Author Kiran Nagarkar frequently tells me he's 900 years old.
I don't bother to verify, but I'm glad that for a man who feels 900, he still has a lot to rage about.
“I'm not into sadness, I'm into bitterness," he says as we pick on pancakes and coffee over breakfast in Chennai.
The conversation jumps from poverty, Mumbai and chawls to sexual repression, bawdy humour and his new novel, The Extras.
And of course to where Extras began: In the form of Ravan and Eddie, who burst into the Indian literary scene in 1994 in a delightful opening chapter full of black comedy, twists and outrageous imagery.
Ravan and Eddie remains one of the best books set in Mumbai: The city’s chawls, its language and cinematic culture were as much a character as the book’s two tenacious heroes whose lives intersect thanks to a bizarre accident only Nagarkar could conjure up.
Extras, the sequel to Ravan and Eddie, follows the journey of the two men, 18 years later, into Mumbai's Aunty Bars, taxis, and finally, the Hindi film industry.
Excerpts from a conversation with Nagarkar, who won the Sahitya Academy Award for his path-breaking 1997 novel Cuckold:
Hindi cinema is a big part of The Extras, but you've said you have a love-hate relationship with Bollywood…
My relationship with Hindi films is very peculiar. I can't stand them most of the time.
The two books, though, are full of references to Hindi cinema… No one has quite analysed the success of Shammi Kapoor as you did in that digression in Ravan and Eddie. Among other things, you put down Shammi’s success to the fact that he “didn’t give a centipede’s shit about how absurd you thought he was”.
That was meant to be a pure kind of hatred digression – but when I started writing about the romantic 1950s and 1960s films, there was some kind of transformation within me.
I realised that this guy Shammi Kapoor - maybe he did it completely unconsciously - turned from being a monumental failure to a huge success.
Just as authors can find their voices, this man found his own style. I did not, however, lose my enormous detestation of Raj Kapoor or Guru Dutt... They were utterly sentimental people. Raj Kapoor's characters oozed self-pity.
The critics keep talking about these films in terms of how great a shot or camera angle is... They can shove it, yaar… Ultimately, a film is about its characters and the insights it gives.
The camera work, the music. everything is meant to enrich a film. But what would you enrich in those films? There's nothing! That's why the film songs remain…
The movies of those days? God help us!
And what of today’s Hindi films?
There is hope. There's a new kind of cinema - and it's not happening at the level of the parallel cinema of the old, which got you so bored that you either went and killed the director, or you instantly went to the 31st storey and jumped out. And there was no Raavan to rescue you!
Why did you choose to write on Extras?
In my time, you saw ten, at the most 20 extras in films. Getting into movies was seen as so radical then.
One of my own aunts - terrible shame that nobody in the family talks about it - broke the mould. She finished her Bachelors and had four children. She got into theatre, and then into the movies.
In those days - we're talking about the early 1940s - she was really a pathbreaker.
Today, the whole attitude has changed… It's impossible to escape the number of people who want to be actors.
Even if the film industry is growing at an enormous pace, how many would make it - 100? 200? What happens to the rest of them? So many parents have become pimps!
As The Extras says somewhere, the original sin is not eating the apple, or making love to Eve, it is hope…
I have this section in the book - One extra who became a superstar and two bus conductors: About Mumtaz, Johny Walker and Rajinikanth.
Today, people who want to be actors never say they want to be an actor. They say they want to become a superstar. You want to beat Shah Rukh at his game. So then, whether you like it or not, you do what it takes to make a living.
These aspirants come from all over India and the majority of them end up as Extras. Or they do something else. And yet this is something that we never talk about, never think about. We're not even condescending towards them. They don't exist.
And did you ever want to become an actor?
I remember my brother asked me when I was eight years old: What do you want to be when you grow up?
And I confidently said, "Actor!" And my brother - I can't believe how wise he was - said "Sure!"
I had small pox at the age of 18…I was thin as hell, ugly as I am now. What small pox does is that it marks your face out so badly that you don’t have your confidence any more. I used to be 108 pounds… Sometimes you saw me, sometimes you didn't.
I was very self-conscious about how terrible-looking I was... and I guess that put paid to my acting career!
So, was it fun to resurrect Ravan and Eddie?
Of course…Ravan and Eddie are my children. I care deeply about them, and that affection is what comes through.
I might make fun of Ravan, for instance, in that passage where he becomes a bandleader. I might make fun of the kind of clothes he wears, etc. But at no point is my love for them and my affection for them ever in doubt.
There is one word that is always used about your work: Bawdy. You’re among the few contemporary Indian writers who’re totally unconscious while writing about sex – or about any bodily function, as you would say… Considering our history of celebrating the human form and sexuality, when do you think we got so squeamish?
We are one of the rare people that actually have a genuine national narrative. Which other country won its independence through the kind of idealism of Gandhi and the common people who fought for freedom?
Despite the increase in our population, can you show me at least one movement for which you can put together 500,000 supporters? If you can put together that many people even today, you can remove this government. And we can actually become an upright society in time.
Gandhi managed it then, in the days before the Internet.
We have a national narrative, but how many young people even know that we had to fight for our freedom? And the fact that we won it in such an incredible fashion? This is completely forgotten...
So no wonder, then, it does not even occur to us to marvel at the sculptures of Belur-Halebid; or wonder how Vatsayana could think…”Let me try and figure out how many ways I can make love, or how many ways a woman can make love to me.”
The Joy of Sex came out just today... And even then, we are only going to look at those illustrations or pictures in the closet.
What of the common theory that we lost our openness by virtue of being ruled by the British in the Victorian age?
There is no denying the culpability of the British in the matter of our repression since they made our 18th, 19th and 20th century forefathers self-conscious and ashamed of the sexual exuberance of temple sculptures. But the Brits left our shores 65 years ago. Isn't that enough time to become mature and understand the incredible richness of our past? I am not suggesting that there was uniform acceptance of these traditions from all strata of society, but there was a singular lack of guilt and prurience.
Imagine the beauty of having those sculptures around you, or think about writing a Kama Sutra in the open... When you go to Khajuraho or other places and see how there is absolutely no sense of self consciousness, don't you want to touch the feet of these people?
And the sexual thing going on at Khajuraho is just ten percent of the temple. The rest of it is the rest of life. They observed the full spectrum of human life. Nothing was left out. Now isn't that supposed to be the province of art - The human condition in every aspect of it?
There is no sense of guilt whatsoever. This openness is one of my ancestors...Why would you want to deny such an ancestry?
You do not realise what a prized possession this is: to be born without guilt. Guilt is not a Hindu condition at all. And what a blessing that is!
One of the other ancestors that I have is the tamasha tradition. Tamasha is restricted to Maharashtra, but you do have the folktale culture everywhere else in India, too.
On a personal level, when did you lose the self-consciousness required to write or speak about sex?
That was one of the major decisions I took when I was 18 or 20.
I was so self-conscious about being ugly and terrible to look at that I began to hate the human body...But I was waiting for a train to college, and I do not know what happened...I don't remember the context, but I sat there, waiting for this train to come, and I said to myself, my body may not be any great shakes, but the human body is beautiful...
This is a very wide subject, and I feel terrible even today about how self-conscious we are about making love.
We- the so-called educated people – don’t want to address the colossal problem of repression that we have.
The moment sex becomes a furtive act, it means you don't make time for it. You're not going to understand your body overnight. It takes you years to understand the complexities of love making, and the joys of it. If you haven't grasped that giving pleasure is so much pleasure, you have failed.
The people who did all those sculptures and paintings must have known something about it, right? And we're denying all this? Are we mad?
Whatever one might say about Masters and Johnsons and the rest, they’ve made the whole thing into a measurement exercise, which is terrible...
I think the Hindu way is much better: Openness. That sex is part of life and that a woman's body and a man's body are instruments of tremendous pleasure.
I'm completely amoral in one sense. If there is consent from both parties, what business do we have to poke our noses in other people's lives, especially when it comes to their sexual preferences?
Another big part of the two books is the chawl. You've written extensively about the water wars, the oppressive lack of privacy and sense of space in chawls – “Low-cost housing for low-cost people”.
The British built these chawls, but they came here as colonizers: It's the nature of the colonial beast to exploit.
But I had thought that after we won independence, our society and political leaders would treat even the poorest of the poor with dignity and prize the sanctity of individual lives. To me, one of the primary purposes of architecture is human dignity. Imagine 40 families standing in a queue for six toilets, two of which probably don’t work.
It’s a shame that we don’t get furious and do something about people living in chawls! What do we do instead? We sell the land, we let people stay in some foul place which will start leaking in two months.
Today, of course, the people who live in chawls in Mumbai are very lucky… At least, they’re not living on the pavement like so many others.
Did you live in a chawl?
My family was oddly very poor but Westernised because of my grandfather being a Brahmo. He died young. My father had to educate his siblings, and he himself barely passed Class X. We stayed in a house which was barely above the level of a chawl.
One of my father's friend’s daughters would come over when I was a child. She would ask me,”Where are your other rooms?”
I would say: "Under repairs"
And at age four, the neighbours would point to me and say: "Arre wah..Sri Krishna aa gaya kya?” This was the level of repression in a genteel locality.
Like how in your book, a neighbour refers to Ravan as a "closet Shri Krishna" for visiting the Sarang sisters?
That's definitely autobiographical…
If you cannot get into the mindset of people living in chawls - and am dealing with that - it would be hard for you to critique my book.
T
he Extras has been torn apart by certain critics… But in some cases, the reviews lead you to suspect the critic hasn’t read the book: One gets the very structure of Extras wrong. What’s your take on the quality of literary criticism today?
The primacy of the text is so easily forgotten in criticism today. One critic thought I was writing about slums, not chawls!
Critics can illuminate a book in so many ways... They can do the reverse of the onion theory - unravel one little membrane a time, and yet the core keeps getting stronger.
If you look at our past, we have the finest people to go to when it comes to rigour, robustness, lyricism: We have Kabir, we have Dnyaneshwari.
And then in the late 1960s, say in music, we began to play to and for a western audience. The tabla or the pakhawaj were no longer seen as accompanying instruments; they became intrusive and wanted nearly equal play time and completely turned classical music into a mechanical jugalbandi. The worst part was that we Indians were devoid of all discernment.We thought this was an evolution of classical music and brought this playing to the gallery at the most banal level to our own local concerts. If there had been fine and genuinely courageous music critics, they would have emphasised the meditative nature of Indian music especially in the alapi, and thus the terrible distortion and trivialzation of our north Indian classical music may perhaps have been avoided. But if the critics don't do that, then the author is forced to turn critic.
What of the criticism that The Extras is too long? Is there pressure on authors these days to keep books short?
Of course there is pressure, but that doesn’t matter to me. Nobody tells me Cuckold is too long....
I guess it's the pacing of the book that matters: What you're saying and how you're saying it. The Extras is just absolute fun... Don't we want some fun in life? What's wrong with us?
Do you think we’re losing our sense of humour?
We’ve become utterly humourless... What a sad lot we are! And we’re now very self-righteous... I remember reading online responses to James Laine’s Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. Whatever I might think of the book, the viciousness with which the author was attacked was completely uncalled for.
If you want to ban books for sexual content, then do away with temples..Do away with notion of the idea of the university...Here is one place where people can come together not only for learning and knowledge but to be able to express views in opposition or at tangent with each other... It is the one place in any city where there can be just no forbidding. Openness of thought - If you don’t have it, then what can you do?
What of your city? Does it upset you, the way Mumbai is changing? Is there anything in common with the Mumbai you grew up in, and the Mumbai of today?
There is just nothing in common. If you look at the photographs from the 1930s, or from my childhood – I was born in 1942 - it was a beautiful city full of trees.
Any city which is on the sea should by rights be exceptionally beautiful. There were fewer cars those days, the population was not so monstrous.
There are still staggeringly beautiful spots in the city. If you pass by the Parsee Colony, you’ll notice that all two-storey buildings are being broken down and turned into highrises. But for some reason, the Five Gardens are still there, and you cannot imagine how beautiful it is.
Shrubs and flowers are lovely to look at, but there is only one kind of tree that sets me on fire, and that is huge shade-giving trees. And with the kind of summer we have – just seeing the sheer gall of the flowers to come up with the colours that they have... is so wonderful.
So that's what Bombay was... Hindu colony was a narrow road. But even there, the trees went across and there was always shade.
The notion that you had to walk in the sun in summer was completely alien. Today, you've to block the windows if you want to watch a movie. It's so noisy, it's appalling.
One of the good things about that time was that there was no such thing as choice... Advertising hadn’t yet taken over your life. TV was black and white. When I thought I had made good in life was when I had a record player...
Today, things are so hard, I don’t know what's going to happen. The patent shame is that people starve, that we allow them to starve... That we do not get furious and do something about poverty.
Your biggest fears about your city?
That they come true.
Where does your structure and style of story-telling come from?
I do not write to obfuscate… I think depth comes with transparency...The number of people whose words influence me must run into hundreds.
But for me, Graham Greene makes the notion of a classic clear - that you keep going back to it, you want to go back to it because every time you discover something that's invaluable to you.
First published on sify.com in 2012
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