Nagarkar, a liar who spoke the truth

Bindu Menon 

IN one of his interviews, Kiran Nagarkar said a writer had to tell many lies, and confessed that he was a liar in that sense. In the death of Nagarkar, the literary world has lost a liar who was obsessed with telling many uncomfortable truths. The writer and playwright, who has a body of works penned primarily in English and a few in Marathi, was one of the foremost voices of reason in modern Indian literature. Nagarkar, who died at the age of 77 on Thursday, following a brain haemorrhage, also worked as an academic, journalist, screenplay writer, and even acted in a film.

He wrote his first novel, Saat Sakkam Trechalis, in 1974, in his mother tongue Marathi. And as the title implies, something didn’t quite add up there. In Nagarkar’s own words, it was a language he had no connect with. Yet, this novel, and the play that followed, Bedtime Story (1978), are considered seminal pieces in Marathi literature today.

But it was Ravan and Eddie, his first English novel published 20 years later, that set Nagarkar apart for his irreverent, witty and innovative writing style. It marked the advent of a writer invested with a febrile imagination, who drew much from his own experiences of living in a slum. This roller-coaster ride of a novel that follows the lives of two boys from a chawl spawned two more novels that would complete the trilogy — The Extras and Rest in Peace. The novels, while high on ribaldry, laid bare the vibrancy of a city that Nagarkar loved and his disillusionment with its changing face and neocolonialism. In Nagarkar, the literary world didn’t just find a refreshing new chronicler of this diptych of a city called Mumbai, it also found an iconoclast who, while spinning tales, unwove traditional and set beliefs.

The English novel, Cuckold, for which he received the Sahitya Akademi Award, is also one of his finest. In his treatment of myth, masculinity, tradition and history, Nagarkar gave a new churning to the story based on Meerabai and her husband, the Rajput king Bhojraj Thakur. Years later, in the wake of the row over the film Padmaavat, Nagarkar confessed that he wasn’t sure if he would have penned such a novel in these times.

This admission of censoring of thought was a telling statement, coming from a man whose Bedtime Story,  a reinterpretation of the tales of Mahabharata and an indictment of the Emergency, suffered 78 cuts when it went to the Maharashtra censor board in 1978.

His integrity as a writer was tested in 2018 in the wake of MeToo allegations. While he denied them, the scars remained, with a publisher cancelling his contract. The Arsonist, his last novel, came out this year. And like much of his later works that are darker, this one too is a reimagining of life and history. This time of a secular icon — Kabir.