SAHITYA Akademi award-winning novelist and noted playwright Kiran Nagarkar passed away on September 5 in Mumbai following a brain haemorrhage. Nagarkar, who wrote in Marathi and English, will be remembered not just for his skilled writing but also for being the voice of Mumbai’s working class. Those who knew him believe that Nagarkar had many more stories to tell the world. It was too soon to bid goodbye.
A well-known Mumbai journalist called Nagarkar “the quintessential bard” of the city. Indeed, Nagarkar’s knowledge of Mumbai was deep, and he caught the pulse of the colourful metropolis like no other. His storytelling was almost Chaplinesque in style; it was side-splittingly funny and yet reflected the darker side of life. It was Nagarkar’s innate humaneness and empathy that made him an exceptional writer.
Novels
Nagarkar wrote seven novels in Marathi and English. His first book Saat Sakkam Trechalis (Seven sixes are forty-three) was published in 1974 in his mother tongue Marathi, and later translated into English. Ravan and Eddie followed in 1994 and became a classic. But it was Cuckold , published in 1997, that established Nagarkar as a writer par excellence. The protagonist of Cuckold is the little-known husband of the 16th-century poet-saint Mirabai, who dedicated her life to Krishna. A brilliant political novel, Cuckold won Nagarkar the Sahitya Akademi award.
In 2006, Nagarkar published God’s Little Soldier , the story of a Muslim boy who becomes a religious fundamentalist. In 2012, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. His most recent book is The Arsonist (2019).
Nagarkar was best known for his Ravan and Eddie trilogy— Ravan and Eddie (1994), The Extras (2012) and Rest in Peace (2015)—that chronicled the lives of two unusual Mumbai boys. The trilogy is perhaps the most comic, dark, sensitive, colourful and accurate narrative of life in Mumbai’s infamous chawls, or housing colonies, built in the late 19th century for migrant textile mill workers.
Through Ravan’s and Eddie’s lives, Nagarkar revealed a layer of Mumbai that was often romanticised in films and stories. His descriptions, irreverent, bawdy and comic as they were, also had a subtext of intense sensitivity and strove to tell the reader how the working class lived, as also the disparities, aspirations and religious divides that make up the melting pot that is Mumbai. Ever so often, Nagarkar would capture moments in this city of contradictions, leaving the reader saddened, joyous, helpless and hopeful in turns.
Deeply fond of theatre and films, Nagarkar also wrote several plays and screenplays. His play Bedtime Story (1977), based on the Mahabharata, courted controversy when the city’s political right wing took umbrage to certain sections of the script. He also faced the hard-handedness of the censor board with this play. Nagarkar’s other plays include Kabirache Kay Karayache (on the 1992-93 Mumbai riots) and Stranger Amongst Us . The screenplays he wrote include The Broken Circle , The Widow andHer Friends , Ravan and Eddie and a script for a children’s film titled The Elephant and the Mouse .
Much ahead of his contemporaries when it came to being attacked by the right wing, Nagarkar was at the receiving end of their wrath for almost his entire literary career spanning 45 years. Undeterred by their threats, he soldiered on with his writing because he genuinely believed that in a democracy everyone must be free to say what they wanted. In recent years, however, he appeared rattled by the rapidly growing religious extremism. He often spoke out against the curbs on the freedom of expression and the authoritarianism of the current regime. He once famously said: “Democracy is not a gift. It needs to be earned.”
Nagarkar was born in 1942 into a family of modest means but progressive ideas. His father was a clerk in the Indian Railways, and they lived in Mumbai’s Hindu colony near Dadar. The family had given up wearing the sacred thread that signified their upper-class Brahmin status, an unconventional move those days. Nagarkar often lamented that the Mumbai of his childhood, the Mumbai which once housed reformists, had unfortunately deteriorated into a bigoted society.
Nagarkar graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Pune University in 1964 and a master’s degree in English literature from Mumbai University in 1967. He began his career as a journalist and later switched to advertising where he worked for 15 years. While advertising may have channelled his creative energy, his true love remained fiction and the city of Mumbai.
In 2018, concerned by the hike in public transport fares, particularly BEST bus fares, Nagarkar wrote an open letter to the city’s Municipal Commissioner. He pointed out that public transport was subsidised across the world: “That’s the only way the poorest of the poor who live in slums as well as those who belong to the lowest rungs of the middle class can afford to travel to work, and that too only when fares are reasonable.” The letter gained a reasonable amount of publicity and resulted in a review of the price rise in bus fares by the city’s administration.
A quiet and elegant man, Nagarkar also had an unpredictable, wry and self-deprecatory sense of humour that he would unleash with such accurate timing that readers and listeners were left either stunned or rolling in their seats. His books were always launched to packed halls. It was a treat to listen to him read his work with just the right intonation, which would keep the audience gripped and wanting more. He once said that the greatest compliment to a writer was when people actually bought and read his or her books.
In conclusion, it seems fitting to reproduce an extract from Ravan and Eddie which describes the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, if only because whenever Nagarkar met Frontline ’s correspondents in Mumbai, he always said that he was impressed that in these dangerous times, when journalists are looked at as the enemy, Frontline had the courage and conviction to tell the truth.
“Putting on the white shirt and khaki half-pants (never called shorts) was a ritual as complex as a samurai initiation…. Pick up your half pants. The relationship of the bottom of each leg of the pants to the waist is as precise as the ratio of the circumference. The flare is 7.19378345267 times the waist. Put the left leg through the left khaki pyramid, the right leg through the other pyramid. Tuck in the shirt, very tight please.… Even when you grow up to be a Shakha Pramukh and are talking to an assembly of distinguished guests, don’t forget, yank up the pants.”
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