his own voice in a futile effort to match their hectoring—the impression was that of someone made weary by caring too much about too many things.
There must, of course, have been many other Nagarkars coexisting with the ones I
experienced. Here was the author of warm, wide-ranging novels about Mirabai’s cuckolded husband, about life in a Bombay chawl; the man who understood history’s foot-soldiers so well and somehow managed to be both empathetic and funny about them; the caustic playwright who used the Mahabharata to comment on the many faces of discrimination in our own time.
And yes, when looking at the entirety of a life, one must allow— remembering the MeToo allegations—that the person who did the above things might also have behaved inappropriately with young women who came to interview him. When such charges are levelled against beloved artists, the usual question is “Can you separate the art from the person?”—but this is reductive, implying a need to stick ‘good’ or ‘bad’ labels on people; as if all of us aren’t many things at different times; as if introspective art can’t come from the better places in a person who might do condemnable things in other contexts.
The Nagarkar I knew would have understood those contradictions. “Nothing is more dangerous,” he told me at that first meeting, “than to be sure of your own rightness, or righteousness.”