Indian Writing

Kiran Nagarkar on reading in public:

I did my first reading in public at the age of 50. Till then I had stubbornly refused to appear on TV, not even as a mute participant, not even when my first novel in Marathi was being discussed, or when my play Bedtime Story ran into serious censorship problems.

Now, finally, I was making my debut and there were notices being put up all over the University of Chicago. The organisers (or was it just me?) were expecting between a hundred and two hundred people at the minimum, but the public turned out to be all of four professors from the University who had obviously been coaxed or coerced to come out of pity for an over-sensitive author who might be terminally traumatised and take it into his head never to speak or write again.

Let’s go to the A-List table,” said an author at Neemrana, some years ago and left the table where a couple of poets and other Indian writers were sitting.

And while we can sneer at his social climbing, the media aren’t much better. A weekly news magazine said that the Kitab festival has no A-list authors. I don’t know what that means. I think it means: no millionaire writers. I think it means: none of the Big Advance Boys. I think it means: if you’re writing a book and you have some ideas, we of the media have no time for you. Only call us if someone is willing to pay you a few hundred thousands or more.

We don’t invent the A-list any more. The marketing johnnies decide. Take the case of Kaavya Viswanathan
What happened to the idea of the book itself? What happened to the idea of the counterculture, that there could be something we were interested in that has nothing to do with how many dollars someone thought it was worth?

It wasn’t a vanity book-fest. There were lively sessions on the state of journalism, on censorship and the radical media, and on the translation of fictional works for the screen. There were writers such as Deborah Moggach, Esther Freud and Geoffrey Dyer reading and speaking.

A couple of newspapers were unfair to Kitab. One journalist, who had probably never heard of Deborah, Geoffrey or Esther implied (in a publication called, I think, The Weekly Azaan) that the festival was a failure because there were no ‘A-listers’. The organiser, Pablo Ganguli, replied saying that he was concerned with cultural debate and not with vulgar alphabetical lists. Being one of the writers invited, I should perhaps take not being on the Azaan’s ‘A’ list as a slight to my long and happy career. In fact, I couldn’t care less.

“Where is Jessica Hines?” I asked an organiser.

“She can’t make this panel,” she said.

No, she couldn’t. Not unless she had a clone. She was at Max Mueller Bhavan, reading from her book. This must be the only time a speaker has been cross-booked by the persons in charge of the festival.

But what was our panel about?

I had been told it was about how the media determine issues of gender.

Our moderator announced that we were there to speak about genre.

Farrukh Dhondy raised his eyebrows.

“Gender is genre,” said Hoshang Merchant, the gay poet from Hyderabad.

The evening before, Nick Pearson, editorial director of Fourth Estate, UK, released my book of poems, Portraits of the Space We Occupy, and I sorely suffered from a hangover from my own reading for the next twenty-four hours. The collection was launched at Oxford Book Shop, Churchgate. What this really means is that just as you begin to read, the grinder goes into action at the Cha Bar at your elbow on your right. And of course the mike, as er, has its own agenda. So what you read comes out as a vengeful gurgle.

In between poems, I catch sight of Amit Chaudhuri, the brilliant writer and singer, who are also the president of Kitab Board, at the Cha Bar. I gesticulate wildly at him. The mike, the mike, I mime endlessly like a moron. But Amit coldly looks through me. His eyes glint. Is he thinking of a review of mine of one of his works?