#
Sometimes, I feel that a good biography is not just a biography of someone else, but
#
it's also the story of our interior life.
#
Here are two seemingly contradictory things that are both true.
#
One, each of us is unique and we have selves that no one else can truly access.
#
Two, we are all also fundamentally alike.
#
We live, we love, we cry, we feel self-pity, we empathize with others, we want glory, we
#
want validation, we are slaves to inertia, we help others, we hurt others, we hurt ourselves,
#
we are ruled by our egos in unseen ways, and most of the time, we do not self-reflect.
#
The biography I discussed today is a book like that.
#
Akshay Mukul brings alive the interior life of the great writer Agya.
#
And as I read about his struggles and frailties and multitudes, I was forced to ask questions
#
That's the great thing about reading.
#
Every good book that you read deepens your sense of yourself, and every great biography
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
My guest today is Akshay Mukul, who has been on the show before.
#
In our earlier episode together, we discussed his great book on the Geeta Press, and I learned
#
so much from that episode that I keep referring to it as regular listeners would know.
#
Well, Akshay's second book is his second masterpiece.
#
Writer, rebel, soldier, lover is his biography of the Hindi writer Agya, who disrupted and
#
transformed Hindi literature.
#
He himself lived multiple lives.
#
He made bombs for Indian revolutionaries who tried to get Bhagat Singh to escape from jail.
#
He started his first novel, the classic book Shekhar Ek Jeevani, when he was still a teenager
#
He was a bridge between different schools of Hindi literature and a mentor to young
#
writers over a period of decades.
#
He also had a short stint in the army and a colorful love life.
#
And as much as his great book bears Agya's inner life to us, it also works as a history
#
of Hindi literature through these decades and a picture of India and some of India's
#
Akshay's next book is going to be a biography of J.P. Narayan, and I can't wait for that.
#
But for now, do listen to this conversation.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it?
#
Well, I'd love to help you.
#
Since April 2020, I've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear Writing,
#
and an online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
#
We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase the work of students, and vibrant community interaction.
#
In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
#
about the craft and practice of clear writing.
#
There are many exercises, much interaction, and a lovely and lively community at the end
#
The course costs Rs. 10,000 plus GST or about $150.
#
If you're interested, head on over to register at IndiaUncut.com slash Clear Writing.
#
That's IndiaUncut.com slash Clear Writing.
#
Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just a willingness to work hard and
#
a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
Akshay, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
Great to be back again.
#
Yeah, it's been quite a while.
#
Just before we started recording, we were having this lovely chat in the booth with
#
Afran Amartya who's looking after the sound.
#
He grew up in Jamshedpur, you grew up in Ranchi, and you guys were sharing stories of growing
#
up in different decades, of course, over there.
#
I want to actually start talking about your childhood at one sense in a particular way,
#
but also in a general way about how much the world has changed in ways that we don't recognize.
#
The particular example we were discussing outside was that almost sort of spontaneous
#
film festivals used to happen in Durga Puja, in the field where they used to show a film.
#
All workers and the officers and their kids would all gather and it would happen.
#
And we were talking about how today everything is available at the, you know, you press a
#
button and it's there, you can watch it in the privacy of your home, but something is
#
lost in the sense that the way we used to gather and we used to do our thing.
#
But it's a great net benefit because everybody can watch everything, access is not an issue.
#
Equally, I think about, you know, in your beautiful, powerful book on Agya, which is
#
so rich in different ways, there's so many glimpses there where you see a lost world
#
come to life and you realize that things that we take for granted, we shouldn't take for
#
Like this is beautiful thing about how in 1932 the police take away his poems.
#
So he, he, and that teaches him a lesson that make a copy.
#
And I think somewhere else you mentioned he submitted some stories through a magazine
#
called Madhuri and they said they'll publish it, but they weren't publishing it.
#
So he wrote to them asking for his stories back, you know, because there used to be only
#
one copy and that's, you know, and you see this in some way also in his relationships
#
with women, which are so unsure and you feel that that kind of normal mingling that people
#
do and you know, that's just not there.
#
It's like women are another thing entirely.
#
And I think to some extent, our generation growing up when we did, it was like that for
#
I'm sure as a young man, you were as awkward as me, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
#
And I want to talk to you a bit about this because I think I believe that we live in
#
the best of times, but I do feel a sense of loss for something that is gone.
#
Maybe a sense of innocence or maybe a time where we weren't all lost in black screens
#
and there was personal connection and you were forced into me time because it was really
#
You can't gaze into a screen or whatever.
#
And equally there is a sense that, yeah, we are in the best of times, but we are not young
#
You know, it's, it's, we are there, but we're not quite there.
#
And I feel a sense of wistfulness also at this, what are your feelings?
#
Well, as you said, you know, when I see like my daughter's generation, they have everything.
#
We were just talking about the movie collection or criterion collection.
#
They watch some of the best cinema in the world and it's just press of a button.
#
What we have lost is, well, innocence is one and also I don't like, you know, it's good
#
As a parent, I feel, okay, kids are very sure about what they want to do, but I do miss
#
that age or the time when we really didn't know what we were doing with ourselves.
#
If someone was reading books, he was just reading books without bothering about what
#
You know, those who took science always knew, you know, they had a path charted for them.
#
You go to IIT or some engineering college, you go to medical, you know, but there was
#
some like many of us, someone like me who was trying to study humanities at a time when
#
I was like, I like people almost like everyone in the family knew this guy is the loser in
#
Why is he studying humanities?
#
So that uncertainty and we landed on our feet.
#
Okay, we were not sure we did things which we are not proud of now.
#
When I remember, I really I don't know that Akshay Mukul anymore.
#
You know, the kind of things one did when was I did intermediate, which is like not
#
equivalent of your plus two.
#
So I went to college immediately after 10th.
#
So you know, the college brings certain things to you, it does something to you.
#
So I did all that in a small town.
#
But yet when I look back, I did a lot of good things.
#
That time, it looked like waste of time, cinema, for instance, we were talking.
#
So the best movies I saw through film clubs in Ranchi by this public sector undertaking
#
where my father worked, or you know, this film shows which will happen in open ground.
#
And I watched some of the best Hindi movies that we read books, there was a British library
#
in Ranchi, which was like, and we just devout books from there, we'll go get four books
#
Then there was one Bihar government library in my neighborhood, which was extraordinary
#
library and that's most of my Hindi readings came from there.
#
So when I go back to my town, I, which I bedded last year, and I realized that the city has
#
lost its, you know, it's become very aspirational.
#
You can't hold that against them.
#
Everyone wants to be Delhi and Bombay.
#
So I have my friends who will tell me who will take me to a, you know, big cafes in
#
I don't mind going to cafes, I, but somewhere that, you know, people who are doing all kinds
#
who were not taken the kind, who are not taking the usual path, I don't see too many people
#
Everyone is either doing engineering, medical, now, of course, it has expanded.
#
So I do see people going to fashion institutes, NIFTs, or, you know, NIDs, and all those things
#
Law, for instance, but that generation, that bit of irreverence of the 17, when you're
#
You're just too calculative.
#
You're just too kind of, you know, you're kind of charting a course at the age of 17.
#
I didn't know till I was in DO what I was trying to do.
#
Things happened and one landed on its feet.
#
So that's how I kind of, so that my thoughts are and I, so a lot of people when they say,
#
you know, like just now when Amartya was saying that his city has changed, he's younger to
#
me and I feel it, you know, I still go back whenever I go to Ranchi, I go to this old
#
bookstore guy from whom used to buy secondhand books.
#
He's still on my phone.
#
Still when he gets this old penguin classics, he calls me.
#
Whenever I go, I pick up books worth five, ten thousand rupees from him.
#
But and I realized that my nephews and nieces who were growing up, they didn't know about
#
So still, and I was asking him, he says, people of your generation are still coming to me.
#
Younger people are not coming.
#
Younger people are coming for guides, you know, the cat guide, Jay, all those things.
#
So I see the city has changed in many ways.
#
I don't want to be judgmental about it.
#
But yeah, the city is no longer from its architecture to its ethos.
#
In every way, the city has changed now.
#
But yeah, that's how it is.
#
You know, what do we do?
#
Nostalgia is I don't know what to do with the nostalgia, but yeah, it's there.
#
But it was a good time.
#
It's a great, great time I had in growing up there.
#
At the start of your book, at one point you write, quote, I encountered Aghia's writing
#
at 17, an age when everything in the world looks wrong and the mind is befuddled with
#
His Shekhar Ek Jeevani further complicated my small town world and my ambitions to leave
#
And elsewhere you quote Aghia is saying early in his life, I think he's writing a letter
#
to someone and he describes himself as quote, a black man in a dark room looking for a black
#
cat which wasn't there.
#
And what an incredible image.
#
You just know that this is a writer.
#
I want to ask you about this sort of process of finding yourself, because I think today
#
what happens is that if you're 17 today, there are proxies for finding yourself.
#
You may not really know who you are, but you can go online and you can join an ideological
#
tribe or if there are interests and inclinations which in our generation would have left us
#
completely alone because no one around us would have shared them, today you can find
#
It's a different ballgame, but for you and me growing up and we did, we are sort of in
#
that circumstance of geography and whatever is around us and however privileged the childhood
#
is, it is still limited compared to today.
#
So tell me about your growing up years and that process of sort of finding yourself and
#
when you talk about how that is an age when everything in the world looks wrong and the
#
mind is befuddled with a million ideas, paint me a picture of yourself.
#
Well, I was kind of, you know, as I said earlier, I was not inclined to study.
#
Somehow I didn't do as well as everyone expected me to do in 10th and I was very clear even
#
when I was kind of in 10th or 9th that I will not study science.
#
Maybe there was too much of science at home or maybe I loved reading and I thought, well,
#
I see everyone, what science does, I knew all the, you know, the Irodov science, the
#
physics, all my friends are talking about all the time, all these physics, Agarwal classes.
#
So I had to kind of, it was not easy, my father agreed, my parents agreed and they said,
#
OK, fine, do whatever you want.
#
That way I have to kind of, it was not easy being a parent where one child says that,
#
OK, I'll study humanities.
#
So I was a bit kind of, I'll say that I was an oddball.
#
So I did and as I said, Sehkar, the only thing you could do, the only way you could
#
keep your mind occupied was read or you hang out with friends.
#
But since most of my friends were science students, day after 10th they switched off.
#
They were kind of there, but now one hour in the evening, not every day.
#
So we still had a gang of two, three people who, like us, all losers club used to call,
#
we'll just hang out, go from one, you know, I grew up in an industrial township.
#
So we had the sectors, we'll go with friends, you know, at that age, you're also trying
#
to look at girls, you know, all kinds of things we're doing.
#
And reading was what kept me going in the sense and someone, I can't believe she had
#
this friend of mine, she had read already, Sehkar.
#
And I said, and she said, you just read it.
#
And I got the Sehkar and I read it first volume.
#
It took me time because it's not easy to, you know, it's not easy to access initially,
#
but once you get into it, you're hooked.
#
And then you realize that this man has written, there was no Google those days.
#
I'm talking about 87, 86, there's no Google, nothing.
#
So you try and read more about again, you find that it's autobiographical in library
#
books still. I said, look at this guy at the age of 18, 19, he's done this.
#
And what are we doing with our life as it is, you know, even if I'm cocky and I'm
#
saying I'll study humanities, I'll arts somewhere, I know that it's a very risky
#
thing that I'm doing, you know, I'll be judged because much as you try to be
#
reverent, there's always this, you know, and kind of make your parents unhappy at
#
some stage at some level.
#
And then you find that this man has done so much and you read it's autobiographical.
#
And then you say, oh, God, what am I, what are we doing?
#
And and my thing was also that why should I be in the city if I'm not studying
#
science? Why should only those who study science have the liberty, the power,
#
everything to go to, you know, this IIT, that IIT and many cities I got to know
#
of was through these friends, brothers, cousins who were going to IITs and they
#
were saying, oh, the city is like this, that city.
#
I said, I too want to go to Delhi, Delhi University.
#
And I came and that changed my world.
#
But yeah, 17 years, I was I was reading a lot and I was and I was reading across
#
in the sense Hindi, English both and in a same way.
#
So I grew up in a completely bilingual household with bilingual literature and I
#
was reading Hindi and there was no this thing that you have to only read English.
#
So by 17, I had read some of the stalwarts of Hindi again being and I guess always
#
tough. But Sehkar completely blew me.
#
And then I read two volumes and then I said, oh, God, this is the life.
#
This is the man. And and look at 17 years been through all kinds of experiences.
#
What have I done at the age of 17?
#
I have a small town. I see everyone will move out in a year's time.
#
I am I'm so uncertain about.
#
So that's what I said, you know, before before a little bit million ideas.
#
And coming to Delhi, in a way, it helps.
#
It expanded your horizon.
#
You read more. You met different kinds of people.
#
People were not only talking about I.T.
#
and the be all and end all of the existence was not engineering and medical.
#
So it kind of expanded your worldview.
#
And so that's how it worked.
#
So 17 was a kind of restlessness, kind of all of us are confused.
#
I remained confused for a long, long time.
#
Even now, I am I mean, that's in a constant state of my being, actually.
#
But yeah, those days even more.
#
So we'll take a digression here and I'll like go into amusing,
#
which comes from something that you said, which really doesn't apply
#
to either your book or to you.
#
But it's just a thought, which is that, you know, you mentioned about
#
how you weren't sure of what you were going to do.
#
And then you read Shekhar Ijjivani and then you realized that, my God,
#
this Agia, he was so young when he wrote it.
#
He did so much. He went into stuff.
#
And I find that there is like there are these binaries and you know,
#
there are people who can get trapped into this binary
#
where they're full of self-doubt.
#
And that might mean that you overthink it and you don't end up doing anything.
#
And on the other hand, you have people who are just people of action,
#
who are jumping into things,
#
perhaps when they're unprepared and they can't do it.
#
And at one level, you know, you want to be the guy with the self-doubt
#
in the sense that there is, you know, the famous phrase,
#
Dunning-Kruger effect, which has two sides to it.
#
The side that people talk about is that people who are not good at something
#
often think they are better than they are.
#
And which leads to too much confidence.
#
And there are so many pundits on Twitter like that.
#
But equally, people who are really good at something,
#
they find it so easy and they take it for granted that they assume
#
that everybody else also knows that.
#
And they think they're worse at it than they actually are.
#
And this can lead to sort of the imposter syndrome,
#
where you'll be like, am I good enough to do this?
#
Am I not good enough to do this?
#
So that's one side of it.
#
But the other side of it is that actually,
#
those who suffer from the Dunning-Kruger syndrome
#
or those who have the bias for action,
#
the positive side of it is that you only learn things by doing things.
#
And these are people who are plunging into the world.
#
And sometimes they fake it till they make it.
#
Sometimes they fall on their face, but they learn a lesson from that.
#
And, you know, and some of us overthinkers,
#
we overthink too much and don't end up doing enough.
#
So I wonder what you feel about, you know, these two aspects.
#
Yeah, I agree with you entirely.
#
I learned, for instance, when I was getting into the first book,
#
I'm a kind of at some stage, I don't know when it happened.
#
I kind of my fiction reading came down drastically.
#
Even now, now I read far more fiction than I used to say five years back.
#
And I started reading a lot of these academic tomes and I love reading them.
#
And I can be really I can read them over three days.
#
And some people will say, what is wrong with you?
#
How can you read this dense prose? But I loved it.
#
So when I got into Geeta Press, I had, as you said, you know, you learn
#
in the course of the journey, I learned a lot.
#
And I was so full of self-doubt.
#
And I have a few friends.
#
You can call them my teachers.
#
Some of them I was showing my chapters, which was the first time I was doing something.
#
It was not like journalism where you write in the midnight and early morning.
#
And I knew this kind of because I'm self-doubt.
#
I was always uncertain how good will it be, whether it's good.
#
And I need that validation from some of my friends who are very good at it,
#
who went to academics and did and they were all along very good students.
#
And so I'll show it to them.
#
And I remember showing giving my first chapter to a friend of mine.
#
I will name her as the big academic in US.
#
She she's a very thorough person.
#
She is the most honest person that I know.
#
She read it. She'll not fake.
#
And she comes from a world where she doesn't even know about Geeta Press.
#
She's part South Indian and part she has Lucknow background.
#
And she read it and she said, Who have you written it for?
#
You know, so and you know, it was I remember some 30 page chapter
#
I had printed at PDA, I sent her the word file
#
and she sent me some 12 page comments.
#
And I said, well, at that stage, I actually wanted to just dump it.
#
Then then she wrote another mail saying that, look, this is not for this.
#
How do you attract my attention?
#
I don't know about Geeta Press.
#
How do I get hooked to it?
#
You have to tell me that.
#
And that was so like her.
#
There were many, many other people, you know, this whole world.
#
You know, it's like millions, some hundred hands are needed when you write a book.
#
You know, author gets the name.
#
But there's so many people who make you do it.
#
And that has been my learning experience.
#
So my self-doubt, I have like right now, I'm getting into a book.
#
I and I've been debating to start writing it every day.
#
I think, OK, I'll start writing today.
#
Then again, I'm full of some doubt.
#
I need some more things.
#
And I'm constantly so it will go on.
#
I look it happened with a book, too.
#
I kind of was not sure whether this is the right opening that, you know,
#
and then went and suddenly one day I started writing.
#
And then it slowly, slowly happened.
#
So my self-doubt helps me in a way because I constantly learn.
#
I'm I'm seamless about sewing things to people, people I really trust,
#
people I think that they will never give me wrong advice.
#
And thankfully, I'm fortunate to have some friends and mentors
#
who I can just sew it and they can and they and they also know they can be.
#
And I always tell them, be brutal.
#
And and at later stage, I have editors who have been ruthless.
#
You know, I have I have been endowed with very ruthless editors.
#
And it's constantly so this self-doubt gets constantly, you know,
#
it settles down in the course of writing the book.
#
When I start, I'm more full of self-doubt in due course.
#
Like by the time book is ready, it's print ready, it's going to press.
#
Then I know, OK, it's gone in some direction.
#
Questions have been answered.
#
And some of these questions that editors ask you, Sonal who edited again.
#
My God, it's like I keep telling you, what the hell are you doing writing?
#
You know, it should be like editor.
#
She's such a good editor.
#
And she's just like and and and I made it very clear right in the beginning.
#
We didn't know each other much.
#
See, I had kind of help when the caravan extracted
#
the press book we had met.
#
And after I said, look, there should be no holes barred. Right.
#
We are not getting abusive with each other,
#
but we are getting brutally frank with each other and still do it.
#
And when I'll not like to change something, I'll tell her.
#
But mostly I change because most of our interventions are very good.
#
And then Ajita, fantastic editor, fantastic editor.
#
She's like she can until last minute it got edited and everything.
#
So so many people helped me in getting rid of my self doubt.
#
And I'm back to self doubt a new book and I'm back to square one.
#
I'm still like, I know first five thousand words.
#
All right. I'll send it to someone.
#
Some person really said, OK, you're on the right path.
#
It looks interesting. Carry on.
#
So then that's how we deal with it. Yeah.
#
And, you know, I think about this and I think that it's a question
#
of finding the right balance.
#
Like Abraham Lincoln once said, give me six hours to chop down a tree
#
and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. Right.
#
And I get the value of preparation.
#
But what Lincoln does do is after four hours, he starts cutting the tree.
#
And many of us, like I'm especially being critical of myself, really.
#
Many of us, we don't do that enough.
#
We just sharpen the axe till there's no axe left.
#
And it's so when you when you write, when you like,
#
I guess in journalism, of course, you have no time.
#
There is a deadline. You're doing it's going, you're doing it's going.
#
And that's a great training ground also for getting it done.
#
But then when you're doing a book,
#
it does a moment where you shift from preparation to action.
#
Is it about how much preparation you have actually got done
#
and there's a right moment to start?
#
Or is it more a psychological thing that you manage to kind of?
#
I need the whole story in my head.
#
And even when you're looking at archives, you know, OK, this part
#
I never had, this I found her.
#
I spent three months in the US looking at the archives
#
and I found so many things which I didn't know.
#
And I had this inclination and I just kind of I went to archive
#
to archive East Coast to West Coast.
#
I did. And I realized the story is getting complete now.
#
And I had already spent two, two and a half years
#
looking at the national archives and everything.
#
So now I have a broad story in my head.
#
And at some point, if you're writing a book, that's how it works for me.
#
And I don't know how it works for others is that you have to decide that, OK,
#
now get on to writing, because even when you start writing,
#
there'll be questions, there'll be gaps, there'll be loopholes.
#
So again, I'll go in search of the archives.
#
I'll go in search of filling those gaps.
#
So might as well start writing now.
#
I can't kind of procrastinate any longer.
#
So that's how I do. And I know I'll go.
#
Then the last stage will be when editor looks at it and editor will find holes.
#
And always there is some problem.
#
You know, they'll say, oh, how do you assume that everyone knows this?
#
Or why are you kind of in love with yourself?
#
Why are you written five thousand words on something which can be just a thousand words?
#
So these things constantly happen.
#
So now with some stage, I decide that now is the time to start writing
#
and making sense of the archive.
#
Problem happens when you just collect too much.
#
Like this is I'm grappling with this right now.
#
I I just too much material.
#
How do you do the same thing happen with a 70,000 pages of his private papers,
#
then papers all over, you know, U.S.
#
papers, related papers, then his revolutionary days papers.
#
So finally, I spent almost a year making sense of those papers
#
because then I knew that there is a story.
#
This is how I'll go about it.
#
And then I started writing.
#
Then I could go back and forth and easily write and could fill,
#
you know, the folds here and there.
#
And then that's how it happens.
#
And in the course of writing, it happens like you're writing chapter two
#
and you got something which would have been in chapter one.
#
Then now I as someone told me, I will name him again, then make a plumbing file.
#
So I call it a plumbing file.
#
So I said, OK, this thing has to go in chapter one.
#
So I'll not go to chapter one.
#
That's that stage after I'll finish the entire writing.
#
And then I'll start the plumbing work.
#
You know, OK, this had to go there.
#
So that's how roughly I work.
#
Yeah, that's that's actually a beautiful tip.
#
If I ever write something long, I'll remember the plumbing file.
#
And I'm also like there were various parts of your book where, you know,
#
you'll reproduce a fragment of the letter and I'll be like, shit,
#
I wish I could read the full letter.
#
For example, when he says, you know, when he talks about how,
#
if I don't do this, he tells a friend, I'm just going to kill myself.
#
And that's such a striking sentence because you're like, fuck, you know,
#
I get the depth of that sentiment, but I would have loved to read the full thing.
#
And I guess that when you're writing it, there are those two imperatives.
#
And one imperative is that you are immersing yourself into a rich life
#
and you want to put all of it in.
#
And then there will be another imperative that no, you're writing a book
#
which has to be published in a certain form and you have to craft it for that.
#
So how do you sort of deal with this?
#
Because, you know, my like my inclination always is give me more,
#
give me more when I'm getting into it.
#
Yeah, I know. Even with again, this happened.
#
You are the second person, actually.
#
Writer friend Siddharth Chaudhary is another one.
#
And he said that, listen, I don't mind if it was some hundred pages extra.
#
I said, you're serious.
#
You have been and Siddharth has spent his life in publishing.
#
He has been a publishing house, academic publishing house editor.
#
He says, yeah, I really don't mind.
#
Oh, and exactly the thing that you said, he says, oh,
#
why couldn't you put the whole letter of this or that or some of the Kripa
#
sin bit letters? I said, well, I had to struggle.
#
I had to kind of constantly argue with my editors.
#
And it was really getting out of hand
#
because, you know, everything kicks in a marketing of publishing house.
#
We'll say, yeah, come on, we can't try.
#
You know, there's a whole host of factors which completes a book.
#
You know, you have to be considerate about that.
#
So many things got out.
#
But yeah, so for instance, yeah, some of these letters,
#
especially his letters with Kripa sin,
#
especially that later he writes to Rekha Jain, Nimi Chandjain's wife,
#
saying that I'll commit suicide and Dr.
#
Hyde, if it fits on anyone, that's probably one of the most,
#
again, never reveals himself, bears himself away.
#
He has in that letter in a few places he has.
#
But yeah, one tried to put as much as one could and not hide anything,
#
not keep anything out of keeping that in mind that, oh,
#
how this will be judged and how this will be happened.
#
And thankfully, the response has been good even from his family,
#
although there are a few things which, you know, no family likes to talk about.
#
Everyone. So they have been responded.
#
No one said that. Yeah, everyone said, oh, it's a fat book.
#
But said, yeah, it's kind of we could read it in
#
over two days or three days.
#
But you and Siddharth, I mean, two people who said there should have been more.
#
You know, so, yeah, that's I take it as a compliment.
#
Maybe I can't even promise that the next edition will have more because that's what would happen.
#
But yeah, that later I can separately send you that letter.
#
I mean it absolutely as a compliment, because you just made me fall in love
#
with the subject matter that you were writing about and you brought it so alive for me.
#
That's why I wanted more.
#
So it's. Yeah, I understand.
#
Yes, love. That's how it should be.
#
I'm reminded of this great book by Robert Carrow called The Power Broker.
#
Yes. Which he wrote in Robert Moses.
#
Amazing. And one of the great tragedies of that book is I think it was around a million words.
#
And the publisher said, cut it down.
#
And they cut it down to eight hundred and fifty thousand.
#
And the hundred and fifty thousand words they cut were on Jane Jacobs.
#
Robert Moses's fight with Jane Jacobs.
#
And Jane Jacobs is one of my heroes.
#
And I can't, you know, every once in a while, I'll think about, you know,
#
how I would love to read that.
#
And for me, it was like, how could I cut that portion?
#
You know, I read about it.
#
My thing was that, how can you?
#
And I remember talking to one of my editor friends and they said,
#
well, you guys, you're always very cruel to editors, you don't know.
#
You have not even read it.
#
And you're saying, how could he cut it? Right.
#
I said, but that guy is like, you know, I want to know more.
#
But that's so. But Robert Carrow, look at him.
#
It's Lyndon Johnson volumes after volumes coming.
#
He goes to my god. He's incredible.
#
He's like as biographers go, he's gold standard.
#
He's another level. I just worship him.
#
I worship him too. It's just like the pinnacle.
#
And I wonder about, you know, whether in the way that we think about
#
literature and writing and all of these forms, that we are trapped
#
in a mindset that evolved in a previous time in the sense
#
that why is a form the way that it is, why is a book
#
a certain number of pages and there's a minimum and a maximum.
#
And the reason for that is a constraint.
#
And it's a printing constraint.
#
This is how many you can put together.
#
And from that artificial constraint has evolved a convention
#
of the length of the book.
#
You know, the same way that you had the three minute song,
#
because at the turn of the century, turn of the 20th century,
#
the disc could fit that much.
#
Then later you had long playing records which would have 40 minutes.
#
So then your tradition became 40 minutes.
#
12, three minute songs and radios had the convention of that.
#
Even in a newspaper, you know, the convention of how long an article
#
All of these conventions have come out of physical restraints,
#
which, in a sense, in different fields have been vanishing in different ways.
#
You know, and yeah, I have seen I have kind of
#
I've been thinking about many things.
#
For instance, one of the publishing house constraint
#
and it's completely manufactured and I have been asking this
#
to my publishing house friends, editors and everyone.
#
Everyone says, I ask them, like the new thing is that books
#
shouldn't be more than 100000 words. Right.
#
Now. All of us have friends,
#
family members who don't read and they will not read
#
even if it's 25000 words, right.
#
They will not read a full page newspaper story.
#
So this where is this coming from this 100000 word limit?
#
I don't understand this.
#
Like newspapers do some kind of survey.
#
You know, this called readership survey and all that.
#
They have at least some figure.
#
Publishing house is no such thing.
#
On what basis did you come to?
#
Unless only your sales and marketing department is saying.
#
And I'll give you instances.
#
John Richardson's around to write Picasso's four volume biography.
#
It was a mammoth project.
#
He starts sometime in the late 80s.
#
He first volume comes early 90s, then mid 90s, then third.
#
Fourth comes after he dies, which is 2019, 20.
#
He had completed it. Finally, it came out now.
#
And these four volumes are 10 years of his life.
#
So these four volumes are 40 years of Picasso's life, not the entire life.
#
And look at the detail and look at the way book has done.
#
I was asking this Susan Sontag biographer who did blurb for again.
#
And, you know, same thing.
#
He wrote Clarice Lispector's biography.
#
Everyone should read it.
#
What a brilliant biography that is.
#
And the sole thing of that, it's a fat book.
#
How? But the book has done very well.
#
How is the three volume Stalin biography come?
#
There are hundreds and thousands of biographies in Stalin.
#
How is it coming? And people are reading it.
#
This lady, I'm forgetting her name, she did two volumes on Henry Matthews biography.
#
Absolutely brilliant biography.
#
And two volumes. People read it.
#
So I don't know on what basis, as you rightly pointed out, you know, this
#
things happen because of time, because of other circumstances.
#
And people say, no, that's the norm.
#
You know, a number of copies that Ramguhas India after Gandhi has sold.
#
Tell me that's like happened here.
#
It's not even some US market or anything in India.
#
People are constantly reading, always reading.
#
Every revised edition is selling in thousands and thousands.
#
This is something we have.
#
We have kind of invented ourselves publishing out this 100,000 word.
#
For instance, I I don't understand.
#
And they say, oh, fat books don't sell anymore.
#
spending 1000 rupees for a small little outing that you do.
#
You go to a cafe for, you know, with a friend.
#
You end up spending books. Why is this?
#
So therefore, when a lot of people say, oh, who's going to read this fat book?
#
I said, let it be. Some books need to be written.
#
Some, you know, not everything can be on the can be tested
#
on the touchstone of market or sells and this and that.
#
And some books will never sell.
#
Some books will never sell like other books, you know.
#
So let it be. I guess life need to be known.
#
Nirmal Verma's life should be known, you know,
#
which beneath did in a completely different.
#
So how Gandhi's life, which Ram did two volumes, it needs to be told.
#
You know, look at the number of biographies of Nehru, Kip's coming,
#
you know, or Hitler, for instance, this Hitler is like a publishing house.
#
It's a separate publishing of the industry.
#
You know, look at the number of books.
#
Ion Curso has done on Hitler and each better than the other.
#
And apart from the two volumes he did, which is like I consider it like again,
#
the touchstone is a gold standard of classical biography.
#
So, I don't know, these things I invented, but this is a fad,
#
there's a phase, maybe it will pass.
#
I don't know everything.
#
And, you know, one thing which has happened with publishing house,
#
with my little experience interacting with them is that what happened
#
to newspapers many years ago, that the marketing team, the sales,
#
they started overpowering and they started dominating the editorial.
#
Many of my publishing house editor friends say that it was not the norm
#
that the sales guys will sit in acquisition meeting.
#
They will not even know what the book is about, who the subject is.
#
And they'll immediately on that basis and that one meeting, they'll tell you that,
#
oh, this book can't sell in the market.
#
And I do know some very good proposals have fallen by the wayside
#
because sales said, OK, this book is will not do well.
#
How do you know? How do you know?
#
And this is actually a subject I feel really strongly about.
#
And I'll actually say that you mentioned that publishers don't even do surveys.
#
My point is that even if they did surveys,
#
they would not know what the market is like simply because
#
you don't know till things come out how they will be responded to.
#
Like the classic example I give for this is when I contrast radio
#
and broadcasting, right?
#
People think podcasting is radio on demand.
#
That's the only difference. It's like a Netflix for audio.
#
It's not. It's very different.
#
And it's different because radio stations have different incentives
#
and different imperatives like in India for to have an FM station.
#
You pay so much license.
#
It's so expensive that you're catering to the lowest common denominator.
#
And you are you don't have the space to go after a niche.
#
And even if you go after a quote, unquote niche,
#
it's a large niche. You already know it is there.
#
But my point is that some niches don't know that they exist.
#
You know, for example, nobody in the right senses.
#
Ten years ago would have said, OK, you do a five hour conversation.
#
Absolutely. Do six hour conversations.
#
No one in the right senses would have said that.
#
Even the editorial people would have said no.
#
And I've asked people now that you raised this issue.
#
So I kind of and this compliment to you.
#
I have friends who are not related to the world of,
#
you know, they move to audio books even before it became a fad
#
because they are in corporate lifestyle.
#
They're traveling all the time.
#
I can understand. Earlier, I was very dismissive of them.
#
Now I realize that they had a point.
#
They were ahead of many of us.
#
So a friend of mine in Bombay said that, look, I heard your scene
#
It took me over two days in Bombay traffic and I was done with it.
#
I said, aren't you tired of it?
#
They said, oh, I don't mind if it was another hour or so.
#
So then you did five hours.
#
I know of some friends that, oh, I mean, this is in five hours.
#
Then I heard Jerry's seven hours or eight hours, as you pointed out just now.
#
So, yeah, why not? Let's
#
let's do this. And it's I haven't heard completely.
#
I know so many people who were listening to your podcast
#
over three days, over two days.
#
People, even those who are not driving, those who are taking metro.
#
I take metro once a week. I go to Jindal to teach.
#
It's like one hour, half hours, one way, three hours in metro.
#
I can easily finish a podcast.
#
Everyone has phone. Everyone has earphone.
#
It's finished. And people are constantly doing that.
#
You look around in metro.
#
You look at a scene cars.
#
Everyone is doing something or the other.
#
So, yes, nobody would have thought it's work.
#
There's a niche which existed and it's happened.
#
Nobody would have known the niche was there.
#
Yeah. And also, you know, the and of course, the reason it happens.
#
What plays into this is people have people listen at higher speeds
#
because our brain can comprehend 500 words a minute.
#
So it's very easy to just take the speed up one step at a time
#
till it normalizes each time.
#
And, you know, so people listen at higher speeds.
#
People are captive audiences when they're commuting or working out.
#
But the most important thing.
#
And this is, I think, what a lot of conventional thinkers about media
#
don't realize is that people crave depth.
#
You know, it is. Yes, there is this cliche that we are the generation
#
of the short attention span. I don't agree at all.
#
Some of the time we are.
#
Some of the time I and even you, I'm sure you'll be swiping and scrolling.
#
Yeah, we want to sit. Yeah, I want to sit.
#
And and I and the other thing I just want to say about, say, your book,
#
What will happen with your book is
#
I hope your book is a massive bestseller,
#
and I think it's possible to combine large numbers with deep engagement.
#
But even if you don't sell as much as the Chetan Bhagat book, for example,
#
he'll have more readers, but you will have deeper engagement.
#
The kind of the way that I felt myself engaging with your book
#
and responding emotionally to it and looking for other rabbit holes.
#
And, you know, that is, I think, incomparable.
#
And the other thing that also happens when you do work like yours
#
is that it is not just going to travel across space
#
ki duniya mein har jaga log kharidenge.
#
It is traveling across time.
#
Tees saal baad that book is there.
#
It is a record of a period of time of the way people thought,
#
It's fucking invaluable. Yeah, it is.
#
And that's how you know that.
#
So everyone and what I don't like, actually, is
#
along with the book comes the next sentence.
#
And this even from not always good editors and publishing house people,
#
they don't always do that.
#
Like my editor in Penguin or Westland.
#
No one has ever asked me what sells happened because they're
#
they're still committed to that whole idea of book having a deeper impact.
#
This will, you know, the expanding that conversation.
#
But a lot of people will ask you, how much is it doing?
#
It's like almost saying, you know, what is this car and what mileage does it give?
#
You know, that's a good every time someone says, look, what a car.
#
Have to ask the mileage immediately.
#
We will buy a car worth 50 lakhs.
#
And the first question will be, what is the mileage?
#
You kill it by saying this.
#
Actually, if you use a metaphor, the deep engagement, I think your car,
#
which you have now produced with this book and even the previous one,
#
as mileage of 1000 miles a kilometer.
#
Yeah. So this is I really don't understand people
#
immediately coming to sales figures.
#
You know, books have their own life.
#
I ended with Mervyn poem in the acknowledgement saying that,
#
well, this is so far I can take, you know, it's your life.
#
You go and see the world and blame me for whatever wrong happens.
#
But so we are kind of our engagement with books
#
while bookstores are doing well, books are selling more and more.
#
This too has happened that the conversations often end with how,
#
you know, whether it was a sales figure, what was that?
#
And it's mostly the non-publishing people who will tell you.
#
I haven't heard some died in the old publishing house, editors,
#
anyone talk of figures all the time.
#
Yes, figures come when, as you mentioned, when Chetan Bhagat name comes
#
because it's synonymous, his his popularity, his this thing is
#
one million sold within a month or this or a Mr.
#
Party. But other books have to find their place,
#
have to make their way in the people's mind.
#
And, you know, I travel even in US 73 universities
#
where I spoke on the book Berkeley, where I get taught Pennsylvania
#
And I realized that the kind of questions people can ask.
#
And there was this African-American student in Minnesota
#
who was very curious about our guest's life.
#
He had read the PDF and he came up with such serious questions
#
in the interaction I had.
#
And I was like, really, we went out for dinner later.
#
And I asked him, why does this man strike you?
#
Why? What does it do to you?
#
And then he said, look, I'm interested in interesting lives.
#
Here's a man who's done so much.
#
And he said, first, I read Wikipedia entry on him.
#
And then I started reading stuff.
#
I said, oh, this man is interesting enough to kind of read.
#
So I was very, very kind of pleased with this kind of response.
#
He's a man who's nothing to do with again.
#
He hangs around with a lot of these Asian students,
#
Indian students in Minnesota, that history department.
#
But that's it. He's been he's even been a US soldier.
#
And then he's come back and he's.
#
And that's interesting then, because I was a soldier.
#
So he says, oh, look at this man.
#
And I was I said, look, the book can move people away,
#
you know, in a different culture, in different contexts.
#
So it's their own way of kind of finding life for themselves.
#
Let's sort of move on to talking about, you know, your journey again
#
and something that you said a little earlier interested me,
#
where you said that once you move to Delhi, you know,
#
everything changed for you. It made you a different person.
#
So tell me, tell me a little bit about.
#
Well, Delhi is Delhi University.
#
I kind of just the freedom of for 18 year old.
#
First thing, you know, you know, not to you have no seven o'clock curfew,
#
which they are at my place.
#
You know, whatever you do, everything has to be done by seven.
#
So that first thing is your curfew goes.
#
And I remember becoming a member of many of these libraries,
#
American, US Library and Kasturba, Gandhi, Mark,
#
Max Muller, Bhavan Library, which is very good.
#
And you are this all these places
#
which are full of activities all the time.
#
University itself, the kind of people who will come,
#
people who I read about, I could see them.
#
You could go and kind of attend their talks, ask silly questions,
#
really make fool of oneself.
#
I have done that. And I'm like kind of I remember once
#
I was maybe in third year college
#
and I had a very good friend who was doing economics, very bright guy.
#
Very, very kind of exceptionally bright in economics.
#
So he said, hey, listen, Amartya Sen is talking in D school,
#
which is across the road.
#
I was in Kirori Mall hostel.
#
So we came and I said, hey, listen,
#
tell me some question which I can ask. I have no clue.
#
I don't know E of economics.
#
I had studied economics, my intermediate.
#
And he said, oh, ask him about game theory.
#
I said, what is game theory? I said, you do.
#
You he's not going to ask you.
#
And Amartya Sen is not a man who's going to ask you.
#
He's he'll take you seriously.
#
And you go there and you just kind of when the question
#
answer session starts, you ask them and you think you have been like
#
you're like an exceptionally bright guy who would ask some really smart question.
#
And everyone is looking at you.
#
What a stupid guy you are. Who are you, by the way?
#
We don't even see you, you know, economics guy.
#
And then I remember him answering, you know, through analogy of a football
#
field. And that's what I asked, because that's my friend told me.
#
It's not my own making, by the way.
#
He just completely tutored me the question.
#
He said, you ask him, how does the game theory work if I have to in a football field?
#
And I'm not to say to get very seriously thought it was a very smart question,
#
which everyone, all my friends who look at you since when are you interested in this?
#
It's actually an interesting question.
#
So this is my friend who did it, not me.
#
He tutored me this question.
#
And then he took it and spent some good 10 minutes explaining that.
#
And so then the tea break and after the talk ends and all
#
a lot of people asking, you know, everyone knows everyone in Delhi,
#
do you campus in all these colleges?
#
I said, why you into how since when are you interested in Niko?
#
I said, well, I just asked, said, OK.
#
So similarly, you could meet writers, poets, painters.
#
All kinds of things are happening.
#
And kind of as I write also in the introduction,
#
I got introduced to many.
#
I had heard of Mukti Bode.
#
I had not read Mukti Bode in Raji to be honest.
#
I started reading Mukti Bode.
#
And I remember in my hostel, Hindu, Hindi, one of Hindi honours student.
#
He said, you read Mukti Bode.
#
Again, it's too complicated.
#
He looked at both like the dark alleys of the heart.
#
He is a poet of the dark alleys of the heart.
#
You'd read him and it's completely and then you find
#
he's the SFI, the entire left student movement or student organisation
#
of the parties that he is the poet for that Mukti Bode.
#
And I started reading Ragbir Sahay, for instance.
#
I became like Ragbir Sahay.
#
I was a big fan of Ragbir Sahay and many other Hindi poets.
#
Of course, Naga Junwan had read Naga Junwan.
#
Do you have any favourite poems from then that you remember?
#
From whom? Any of them?
#
Like anything that you really love that moved you?
#
There is this, I just was reading.
#
I'm bad with remembering that, you know, there's this Sarveshwar Dal Saxena poem.
#
And of course, this is Laar Chand Ka Moo Teda Hai,
#
which is a long, long poem of Mukti Bode,
#
which, I mean, of course, I never kind of memorised it by.
#
But yeah, that's like one poem I keep going back to.
#
And Ragbir Sahay is probably the poet
#
who brings out this whole distortions of Indian democracy the best.
#
Imagine Naga Junwan in 60s.
#
Thackeray is just coming up.
#
I remember a few lines from them, from that poem.
#
And I really wonder if in this day and age
#
he had written a poem on the present dispensation, something as biting.
#
I don't know how he even skipped Thackeray's Nohru.
#
Those were the heydays of Thackeray.
#
His Thackeray is coming up in Bombay, in Maharashtra.
#
My God, then this poem is on Indira Gandhi.
#
Basically, it's stop pretending that you're interested in election and all that emergency.
#
So even against one of his poems on emergency,
#
it got translated in the book.
#
It's there. It's called
#
You know, there's a poem.
#
So to Delhi, in a way, so you had this all these things happening all the time.
#
And some of them alive, you know, again was gone for a game.
#
He died in eighty seven.
#
And I heard of him in which I mentioned in a great detail about Kumar Gandharva
#
and spending I used to hang out a lot there.
#
And he's saying about again, I didn't know that year before he had.
#
He told us that he had went and on his 75th birth anniversary in Delhi.
#
So I hung around a lot and ended up
#
even when I became journalist, my first early years where
#
where I was writing a lot on painters, poets, musicians, writers, a lot.
#
So I kind of I would have interviewed everyone that you can think of that generation
#
from Hussain Saab to everyone, you know, Francis Newton Sousa.
#
So I had a great Manjeet Baba, Nirmal Verma, everyone.
#
So that kind of, in a way, set me in a lot of ways.
#
And every time you talk to them,
#
saying, you know, there's this whole M.F.
#
Hussain's image of a flamboyant and what struck about me, about him is
#
his reading. You know, I remember once I had gone to probably the last time
#
I interviewed him and that a biography of Frida Kahlo had come by
#
by this writer, Hedin Harera, which later on became a Hollywood movie,
#
And so I generally he will ask, what are you reading?
#
And I'll ask, what are you reading?
#
He said, I'm reading something.
#
I said, you know, I'm reading Frida Kahlo biography.
#
He said, oh, where did you get this from?
#
So fact and fiction used to be in Basant Bihar market.
#
I said, I got it from there.
#
He says, oh, oh, I'm traveling, but I need to get this book.
#
And 15, 20 days later, just he was back and I met him in one of these exhibitions.
#
He said, I got the book and I've read it.
#
That's how someone should write a biography.
#
And so it's been my kind of I've been trying, but it will not work out
#
for whatever be the reason. His own his biography, someone
#
he's a he's a biography waiting to be written.
#
Such sayings of the man.
#
He had so many other things about him.
#
Why didn't it work out?
#
Well, you know, there's a whole state of M.F.
#
Hussain, which is not like the family has, you know.
#
So I don't want to get into this, but it's very complicated.
#
I do know friends in the art world in Bombay.
#
Many people are approached.
#
Everyone says it's difficult.
#
Leave it. You can't do it because it will never come to you
#
because everyone has a piece of M.F.
#
Hussain and how do you get the whole you won't get a complete picture.
#
And he was he didn't keep his, I think, papers.
#
He kept them, but I don't know, he kept them all over the place.
#
And some of his very close friends in Delhi, whom he like,
#
they grew up because of Hussain's patronage.
#
They have all become they want to hold on to it.
#
Everyone is looking at the market.
#
So it's very difficult.
#
So it's like one big biography, which I doubt will ever get written.
#
I want to ask you about how our tastes evolve, because when I look back,
#
like you mentioned, who are the poets that really drew you
#
and struck you at a personal level and why someone
#
recommended a particular poet to you?
#
And I look back on my youth and I think of my taste in two ways.
#
And one is that when you're young, you're full of angst and rebellion
#
and you're thinking in different ways and you're interested in sex and violence
#
and you get drawn to a particular kind of literature and whatever.
#
And 30 years later, you might read the same thing and say,
#
what is this? And at the same time,
#
there is something at the core of you which doesn't change.
#
And there is something that spoke to you then,
#
which still speaks to you the same way and makes you, you know,
#
if it made you cry, then it makes you cry now.
#
So tell me a little bit about the evolution of your tastes
#
in terms of what you were reading and how you were looking at it,
#
because it's really interesting because your book is not just a biography of Ageya.
#
It's also a chronicle of how Hindi literature itself is evolving
#
and the values and the aesthetics within that.
#
So in terms of what you like, is it, you know, what is that evolution like?
#
What is something which is at the core of you and will always move you?
#
And what is something which, you know, you feel that you move past it?
#
See, this in one line, all these interactions with poets,
#
One thing it did was that it for some reason,
#
and I don't know when it happened, but when then there was a stage
#
when I kind of I called myself a poetry junkie.
#
Now I survive on poetry.
#
I only read mostly read poetry.
#
There's I see a new poet and I become restless.
#
My sipapa was like sensational.
#
Olya Kaminsky and everyone, the old one, new cultures, new places.
#
Anyone goes to a new city, new country.
#
I said, just get me a local and some poet from that country, that city, if you can.
#
But poetry, everything, this entire test, for some reason, has kind of become
#
taking this whole poet path of poetry where I read and I think of all forms.
#
I other day, I was telling someone, you know, only the fiction writers and poets.
#
I don't believe in God, but I do believe that these two are the only ones
#
touched by God. Non-fiction writers, nobody gives a shit.
#
You know, loads of, you know, archival paper.
#
You sit down like a donkey and write. No big deal.
#
You're going very hard on yourself.
#
No, I'm telling you, you just look at these poets.
#
My God, you cry when you look at them.
#
You keep going back to them and you say, my God, this happened to me.
#
You know, you can marry Oliver.
#
You know, this Nazim Hikmet, the other day, Nazar Kabani.
#
Well, it's a whole range of Farooq Farooqzad in Iran.
#
These are poets like this whole life.
#
The whole essence of life is there in poetry.
#
Nothing moves. For me, it works.
#
So I keep it very near me.
#
Even when I'm writing, I just I'll it's like literally at my like this distance.
#
I just pick it up and I'll read whatever.
#
I'm only listen to poetry podcasts.
#
It's like it's a point of near obsessions become a OCD kind of thing on poetry.
#
So all this has become I used to be very interested in art.
#
I continue to be interested in art.
#
But I realized that I did commit a mistake, which I tell a lot of people not to do is
#
I started hobnobbing with them a lot.
#
These artists and somehow many of these artists, I became kind of
#
I the great artists, nevertheless.
#
But when I saw their side of them
#
and I know it's a wrong way to look at art and the artists don't mix them.
#
So but yeah, I do keep in touch with some of my artist friends.
#
But I like the earlier generation much more.
#
They were still so casual about things.
#
They were still they were irreverent, even when they were in the 70s and 80s.
#
Suza had seen the whole world.
#
Suza didn't care about money.
#
Suza didn't know what was happening or someone like Gaitonde
#
who started living in Delhi in Noida.
#
Or even Krishna Khanna, you know, this.
#
So some of these people I interacted a lot with.
#
But mostly now I keep to myself, I keep myself to poetry and this own work.
#
So my entire sensibilities have kind of taken this whole thing about me.
#
You know, it's everything I look for, I look in poetry.
#
You find always, you know, it keeps you, it nurses you.
#
It kind of whenever I'm I'm going through any crisis,
#
the poetry which heals me, nothing else.
#
I I just I'm one or two out of Britain,
#
which I read out to my wife or daughter and they'll say, yeah, it's fine.
#
But I know they're just trying to humor me.
#
It's not it's not even worth showing anyone the third person.
#
These two people can be a captive audience.
#
So, yeah, I saw you pause for a fraction of a second before answering.
#
And you shook your head and said, no, very vehemently.
#
And I said, OK, he does.
#
But it's like me, koi aur kabhi dekhega nahi.
#
You know, as you're coming up, what is in your sort of conception of yourself?
#
Like in college, if I remember from our last conversation,
#
you started history, right? Yeah, I started.
#
And then you became a journalist and all of that.
#
Yeah. How is your conception of yourself evolving during this time?
#
Like as young people do, do you have any grandiose aims ki yeh karenge,
#
wo karenge, yeh kitab likhenge?
#
Are you just going with the flow?
#
See, things happen. First book.
#
Yeah, I had I was really, you know, as Tony said, famously,
#
I started thinking because I was really getting end of death with journalism,
#
not because I don't love journalism.
#
I was doing fairly well as a journalist.
#
But the way it's like, you know, when you're working on the biggest paper
#
in the country, things do happen, as stories come to you.
#
You know, I remember I was in times of 17 years, my last job.
#
And everyone knows, oh, he writes on education.
#
This was covering X, Y, Z political parties.
#
Some leader will call, oh, this is happening, that is happening.
#
Everyone wants it to be in times of India.
#
Life had become very easy.
#
And but it was going nowhere.
#
And then, you know, 40s.
#
So as Tony's famously said, you know, when
#
someone asked, why do you start writing history,
#
new archives, new language at the age of 50s and midlife crisis?
#
Because he said I was already into my third marriage.
#
So fourth marriage was not an option.
#
You know, I can't have a new car.
#
This doesn't kind of give me any cake.
#
This is he went to archive, started learning Czech language,
#
completely changed the history of Europe, Europe.
#
So I was kind of it was a mix of my complete kind of
#
I was bored with journalism and midlife crisis put together.
#
I have to do something different enough.
#
I've been reading a lot.
#
And everyone will say, oh, you read so much, you should write.
#
And then I got into this slowly, this guitar press, and it worked.
#
So that gave me that kind of, you know,
#
it made me greedy in the sense, OK,
#
So I and my wife said, OK, you whine too much.
#
So just quit if you want.
#
I want to because because we will go to office together.
#
She's also a journalist till till recently.
#
Our offices were next to each other.
#
And she'll say, oh, God, I can't take your whining.
#
This one and a half hour each way you whine.
#
So you quit and do whatever you want to do.
#
Said so that's again happened again.
#
As I mentioned, I was to work on another book on Hindu nationalism.
#
I had done 20 percent, 15 percent work, which kind of now stands abandoned.
#
I don't know whether I'll ever get into it.
#
I've been telling other friends to do it.
#
And then again, just happened.
#
And then five years went.
#
I JP was actually JP was somewhere in my head.
#
I had to work by one morning.
#
I remember getting called from Ramgoha saying that, listen, I'm your bilingual.
#
Right. So, you know, so you can deal with this better JP.
#
I said, well, I've been thinking, but I'll do it.
#
And he and Gopal Gandhi said, OK.
#
And then I got into it and I realized that, well, I should have got into it earlier
#
because I was somehow it's wrong.
#
I somehow had this in my head that there are too many biographies of JP.
#
One came recently, which Sujata did with a father
#
who's a close associate of JP and distant and relative also.
#
So then a lot of people said, oh, now this new biography has come.
#
I said, well, Gandhi has hundreds of biographies.
#
So there can be another biography of JP.
#
He can easily have a dozen biographies, you know.
#
Next book, I haven't thought there's some vague idea in my head somewhere,
#
which I and Ajita discussed at some point.
#
I don't know whether I'll be able to do it.
#
But yeah, I would like that to be.
#
And I want to kind of get out of the archives now.
#
I have kind of three book archive heavy is like kind of getting into me.
#
Although, as Ajita said, I know you'll get into the archives again
#
because you'll try and do this.
#
So this is a slightly different book, but it's too early to talk about.
#
There's no point talking about something.
#
I have not even started writing JP and talk about book, which will be after that.
#
It's like who knows what happens, you know.
#
So you mentioned archives and I'm just wondering that, you know, future world
#
does everything in every archives get digitized and get online
#
and then can be told through industry instantly,
#
maybe by GPT 18 or whatever the GPT then is.
#
And and in a sense, biographers then have it so easy
#
that you're not bound by scarcities of access and time and all of those things.
#
And so, you know, you're like our episode on the Geeta Press
#
was very momentous for me because it played a part in my realizing
#
and I think many other people realizing as we heard the episode and read the book
#
that that in my particular case that I had been in an elite
#
English speaking urban bubble all my life.
#
And I never really realized what the real India is like
#
because you grow up in the cities and I think like we discussed last time,
#
I was, you know, you were reading in all the languages
#
and you had a wider exposure.
#
You were reading in Hindi also, but I was reading only in English.
#
I'm in a city. I'm in this elite cocoon bubble.
#
And I think, OK, this is what India is like.
#
You are broadly secular, broadly tolerant.
#
This is what it is like.
#
And your book opened my eyes to something that till that point,
#
I hadn't realized, which I feel foolish saying, because it just feels so obvious.
#
It's like the air around us that India has been
#
just a completely different phase that what we see in our politics today
#
is really, you know, politics catching up with society.
#
But our society always had these problems.
#
Your book is such great, you know, descriptions of how
#
what appear to be political problems of today,
#
which have been amplified recently by this regime, like, you know,
#
cow slaughter, like love jihad and so on and so forth,
#
were live political issues in the 1920s.
#
Right. So it was an eye opener for me.
#
And as you are responsible, partly responsible for that awakening,
#
I also want to ask you again after these years have passed since we last recorded
#
that what do you think of what is really happening in our society?
#
Because one way to look at that grand narrative is to say that
#
our society was always like this.
#
And now our politics is like this.
#
And from that point of view, it almost seems
#
ordained that asahi hoga that we were always going to get here.
#
But another way of thinking about it is that the nation does contain multitudes.
#
You know, JP Narayan, the younger one, not the one you're writing a biography on,
#
did an episode with me where he reminded me that as much as we are illiberal,
#
we are also liberal in the sense you look at our cuisine, our clothes, our language.
#
It's just a delightful hodgepodge of everything we've taken from everywhere.
#
And then that leads me to the more optimistic thought that what we see today
#
in both our politics and our society is the amplification
#
of an ugly part of our society, perhaps.
#
But there are better angels of our nature which can be appealed to.
#
And, you know, so I just want to ask that as a citizen
#
and someone who has studied all of this deeply, what is your sense?
#
Because sometimes I feel hopeless.
#
Sometimes I'm like, why even engage?
#
Yeah, I do get hopeless at times, but also, you know, by nature,
#
I'm an incorrigible optimist.
#
And lately, I've been kind of a friend of mine
#
who's kind of had this theory and I kind of come to agree with her on this
#
that a lot of what is happening also that education
#
bypassed a large section of the population.
#
And much as we hate this digital age and this new age,
#
it's kind of put everyone at the same, you know,
#
that it has empowered them.
#
So their education is coming from WhatsApp.
#
Their education is coming from, you know, these kind of various
#
new modes of education, which are easily available as a click away.
#
And they think, OK, here is my chance to kind of abuse
#
someone who was completely invisible to me.
#
Otherwise, on social media, I can go and abuse this person,
#
that person, this politician, that politician.
#
So the education completely back.
#
So what we are seeing now is like kind of every day is worse than the previous day.
#
That seems to be kind of, I don't know, any lighter than the tunnel now.
#
But somehow we have also been very resilient.
#
We also see things happening, you know, when you go for book.
#
I have been traveling a lot for the last three months,
#
and I have taken very small towns, Patna or
#
Ratchi or Jaipur and other places.
#
And I have been kind of interacting with some of these young people.
#
And then you're full of then I'm kind of I don't want to lose hope.
#
They do realize that things are happening, which is not good.
#
They do realize that some friendships are going, you know, haywire
#
or friendships are broken because someone belongs to a certain community.
#
These things people have started questioning.
#
I don't know whether when it will become like
#
a kind of a mass thinking, what we see in Israel happening right now,
#
the entire country, including their diplomatic staff, is opposed to what is
#
happening, unbelievable, whether that kind of thing will happen.
#
Will people will say that talking about killing about of someone is
#
per se is period bad. We are not party to this.
#
I don't know whether that will happen so easily in this country,
#
because we are so full of hate right now.
#
We are so full of anger.
#
We rarely have you seen in history someone in so much
#
brute majority in power, in parliament, all levers of power and yet so angry.
#
What makes a person in power so angry?
#
Why should you be angry? Isn't your job to work?
#
What makes someone who is in absolute control so insecure?
#
So these are the questions, but I still feel we will emerge out of it.
#
You know, while working on JP's biography, I've been seeing some of these
#
old archival stuff during emergency, some of the emergency papers,
#
which are in Chicago University, Regenstein Library.
#
I've been kind of going through the microfilm and you find some of these
#
stories are so brutal, they're so sad.
#
And I've been thinking, you know, sitting in this archive all by yourself,
#
we're going through the machines, microfilm machines.
#
And then you said, look, people came out of it, right?
#
We've been like out of it almost now, 50 years, you know.
#
So things will happen, things will.
#
Also, this is a very new kind of thing.
#
Emergency brutality was not community killing each other.
#
You know, that was not happening.
#
That was that fabric of the society was not under threat.
#
What is happening now is very, very different.
#
Where everyone is kind of a certain section of the society is being
#
constantly being pushed.
#
I mean, there's a very dominant and obvious anti-Muslim strand
#
which is getting worse and anti-Muslim.
#
And whatever they might say, whatever they might try and pretend.
#
At the end of the single line story is I'll create
#
anti-Muslim narrative and I'll get votes.
#
All those things, mumbo jumbo, people talk, you know, this happened,
#
that yada yada yada, all those things, nothing.
#
You basically you are attacking your single point.
#
And that and Hindus will rally around me because I've created this other.
#
So that kind of ends working.
#
You know, come to think from BJP's point of view, from their point of view,
#
it's like working. Why not?
#
You know, a couple of thoughts.
#
And what is that as far as, you know, coming out of the emergency was concerned,
#
I think, you know, once something happens in the benefit of hindsight,
#
we take it for granted that this is what had to happen.
#
But I think we're also lucky that she was delusional enough
#
to think that she would actually win and therefore she called it off.
#
Sanjay Gandhi wanted a dictatorship for life, so we were kind of lucky there.
#
And I'm also thinking of your point on education,
#
which is a point many people make.
#
But I think education, as it is currently defined as, you know,
#
is not necessarily a countervailing force against a bigotry because.
#
Some of my some of the most communal friends that I have
#
went to the fanciest universities and institutions.
#
You know, these are the people who know some of this,
#
my IT and friends, friends who went to this fancy
#
IMs and all, they know what they're talking about.
#
They're being deliberately there.
#
These people, they don't even have that option.
#
OK, so they think, oh, suddenly on phone, on on Twitter, on my phone,
#
I can abuse Narendra Modi or I can abuse Rahul Gandhi.
#
So look at the amount of power it has given.
#
So while it's not a very convincing argument, I agree.
#
But point is that this has empowered a section of the society
#
which derives great pleasure abusing the educated,
#
the so-called elite, which the concept itself has undergone change.
#
What was earlier the Lutyens elite has been replaced by a new set of Lutyens elite.
#
You know, we see weddings happening with those journalists, their children
#
and prime minister going, which was happening in the earlier Congress regime.
#
So one elite changes another elite.
#
That's what has happened.
#
But this anger, this hatred, and I have this patent question.
#
I keep asking a lot of my friends, those who went to fancy institutions
#
and have a fat salary, I said, give me one instance
#
where a Muslim took away your seat in school, college, ran away
#
with your girl trade or with a job.
#
Where is this anger coming from and where was it all all this while?
#
You know, nobody has an answer.
#
He says, oh, you have no idea.
#
And it's something which is like kind of hackneyed.
#
This Muslim demography, for instance, we have been hearing since the fifties
#
that Muslims will overtake, which is blatant fucking misinformation.
#
Blatant does not happen.
#
It will never happen. It will never happen.
#
But why are these people?
#
One section gets carried away.
#
I can understand why people who had the, you know, our kind of background,
#
why are they taken by this?
#
What is your candid answer to the rhetorical question you ask them?
#
Where is this anger coming from?
#
Because I am befuddled about that, because it is easy to say, you know,
#
all all these, what they say, they'll talk about demographics.
#
They'll talk about who or who or they'll even talk about partition
#
and what we went through.
#
And I think all that is BS.
#
You know, all that is BS that there's something deeper.
#
But I don't understand what is that deeper and why is it there?
#
You know, why is it necessary for so many people to create another
#
What is your candid answer for that?
#
I don't know, frankly, see, it's a it's a.
#
It's a mix of many factors, if you
#
and, you know, we come to we have started noticing it now
#
in the last 10 years or so, or maybe earlier or after,
#
you know, after the mandal when this rath yatra happened.
#
But come to think of it, I think I said this in my early episode
#
when we had is that even in the 52 election, 51, 52 election,
#
which is three years after Gandhi's assassination.
#
You know, I've been looking through Hindu Mahasabha
#
file because I had to write one piece for wire.
#
Siddharth had asked me to write on how did they do it in the first general election.
#
Every day are not there's no remorse to begin with.
#
OK, Savarkar is out of jail by 51.
#
Savarkar is out of jail and he's the star campaign, as we call it now.
#
Every second candidate of Hindu Mahasabha wants him to campaign for him.
#
And he and they devise some way
#
what we'll call crowdfunding now that, oh, you have to print so many posters
#
and sell it for two rupees and these things for Savarkar.
#
So that, you know, that funds is which all parties are doing,
#
which funds is travel and all.
#
So we have been there is a section we were maybe living in bubble.
#
As you said, you were living in bubble in a big city.
#
I was growing up in a small town, but again, with the same thing that,
#
oh, I have an ex-doggo neighbor and a Garhwali neighbor.
#
And I have my Muslim friends and I'm going to their houses.
#
They're coming to my house.
#
And the world is like this.
#
They were deep in it, which no one saw.
#
Why in 52, for instance?
#
And if you look at the subsequent elections, they're only gaining strength. Right.
#
So had they been not part of Gandhi assassination,
#
maybe they would have done much better in the very first election,
#
definitely in the second general election.
#
It's a Gandhi assassination which kept them out of power for some time.
#
By mid 60s, they're back there in the game.
#
They're very much in the game.
#
And the 70s, we know, left, right.
#
Everyone comes together to take on Indira Gandhi.
#
When we say they, you know,
#
is that a sort of a monolithic sort of statement?
#
I mean, the statement seems to imply that they are one monolithic thing.
#
Whereas the Mahasabha and the RSS are quite different,
#
that there is a Hindu right wing within the Congress Party.
#
Yes, yes. I'll explain that.
#
Congress always had this problem.
#
Look, even now in Congress, even now, I know some of these leaders
#
who privately are not very happy every time Rahul Gandhi attacks RSS.
#
What do we have to do? This is a wrong strategy.
#
So Congress, there is a legacy thing within Congress.
#
In good old days, you had from Rajendra Prasad
#
to Seth Govindas, to Tandon, to Jeevi Panth, everyone.
#
They were part of the they were of right wing persuasion within Congress.
#
It never changed. And they all, if you if you look at the handling of,
#
for instance, I'll give you an instance, Nehru writes, Nehru comes to know
#
in 51, just when the elections are in the thick of election or
#
I think 51, he writes to Sastry is his points person for Uttar Pradesh.
#
Sastry is Home Minister, Panth is Chief Minister.
#
Panth is Chief Minister and he really trusts Lal Bahadur Sastry.
#
And actually, their relationship needs to be written about Nehru and Sastry.
#
So he says, you know, overnight in Fayazabad,
#
Muslim Hotel overnight, board changes and it becomes a Hindu Hotel.
#
Right. So Nehru writes to Panth Singh, what is happening?
#
I want to be to change in no time.
#
Do it in a day's time. Restore it to the original owner.
#
So, you know, when you said they, I'm trying to explain they.
#
So they're hydro headed and it works for them.
#
It has always worked for them.
#
That phase of the early first 20 years, you see, Hindu Mahasabha is very active.
#
Then slowly Hindu Mahasabha takes a back seat.
#
It remains very much there, working on ground in Adivasi areas
#
and other, you know, bit Banwasi and RSS through its various outfits.
#
And there is Jansang, the political face of all these organisations.
#
And within Congress, people who look the other way.
#
And much of what happened in Ayodhya, if you come to think of it,
#
If that after the installation in 49,
#
if actions were taken, if action was taken, things would have been very different.
#
In fact, Nehru specifically asked both Panth and Lal Bahadur Shastri,
#
who was in the Home Minister in the UB government, to remove the idol.
#
And things would have gone this far.
#
Congress always is always playing with this.
#
And then Sabano, you ended up with Sabano.
#
And then after that, how do you justify your Sabano thing?
#
So Congress always had this.
#
The larger right wing thing, of course, these and
#
the right wing parties walked away with everything.
#
And they did it block by block, you know, brick by brick.
#
And we came to we woke up suddenly, I think, around Rath Yatra time.
#
Then we said, oh, these guys are never coming to power.
#
2004, they lost with our own.
#
It will never happen where we are now.
#
Yeah. And there are two simultaneous trends which make me a little less hopeful.
#
And one of them is mixed.
#
And one of them is that this train was always there in even our politics.
#
Like Nehru was a bit of an outlier within his party in his secularism.
#
If you look at all your tall leaders of that time, whether it's Rajendra Prasad,
#
whether it's Patel, whether it's Panth, who is CM of UP and
#
Lal Bahadur Shastri is Home Minister of UP or and you look at that era of people,
#
it's it's really, you know, a much more conservative leadership.
#
But having said that, I also find that that conservative leadership is much more
#
honorable and less radical than those in the other parties who came after them.
#
Like Lal Bahadur Shastri, I remember famously when he was Prime Minister or
#
just before said that, you know, my religion is a personal thing.
#
It doesn't matter what it is.
#
It doesn't come into office with me, even though he was a deeply devout man.
#
So it's interesting to look at counterfactuals and think about what would
#
have happened had that sort of conservative strain.
#
But relatively, if those guys are taken over.
#
The other thing that I think about is,
#
you know, you referred to sort of modern times.
#
And one thing that worries me about modern times is that and it's both a good
#
thing and a bad thing, but I'll talk about the bad aspect of it.
#
And the thing is, there is no consensus on the truth anymore.
#
Earlier in the 90s till the 90s, there would be a broad consensus on the truth.
#
Maybe the Hindu would lean slightly one way,
#
TOI would lean slightly the other way.
#
But you had a broad sense that these are the basics.
#
Today, that has broken down.
#
The mainstream has dissipated and you have narrative battles.
#
And what technology does to these narrative battles worries me a lot.
#
I imagine sometimes that if I'm 15 years old, I'm 15 years old in some small town
#
somewhere, my friend sends me a WhatsApp video or a link to a YouTube video.
#
It is some random, radical nonsense.
#
Right. And then the algorithm takes over.
#
And everything else I get on YouTube is related to that.
#
And soon I am in that universe and I don't know any other reality.
#
Any contrary view that comes in front of me, I am thinking, what a moron.
#
That idiot doesn't know what he's talking about.
#
When my whole world is this, this is what has happened.
#
And I've literally experienced it personally because I once, you know,
#
I wanted to sort of get into a rabbit hole of what the right wing is,
#
like the really rabid right wing, the guys who say even Modi is failing them,
#
even Shah is failing them, you know, Maulana Modi.
#
Yeah. And so I didn't want to mess up my YouTube algorithm.
#
So many incognito window may I open another Gmail account or YouTube make here.
#
And today, my two YouTubes are different worlds.
#
There is not one thing common between them.
#
Yeah, this actually you explaining it better what I was saying earlier.
#
This education by even, for instance, like in small town, if you were
#
and this some friend would have sent a logarithm that you're talking about.
#
And that's what has happened to a large section.
#
They're refusing to talk.
#
They say everything that's written in a book is a lie.
#
You know, what Romila Thapar writes is a lie.
#
What Ramgur writes is a lie.
#
Arundhati Roy writes is a lie.
#
You know, then I don't mind having a right right wing point of view.
#
As long as it's you engaging with each other.
#
The problem is that you don't want to lift a book and you already made a
#
you have a view on that book. Right.
#
You know, somebody sending a video,
#
they look at this, what do you have to say to this?
#
You know, so and what is particularly tragic is that, you know,
#
there will always be a large section of people who don't read, who are not
#
interested in the intellectual life, and I'm OK with that.
#
And if those people feel this way or they are dismissive of, you know,
#
all the knowledge and literature out there, I can understand that.
#
But what makes me really sad is that even our intellectual discourse has become
#
this, where from both left and right, we just don't want to talk
#
to each other. The other person is not just wrong, they're evil.
#
Yeah, this that that conversation stopped many years
#
that conversation. And now it's of course, there's no no conversation happens.
#
And we are too, you know, busy branding each other.
#
And that helps, you know, brand me something.
#
And then both of us are happy in our own world.
#
yeah, conversation has stopped.
#
And that's where the problem is.
#
So let's let's on this really depressing note.
#
I think we should feed ourselves a little bit.
#
Let's take a quick commercial break.
#
And then on the other side, we'll talk about again.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog
#
India Uncut, which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at
#
the time. I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many
#
ways. I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many
#
different things because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons.
#
And now it is time to revive it.
#
Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter
#
at indiancut.substack.com where I will write regularly about whatever catches my
#
fancy. I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email
#
inbox. You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
#
Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Akshay Mukul on his wonderful book on Agya.
#
And before we start talking about the book itself and Agya itself,
#
tell me a little bit more about how you arrived at doing the book.
#
You've spoken in your chapter and we briefly mentioned about how his writing
#
made a deep impact on you.
#
But it was almost in a sense that, you know, it's almost a revisitation
#
that happens many years later.
#
And then you speak about how in 2015 you are at a party at a friend's place,
#
I think Vasudha Dalmia, and she suggests that karo.
#
So take me a bit through that process of, you know, figuring out ki yahi karna hai,
#
You know, there are times when we say a coin dropped, you know.
#
I call myself biography junkie.
#
And I've always wondered why there are no more biographies, not more biographies
#
And again, always because, you know,
#
those who love, there's a world is, at least the Hindi world is divided
#
right down the middle and those who love him, those who hate him.
#
And of all the writers of his generation, he led a very fascinating life,
#
not to say that others didn't or their literary kind of thing was any less than
#
Agar or anything, no, but in terms of life.
#
And I remember just kind of and I had written one long piece on him and three,
#
two other poets who were born in same year, 1911.
#
So on the centenary year in times of India,
#
I had the weekend paper crest and written on him,
#
Nemi Chand, sorry, Naga Arjun and Samseer Bahadur Singh,
#
three poets who were born in 1911.
#
And then at that time, I realized that, OK,
#
I was talking to a lot of people who knew again and all that.
#
I realized at some stage.
#
And then I asked Basuda because Basuda's
#
elder sister was Agar's partner, Ila Dalmia.
#
And I said, why there is no biography of, why don't you?
#
And she had done one very long seminar on Agar in Berkeley,
#
where she was teaching in 2011, which had come out as a book called Rethinking Agar.
#
So she said, why don't you do it?
#
So I said, well, I was kind of OK.
#
I said, how do I do it?
#
You know, I don't want to do talking to people, this, that.
#
I said, OK, there is papers.
#
And it so happened when things have to happen.
#
So we were having actually we're not in party.
#
We were having coffee in Indian International Center.
#
And I said, you really want to do it?
#
I coin drop. I said, I don't mind.
#
And then she called someone and said, look, he's the guy and he wants to do.
#
And the person knew me and they said, OK,
#
if he wants to do it, we'll give him access.
#
And things started working.
#
It took some time to get possession of papers.
#
But by I think early 2017, I had the papers early.
#
I think by Feb and I had all the papers and
#
and I thought papers will kind of help me in terms of.
#
So even though it's an exhaustive paper,
#
there were still loopholes, gaps, the papers, which it didn't address.
#
And then that took me to archives more, some bit in US,
#
a lot of it in other archives in Delhi and other places in India.
#
And so that's how it came about.
#
And then I realized that the story is far more complicated.
#
And there's far more than what people make it out to be.
#
So that's how it happened.
#
And I kind of took away my five years.
#
So, yeah, that's how I call it.
#
Like every book undergrad program now.
#
So it takes me four to five years, you know,
#
one year dropped, almost like one year goes in procrastinating.
#
And I'm because I'm an outsider and I've, you know, I don't know this.
#
I'll ask like a very basic question of what is the kind of research material
#
that you look at, because his papers, I'm guessing, would include his own writings.
#
You've pointed out his diary entries, maybe drafts of things he's written.
#
And they would include letters from people to him.
#
Like Kripaseyan's letters to him are all there.
#
But there's only one letter from him to her, which you managed to find.
#
And equally, there are so many great men in his life.
#
Banarasi Das Chaturvedi, Janendra Kumar, you know, Mukti Bho, Dharmavir Bharti.
#
And I would imagine that you will find letters from them to him, perhaps.
#
But to get the letters from him to them or to get a sense of what they thought
#
of the interactions, you've got to go into their papers.
#
So it's actually not about one biography.
#
Absolutely. And this is always this I'm encountering while working on JP.
#
There's always this tension.
#
There's always this kind of a problem.
#
There are two ways of dealing with.
#
And what was happening with that generation
#
of people is they were destroying letters.
#
For instance, Agya was great friends with Premchand's son Sripath Rai,
#
who was his publisher and very close friends.
#
A day or two after Agya died, there is an account by Hindi writer Naseera Sharma.
#
She goes to meet Sripath Rai and she finds his burning papers.
#
What are you doing? I'm burning letters.
#
He's no longer there. What to do with it?
#
And Sara Rai, who had just written an absolutely brilliant,
#
brilliant account of family, she's been on my episode.
#
It's like it's like completely blew me.
#
So I was asked, Sara, he said, you know, he just came with a jola to Allahabad
#
and he was suffering from depression.
#
But what saves you in case of many people, for instance, Agya,
#
he made draft of so they were using typewriters a lot.
#
So one way is that there is always a used
#
carbon and you had the copy of that later.
#
Second way of looking at it,
#
which I do and I have kind of asked many people, Patrick is no more.
#
And he told me this is how he works and it helps.
#
You will find invariably that if you look at the exchange,
#
suppose you don't have one side of the story, like Chaturvedi writing to Agya,
#
Agya's letters to Chaturvedi not there,
#
although I accessed Chaturvedi's letters in national archives,
#
you'll find the first para always goes in invariably.
#
Oh, you asked me this, but this is I don't agree.
#
So you get some idea of what the conversation is all about.
#
So that's how it worked.
#
In case of Agya, he kept papers.
#
And in many cases, you just kind of, for instance,
#
that later we talked about when he says I want to commit suicide.
#
I kept looking for what did Rekha Jain said to him.
#
And Ashok Bajpe is Rekha's son-in-law.
#
And I tried looking for, I couldn't find even in Nemichand Jain
#
exhaustive papers in Tinmurti, they reply.
#
But then at times you think, OK, this is good enough,
#
because you know, he's going through the depression.
#
He just lost his father.
#
There's a bad affair, one affair gone completely bad.
#
You know, it's just over with Kripa Saint.
#
So you still get the larger context.
#
But yeah, it's a struggle.
#
It's a struggle because
#
because if you try to be as truthful and objective and try to base
#
yourself only on archives, this becomes a bit of an effort, which I faced.
#
So but yeah, I managed because they're still at paper.
#
Again, with JP also, I realized I can see that many copies have been made.
#
I'm looking at back and forth letters, even if I don't get
#
like Nehru's letters to him, Nehru invariably first para goes in saying,
#
you wrote your letter on this date and you said this and this is my view.
#
And I don't agree. And this is what has become of you.
#
So they're constantly arguing,
#
but you get a larger sense of what was happening.
#
Let me ask you a tangential question
#
that letter writing was something that people did that they no longer do.
#
Like the way that we communicate is we'll
#
communicate in WhatsApp messages or e-mails or whatever.
#
And this has two consequences.
#
And one consequence for a historian is that there is really no record
#
of deep conversations and what is happening.
#
You've just got splinters of thought and the other
#
consequences for the person themselves that, you know, when we write,
#
when I write along, if I write a long letter to you,
#
there are two things that are happening.
#
One is because I am sitting down with pen and paper and making a considered effort
#
to write something for you. I am thinking it out deeply.
#
I'm thinking about stuff I would otherwise not have thought about deeply.
#
And the second thing that is happening is that when you receive a handwritten
#
letter from me, which is four pages, you have that sense that this person has
#
thought about me, that I am important for this person.
#
And you are someone who I'm sure in your life, like I have,
#
you've written letters in your youth and childhood to people.
#
And today, I don't know if you do anymore.
#
No, I don't. I wish I could do.
#
In fact, when my daughter was going abroad, I told her that, look,
#
I'll write you letters, you know, and it's been a year since gone.
#
And just the other day I was thinking, I was telling her,
#
she said, oh, you never wrote me letter.
#
So I do write her mails and she writes mail.
#
But then you know how mails are.
#
And my biggest fear, as you said, I've been asking this question to archivists.
#
I remember last year, late last year,
#
I was asking this absolutely fascinating archivist in Chicago,
#
Regenstein Library, Laura Ring.
#
I said, Laura, what will happen to you people when you want contemporary
#
records? What happens 20 years down the line?
#
She said, well, in America still there is a culture, said politicians and all are
#
still writing letters, but yeah, there also it has moved to mails, you know, emails.
#
Somewhere in Texas, Austin, this archivist in that Harry Ransom Center,
#
he said, well, now many people are giving away their hard drives, computer hard drives.
#
But I don't know how good, how, what happens to it, whether they're back and forth.
#
You deleted some mails.
#
I don't know the feel of the paper when you touch that paper,
#
when you even the smell, you know, that it takes you to that era.
#
Someone writing 1920, 1930 and, you know, so that's a different feel.
#
I don't know how seriously and whether Indian archives will ever be able to get
#
hard drive from a politician or a public figure or artist, painter.
#
No one is writing letters.
#
And I've been asking writers also.
#
Some people do write like recently.
#
Now, I believe Ram's book on Rukun Advani is coming.
#
They have been exchanging letters.
#
But then Ram and Rukun, a very different generation, even on mail,
#
they'll write long. In fact, there is a whole exchange between Amit Chaudhary
#
and Pankaj Misra, which came out, I think, a year back when
#
Pankaj Misra's novel came and Amit Chaudhary had.
#
So it's but that's last.
#
There's few and far between.
#
There are a few people who are doing it.
#
I don't know what will happen to political figures.
#
That generation of and you can already see archives drawing out.
#
You know, it ends almost much as we say about Nehruvian period
#
and even the right wing politicians of Nehruvian period.
#
I'm talking about Sama Prasad Mukherjee to all those people.
#
They were writing long letters.
#
There's a constant engagement happening even after he has left the cabinet.
#
You know, the first cabinet, Sama Prasad Mukherjee, Ambedkar.
#
What will happen to that?
#
And that ends. Now, if you look at Manmohan Singh papers,
#
there are no Bajpayee papers.
#
A friend of mine had just completed.
#
The first volume is about to come, Bajpayee, and he has done a remarkable job
#
of doing interviews and he's recreated and people have been reading.
#
I have read the first volume and it completely blows you.
#
But that's like it was very hard for him.
#
It took seven years of his life.
#
He was a young, he was a very, very young guy, for heaven's sake.
#
And you find that after even Shastri papers are there,
#
Indira Gandhi papers, you find bits and pieces of papers are closed.
#
But after that, there are no papers.
#
If we want to write about the last 10 years, eight years, what will we write?
#
Only source will be newspaper reporting.
#
And we know what has happened to media.
#
So imagine 20 years down the line, if you want to write about Modi era,
#
your source will be the newspapers, magazines.
#
Maybe, thankfully, you have this whole lot of scroll, the wire,
#
the caravans of the world, which kind of doing some journalism still.
#
And otherwise, you'll be so handicapped.
#
It's bad for future archivists, biographers, historians.
#
It's going to be very, very tough.
#
And also, I think these guys, they don't even, I mean,
#
I don't think Modi and Amit Shah would be writing letters.
#
I don't think because, you know, it's also the nature of the politics,
#
which is mostly done otherwise, you know, the whole idea of engagement.
#
Even the, even someone has been like,
#
there is a letter with Nehru writes to JP where he's like,
#
it treats him like his younger brother.
#
JP throughout his life calls him my dear bhai.
#
And in this letter, it's like end of death of Nehru.
#
He says, yeah, why are you attacking me so much?
#
Why have you turned against me so much?
#
As a long seven page letter, it gives you the insight into the relationship.
#
Will we ever know that about and it's not really about Modi.
#
Manmohan Singh gave away his papers to Teen Murti.
#
There are only reports.
#
There are no correspondence.
#
There are no what was happening within the cabinet.
#
And there were a lot of issues, you know,
#
those so-called alleged scams happened, 2G and coal and all that,
#
although nothing came out of it, considering that no one went to jail
#
during Modi years and they promised that action will be taken.
#
So we don't know anything.
#
So our only source will be the interviews.
#
And I have my reservations about interview,
#
my personal reservation, many people don't agree with me.
#
I had a kind of not so great experience while doing aggai.
#
I interviewed 60, 70 people and I realised that many are still trying to fix him
#
after death. Many are still that they will not seem anything less than a god.
#
I tried doing the JP with some of his young acolytes who are big politicians now.
#
And I realised they're still trying to tell me that someone is saying I was
#
the closest to JP, the other guy saying I was closest to JP.
#
I said, well, why am I getting caught in this?
#
So I'll rely on archives and archives helping me.
#
You know, there's enough evidence record.
#
I don't know what will happen to future history.
#
And a lot of people are grappling all over the world.
#
So when I was in Harry Ransom Center and they said, oh, you come now.
#
Two days back, Robert De Niro gave away all his papers.
#
So I think there's some culture there of giving away papers.
#
Now in India, India has many problems when it comes to archives.
#
One is people will let the papers rot in their homes.
#
The moment you ask, they'll say, oh,
#
this must be some priceless or some random guys coming and asking for it.
#
Then they start asking price for it.
#
They'll make it difficult for you.
#
So I have faced and people who are in the archives, you ask them,
#
everyone has some story or the other.
#
Now, thankfully, one or two private
#
institutions, because you can't expect government to be looking after archives,
#
all the archives, it's not their priority.
#
Dean Moorthy has one of the best collections in the world,
#
private and institutional archives, national archives, great collection.
#
Now private, Asoka has started archive,
#
which are very good archives have started and they have very good collection of
#
papers, so it should become a million in US.
#
It's all free. You can you just book it.
#
You go, you everything is sold and everyone is collecting papers.
#
You know, the private archive,
#
all the universities are the biggest source of archives.
#
Bombay poets, all the Bombay poets have given away their papers to Cornell.
#
Arvind Krishnamurti, everyone, everyone's paper is there.
#
Now, second set of papers most likely will go to Asoka,
#
but it's easily accessible.
#
A lot of people say, oh, why is it going to US?
#
At least they're preserving it well.
#
OK, now in during Covid also, people started sending you
#
digital version of it, scanned copies of it.
#
But I don't know about future.
#
More I think about archives, more I get very depressed.
#
And what you what you say about the unreliability of interviews is also so
#
true because memory is so unreliable and like 10 people will tell you 10
#
different stories and none of them is lying.
#
That's just how they remember it.
#
And yeah, and I'm just perhaps a naive question about archive.
#
But I just think that, you know, isn't in an ideal future, aren't all archives
#
simply online for anyone to access?
#
It should be. I'm all for democratization of knowledge.
#
It's happening. It's a big movement.
#
Covid actually helped in a big way.
#
That was for researchers.
#
Then for two months, three months, six months,
#
many archives were like British libraries started sending you stuff.
#
If you wrote to them, they said that this period is you go to the catalog.
#
Catalog is online. You look at this.
#
You tell us, we'll mail you.
#
I remember, you know, I was 20, 20 early in February, March, just before Covid
#
became really big and lockdown started.
#
I was in Chicago and I had to go and look at archives in New York.
#
And I had all kind of tied up with Rockefeller archives in Sleepy Hollow.
#
And I wrote to her, this archivist in the middle of and we know New York was the epicenter.
#
Some of these archivists, their gods,
#
did they the way they help you, my God, why should someone help you?
#
Nothing to do with aggay.
#
They scanned everything and sent it to you.
#
She sent me everything.
#
Laura, I was talking about in Chicago.
#
You know, I thought Dinman, which aggay edited.
#
I thought, you know, it's in Timurty.
#
I need it for some period.
#
And I knew all of them are there.
#
And suddenly everything is closed.
#
I wrote to Laura, Laura, I'm in deep trouble and this is what it is.
#
So entire Dinman collection is in Chicago library.
#
She said, OK, I'll look at her.
#
She scans the contents page for 10 years.
#
Sends me, she said, you tell me what all which all articles do you need?
#
Then I'll scan them and I'll send it to you.
#
She does that. Who does that?
#
You know, some of these people are like Tripti More in Pune.
#
A random call I make because I'm looking for one VAC journal, which are aggay edited.
#
So the English journal with three issues came and I realized there was some VAC
#
from they have some VAC collection.
#
I called. I don't know her through website.
#
I call her. I said, look, VAC said, yeah, I have VAC, VAC.
#
But she said, but is it in English or in Sanskrit?
#
Because Deccan College is like the repository of Sanskrit.
#
And it has a great archive, that college.
#
She said, OK, hold on. I'll call you back.
#
This is your number in 10 minutes.
#
She calls said, look, this is she to clicks, pictures and sends me and said,
#
oh, this is Sanskrit one. But what do you need?
#
I said, I'm working on again and this that with you.
#
OK, I couldn't help you with this.
#
Sorry, we don't have English.
#
But see, over the next two days, she sends me every damn academic article
#
ever published in on again, some hundreds of them.
#
Why did she have to do it?
#
So, you know, these are people who who actually, when I say these are people
#
who make your book, we are just kind of, you know, we we are
#
But I'm Laura or I'm forgetting her name is in New York.
#
She was not there when I again went to that archives and work in October.
#
She was not there. She had moved to some of the archives.
#
So these are the people who make it.
#
And everyone is worried about this thing that we're talking about.
#
What happens, the future of archive.
#
But everyone is for democratization.
#
I know some of my friends were teaching
#
in the US universities, everyone is working towards just make it available,
#
So in US, for instance, all universities,
#
the archive is the catalog is online.
#
And if you click, click, click, you will find which are the boxes,
#
which are the files you need and you can order.
#
They even have announced system where you can hire a researcher sitting here.
#
You can hire a researcher.
#
They'll send you a list of researchers.
#
Since you see the catalog, you can tell the researcher what all you want.
#
They'll do it. They charge. They're very good.
#
They'll tell you this will take three hours.
#
They charge you for three hours, upload you the stuff on any of this cloud
#
drop box anywhere and you pay online and you're done.
#
So it's it's becoming there is a move.
#
It's very early, but it started in India.
#
We don't know in India. We just put barriers.
#
It's the first thing is, why do you need it?
#
And National Archive, it's not because now, you know,
#
in archives have a rule that you give 10 files in the morning, afternoon, evening.
#
And you give in the morning after an hour,
#
it returns and it says NT, which is not traceable.
#
National Archive is constantly this fear.
#
National Archive working like every day is a trauma.
#
They don't allow you phone in US.
#
I came back with eight thousand pages, all my phone.
#
This is democratization of knowledge.
#
They're not insecure that, oh, you're looking at the CIA papers and this will
#
happen and I know you take it just the thing is that work quickly.
#
Get the hell out of this place and full access.
#
Here we don't allow clicking pictures.
#
So this photocopy, this staff resources,
#
then there are not enough staff, there's no photocopy machine is not working.
#
And some of the staff are absolutely like Timurty.
#
I got these people are like that's and there's a and it's a long tradition in
#
Timurty of great stuff and archived, there's a manuscript division,
#
which is like run so well, but then you can't blame them because the rules are
#
such if they start allowing scholars to click pictures, it will be so easy for
#
everyone, but there's a whole mindset that God knows what all you will take away.
#
They are anyway I'm seeing all the files
#
and you have these rules of one fourth and this and that it's all complicated.
#
I mean, it's a whole power thing.
#
It's a power thing that I hold on to this.
#
So many papers will come and you will find that they have not been open.
#
Family has given the papers that said for 10 years they will not open.
#
I can understand even in US it happened.
#
There are some papers which Kennedy papers opened much later as assassination papers.
#
Becoming increase in the whole idea is
#
to kind of tell you who has the control, look, I'll decide.
#
And I find some of these foreign scholars
#
who come, they are like constantly and it's full of foreign scholars.
#
Indian archives, you go anywhere.
#
But I don't know, some of the archives are good.
#
Bikaner archives digitizing everything.
#
But still this idea of sharing what we are
#
talking about, democratization of knowledge, that is not happening yet.
#
But what you mentioned about the people who helped you with the New York archive
#
and the Chicago archive and the lady in Pune is like so heartening because it
#
makes you feel that there is an unseen community of people who love
#
knowledge and who therefore just get it that this is a labor of love.
#
You know, when I went in last year and I said Laura is a poet herself.
#
She has a PhD from Chicago.
#
And she chose this to be head of the
#
And it's like one of the best research
#
libraries in the US, the Regenstein Library in Chicago.
#
And she said, oh, I'm so happy and this and that it was like it was her book.
#
Oh, you don't have to do that.
#
Why did you mention me?
#
But these are the people, you know, and I rely on them so much.
#
It's like a little community that you have.
#
What do we walk away with all the credit name, whatever little money and what do
#
And scholars after scholars come take help.
#
And these people are doing it for years.
#
And, you know, you tell her one thing and it will excite her in case of Laura that,
#
oh, how come we don't have the paper?
#
You know, recently, you pen archivist was traveling through India looking for
#
papers and so someone mailed me saying that, look, if you can help him getting
#
papers and all that in India, you can't visit for 10 days and get people.
#
People ask you 200 questions.
#
The same grandfather, they forgot.
#
They'll say how much money they can make out of it.
#
way we are at personal level also, and there are such eminent families, such,
#
you know, achievers, you know, people, scholars, the papers all rotting.
#
That's sorry stories of sad stories of some of the archives.
#
I don't want to name the big people in
#
Banaras and all, which are they all rotting.
#
And when you hear those stories, why aren't they not given?
#
They'll not give. We have tried everything.
#
Do you know that what has happened to Rahul Sanskritayan papers?
#
Rahul Sanskritayan brought the whole Buddhist knowledge.
#
The manuscripts are still in Patna, in the Patna Museum and all.
#
But his own private papers.
#
I tried looking for it because I guess father was friends with him,
#
Hiranand Sastry and his family.
#
His wife was still sorted out the papers, everything.
#
Now, no one can get access to those papers when his son,
#
if he when he is no longer there, God knows what will happen to those papers.
#
And this is a real treasure we are talking about.
#
We're talking on a slice of history which we'll never know.
#
Bits and pieces are here and there.
#
You know, his conversation with me so can be part of my papers, if at all.
#
But what did he collect other than those manuscripts?
#
It's a rich life he led.
#
So there are some such fascinating individuals whose life we'll never know.
#
One of my recent guests, Janbi Phalke, I think is planning to write on Rahul Sanskritayan.
#
Yeah, Janbi has been trying.
#
I know so many other day and someone else told me that she's trying to work on a
#
biography of Rahul Sanskritayan, everyone hits that block.
#
I remember meeting Janbi a few months back, I was in Bangalore.
#
And I was telling her same thing.
#
He wrote such fascinating science stories that Janbi actually first told me.
#
And she's saying, here, I'm looking for those stories.
#
You know, science story for children in Hindi.
#
So so much knowledge will just disappear because we don't want to give up.
#
So that way, whatever you might say about American scholarship, this whole thing,
#
giving your papers, giving everything.
#
Rockefeller archives, whole world, this whole lot of scholarship on how they were
#
the CIA front for spreading this Congress for Cultural Freedom thing all over the
#
world. The same Rockefeller archives, all of it, they have kept.
#
And it's accessible to every scholar.
#
You go and see Rockefeller archives and say, what is wrong with these guys?
#
You know, they have all about themselves.
#
After a certain stage, just let's call a seat.
#
Knowledge wants to be free.
#
So and just thinking aloud, I think like one extension, like maybe we lose this,
#
but maybe another way of getting an insight into a person, into the private
#
recesses, which they would never write about themselves is an online activity.
#
Like one of the most interesting books I
#
read in the last few years is called Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Ravidovitz
#
and where he just examines anonymized data, but very comprehensive data across
#
such platforms, including Google, to see what it reveals about people.
#
And it's really interesting.
#
Like, for example, the bizarre thing about India and to some extent Bangladesh
#
is that the number of men who fantasize about being breastfed in these two
#
countries is like orders of magnitude more than anywhere else in the world.
#
Or and there are other similar, really bizarre, interesting.
#
And I'm just thinking that if you can look at a person's and individual's
#
Google data or maybe in this day and age, what are they asking?
#
Chat, GPT and so on and so forth.
#
Yeah. And that's one way people have to.
#
In fact, there is this famous piece here.
#
I'm sure you have read it.
#
Frank Sinatra has called a New Yorker piece.
#
But yeah, he doesn't have access to Frank Sinatra, right?
#
But what a piece he writes.
#
It goes down every time someone says, oh, there's no archive.
#
I said, well, this Frank Sinatra has called you have to read.
#
Or recently, what is the name?
#
Amy Calhoun, whose father died, was a New York Times music critic and theater
#
critic, I think, who tried to write biography of Frank O'Hara.
#
And she just goes to a father, I take one day and she finds these tapes
#
and she asks her father, what is it?
#
He says, oh, you have no idea.
#
I wanted to work on Frank O'Hara.
#
I was a friend and this and that.
#
I think Frank O'Hara's sister or daughter, one of them,
#
they kept telling him, oh, I'll set you papers with you, this, that.
#
Finally, it never happened.
#
So based on what the father collected,
#
Amy Calhoun has written a book which came out last year on Frank O'Hara.
#
And there's already so finally,
#
Frank O'Hara's daughter gave those papers to another biographer,
#
which is a good biography.
#
So people are now inventing ways of writing
#
with this because there has to be book on a lot of people.
#
So there has to be dispassionate biography of Narendra Modi ten years down the line.
#
Right. How do you do it?
#
So there have to be new ways have to be invented, as you said,
#
from online activity to speeches to everything.
#
Well, we'll not get the personal life,
#
the kind of granular details, those things which we which makes, you know,
#
which humanizes these larger than life people.
#
But, yeah, at some form, it has to be written in writing letters and postcards
#
and just writing a diary forces you into self-reflection.
#
Yeah. So the question is not just of whether there is any material there.
#
But the question is, how are you growing as a person?
#
So exactly imagine having none of it.
#
So this Twitter becomes your
#
or Facebook or Instagram, whatever.
#
So let me let's talk about Agnya now.
#
And as just a wonderful title of your biography indicates,
#
you know, writer, rebel, soldier, lover.
#
This is a man who contains multitudes.
#
You also write in the book about how there's almost a mythology around him.
#
He's been mythologized in various ways, CIA agent or great literary figure or whatever.
#
There's so much about him.
#
And therefore, I think, you know, the first part of the journey,
#
your journey must have been to get to the personal.
#
And I am intrigued by how much of your interior life,
#
how much of Agnya's interior life rather, is visible through your book.
#
Like in the Jekyll and Hyde letter where he's writing to Mrs.
#
Jan, he writes, quote, My entire life is led internally and never gets expressed.
#
The other life, which is led on the surface, is almost impersonal.
#
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fits anyone, it's me, stop, quote.
#
And and you know, later what I found like
#
incredibly fascinating is when he's documenting his dreams.
#
And I just want to read these out because these are so fascinating.
#
Just in the honesty that he is actually documenting them.
#
And like you said, he would sometimes just wake up and whatever is in his paper,
#
he would just write it down.
#
Now I sit down on a stump of pine on the lower edge of the road.
#
I have two cats on my lap.
#
I allow one to run away.
#
I kiss it. It smiles and returns my kiss in human fashion.
#
It keeps smiling and returning kisses passionately and more bites.
#
I stop. It looks even more womanlike.
#
Though I know it is a cat, it invites me to coitus.
#
I agree. The act is performed in human fashion, yet not so far.
#
It's just an ordinary size cat.
#
I'm in the middle of a kiss when I feel a few drops of warmth on my skin.
#
I know it is a cat's urine for the cat as an orgasm.
#
Suddenly I awake at about the end of an orgasm myself.
#
And a little later, here's another one.
#
I dream that I'm a woman dressed in sari and petticoats
#
and that I'm in a state of strong sexual excitement.
#
As the excitement deepens, my body becomes tense.
#
I even lift the middle of the ground or bed, whatever it was,
#
and resting my bow-like body on shoulders and heels,
#
I feel the orgasm occurring with intense pleasure.
#
And note that my petticoats have been soaked.
#
And later you point out about how when he's writing about another dream,
#
he writes as an aside, I was feeling very happy that I could now
#
dream of normal coitus and not homosexual intercourse.
#
And later he does write a homosexual intercourse with a numberdar.
#
And these are all dreams that presumably he's having in the prison.
#
Yeah, this is all a prison dream.
#
It's like a prison dream.
#
And I love the honesty of these and the fact that, you know,
#
just in that line in the cat dream where he says it is somehow human, right,
#
which you only write where you're writing honestly about a dream.
#
It's, you know, you can make out.
#
And I wonder what motivates this kind of writing.
#
Like Jerry, in his episode with me, pointed out that when he would write
#
a journal when he was young, he would still write it with a sense
#
of anxiety because he was writing it because he hoped it would one day
#
be discovered when he was famous, right.
#
And that can be one sort of thing at the back of your mind that, you know,
#
I'm writing a journal because one day it'll be discovered and people will read me.
#
Like I was just chatting with one of my writing students yesterday,
#
having coffee with her and telling her she should journal.
#
And she was like, you know, that, you know,
#
I get anxious about the quality of the writing and I'm like, why?
#
It's a freaking journal only you're going to read it.
#
But, you know, but there is that thing at the back of your mind that what if one day
#
somebody reads it and I'm wondering about Agnya's motivations or what you think
#
they are at this point, that is there the sense that these will someday be discovered
#
and he'll be an important person or is it just easy writing so that he himself
#
remembers because a dream fades away within a few minutes of waking.
#
Yeah. And what is this like what you've done
#
throughout your book is even though at the start he says a life I live inside is
#
not open to anyone yet throughout the book, one gets a sense of that interior life.
#
So tell me about your journey of knowing that person,
#
knowing that interior life and coming to grips with his motivations and so on.
#
See, these dreams were actually
#
actually the first instance of when a gaze opening up his writing.
#
See, already he had some thing about writing when he was in Madras.
#
He was writing his part of, you know, in college.
#
This was the Tagore Society and this and that.
#
And then he's involved in a lot of these activities in Lahore.
#
He he had taken to writing by then.
#
And this is this these dreams are coming out of the immense fear,
#
this anxiety that I'll get hanged.
#
And this is also the first draft in a way of his classic Sekharik Chipni,
#
which is series of dreams again.
#
And that completely socks the Hindi world
#
in 1941 when it comes that, oh, God, how can you write something like this?
#
This relationship in, you know, about with his cousin, which was also happening,
#
is very autobiographical.
#
And he says that, you know,
#
so the first draft emerges out of these dreams and dreams is how the Sekhar is
#
also written, so this is very, very important.
#
The making of again, you can see these dreams.
#
And what I what I was completely blown by the prompting, he's writing the time
#
which he had just woken up, just woke up with a dream.
#
And he's right. How many of us do it?
#
So there is a sense of vanity when I look back.
#
I think maybe he knew he thought it will be discovered.
#
But they are written in a very haphazard manner on the paper,
#
on the back of these court papers, she's writing at my pencil.
#
Occasionally he writes with pen and he writes in English, all of them.
#
And then, you know, while he's in jail
#
and he's in correspondence with someone like Janendra Kumar.
#
And he says that, look, I'm writing something which is so big.
#
I'm completely, I'm myself, I'm blown by what is happening.
#
His Sekhar and the first title is Usantarer, he calls it, it's a Bangla name
#
that he's given title, title that book later on, it becomes Sekhar Ek Jibni.
#
So the dreams are very important in the making of again,
#
could be vanity because knowing again the way he kept his papers,
#
very in a very organized way, a lot of people always knew that, you know,
#
since well, could be, could be he kept all his papers very well.
#
But I think these dreams are very, very important in the making of again.
#
And this was the only way of knowing again, as you said right in the beginning
#
that this whole myth about again, so a lot of people who read the diary
#
entries after the book came and they were like completely, oh, God, this is like,
#
this is Sekhar Ek Jibni, but this is like another level of dreams, you know,
#
And some of them got edited out, actually, because there's many.
#
I got completely, you know,
#
I said, OK, because they're also telling me his story, how he's growing,
#
what is happening and, you know, he writes about a dream in the night
#
daytime, his corresponding with his writers, mostly he's writing Janindra,
#
who's his friend, and occasionally with Banarshi Das Chaturvedi.
#
when it when the book finally comes and if you see, actually, I think it has gone
#
through, I saw the first draft, which is part of his papers,
#
which has a very different opening of Sekhar and all.
#
And when his brother reads it, I don't know which version his brother read,
#
his younger brother, who went to Cambridge and he says, my God,
#
what is this, this is going to be because he's privy to his relationship with
#
cousin and other and he says, like, what have you done?
#
You know, father is not going to be happy and father is not happy when he reads
#
the manuscript or he gets to read somehow.
#
So it's entirely based on dreams.
#
So the dreams were very, very important for me and
#
and for every time that he writes,
#
there is a there is a story when he writes Nadi Ke Dweep.
#
Again, I consider it more autobiographical than Sekhar.
#
So in way of unraveling again, these
#
papers help in the sense, whether it's dreams or what is happening
#
in his life with Kripa Sen and others around that time when he writes Nadi Ke Dweep.
#
So therefore, I kind of considered them very important.
#
And I and these papers helped me in a way unravel again or kind of look at interior in a life.
#
So, yeah, so that's how I look at it.
#
And these dreams somehow, my only kind of I was little,
#
you know, I thought he continued with it later also.
#
in the sense when he becomes big, when he's out of jail,
#
he's no longer writing about those dreams.
#
Nobody stops dreaming. All of us do.
#
I always wondered what happened.
#
So these are the dreams.
#
And it's certainly how a lot of people asked me, my editor asked me,
#
did you stop dreaming after that?
#
You know, so it was just the fear of death, the fear that you might be hanged.
#
You know, this you are revolutionary, you're in jail.
#
One thing could be that you might be hanged.
#
So out of that, his writing.
#
But he is chronicling it so well.
#
And that's why he is so excited about it,
#
because he's already written Sekhar in a way in jail.
#
And he's telling everyone I'm myself.
#
And he is comparing himself to some of the best writers.
#
It's a bit cocky also. You know, you're that age, 1920.
#
So he's telling the world.
#
Imagine he's 31, he's 30 when this novel comes and he's only 19 or 20 when he's in jail.
#
So he is very, very cocky.
#
And he's saying that, you know, this is better than many people have written and all.
#
And he's also talking about, you know, in grandiose terms of terms of, you know,
#
Romain Roland's series of novels and, you know, taking names like that and saying,
#
Yeah, and he's so well read.
#
My God, that is another thing.
#
Imagine in jail, his money that he gets, whatever work, you know, you get paid.
#
His money is entirely spent on subscription of journals, books.
#
He mentioned one of the letters he refers to some news item and he started searching for it.
#
I said, what is this? How did this guy get it?
#
And it came just in a journal just two months before.
#
How do you do that? His entire money goes there.
#
You know, he's constantly talking.
#
He's telling from inside jail to Janendra,
#
who's elder to him, that this book you will get in Marwari Library in Delhi.
#
And, you know, when he sent the list of the Russian authors to Janendra,
#
that this is all he has read already, I was like, my God.
#
So, in fact, one or two authors I read, I had not read till I.
#
So I read after finishing the book.
#
I said, I have to read it.
#
So he is ahead of his time, is homeschooling,
#
everything put together, he's a very precocious young man.
#
And I want to talk a bit about that also, because I'm like to understand a person
#
who has been a reader, I think it's also important to look at what he has read.
#
And therefore, does your approach become that if you're trying to understand him,
#
you also have to go through some of the literature.
#
Like you've spoken about when he was being homeschooled,
#
you've written, quote, just over five years old,
#
he was inducted into the family tradition of learning Hindi, English,
#
Sanskrit and Persian at home.
#
The education was informal and rigorous.
#
Pleased with Sancha's, that's what they called him, attention and ability to retain
#
complex Sanskrit texts like Panini's Astradhyayi, Hirananda, that's his father,
#
employed teachers exclusively for him.
#
The young student learned by wrote Sanskrit compositions such as
#
Shiva Mahim's Stotra, Valmiki's Ramayana, the Rasa of Kalidasa's work and the
#
Persian poetry of Hafiz, Tulsi Das's Ramcharitmanas, his mother's
#
beloved text in the vernacular came later,
#
but he always felt closer to Valmiki's Sanskrit version.
#
Stop quoting. This is one part of it.
#
But then you also speak later about all the English that he is reading.
#
The fact that he is actually when he's in school and college,
#
he is a stud at English.
#
He could have made a career writing in English.
#
Right. Later on, you pointed out about how,
#
I think he wrote an essay later in life on Turgenev and then wrote about Tharo
#
and he's just absorbing all of this material and all of this shapes him.
#
Like in the kind of Hindi that he writes,
#
at one point, there is a criticism that is too Sanskritized or it's too formal
#
And I'm sure that this childhood has something to do with that.
#
And at another point, if you just like in the material of everything that he's
#
turning out, you see these influences like Shekhar Ek Jivni, one of the reasons
#
it's acclaimed is the interiority that this is the first book in Hindi literature
#
almost, which is so much interior life.
#
Yeah. And it is not as if it like in the context of Hindi literature,
#
therefore it must seem sui generi that it's original and out of nowhere.
#
But in the context of all the reading he's been doing, it probably isn't.
#
So how much reading did you have to do and how much did that reading of what he
#
has read help you in getting a sense of the man?
#
I had to read a lot, actually.
#
I had to, in fact, some of these Russian authors,
#
I'm forgetting the name of this Russian author, one of the story he
#
referred to, because I got very curious about that story where he says, you know,
#
few friends are going on a bridge and the bridge suddenly collapses.
#
This was the author, I'm not getting it right now.
#
So I started reading some of these books that he had, he was recommending,
#
some of the books that he was quoting often.
#
and he's, you see, he's reading from, he's reading a lot of European, Russian authors.
#
He's reading less American authors.
#
But yeah, his great Elliot fan, his T.S.
#
Elliot is great. In fact, there's a whole, his brother even tries to show his
#
manuscript to T.S. Elliot, which, God knows, never happened.
#
And so I had to kind of revisit a lot of his readings.
#
And also, you know, he was, when it comes
#
to European authors, some of these German authors, for instance,
#
I had to, in fact, I read some of them for the first time because of Agay.
#
So it gives you the thing to peep into Agay's life, into making of as a writer,
#
where he's getting his influences from.
#
And one long interview he gave to Duke
#
University, which is part of his private papers, which is one of the best
#
interview he gave, which was done over a long period of time.
#
And where he talks about influences of one thing, and then he's,
#
one of the things he said, which he repeated later also,
#
even when he's a revolutionary,
#
before he becomes a revolutionary, you look at the Polnay and all these authors
#
that is reading, these Russian authors.
#
So even when he is plunging into this young youth, restless phase of being
#
a revolutionary, he's gone there with a proper reading.
#
And that's what also later on he realized that, well,
#
this is not what I thought will happen.
#
And he is kind of he gets caught in anywhere.
#
Rest is kind of by then, anyway, that movement is over.
#
So for him, everything that he does,
#
it should come with a proper reading and, you know, that kind of whole
#
intellectual backing to it.
#
This is an argument about whatever he's doing.
#
Someone asked him, I think,
#
Professor Sonak of Duke University asked him, how do you want to be remembered as?
#
You know, and then he explains why
#
he thinks why he is he's the first free thinker of the Hindi world.
#
And that comes from his
#
reading everything, anything.
#
And that also puts him in and brings a lot of criticism to him,
#
you know, he his ideologically, he can be, you know, go anywhere and all that.
#
And people use that against him.
#
But he was thinking differently.
#
Yeah, and there's this sort of, you know,
#
going back to the theme of sort of how good he was at English at one point,
#
he talks about how, you know, when he speaks in Hindi,
#
he's translating his thoughts from English to Hindi.
#
And then he's speaking.
#
And elsewhere at one point, you write, quote,
#
Agia's dismissal of Anglo-Anglian writing was on the surface at odds with his
#
international network of friends and collaborators and his reputation among
#
peers as a Hindi world's export commodity.
#
His first editor had said there are two
#
Indians misborn in India, Agia was one, Jawaharlal Nehru was another,
#
And it reminds me of what Naipaul said
#
about Gandhi being the least Indian of the Indian leaders, because Gandhi's
#
influences were all also Ruskin, Polstoy, all of that.
#
And I find that really fascinating that, you know, and you've done that at such
#
depth and I love that going into what he read, because all of these leaders,
#
like you look at, say, Gokhale Ranade, Agarkar, the great 19th century liberals
#
and they're leading, they're reading Mill and Bentham and all of that.
#
And you understand exactly where they're coming from.
#
And you have Gandhi, who's kind of all over the place and his influences,
#
Tolstoy, Ruskin and so on.
#
And then again, in his philosophy, there's a lot that's great,
#
but it's not quite coherent from this and that.
#
Again, you know, Nehru, you see what his
#
readings are and the influence they have.
#
And I always kind of find that fascinating.
#
What I'm also interested in is that with these influences around him.
#
And I think what happens when you're a kid is that it's very seductive that when
#
you have the English language and the whole world of authors available to you
#
and then you have Hindi and there can be a tendency in some families that you kind
#
of get snobbish about it and you look down on the local and you venerate the
#
international, but he's clearly not doing that one, of course,
#
because of the childhood love of Sanskrit and all of that.
#
But also he's discovered Hindi literature.
#
Like at one point you speak about how he
#
reads Maithili Sharangupt and he's so impressed by this particular couplet,
#
you know, Tere Ghar Ke Dwara Bahut Hai, Kisme Hoka Rao Mein.
#
And it seems that it's almost like a metaphor for Hindi literature itself,
#
that Dwara Bahut Hai, and the one he chooses is Maithili Sharangupt perhaps.
#
So tell me a little bit about his understanding of Hindi literature,
#
where it begins, because it obviously begins as a reader that you fall in love
#
with something, but later he grows to be perhaps the most
#
trenchant and the most insightful critic of it.
#
Yeah, see, he's, as we talked about, his home schooling and Hindi early poets
#
that writers that he likes is of course Maithili Sharangupt with whom he builds
#
lifelong association and probably he's the only one with whom he never fights.
#
Otherwise, against fighting with everyone.
#
He calls him Dadda, which is elder brother.
#
And his entire time when he comes to
#
Agra is spent, we can spend with Maithili Sharangupt in Chirgaon, which is Jhansi.
#
Agai's Hindi, he's and that's a phage
#
when he's getting, he's reading a lot and through him, Maithili Sharangupt is,
#
of course, one of the early, then Jayanidhar Kumar.
#
In fact, Agai early on says also, I am not the father of modernism or anything.
#
And he he cites Jayanidhar Kumar Sunita, a novel, which is like a completely
#
he said it came before Sekhar and all that.
#
So he's drawing from these people.
#
He's also very impatient.
#
He's also kind of and he doesn't believe in this.
#
He has to chart his own path and he is very early young, very young.
#
So he's critical and he's very
#
he's restless about the Hindi that he reads.
#
And if you remember, it's there in the book in great detail when he is moving
#
from Agra to Calcutta as editor of Visal Bharat.
#
Before that, Krishna Karpilani asked him
#
to write a long essay, two part essay on the state of Hindi literature.
#
Mind you, this man is this in 1936.
#
There are big guns there, right?
#
From Matleesaran Gop to Jaisankar Prasad to Nirala and it's a jaw dropping essay.
#
And he writes in English and that essay he demolishes everyone except few.
#
Matleesaran Gopthi's space and with Nirala, he says, Nirala is dead as a poet.
#
So this man is also very restless.
#
Well, some people say that this was his way of getting recognized by the Hindi
#
world that everyone says, who is this young man who's kind of demolished everyone?
#
Partly, yes, maybe this is a way of seeking attention.
#
But it's also some of the points that he's making about this poet.
#
He revises later on, but
#
he he revises only about Nirala.
#
He says it was a mistake.
#
It was kind of so he's very restless.
#
He's trying to carve his own path.
#
He doesn't want to get identified with one school or the other.
#
So people call him earlier the experiment, you know, this
#
pariyogsi, you know, experimentalist.
#
Then they are like he's now part of that progressive set.
#
He's always his ideology can't be running your literature.
#
So he's picking a fight with everyone.
#
Sikhar in 41, he has established himself as his own man.
#
And he continues to do that.
#
So that journey, so he gets into Hindi,
#
carves his own this thing early on, if you see early influences, you will find
#
his greatly influenced by Chhaya Baad, Ja Sankar Prasad or Mahadevi Verma,
#
some of these poems, Poochalun Ke Naam Tera, this is like some 1936 poem,
#
but later on he finds his own voice.
#
He he carves his own path.
#
But then he's also in literature, in language with Hindi, does something very
#
different, and he's probably the first of his generation of that generation
#
that he's thinking of writers as a community and is the first anthology,
#
the Tar-Saptak, which comes in, I think, in the mid 40s, 44 or something.
#
Seven poets he brings and in seven new voices and five of them are Marxists who
#
hate him otherwise, you know, out of seven, five are Marxists.
#
Second one, you find everyone is there.
#
And at least the first three Saptaks,
#
which he brings out, are great experiments in Hindi poetry.
#
They're like the template of modern Hindi poetry, which get done.
#
So even so his entry into the world happens through that route.
#
But then he soon finds his voice.
#
He's dismissive also at times.
#
We find in the 60s, 70s when he's becoming almost becoming a prophet,
#
messiah, staking on people, he's also full of himself.
#
And the Sahit Academy anthology is coming out.
#
He has to write an entry again and he writes about himself.
#
And people say, what is wrong with it?
#
He writes about his Sikhar being one of the classics.
#
So that's a different Agya.
#
that's how he has been, as he said, you know, contain multitudes.
#
So so his journey and his very kind of while he creates a whole generation of
#
writers, he kind of helps and holds in various ways, even those who are
#
ideologically opposed to him.
#
But we also find that some of these brightest minds around under the 50s,
#
60s, the Rambir Bharti, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena, Raghuveer Sahay,
#
some of these bright minds don't stay with him for too long.
#
You know, they just kind of they push themselves to the margin.
#
They just withdraw because and he surrounds himself like all prophets with
#
mediocre writers and poets later on. Yeah.
#
I want to talk about all this in detail and I'll kind of come back to this
#
different schools within Hindi literature and that journey that he made
#
in kind of breaking down one sort of way of writing and building an ecosystem
#
that would flourish and take Hindi literature forward.
#
But before that, I want to speak a bit about his personal writing,
#
you know, that the journey that he made both as a poet and a writer.
#
And you point out you actually reproduced
#
his very what is probably his very first poem where you speak about, quote,
#
a relative gifted him a spinning top and as a four year old spun it around,
#
he sang the top is dancing.
#
A slight change of emphasis turned into Bhoomi and the one line poem acquired
#
new meaning over the earth is dancing, you know,
#
and he thought fondly of that bit of wordplay as his first poem, stop quote.
#
And I'm very interested in the journey
#
that one makes into poetry, because I think that all of us,
#
when we first fall in love with poetry, in a sense, we fall in love with
#
the one musicality, the way it sounds and to the delight in taking something
#
and in exactly this kind of wordplay that you take something and you make it
#
something else, you give it some other meaning, you know,
#
and that's how we begin and that's a purity of the beginning.
#
But then after this, as we evolve, so much else comes into it.
#
And what else comes into it could come from all the reading that you're doing
#
or it could come from an aesthetic that you develop over time.
#
And this is a man who has incredibly strong views on language
#
and what it should be and how it should be used.
#
Yes. So how does it affect his own work?
#
Give me a sense of the evolution of his own work.
#
See, as I was saying, he is a master of that.
#
And he's very harsh also to many of these
#
contemporary poets or younger poets or writers,
#
because he has to play with language, you know, and he exasperates you.
#
His father says, why do you use these words?
#
You know, when he sends him tea from Assam, when he is an army,
#
he sends tea to his father, you know, tea leaves.
#
And you might have used,
#
you know, there's a way you can, Uttam Chai, when it's a first grade tea.
#
Now he uses Uttakresht or something.
#
His father says, why? Why?
#
His father is a Sanskrit scholar himself.
#
You know, he's constantly pointing out
#
these things in people, languages and all that.
#
And he's constantly playing with in private letters also,
#
you will find that he's doing it with people, he's many times he's talking about
#
someone's writing that, OK, this happened, even his love letters,
#
the way he is, you know, some of this T.S.
#
Eliot poem, the way he and Kripa play with it.
#
So this constantly happening and that.
#
That's just a whole phase when he is very, very particular.
#
He is particular in the sense is like
#
he spends a lot of time with that, you know, this whole how a particular word
#
he's he'll spend days and days.
#
If you look at some of his notes on translation,
#
which he is doing along with many others, again, same thing is happening.
#
He's not getting the sound.
#
He talks about the, you know, it doesn't make the right sound in my ears.
#
And he's constantly even with words, even, you know, if you say some of the drafts,
#
some of the manuscripts of his poetry collection, it's like all seal,
#
in the sense, all done, sent to publisher and most in most cases,
#
and you will find subsequent data saying that this poem,
#
this needs to change, this particular word.
#
It's constantly having chiseling away all the time, all the time.
#
I think that's all this suddenly in a later phase, which is a phase when he's
#
more of a public intellectual, he's addressing this.
#
He's then into larger issues, he's less into the language.
#
He keeps talking when in US, when he goes teachers in Berkeley,
#
there is one lecture he delivers in Australia.
#
There also language comes,
#
but not the way in the first 20 years when he is like really, really,
#
when he is a point of irritation, you know, he is constantly pointing out.
#
Even if someone writes letters to him,
#
he says, you know, this word could have been something else.
#
So, yeah, he is the ultimate craftsman.
#
And he judges people harshly also at times, others who are not so particular.
#
And he says, OK, this word could not have been used or not.
#
Even it doesn't with the English also, very particular with English.
#
Yeah, I mean, you've got this lovely bit
#
where he's chatting with Chaturvedi about the challenges of translation.
#
And you write quote, and this is just an
#
illustration of how sort of the granularity with which he looks at language.
#
And he writes quote, he detailed, you write rather,
#
he detailed the challenges he himself had faced when translating an economics
#
textbook recently, for example, socialism was translated
#
as Samyavadi in Hindi, whereas in Marathi it was Samajikvaad.
#
Agniya felt the Marathi translation was
#
more apt since Samyavadi actually meant equalitarianism.
#
Similarly, communism was variously
#
translated as Vargavad, Srenivad and in some places even Sangavad.
#
The last word he felt could be the Hindi translation of syndicalism.
#
If Chaturvedi was keen, Agniya would submit a detailed proposal for
#
Vishal Bharat, which was of course a magazine.
#
And what I find so fascinating about this is that on the one hand,
#
there is this granularity with which you look at words and grammar and the actual
#
craft of it, but on the other hand, as far as the content itself is concerned,
#
he is letting himself go, he's going to places no one has gone before.
#
Yeah, absolute, absolute.
#
Can you give me a sense also, I think at some point you speak about, you know,
#
different, when you've spoken about his evolution as a writer,
#
you've also spoken about, you know, I think Ashok Vajpayee wrote about
#
the various phases in his short story career and so on and so forth.
#
Yeah, so tell me a bit about that, because, you know, just that evolution
#
of the kind of writer he was and all of that.
#
So see, first, as Agniya himself put that, you know, he said what is,
#
which I mentioned in the introduction about he took to short story writing
#
very early on, apart from Sekar, he kept on writing and then suddenly he
#
stopped sometime, I think, given the year 50s or 60s.
#
He'd done some 57, 58 short stories.
#
Some of them stories are like absolute, for instance, Kassandra Kavisa or
#
this other one, Rose, which very well translated by Poonam Saxena
#
and this anthology of Hindi writers.
#
I don't know what this phase, he was asked again and again,
#
why did you stop writing?
#
And he says this my short and by then
#
his short stories had become weak, some of his later short stories are not that great.
#
And he himself, I think he had divided his 67 short stories into four, four
#
phases, and he says this is what happens.
#
at some stage in that phase, he thinks that his poetry, he's not doing enough
#
poetry and that's what he actually wanted to be.
#
So even, you know, he could have written more novels.
#
So there is a whole gap of 10 years
#
between first and second novels, almost 10 years or maybe more.
#
And then the last one, which is a very
#
weak novel, of all the three novels that Agar wrote, this was like,
#
yeah, the third novel was like, kind of.
#
So what gets missed out a lot, again, I think later on started talking
#
and his whole journalism, with again,
#
there is a tendency to look only at his as a writer, as a poet.
#
So we go through these phases of, so he's doing many things.
#
His writing, he's trying to put a larger, he's creating the larger Hindi world.
#
He's trying to get authors together.
#
He's fighting, he's right from mid 30s or late 30s till he dies
#
at all flashpoints of Hindi history, Hindi literature.
#
He is involved in one way or the other.
#
But he's also, what gets mostly talked about is his literary pursuits,
#
his literary output and all, his journalism.
#
His later avatar as a public intellectual, where he's an essayist and is writing
#
on larger issues, his lectures, they don't get.
#
So I see again in kind of as a poet, as a novelist, as a short story writer.
#
Some of them are extraordinary short stories.
#
Some of them, later short stories are not that great.
#
Same thing happens with his poems.
#
I think you mentioned he had like 11 good years, 41 to 52.
#
This is actually, it's a stolen theory.
#
This is Harold Bloom's theory.
#
And I started checking it.
#
Ten year phases, Harold Bloom talks.
#
And he gives everyone from T.S.
#
Eliot to everyone that ten years people really do a great job and then they decline.
#
So 51, 52, after I consider, although some of those poetry collections were really
#
good and he himself didn't like when he got Sait Academy for that poetry collection.
#
He said, well, I sort of got it for some other one.
#
It's not my best collection.
#
So I see his he's constantly evolving,
#
he's doing various things, poetry, novel stories.
#
But his phase as a journalist, as a thinker, as a kind of an ideas man,
#
as a public intellectual gets written very little.
#
Some people have worked on it as in I've seen in PhD and all it's been done.
#
But in larger public realm, it's not.
#
In fact, as a journalist, if you see,
#
he's probably one of the earliest one to talk of environmental journalism.
#
Sekhar Pathak told me fascinating stories
#
about him, meeting him in Karbala and Kumaon and all that.
#
Some of his poems, Nanda Devi, for instance, it's like like he had this vision
#
about this is a I think more than 10, 12 poems in Nanda Devi series.
#
And I requested Arvind Kishmehrotra to translate and he was completely blown.
#
He was not he's not a great Agar fan, but he says, yeah,
#
this is like amazing poem and he translated it.
#
Similarly, even Ranjit translated one of his poem, which is right in the beginning.
#
So as a journalist, look at the concerns, even when as a very young editor,
#
he's not the editor, but he's practically running Sanic.
#
You look at the kind of things that he's doing.
#
It's a it's a it's supposed to be a political weekly.
#
He turns it into a political as well as literary.
#
One of the last interviews of Premchand is published there.
#
Introduces M.N. Roy to Hindi readers.
#
He is even there are short stories there.
#
All kinds of things are happening.
#
He is then he takes it to Bishal Bhari, completely changes Bishal Bharat.
#
It's not a long string because again,
#
he picks a fight with the owner, Banarasi Das, everyone.
#
And Dinman, that's the high watermark of Agar's journalism.
#
Till date, you ask anyone who has kind of seen Dinman and the kind of political
#
journalism happening now, or even say 10 years back,
#
no one has come anywhere close to what Dinman's political journalism was.
#
Again, you know, a lot of people criticize him for having turned Hindu and turned
#
towards Hindu right and all later.
#
Well, that's a highly debatable kind of aspect of Agar's life.
#
But you see, one of the most authoritative,
#
one of the most scathing piece on RSS and Hindutva is written by again the Dinman.
#
And Dinman with a very skeletal staff completely changes political journalism.
#
In fact, if you talk to any journalist of that period,
#
they'll tell you that never in political journalism didn't happen after that.
#
And to get noticed, to get criticized,
#
to get written about in Dinman for politicians was a big thing.
#
There is an instance of Lohia, sorry, Lohia complaining to,
#
no, Indira Gandhi complaining to the owners of Times of India, saying that,
#
you know, this is too much of a socialist project, this magazine.
#
And because everyone is on cover from and for a Hindi journalism as
#
Krishna Kumar, educationalist, he said, you know, Dinman was a university.
#
And so his impact as that gets kind of written less.
#
So I see Agar's entire oeuvre in various ways,
#
as a public intellectual poet, writer and someone who's constantly thinking,
#
someone who's constantly challenging the existing notions.
#
And he's never and he's always restless.
#
Even late, he's in age, he's restless,
#
he's challenging you, why should I believe in it?
#
So a lot of people, when they think,
#
what do you think Agar would have done now in the current state that we are in?
#
I think he would have been maybe probably one of the first writers,
#
are completely quiet, except few.
#
He would have been probably one of the first to write or talk about what is
#
happening now because he was an anarchist, as he said, you know.
#
Let's talk about politics.
#
And I was sort of fascinated by different, very different aspects
#
that come together in Agar in the sense that you point out that in 1929,
#
when he goes to the Congress, the grand annual thing that the Congress has,
#
he's incredibly impressed by both the Nehru, Jawaharlal and his father,
#
Moti Lal, and, you know, this idealism rises within him.
#
As it were, he sees Sarojini Naidu go to this large public gathering and put
#
the mic away and say, I will just speak like this.
#
And these are really impressive people.
#
So on the one hand, there is this idealism.
#
But on the other hand, there is also and which is impressive for someone so young
#
because he would have been 18 then.
#
There is also this incredible practicality
#
at realizing where the Congress is failing.
#
As you point out, quote, Sajitanand felt the Congress provided no way forward
#
for a young man ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for his country's future.
#
He considered the leadership too abstracted from real action.
#
They themselves have never learned to follow,
#
but seek excitement and in their quest for sensation, wonder from their duty.
#
These last two are quotes by him.
#
He considered it hypocritical that the Congress extolled the sacrifice
#
of revolutionary Jatinder Naddaas who had died in Lahore jail after after a 63 day
#
hunger strike while condemning the recent unsuccessful bombing of Lord
#
Irwin's train in Delhi by members of the HSRA, which he went on to join.
#
But what I'm sort of fascinated by is a phrase.
#
He considered the leadership too abstracted from real action.
#
And it's kind of ironic because just yesterday I was sitting with a friend
#
who was telling me that she worked with political outfits back in the day with
#
both Congress and BJP as part of a third outfit, looking at them.
#
And she said the problem with the Congress is that they don't get problems at the local level.
#
She's saying, if you go to the village,
#
then the person in the village needs a ration card.
#
Can you get him a ration card or not?
#
And here Congress is saying, idea of India.
#
While she's saying the BJP MP will make a call to his local guy and say,
#
what are the local problems, what do you want?
#
You know, give them that.
#
And it's such a difference.
#
And so it's not merely the fact that there is a toxic narrative today and all the politics is there.
#
It's also how you deal with the ground and you almost see the same sort of separation there.
#
And for an 18 year old to figure this.
#
And this is again, he's writing in jail when he's reflecting back on 18 years
#
and he knows anything can happen, so might as well pen down everything.
#
So this is all he's writing about his life, about his dreams, about everything.
#
And this is and this is so far it looks like it's being written for the Congress of 2023.
#
So he's for some reason, you know,
#
Nehru's are his personal heroes, especially Jawaharlal Nehru is his personal hero.
#
You will find his critical of Congress.
#
He changes his views about Gandhi later.
#
I kept looking for that piece he wrote on Gandhi, which never got published,
#
which he wrote in jail.
#
And he is writing to Janindra that I'm writing, I'm struggling.
#
Whatever. And Janindra is telling you, no, you try.
#
And he writes, he sent it to Bisal Bharat, which never published,
#
which never got published there.
#
And in the 60s or 70s, he returns.
#
That's the longest any journal would have taken to return your publishing.
#
So, you know, this one Banarasi Das Chaturvedi is clearing his papers
#
and he's sending that article back.
#
I thought it will be in our guest papers.
#
But there's a postcard I'm returning that Gandhi piece.
#
He's returning it in the 60s. Can you believe it?
#
So he is only politician.
#
Well, Nehru, the way he changes Nehru forward to his prison poems and prison
#
poems already three, four poems had got published in a prestigious journal in Asia
#
called From New York, which also had an article from Nehru in that issue.
#
And his father and this lady, Gertrude Sain,
#
Bossy Sain's wife, she's part of America and she's American elite.
#
She's those days part of Asia Ritorial.
#
And she writes to him saying, what a son you have and all that.
#
But his politics, he gets really close to, he says also to MN Roy.
#
Nehru remains his hero.
#
He never goes out of the way to criticize Nehru.
#
He's constantly writing, Nandlal Bose is ill and MN Roy is unwell.
#
He writes to him, please do something.
#
Nehru visits MN Roy in Dehradun.
#
But otherwise, he hates Congress.
#
He has absolutely he says this guy and Indira Gandhi and he makes it very clear.
#
His second wife, Kapila is very close to part of the Nehru Gandhi circle.
#
And I saw later when Indira Gandhi is writing,
#
please get this done for someone, Sri Lankan writer, and he does it.
#
But his politics is he thinks Congress has not figured out India well.
#
And so he's very much part of JP's, you know,
#
the journal that Mankind with JP started.
#
But that's what a lot of people say that,
#
you know, he was so much, you know, he was so much anti-Congress.
#
He was pro, you know, Jansung and other, which is not true.
#
As I said, in Dinman, he attacked.
#
Even during emergency, this Nia Pratik was coming after emergency immediately,
#
like all Times of India group does, they figured out who's well disposed
#
to this government and they immediately hire him as editor in Nobhara Times.
#
There he starts his first few weeks
#
or first few months when Janata experiment is almost failing.
#
Then he starts kind of saying that, look, this is not going to work.
#
And privately, he is some of his friends point out that how police is still
#
harassing them and there's no difference from emergency.
#
So he is he remains, in a way, a rank outsider for his, as I said,
#
he is a free thinker, he's moving from, he's restless, basically.
#
If anyone he's very closely attached to in politics is him and Roy.
#
Later on, JP with socialists and all.
#
And I think the loss of Indra's coming back to power in 1980 has kind of he thinks
#
that, OK, now the challenge can be only from these people, you know.
#
So he attends that BJP foundation and other things, some RSS functions.
#
In real life, he is moving towards his life becomes ritualistic,
#
which we don't find that's happening also partly.
#
You know, old age does a lot of things to people.
#
I'm not trying to kind of defend him here or anything.
#
But, you know, he's surrounded by people.
#
Look at the people who are around him.
#
And I think anyone who's been in public life for 70 years,
#
you go through so many phases, you go through phases.
#
And why do you use the last three years,
#
four years of someone's life to completely destroy his,
#
you know, the same thing happened to someone like Nirmal Verma.
#
People just never engaged with his essays.
#
When, same with again, when he writes that India cannot be secular,
#
he gave that famous interview to, I think, Jan Sattar Nobhara Times.
#
India can never become secular.
#
You look, you read that interview rather than the headline.
#
Some of the things that he says, actually,
#
Ashish Nandi's long essay on secularism and Romila Thapar's counter to it.
#
Everyone should read it.
#
But that particular interview and some of the things that he said was used
#
against him, his one of his lecture, Rajendra Prasad IAR lecture that he gave
#
were used in this, it became well, he surrounded himself with people who
#
believed he was relying on them partly.
#
But to say that he had become like that,
#
he would have continued and dismiss his entire body of work just based on few years.
#
I think it's very unfair on him, on Nirmal Verma and many others, you know.
#
So, again, it was never kind of as the same line he will use.
#
Actually, he used a bit too much by saying, I contain multitudes.
#
You know, the Walt Whitman was his favourite poet.
#
So, even his politics is in multitudes.
#
And that's what leftists used against him.
#
A revolutionary of the 1930s in 1940 becomes part of the British Army, right?
#
1950s is part of Congress for Cultural
#
Freedom, which gets exposed as a CIA funded front, which it was.
#
I don't know, you know, people said, and what did he gain out of it?
#
The counter is that he never got job.
#
He never took government job.
#
Yeah, when he applies, they said you are
#
over age and you are this and you go to All India Radio and these are the people
#
who had made huge contribution to his part of the All India Radio set with
#
Josh Maliawadi, Manto, everyone, but that's the golden phase of All India Radio.
#
And Rajinder, the Urdu writer.
#
So everyone and he never gets a government job.
#
He's never, so he's Yayaveri, his itinerant thing in love life, in real life,
#
continues moving from place to place, relationship.
#
So what did he gain out of it?
#
I think about all these different phases of his and I find two common threads and
#
I'm just thinking aloud, two common threads running through them.
#
And obviously, the phases are there's
#
a revolutionary phrase where he is, you know, he's helping build bombs and they
#
want to get Bhagat Singh released or escape from jail and he's with the
#
revolutionaries and they call him the scientist because he's got that physics
#
degree or whatever, and later when they are all arrested and he's in jail,
#
he's defending himself, he's learning the law and defending himself.
#
And I found, you know, you've reproduced some of those arguments.
#
My God, he's a great man, he's in his early 20s.
#
Yeah, he's in his early 20s.
#
Everyone is saying later on, you know,
#
there's this whole interaction with this lawyer who had walked away with the money.
#
And so he's saying, you know, against the culprit,
#
he's telling all other accused that this, you know, the defense fund he has run away
#
with and then such good defense.
#
My God, if you look at those records,
#
the way British officials are saying, you know, this Vatsana is a real guy.
#
He is feeding everyone.
#
He is the man behind this.
#
And then on few days when he's in action,
#
these are very detailed daily reports running into some thousand pages.
#
I mean, people just have to read the book for themselves to see these.
#
And so to get back to the so this is one phase where he's a revolutionary and he's
#
doing this stuff and then there's another phase where he's
#
causing a churning in Hindi literature and then there's another phase where he's
#
kind of joining the army and doing whatever he does and then so on.
#
And in all these phases, I think the two things that seem to be common are that one,
#
there is a bias for action.
#
He is jumping in there and he's doing shit.
#
You know, he's stirring the pot, right?
#
He's throwing himself in there.
#
And number two, he is the outsider in all of these locales.
#
He doesn't really belong to any of these.
#
He's not a revolutionary like, you know,
#
Bhagat Singh, Jamrishikha Raja, the way we understand, he's not a classic Hindi guy
#
because he's got this international experience and he critiques all of them so
#
viciously, nor is he, of course, a typical army guy when he ends up joining the army.
#
So it's interesting that A, like initially, when I think of him as a teenager
#
getting drawn into a revolutionary action, it's like, you know, when we are kids,
#
we are rebels without a cause, right?
#
I remember the anger I felt at nothing at all.
#
But the jeans are torn.
#
You are listening to your alternative rock.
#
You know, we are at a pause.
#
And that's exactly what he kind of is.
#
And this is a convenient cause.
#
And he's jumping into it.
#
But always, wherever it is, he's doing shit.
#
You know, like earlier we discussed that some of us overthink it and we hold back
#
and some of us are just plunging into life and he's kind of doing that.
#
So what do you think about all of this,
#
you know, it seems that
#
he is shaped by all these circumstances,
#
but you put him in a different set of circumstances of 17th century Spain.
#
He could be living a completely different life,
#
but he'll be thrusting himself into things.
#
And yet I wonder what is the center of him,
#
because he is an outsider in all of this.
#
Where could he be an outsider?
#
That's what actually, yeah, it's a very interesting point that you're making.
#
And it's a very, very important point about he remains outsider.
#
You know, one of the last letters that he's writing to someone
#
where he says, you know, now no one reviews my books even, right?
#
I remain an outsider throughout.
#
You know, nobody, they never treated me as one of their own.
#
You know, yet he's so much central to the entire Hindi,
#
the 50 years of the Hindi literature that we're talking about,
#
at least 40s to 70s, you know, 30, 35 years.
#
Yes, like he played such a big role in shaping it, shaping it.
#
And that allows him in a way that, you know,
#
not belonging his cosmopolitan background, his upbringing, everything that some people
#
say that, oh, he had the money to, he could afford all this because he had
#
women who took care of him.
#
I said, well, there are many men who were taken care of by women.
#
And it happens all the time.
#
But that doesn't save you, right?
#
That doesn't explain you why he could have very well stayed with one of these women.
#
He's moving on. He's doing things.
#
For instance, this whole thing that we talked about, you know, being a revolutionary,
#
again, not being a revolutionary the way we understand revolutionaries or the way
#
we read about them, he's very different.
#
In the 40s, when he joins the army and there is a whole long conversation
#
with his lover, then Kripa is saying that and he is unpredictable.
#
Also, when he's saying him only fools go to army, right?
#
Will you take orders from these officers?
#
And he says, yeah, I'll do it.
#
And that's at that point.
#
See, that's also, I guess, changing views about things again.
#
That point says, well, it's not enough that we are against fascism, right?
#
Fascism is a bigger this thing.
#
So the entire Noble Nadiq-e-Duwib is actually, I guess, in a way,
#
explaining why he joined the army, because he this was a big burden.
#
Everyone said, look at this guy.
#
He joined the British army.
#
He does that in a very different way.
#
And if you read Sydney Bolt's account of who was with him and Tariq Ali's father,
#
Mazhar Ali Khan, he's also part of that.
#
They're all working together in the Northeast.
#
British guys are a little, they keep an extra eye on Agha because they think he
#
was a revolutionary and he had joined.
#
So it's not as simple that he had made some kind of a compromise.
#
He had some deal with them.
#
No, because the same Agha in 70s, when he is talking to the Duke University,
#
people say something which is completely contradicts himself.
#
He said, it's not a writer's job to bring revolution.
#
Oh, so someone said, you pointed, you said you once would join the army and once
#
who writers would not only write, but should be in action.
#
So this whole unpredictability of again is so he is anarchist.
#
He is doing these things.
#
And he says, no, it's not.
#
If by my writing, someone gets influenced and does something.
#
So he remains an outsider, people and not able to figure him out.
#
So that Premchand name that he gave Premchand again, name that gave Premchand.
#
It's kind of he remain unknowable in many ways.
#
So many things about him, you know.
#
This is the next slide I want to pursue.
#
The should literature be political?
#
And as you pointed out, Agha came to believe that no, it should not.
#
And again, quote from you where you write,
#
Agha chose to carve his own path, referring to call himself an anarchist.
#
As a writer, he said his refusal to commit himself to a political cause was
#
a political act. It was not the job of writers to usher in social change, he argued.
#
Writers could only enlarge or deepen human sensibility,
#
which perhaps in time could lead to social change.
#
Literature might illuminate the human condition, he argued,
#
but could not set out to correct it.
#
This stance drove a wedge between Agha and writers affiliated with the progressive
#
writers group at a time when Marxism was a dominant ideology among writers.
#
Agha was one of the Hindi literary world's first free thinkers.
#
Stop code. And this also reminds me of something that Milan Kundera must have
#
written around the same time or a little later in this memorable essay about how
#
if literature is political, then it is not literature, right?
#
Which I have a great deal of sympathy for that.
#
I think, like, obviously, your literature is set in the real world.
#
It's illuminating the human condition.
#
In the background, there will be a political circumstance and so on.
#
But the moment you bring it to the forefront,
#
the moment you get didactic about it, it becomes propaganda, not art.
#
So what is and you've later at another point spoken about how you've written.
#
And this is a beautiful summation,
#
which is, in fact, from your introduction, where you write,
#
the only political ideology Agha came close to pledging allegiance to was
#
M.N. Roy's radical humanism, which strove to enshrine the principles
#
of science and individual freedom.
#
Yet he never formally joined Roy's radical democratic party.
#
Agha did, however, remain a lifelong
#
votary of democracy in politics and liberal liberality in literature.
#
In this, he was consistent.
#
So expand a little bit on this, because this, again, in another sense,
#
he's a bit of an outsider and he would be today as well.
#
Yeah, see, look, he this whole thing that I write about,
#
about liberal liberalism in literature.
#
First book that he writes.
#
There is a move to get the book banned.
#
Then when Tar Saptak comes in the mid 40s,
#
again, Hindi Sahit Samil and of Uttar Pradesh says that, no, it has to ban.
#
And Purushottam Das Tandon actually says, no, you cannot ban a book and all that.
#
And at all points, even when authors,
#
writers were completely ideologically,
#
diametrically opposed to his views, you find if they're under attack,
#
Agha is there to defend.
#
When the Boris Pastanath thing happens,
#
he is, I think that time he had a column in Times of India.
#
And just look at the amount of writing he's doing on that.
#
He's trying to get authors together.
#
Even the left writers, some of the left writers, for instance,
#
Malyaj, Malyaj is constantly attacking him.
#
Malyaj is a bright young writer who dies early
#
and Agha tries to help getting his papers out.
#
He says all his things should be.
#
So the well-being of the author,
#
the every writer should be allowed to just say his things that runs constantly
#
throughout, you know, if the first commune that he sets up in the 40s
#
after the war, when Prithik comes from Allahabad.
#
Just look at the they're completely
#
ideologically opposed to people, Nemi Chandjain, whom he later blamed actually
#
for destroying Prithik, Nemi Chandjain, Bharat Bhushan Agrawal, both leftists.
#
Then, of course, there is Sripad Raya is there.
#
And he creates a commune with completely different point of view.
#
In fact, Krishna Sopthi, Krishna Sopthi told me a fascinating account
#
first story that he publishes in Prithik, her story got published.
#
And she thought he's never going to publish it.
#
Someone comes and tells her that your story has been accepted.
#
So she goes and meets him in Karnat place.
#
And he says, he said, you know, I thought my Hindi is very
#
there's a lot of Punjabi in it.
#
You know, I know whether you will like it, but it's your language.
#
She thought it will be edited heavily.
#
He said, but it's your language, it's your this thing.
#
Why will I ask it to be changed?
#
So that he remains a lifelong bottle.
#
Even, you know, this there is a I mentioned it.
#
One of the first the progressive writers were always angry with him and they fought.
#
But when the first meeting of writers
#
against fascism, where he calls people across left, right, center,
#
everyone was done by others in Delhi, where he gets everyone.
#
There's a large account with Prabhakar Machhwe wrote about that meeting.
#
So he never at any point just to set the score also says that, OK,
#
this should not happen to this person or that person.
#
Even when he's inside the academy and a lot of things come to him,
#
what authors who he doesn't think very high off as as as writers.
#
But he says, OK, they need help to help them.
#
You know, so that thing remains even in writing.
#
He never tells anyone that you're not free to write this.
#
And some of this, if you see even in the magazines that he edited,
#
you find people who kind of writing things, which he was kind of
#
he wouldn't have written or many editors wouldn't have allowed, for instance,
#
in Nehapratik, various things, he does that.
#
So that that remains a constant theme in his that let people have their own voice.
#
And then democracy is supreme.
#
Everyone has the freedom and he takes on
#
In those days, that was politics as personal as it is today.
#
And you can see that, you know, his
#
I mean, I have seen, you know, I'm in the archive, for instance,
#
Talking to Golwalkar 1948, the October 1948, Gandhi has been assassinated in January
#
and Golwalkar is writing to Nehru saying, I have to meet you in Delhi.
#
He's saying, OK, you can meet me in office.
#
The civility with even your worst political adversary
#
was there, and that was true.
#
I don't know what is happening with how much authors correspond with each other.
#
But even among writers, I'm talking about the Hindi world.
#
Some of the very, very bitter
#
issues on which they were, but there was so much civility.
#
For instance, again, there's a long thing of one another writer who
#
But throughout, there is so much civility, even when again, writes so much
#
again, Nirala, and then he writes later that he had never met Nirala
#
Later, he meets and there is a whole encounter that Agar writes.
#
By then, everyone had known that there is some guy in 20s who has attacked
#
Nirala and said he is finished, he is dead as a poet.
#
And then when he meets, Nirala looks at him and says, you are Agar.
#
And then everything kind of.
#
So there was a general civility in conversation around that time,
#
among politicians, among writers, even, you know, for instance,
#
Agar had a habit of getting into fights with a lot of people.
#
His fight with Dharambir Bharti.
#
Dharambir Bharti was in a way he made Dharambir Bharti in early years.
#
But then Agar later on didn't get along.
#
You see the civility which is happening, even with the fighting with each other.
#
You can see this bitterness, but the civility, it was not so bad as it is now.
#
Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing is that despite differences of opinion
#
and differences of politics, you could be very close to people.
#
Yeah. But at the same time, he's really fighting with everybody.
#
Yeah, he is fighting with everybody.
#
Yeah, he is fighting with the owner of his magazine, Bisal Bharat, you know, Ramanan Chandrasekhar.
#
So I want to talk about another aspect.
#
And this is an aspect I think about a lot and I don't know what to make of it.
#
And I don't know whether one can get away from it, which is that you what you point
#
out throughout the book in various different places and we see it playing out
#
is how in different ways, sometimes it seemed that people were instrumental to
#
Agar, that he saw them as a means to an end.
#
For example, when his mother dies, you write, quote,
#
at the end of June, Vyanti quietly passed away in Dalhousie.
#
So peripheral was she to the affairs of her husband and son that Hirananda never
#
mentioned her illness to Jainendra in a letter from this time.
#
Agar seemed to treat her death almost transactionally.
#
And now his words, when mother was around,
#
it was possible to have some independence, even if I had to snatch it.
#
Stop quote, which he wrote in a letter to Jainendra later, you know,
#
with his relationships with women and maybe we can talk about some of that.
#
At one point you write, quote,
#
emotionally involved with a cousin, married twice and involved with his third
#
long term partner, Agar was careful about wiping away traces
#
of any other romantic liaisons, though they likely existed.
#
But finding Kripa's letters illuminated some of this side of Agar.
#
His relationships with women, each of them talented in their own right,
#
tended to be extractive, whether financially or for creative gain.
#
Stop quote. Elsewhere, you spoke about how almost
#
all the women he was in love with ended up being miserable, successful women.
#
Either he left them or, you know, they left him.
#
But the two of them, you point out Kripa Sen and Kapila Vatsah and Kunt
#
And then you write this beautiful line.
#
It was as if he was in search of something elusive.
#
And finally, there is this also which I found really interesting.
#
This passage where you write, both love and marriage were over.
#
In the following years, Agar developed various series about men and women.
#
Men, he argued, were biologically polygamous.
#
And now his words, therefore, I would like to be loved by a woman who has
#
multiple personalities and different aspects of it are evident on different occasions.
#
Thus, despite being one, she can take care of man's polygamous self.
#
And then he talks of the different roles or qualities women should aspire to,
#
motherhood, friend, intellectually partner.
#
And I read this and I think that, like, oh, my God, like, number one,
#
I think that this almost feels sociopathic that you are, you know,
#
you are going against Kant's dictum that you treat every person as an end
#
in themselves and not as a means to an end.
#
And at the same time, I think that this is, in a sense, is all of us.
#
And we have to remind ourselves to actually
#
realize that there is another person in front of me and it is not some someone
#
there for our instrumental uses and all of that.
#
So how do you look at all of this?
#
Because, you know, you've described all of this with a very clear eye.
#
You can see this in Agar, but.
#
You know, is this something that you've
#
thought about in general with regard to all of us is something we need to watch out for?
#
Because, you know, you see it,
#
you know, all of us have a circle and friends and relatives and you see
#
marriages, closely of friends, you see your own marriage,
#
you see your own relationships and what Agar was doing,
#
his private papers and what and how miserable these women were in a way
#
opens many things, you know, for your own story.
#
You also start thinking, oh dear, how different am I?
#
You know, when you read some of these
#
letters that these women are writing or the struggle I had to go through to
#
convince Kapilavath Singh to talk, which he never did.
#
And I still remember I was going over to the US in early 2020 and I said, listen,
#
and she was very kind to me because I had written on culture.
#
So I had known her, she'll indulge me, call me for coffee, everything.
#
And then she'll hear my story and then say, I'm not talking.
#
And also, like a good journalist, I didn't I didn't give up.
#
So I have been pastoring a 2017 onwards.
#
And then 2020 said, Akshay, you don't understand love.
#
It doesn't end with a man walking out of the house.
#
And I felt really, really miserable that day, you know,
#
because I realized I shouldn't have done it.
#
And I and I completely give.
#
Unfortunately, she passed away in 2020.
#
And then I realized how much pain and how much love he got.
#
And I started talking to some of these women who had known him intimately.
#
Ela was gone and Ela too was miserable in that relationship.
#
It was not a marriage because the divorce never happened.
#
And if you see one of the letters I quote of in 1986,
#
where she's saying, I'll do whatever you tell me.
#
If you want me to keep my mouth shut, I'll do it.
#
What is it about this man?
#
And I remember asking to one of the ladies who comes from a big influential family
#
in Calcutta, and I was talking to her, she knew I guess he was very young.
#
I want to know from one of the women.
#
One Delhi University professor who knew him very well,
#
she said, look, for the time he was with you.
#
You just expected all man to behave, to treat you the way he treated.
#
And all of them, all of them, mind you, all of them knew his track record.
#
All of them knew how kind of, you know, there are various lurid stories
#
about Agne in the Delhi Literary Circle and all that is kind of completely
#
actually, then you see it closely, you realize he's doing this to others also,
#
What happened with the relationship with Jain Indra?
#
Banarasi Das Chaturvedi, Nemi Chandjayan,
#
but I'm telling some of the people with me fought and kind of got completely
#
there, Dharmbir Bharti later.
#
Even Ramanand Chatterjee, anyway, he was owner of a paper.
#
The interaction was very, for a few, few letters here and there.
#
I don't know what he was in search of.
#
social psychologist and he said, listen, Akshay, you're writing a biography.
#
Don't psychoanalyze him.
#
Leave it to your readers.
#
You give whatever you have and you just leave it.
#
I have still a lot of people have their own theory about it.
#
Someone said that, oh, because he was constantly looking for a mother figure
#
because his bad relations with mother and mother was like,
#
rarely you find this kind of problematic relations with mother,
#
his relations with mothers.
#
So he's very close to his cousin, which also kind of emotional and all that.
#
And with all women, some people said, oh,
#
look, finally, he started getting along with younger women, women who are of his
#
And I don't know all that theory.
#
But yeah, he comes across.
#
But he's also fiercely ambitious.
#
If you look closely and that he is on a path,
#
he's on a path and there he doesn't kind of people can.
#
And there is this side of him which is,
#
I don't know, I don't want to call it problematic,
#
but there is a side to a guy
#
with relationships he he he doesn't.
#
And look at the last life,
#
you know, phase of his life surrounded by completely I don't want to name them,
#
but they are not the kind of people he was hanging out with or kind of hobnobbing with.
#
different parts of the work where women are writing to him or talking about him.
#
And at one point, you speak about how after he dies,
#
Ela Dalmia, calls Kapila to the thing and they're together.
#
And Ela recites his poems, Akeli Na Jaav Radhe Jabuna Ki Teer and does it as a bhajan.
#
And it strikes me that and I wonder and you've seen all his papers, so you would know
#
that was he blind to this?
#
Like, did he ever take that step back and self reflect and think about what they
#
saw in him, like just to begin with the fact that like Ela was 33 years younger
#
than, you know, Kapila was some 17, 18 years younger than him, right.
#
And I'm just thinking that just that should give any reasonable man pause.
#
That why is she into this?
#
What can I do? How is she looking at me to have that?
#
And especially if you're a writer,
#
because writers are supposed to be able to get inside other people's heads,
#
to be empathetic, to be able to live their lives.
#
Did you have a sense he did that?
#
You know, was it really a Jekyll and Hyde that sometimes he does that
#
and he's a good person, but sometimes he reverts?
#
I think with relations, at least two relationships, we don't have much of what
#
happened because he and Ela were mostly together.
#
But with these two relationships, Santosh and Kapila.
#
So many letters of Kapila there.
#
And I think at some point and even with Santosh, imagine within a week of marriage,
#
he sees that the wedding ring is being his cousin is wearing the wedding ring.
#
Any woman would be devastated in a relationship, right?
#
He's completely unmindful.
#
There is something happens that the other person becomes invisible to him after a while.
#
He's not. Same thing happens with for Kapila.
#
He takes such a big step.
#
Imagine marrying your first wife's niece,
#
who wrote to you later saying, dear Mosa.
#
So it's like imagine scandal of the fifties.
#
They had to move to, you know, Allahabad, where all the beer,
#
I think one Chintamani's son helped him get house.
#
And then how early do you get off that marriage?
#
Look at the congratulations which are pouring in for that marriage from all over India.
#
And then he's completely off in no time.
#
She is the one you find.
#
And she's mind you, she was a big dancer.
#
She was coming up as a big dancer.
#
These are all the impression I get is these are all solid women.
#
These are strong women.
#
She goes to Michigan on a big scholarship.
#
She's come back. She's doing PhD.
#
And her mother ran one of the, you know, in a house in Calcutta, later in Delhi,
#
in a house because Hindi writers, politicians, you know, Kapila Vatsen,
#
there's a piece that she wrote, the picture of a young girl wearing frock.
#
And she writes on Charlie Andrews and a piece called My Uncle Charlie.
#
You know, so she comes from that kind of family.
#
And family is kind of says that don't do this.
#
I don't marry this too much of scandal.
#
You know, you're marrying your mausa.
#
And this man takes that step and just leaves that woman behind.
#
Her entire life is, if you look at her
#
foreign trips of Kapila Vatsen, which she's making as a government official,
#
she's only looking for things for him.
#
He's sending him newspapers from India when he's in Berkeley.
#
Second round, when he goes, he's having an affair.
#
And from there, he writes that I'm returning, but I'm not returning home.
#
And he goes and stays with Sri Patrai.
#
I don't know, there's other side to it.
#
And his letters, his separation letters, almost template, you know,
#
the letter that he writes to Santosh when he kind of marries is getting over
#
or with Kripa and Kapila.
#
You know, this is so he's not very creative there.
#
So even Santosh, what struck me was that
#
she was his friend Balraj Sahni's crush and he said that, you know,
#
find out what she thinks about me and blah, blah, blah.
#
And he ends up marrying her.
#
And later she hooks up with Balraj after the marriage is over.
#
And I'm like, what's going on?
#
That was like, well, that generation was very, very
#
And again, it's like, and later they became friends.
#
Mind you, every time he's in Bombay, he has some event happening.
#
Some, you know, he's going for a talk.
#
If you see him writing to organizer, who are the people to be invited?
#
Balraj Sahni, Santosh, this, that, Chetan Anand, Dev Anand, all his old friends.
#
So, in fact, as someone said later,
#
you know, pointed out that scandalous letter wrote to a guy saying that, oh,
#
Balraj Sahni and Santosh spend time in hotels together.
#
And he gets very furious at what kind of a rumor is being spread.
#
yeah, when it comes to women, it's very difficult.
#
I have I'm left, I've asked many women readers, when my friends
#
tell me what they figure out, what they make on.
#
So most of them are very angry.
#
What kind of a man is he? This, that, I said, yeah, deep money.
#
Forget that one, of course.
#
But what do you make of it? Where is it coming from?
#
So like, I think maybe the question to ask them is that are all men like this?
#
No, they say that. Yeah, you're right.
#
You're right. Yeah, very interesting.
#
Someone said that, oh, look, when your biography will get written,
#
no, there'll be no material left, of course.
#
But you all you guys are saying, yeah, that also has come.
#
That's true. Yeah, without fail.
#
Let's not kind of glorify ourselves as being any different.
#
Only the two women told me he made, you know, this instance, it gave me a Frankfurt
#
86 book fair, she said, I stepped out of my room and I was going and saw him in the lobby.
#
And since he asked, where are you going?
#
I have some meeting, said, let's have coffee and then you go.
#
So it's nine thirty, nine or something.
#
So by the time I realized it's two thirty.
#
I said, what was he talking?
#
He said, you have no idea.
#
I was his professor, physics professor, Professor Bernard's granddaughter.
#
I was interacting with her on mail,
#
and she said, you know, once when he visited Chicago,
#
all of them are summoned to come and listen to him.
#
She said, you know, I have it's like it
#
happened only yesterday, said I was a schoolgirl.
#
There's something about someone else I
#
know in Delhi, she said she met him in their house in Calcutta when she was nine,
#
said his memories as there was something about this man.
#
And and all these women destroyed themselves.
#
Kapila, well, of course, he became a big scholar.
#
She was one of the scholars in aesthetics and this, but she gave up so much.
#
She suffered so much, you know,
#
see, and imagine both of them being united in grief when he dies, see Anila.
#
And he was a bloody good looking man.
#
Very good looking, that's what every woman who knew, my God,
#
even someone who saw him as nine years old,
#
her memory of him is of a super handsome man.
#
Like, how can you resist a stud on me?
#
I mean, I was flowing in Kurta pajama and yeah, this was another level.
#
I'm talking about the younger pictures.
#
Yeah, look at younger pictures.
#
40s, 50s, you know, Shashma, clean shaven face, square face, total.
#
Let's now, you know, kind of move from the personal and talk about the enormous
#
impact he made on Hindi literature and I'll sort of quote the way you summed up
#
the overall impact in the introduction where you write, quote, those steeped in
#
the dominant Chhayawardh romantic style and as deeply influenced by Tagore as he
#
was by European Romanticism, Agya pushed experimentation in poetry
#
using a language that was itself in flux.
#
The seminal Tar Saptak, Tar Saptak anthology series, which he edited,
#
marked a departure from Chhayawardh, first for Prayogwad or experimentalist writing
#
and then eventually Naikavita New Poetry.
#
And his critique of Chhayawardh itself is really interesting, given that, you know,
#
it started by being, he was influenced by Jaswinka Prasad and Madhuri Varma.
#
Surveying the field, Agya noticed that since Rabindranath Tagore was translated
#
into Hindi, there had been a tidal wave of Chhayawardh poetry.
#
He used a term interchangeably with Rahasyava, the related intertwined strand,
#
distinguished in later scholarship as having an emphasis on mysticism.
#
Agya thought the classic Sanskrit scholars fear of Chhayawardh irrational.
#
The threat, he said, was from what passed as Chhayawardh poetry,
#
a celebration of, these are his words,
#
a celebration of mental incontinence born out of special psychosis.
#
His words and barely past 20 years himself, Agya argued that this type of incontinence
#
was symptomatic of adolescence, but found a permanent home in those whose inner self
#
was distorted due to some mental or sexual issue.
#
and there is, of course, that classic essay which you spoke about,
#
which he writes, in fact, what he, you know, on Nirala, you mentioned here,
#
it was for Nirala that he reserved his verse, dismissing him in a few lines
#
as an example of the pitfalls of being an atheist.
#
And now these are his words, Agya's words.
#
His is another case of artistic ability
#
gone astray due to overweening self-esteem or due to overweening self-esteem,
#
of poetry sacrificed to a more or less deliberate attempt at originality.
#
And, you know, later in the essay, in the second part of the essay,
#
he talks about the different poetic threads in Hindi,
#
which he classifies as mystics, pagans, fatalists.
#
So perspective, he's like 26 when he wrote this, I think.
#
tell me what's happening here, because what is happening is that
#
there is a dominant strain and this young man is coming in and he's doing two things.
#
And one is he's shitting on all of them in a really crisp, precise language,
#
And two, which is as impressive, is not more impressive,
#
is that he's producing original work that goes beyond and shows a way forward.
#
Just tell me a little bit.
#
See, when he wrote this essay, that was one of the big criticism of Agya,
#
You know, what has he produced?
#
Because Sekhar is yet to come.
#
People have, Premchand's, that interview has happened,
#
which has been carried, saying that
#
someone asked him that who are the future generation, who are the
#
next generation of Hindi writers, and he takes Agya's name also.
#
People know that Premchand has kind of certified him,
#
his stories have appeared, Premchand has published.
#
But well, one collection has come from jail,
#
mostly his unknown commodity.
#
his engagement with literature,
#
even when, if you see, even when he's an intermediate,
#
some of the notes, the diaries of that he's writing, odd pages here and there,
#
where he is constantly questioning what is happening in art,
#
what is happening in literature,
#
So in, by mid thirties,
#
he had, he has, his early poems have come,
#
his, like the one poem that I mentioned,
#
Pooch loon kya naam tera, and there are many, if you see that, that's like full
#
chayawag, early poems, his, his moving on.
#
But he's probably only right of that generation,
#
which who's thinking about these questions,
#
who's thinking even, he's even not so
#
so openly, but he's even questioning whether everything that Premchand is
#
writing, whether that can be critiqued or not.
#
You know, so he's thinking on the larger question of language,
#
how ideological writing should be
#
and his, in a way, it's a period of churning.
#
Hindi is going through this,
#
that phase, because that's also a phase when Premchand has died in the early thirties.
#
So it's a kind of, and Agya is there, very young,
#
they're all, of course, the big guns are there still,
#
sorry, Nirala and Jaisankar Prasad and Mahadevi Verma.
#
And these questions are actually, you know,
#
it's like he's a cat among the peasants.
#
He's like, then people start saying that, number one, they start questioning him.
#
Some people agree also, if you see, say someone like Dinkar writes to someone
#
when he becomes editor of Visal Bharat, he says, oh, now I'll write a lot for Visal Bharat.
#
He comes as an unknown commodity.
#
Dinkar is maybe known more than Agya at that point.
#
But then he says, Makhal Lal Chaturvedi says, no, I'll not write.
#
Because he's an old generation and they say he's too much a young guy.
#
And I can't bring myself to asking him to,
#
you know, whether my piece will be published or not.
#
So that's what's happening.
#
He's constantly questioning the existing
#
Hindi establishment, and he continues to do that.
#
He's become very vocal about this Progressive Writers' Association.
#
I said, how can ideology decide everything?
#
When Siddhant Singh Chauhan attacks his,
#
who is a big Marxist critic, attacks his Sekhar-e-Jivni.
#
And he does it very smartly or, you know, or you can say his,
#
he deliberately reviews Premchand's Godan and Sekhar-e-Jivni together.
#
He says, look at the two worlds, these two writers.
#
Premchand thinks about the society.
#
This man is only thinking of the inner life, individuals.
#
Society doesn't matter and this, that.
#
But that book becomes, anyway, a huge success.
#
So he is constantly challenging the existing narrative, continues to do that.
#
Later on, these fights become ugly.
#
At times, there is a case of overreach also when he talks about himself
#
in third person when the Sahyat Akademi, history of literature.
#
Until late, actually, when Ashok Bajpi attacks him,
#
Why did the old eagle spread the wings of the old eagle?
#
Why did the old eagle stretch its wings?
#
Before that, if you find, again, is not so touchy, he becomes very sensitive.
#
This is 60s when he and then his,
#
the larger issues that he raises about the literature in the 40s, 50s, 60s,
#
that takes in, that's like stripped in bitterness in the 60s, 70s,
#
which is not happening, which was early phase.
#
Even if he was attacking, even if he was
#
being, even if he had the, you know, restlessness of his youth,
#
so in those writings, he was still making very serious points.
#
Later on, it's like picking up personal
#
battles, sowing some people down, running for credit.
#
You know, all those things are happening,
#
but he was probably the only writer of that generation who was constantly
#
engaging with this till last.
#
So about that, you know, he's getting touchy.
#
And I just wonder if the reason he got touchy in his later years,
#
but wasn't touchy at all in his younger years, is that in his younger years,
#
it was always this thing that life is a work in progress.
#
I'm going to do things. I'm going to win battles.
#
But in his later years, perhaps he realizes that jo karna tha ho gaya hai.
#
And therefore, you know, it's legacy which is left.
#
And therefore, when you are attacked, you get touchy.
#
Do you think that's part of it?
#
Could be that also, but partly also that
#
he had by 70s, if you see the time when he gets late 70s, mid 70s.
#
Mid 70s is also, I mean, he's been combative all his life,
#
but then he is getting very, you know,
#
there is an element of settling scores.
#
For instance, he launches a journal called Nya Pratik,
#
which starts just before emergency, continues even during emergency
#
There he will take on someone like Ashok Bajpayee.
#
Ashok Bajpayee was by then heading, he was in Bharat Bhavan.
#
And so there was a page where all these kind of attacks will happen.
#
So through a limerick or through a small writer, he'll say, you know,
#
Bhopal mein toh, all kinds of cows are coming and grazing these days,
#
basically meaning the writers.
#
And there was a bit of history to that, of course, as I said, you know,
#
Mehfil, which came from Chicago, which Naim Saab had this journal with very,
#
very high-brow literary journal and the second issue was on Agya.
#
And this one had written the grandeur of Agya's poems, Ashok Bajpayee.
#
And less than and few years later, he wrote,
#
I think when his collection Kitni Nao Mein Kitni Baar came,
#
he wrote a very critical piece saying Budha Gidh Pank Kyon Phailaaye.
#
And Agya didn't speak to him for almost a decade.
#
And again, he was constantly taking it out on Ashok Bajpayee.
#
Similarly, he edited Din Maan.
#
He was the founding editor and one of his close, someone whom he nurtured,
#
whom he handheld, Ragvir Sahay became the editor.
#
Hill had this limerick basically saying that how Din Maan has now turned into a pamphlet.
#
You know, this is very different, Agya.
#
Partly also because these people had also become big writers in their own right.
#
Sarveshwarya Alsak Sena, Dharambir Bharti.
#
And he's completely blown by Suraj Ka Saatma Ghoda.
#
You know, he teaches Suraj Ka Saatma Ghoda to students in Berkeley.
#
Dharambir Bharti doesn't like that translation.
#
It's a bad translation, but still National Book Trust published it.
#
That's it's available even now.
#
So even Sarveshwarya Alsak Sena, they are too respectful to him.
#
So they don't pick a fight.
#
They don't get into kind of arguments, but they withdraw themselves.
#
So this has been happening with.
#
So this is his touchy phase when his.
#
It took Ila Dalmia's intervention to, you know, bring Ashok Bajpayee and Agya together.
#
Agya will say when he'll call him to Bharat Bhavan for reading or anything,
#
he'll say, I don't go to Sarkari institutions.
#
You know, but finally he goes and he took Sarkari award also.
#
So, yeah, again, one of the contradictions of Agya, you know,
#
when he says things about Sahit Academy, when he gets, he forgets all his criticism
#
about Sahit Academy and then he takes it, which people pointed out also.
#
So except, you see, even the young writer like Mallyaj is taking him on,
#
he's getting criticized a lot at that phase by younger writers for saying things about him.
#
Part of it is also jealousy with his personal life.
#
His personal life is always a kind of a Hindi world is, you know,
#
the rest of the Hindi world is very different from Agya's world.
#
Agya is very cosmopolitan.
#
He has a different education.
#
He's studied in Madras.
#
He could have written in English.
#
So that always remains.
#
People will still remember in Delhi,
#
people will tell you about his churidars, about his various other skills.
#
You know, so he was a great sweet maker.
#
He was a great gardener.
#
He was a great carpenter, you know.
#
So these things are kind of enigma.
#
There's a kind of point of jealousy.
#
So Agya thought that, yeah, you know, this.
#
So he maintains when he writes to Rekha Jain,
#
that my outside life is led in complete silence or detachment.
#
So many people thought he was arrogant and they attacked him.
#
He used to call him a chuppa because he will make people will talk to him for
#
two hours and he'll not say a word.
#
Malayaj in his diary writes that what kind of a man he goes there with his
#
friend, Ramesh Chandrasekhar, who is a great, great follower of Agya.
#
And he says he comes and writes in his diary.
#
This is the five volumes of his diary where he writes,
#
oh, God, this guy is constantly talking to Agya and Agya is not saying anything
#
and he is trying to please him throughout, you know.
#
And these things, when they get written, Agya gets very touchy.
#
He's very touchy in that phase that, oh,
#
these younger writers are attacking me, this is happening.
#
So he'll sulk, he'll not go to your house.
#
You know, those things are happening a lot.
#
Once I mentioned that in the book,
#
there is some gathering, I think, in Nemi Chandran's house and Nirmal
#
Verma, who is very, very close to him, who is like both he and his brother,
#
Some conversation is happening and Nirmal Verma says, why does every
#
journey that you make has to go through someone else's house?
#
Reason being, why do you cite so many authors in your novel?
#
His novels are footnotes.
#
Why? And Agya doesn't like this being done in front of so many people.
#
But he is fond of Nirmal Verma and Nirmal Verma also maintains that.
#
But with Nirmal, it was a little different, but mostly he gets very upset.
#
Even that incident with Mohan Rakesh writes in his diary,
#
he doesn't like being told.
#
And this is again all happening in the 70s.
#
When the authors he had nurtured, some of them have become big.
#
Some of them have, you know,
#
Krishnbaldev Bede wrote a very lovely piece, actually, after his death,
#
when he thought throughout that how he was a arrogant man and he was very
#
different, and when finally he talks, he realizes, oh, he's a very different man.
#
And he wrote a very moving piece.
#
In fact, and mind you, these are authors,
#
all who got their break with Agya, you know, when he was editing Vaak,
#
which in this Krishnbaldev Bede's novel comes in English,
#
he himself translates and part of it gets published in Vaak.
#
Same with Nirmal Verma, Ragvir Sahay.
#
So maybe he expects some kind of that is a prophet, you know, prophet.
#
So that phase is also kind of is not a great phase of Agya's life.
#
We find most of those big artists, painters, musicians, they get into this.
#
I mean, that is a human condition,
#
because I think what also happens is and I see it, you know, in my own and
#
significant life is that when time passes, sometimes you don't realize how much
#
things have changed, you know, someone like there's that old saying
#
about how the days are long, but the years are short.
#
And a decade can just go by in a flash.
#
And you are not where you were.
#
And your relations are not where they were.
#
And you think you're somewhere and you're somewhere else.
#
And this is a man who at one point is a young Turk.
#
He's like he shakes up the establishment.
#
He's a rebel, changes everything.
#
then he becomes almost a mentoring figure, a guide to a new generation in so many different ways.
#
He creates a whole generation of writers, main two generations,
#
almost two, two and a half, three generations of writers.
#
And then when you get older, you find that, hey, no one's giving you respect.
#
And then possibly in ways that they themselves cannot understand,
#
they've been shaped by you.
#
You made it possible for them to be where they are and they don't respect you.
#
And I can imagine the anger.
#
But let's go back to the middle phase.
#
Tell me a little bit more about the way he built that ecosystem,
#
because he is not only someone who with that essay that he's writing when he's
#
26, that he's breaking everything apart, he's also building the new world.
#
He's building a new world.
#
He's doing it with journals.
#
I'll tell you, that's the phase.
#
He does two, three things.
#
Let's go back a little bit.
#
When he comes out of jail, the various options, doing law, doing this, doing that,
#
at one point he says, I prefer to go back to jail.
#
I don't like suddenly so many people, so many voices, so many opinions about me.
#
One of the things that he writes to his
#
father and he discusses with Janindra also is to set up a commune.
#
So that thing of the larger thing for the writers,
#
it's commune of writers that is talking about doesn't happen.
#
Various factors, it doesn't work out.
#
Then 40s after the war, he sets up a commune in Allahabad, starts Pratik.
#
Later on, he is ideology neutral in a way.
#
When this new group comes up in Allahabad,
#
he becomes, although he's not part of it, he, Parimal.
#
Parimal is a group which comes up and it has some of the people who really looked
#
up to him, Vidyan Sahi, Dharmid Bharti, Jagdish Gop, all these people.
#
He is instrumental in getting one of the biggest writers conference in Allahabad,
#
where from Karanth to Tarasankar Banerjee to all the big guns from Malayalam,
#
Kannada, all the languages come to Allahabad and they discuss larger issues of.
#
His constant thing is about,
#
you know, he's talking about copyright much before copyright issue becomes.
#
He is, in fact, called by parliamentary
#
committee also to depose and give his suggestions about copyright.
#
He's talking about royalty.
#
He's talking about how much can state intervene in matters of literature.
#
What happens when I give a talk on AIR?
#
Why does AIR take away my copyright?
#
Why shouldn't it be with me and Parimal and Parimal is something.
#
Parimal is attacking left. Parimal is attacking right.
#
So it's just a convenient thing for Agha. Agha mentors them.
#
Later on, as it happens, small town, everyone is moving away.
#
So Dharmid Bharti moves to Bombay.
#
Vidyan Sahi takes another path. He continues to teach in Allahabad.
#
But these are some of the brightest minds of the generation.
#
Agha mentors them completely.
#
Vaak becomes when he launches Vaak again, he gets, you know, Vaak,
#
one of the theory about the name Vaak is V is for Vaatsayan, A is for Mulk Raj Anand
#
and K is for Humayun Kabir.
#
So he sets a Vaak and he gets people like Richard Bartholomew.
#
These are the early, his early job, Richard Bartholomew.
#
He gets this famous Sri Lankan painter who writes the great pieces on Satish Gujral's
#
earliest interview in Vaak. The three issues, but
#
he's building institutions and he's restless.
#
when quest comes, although he doesn't write, some of his poems get,
#
I think one issue has his poems.
#
So he's reaching out to
#
across ideological, but then
#
I think, Vaak finishes.
#
Then he keeps some bit of it with even with early issues of Nyapratik,
#
but then later on, it's
#
it's a very different Agha, if, you know, post emergency or around
#
the mid 70s onwards, his life is also in turmoil.
#
His his kind of the marriage has got over.
#
It's not kind of he's in a new relationship.
#
There's a Jodhpur thing happens where he goes to teach.
#
It doesn't work out in Jodhpur University.
#
But that middle phase where he's building
#
institutions and his handholding and nurturing a whole generation of writers
#
and to be fair to him at one level, some of these young writers whom he
#
nurtured, whom he set and they always looked up to him.
#
They were also the first ones to attack him.
#
For instance, he looked, Vedians are exceptional teacher.
#
You know, if you talk to people, he was a brilliant mind.
#
And when there is an issue of Nyapratik comes on German literature,
#
where some of the German poems have been translated by Agha in Hindi,
#
he says, how the hell does this man translate from German?
#
Does he even know J of German?
#
You know, and Agha is very hurt.
#
He says, you don't understand the process of translation.
#
And you're attacking me.
#
Some one publisher sends that piece of Vedian Sahi to him.
#
And he's very hurt, look,
#
you could have told me directly, you are writing.
#
He wrote somewhere, attacking Agha.
#
Same with Dharamveer Bharti.
#
became Dharam Yuga editor.
#
Agha had suggested his name and remained there for long.
#
it became a turf war in times of the establishment of Dinman and
#
Dharam Yuga, and they started really writing nasty letters to each other.
#
That phase ends and he watches some of these people completely dizzy.
#
Maybe he expected them to be kind of, I don't know, loyal is the right word,
#
but some way to owe to him that whatever has happened,
#
the role that I played.
#
And then and then he's a very bitter man.
#
He's a very bitter man.
#
He surrounded himself with kind of very average writers and more yes men than
#
anything else, but that phase of over 10 years,
#
maybe I think almost 15, 20 years maybe is when he's building.
#
Even some of his interventions come to think of it on Sahitya Academy.
#
Sahitya Academy, you know, he's
#
he really, really argues the whole
#
kind of exchange between Nehru, him, Radhakrishnan about how states should
#
wither away, become invisible in running this institution.
#
So these are very deep thoughts that he's made.
#
And he's a very and he's opposed to very he's not taking even they make him part
#
of this committee or that committee.
#
He says, well, he remains part of one
#
Hindi committee and then he says, no, I'm out because this is not how it should work.
#
And if you look at, you know, lately, I was kind of recently someone said,
#
can you look at Sahitya Academy, how the awards are given?
#
And I realized that a large part of it is what again had suggested.
#
what is the need, that part, actually, that no one implements,
#
he said, there's no need every year to give award in every language.
#
There can be a year that nothing great came out in Hindi or Assamese.
#
What is this hurry? What is the need?
#
And this whole trying to keep that distance and he is very opposed to state.
#
States role in art, literature and even in Dinman,
#
one of the most celebrated issues on academies he brought out,
#
where he completely attacks academies.
#
They have become and all three of them,
#
Sangeet Natak, Sahitya Academy and Lalit Kala Academy.
#
But it's the state should just lay off.
#
So even in that phase, when he is no longer a person,
#
the institutions have come up, this is a new India.
#
So in the 40s, when India is still coming up, you know, it's a new India.
#
So he is contributing a lot about these academies, how this would shape up,
#
what should happen, who should be kept.
#
You know, the people who are close to
#
establishments shouldn't be there,
#
and this Asia conference, which he in great detail, he kind of interacts
#
with Nehru again on that Asian Writers Conference.
#
He carries report of what happened in other task and meetings,
#
where the constant, the running thread is that you are weakening institutions.
#
he is not hankering for Rajsabha seat.
#
He is not hankering to become Sahitya Academy chairman.
#
No, he from outside, it's also become his very
#
influential voice by then.
#
So he is making those interventions.
#
In the 40s, 50s, he tried to build
#
institutions, help institutions like Parimal and various such groups.
#
But later on, he is saying that whatever we have,
#
the state institutions should become more and more apolitical and away
#
from the state without any intervention.
#
So he is that way, one of the big institution builder.
#
When we were chatting earlier about,
#
how his essay comes out when he's 26, 27 and Premchand has just died then
#
and the whole scene changes and I kind of I thought of another ecosystem
#
that changed completely in a similar kind of way.
#
And I'm just thinking aloud here.
#
Listeners must forgive me if this doesn't feel rigorous.
#
But and that's the Indian political ecosystem in the 1910s where Gokhale dies.
#
And until that point, there is a particular strand of liberalism
#
that has taken over the Congress and it's your gradualist, incrementalist,
#
moderate leaders like Gokhale and, you know, Jinnah being one of them
#
until he completely changes direction.
#
And then Gandhi comes like a black spawn event.
#
And Gandhi is like nothing anyone has seen before.
#
And he changes the entire system.
#
And a whole generation of new leaders comes up under him.
#
But he they're not like him.
#
They are like they're different from what came before,
#
but they're not like him either entirely.
#
And of course, he's he's, you know,
#
he's assassinated before he has a chance to be forgotten and become bitter and all of that.
#
But in a sense, it seems feels like, you know, Premchand is a Gokhale here.
#
And all these other writers who come afterwards are your, you know,
#
Nehru Patel, Raj Gopalachari.
#
I'm being mischievous a little bit and I'm thinking aloud.
#
Agniya, although he had changed his opinion about Gandhi later.
#
that long interview gave to Agvir Sahay for all in a radio, that book.
#
It's a whole book of interviews with Agniya.
#
So he said, yeah, I change opinion because later on with the age,
#
I realized that if not for Gandhi, we wouldn't have carried so many disparate
#
views together and taken everyone along.
#
But in that phase in his 20s, he is very dismissive of Gandhi.
#
No, no, I know. I mean, not person to person, but the disruptive effect and the change in ecosystems.
#
He remained disruptive till the end.
#
He kept on questioning.
#
He didn't fall by this side or that side.
#
He kept surprising people with what he could do
#
with his writing, with his way he looked at institutions.
#
So, yes, he was, he was the tallest of the post Premchand.
#
Despite everything, he remains, you're the tallest writers.
#
Others, you find they're too busy chasing their own dreams, their own Rajsabha
#
seat, their this and that, and they become increasingly politicized.
#
Agvir retains that voice of independence.
#
He remains an independence voice.
#
He has his biases like all of us have, of course.
#
But he retains he and you cannot take him for granted that, OK, Agvir will come to my aid.
#
You know, I will not name the author, he is alive very much.
#
I don't want to kind of create sensation here.
#
He writes one hundred page English novel and he is one of the closest to him.
#
He's a Hindi writer, teaches English in a college, sends a manuscript to Agvir
#
Please do something. And mostly it's done so that Agvir can just call up
#
some publisher and get the book published.
#
Agvir looks at it, he's kind of, you can see that many letters are responding
#
to this request and finally said, look, I suffered, I really had a tough time
#
reading those hundred pages, it's not worth it.
#
So nobody could and this man is like very shocked that I thought, you know,
#
I look up to him as my mentor.
#
So he was highly unpredictable.
#
And it actually helped many people in the past who wrote to him like that, send the money,
#
So he just tells this person that, look, this can't be published.
#
So, yeah, so he became that kind of independent voice and left.
#
Now I find, in fact, even with left, look at the irony.
#
Throughout, he gets relentlessly attacked by left.
#
Siddhanth Singh Chauhan, Namwar Singh,
#
there is a letter of Namwar Singh to Siddhanth Singh Chauhan before Nadi Ke Dweep comes
#
in 1952, that the book is coming, let's prepare ourselves.
#
Ek haat se kaam nahi chalega, do do haat chahi.
#
So imagine that kind of thing you are living with.
#
So if it makes him bitter, angry,
#
well, I can understand where it's coming from.
#
His anger about left, about Marxism,
#
communist, my God, he's scathing.
#
He says, that's a good thought Marx had.
#
It helped understand history and all.
#
It can't be ideology of our times.
#
And this, you know, and same Namwar Singh,
#
in 2011 on his centenary, edits a volume of Agaz poems
#
and calls his long quote poem, Samraagika Naivedya Daan.
#
That's the, no, there is another big quote poem.
#
And he said, this is among the three best poems of the 20th century Hindi literature.
#
He saw it change and he's the, and these people were really personal.
#
I can, you can see the bitterness coming from these people never kind of,
#
they were they were at it and mostly it will get personal.
#
They were attacking for his writing, literature, that is fine.
#
But they were also attacking him personally.
#
And that's something he, you know, for how long can you take it?
#
So it's coming out, Agya also is very bitter about these people.
#
But left changed its opinion.
#
Now, so many, I know this leftist writers,
#
Hindi writers who say, yeah, yeah, it's very unfair to him and all that.
#
And this whole artificial
#
kind of artificial thing was created between Agya and Mukti Bode.
#
They themselves were interacting very politely.
#
They were very civil to each other.
#
You've pointed out what good friends they were, yeah.
#
And this is post, Mukti Bode's fame comes after his death.
#
And Agya never understood.
#
There were two different poems, poets.
#
Their writing or their sensibilities are different.
#
Their background is different.
#
Their ideological and education is different.
#
Yet a kind of artificial battle was created.
#
And again, never like this. Why?
#
Why are you doing this?
#
So it's interesting, I thought like, you know, attacks from the left and the right
#
coordinated on WhatsApp, carried out on Twitter.
#
And I've been subjected to them from both sides.
#
And I thought it's a modern thing.
#
Abhi technology aaga, no, no, no, no, but what you're saying, no, no, it's not a modern thing.
#
So, for instance, Sekharik Jivani, both,
#
you know, the left and right were upset about it because right thought is,
#
how can they be incest, right?
#
Left is angry because Stalin on Lenin
#
was depicted in a way, poor light.
#
So both of them are holding meetings against the book.
#
So it's a rare thing, you know, rare achievement to annoy both sides, you know.
#
You've done something, right?
#
Yeah, you've done something right.
#
So, you know, I've taken up a lot of your time and we are, you know,
#
coming to the last leg of this recording and one shortcoming that I faced in
#
preparing for this is that typically if I if you're going to talk about a person,
#
I read everything that person has written.
#
But in Agnya's case, Hindi and, you know, my Hindi is good,
#
but I don't have a Hindi reading habit and I need to revive that.
#
And I'm sure many of my listeners are
#
kind of in the same boat where they understand it, but can't read.
#
So I'm going to ask you to, you know, read,
#
perhaps read some of Agnya's work, which is which is personal to you,
#
which is valuable to you, which sheds some light on his journey, perhaps whatever
#
you feel like. OK, there are two poems that I'll read.
#
One is kind of I mean, I kind of read it whenever it has a very and maybe you'll
#
also relate to it. This is about father.
#
And this is a poem called Chini Chai Pite Huye.
#
Chai pite huye mai apne pita ke baare me soch raha hu.
#
Aapne kabhi chai pite huye pita ke baare me socha hai?
#
Achchi baat nahi hai pitaon ke baare me sochna.
#
Apni kalai khul jaati hai.
#
Hum kuch dusre ho sakte the, par soch ki kathina hiya hai ki dikha deta hai
#
ki hum kuch dusre huye hote toh pita ke adhik nikat huye hote.
#
Adhik un jaise huye hote.
#
Kitni dur jaana hota hai pita se pita jaisa hone ke liye.
#
Pita bhi saveri chai pite the. Kya wo bhi pita ke baare me sochte the?
#
then his environmental concerns, you know,
#
it's called Nanda Devi.
#
And you can win all this disaster which is happening in Uttarakhand.
#
You can see it's so close.
#
20, 30, 50 verson me tumhari banrajiyon ki lugdi bana kar
#
hum uspar akhbar chhaap chuke honge.
#
Tumhari sannate ko cheer rahe honge.
#
Humare dhundwaate sakteemaan truck tumhare jharne sote sook chuke honge.
#
Aur tumhari nadia la sakengi kebal satsibhakshi baadhe.
#
Ya aato ko umetne wali bhimariya.
#
Tumhara aqas ho chuka honge humare astiwan bimanon ke ghum sutron ka gunjhar.
#
jaldi hi 20, 30, 50 verson me hum tumhari niche ek maru bichha chuke honge.
#
Aur tumhari ussi nadi ghaut seedhi wale mandir me jala karega ek maru deep.
#
You know, and Arvind translated it,
#
and I must read out, it's a brilliant, brilliant translation.
#
Nanda, in 50, 30 or 20 years,
#
we would have turned your forests into masts to print our broadseeds.
#
Grinding uphill, our sakteemaan trucks would have pulled your steel air apart.
#
Your falls and springs would have dried up.
#
Your rivers brought up crop eating floods and enteric fevers.
#
And supersonic jets would have smudged your sky with trails.
#
Nanda, quite soon, in 50, 30 or 20 years,
#
we would have turned your foothills into wasteland.
#
And in your temple by the river, the water not lapping its step anymore,
#
there will be a solitary candle burning.
#
So and of course, then there is this poem on emergency because which which kind
#
of resonates with the time that we're living in.
#
This is this is on a real incident.
#
Indira Gandhi had called a lot of these writers and they're felicitating
#
because you always need this validation from writers, poets, painters or what you do.
#
Hame koi nahi pehchanta tha.
#
Humare chehron pr sraddha thi, hum sab ko bhitar bula liya gaya.
#
Humare chehron pr sraddha thi, hum sab ko bhitar bula liya gaya.
#
Uske chehre par kuch nahi tha.
#
Usne hum sab pr ek nazar dali, humare chehron pr kuch nahi tha.
#
Usne isare se kaha, in sab ke chehre utar lo.
#
Humare chehre utar liya gaya.
#
Usne isare se kaha, in sab ko samman banto.
#
Hum sab ko seero pe diya gaya.
#
Jink ke niche nay chehre bhi take the.
#
Usne namaskar ka isara kiya.
#
Hum bida karke bahar nikaal diya gaya.
#
Bahar hume sab pehchanthe.
#
Jaante hain humare chehron pr nay chehre hain.
#
Jind pr sraddha thi, chehre bhitar utar liya gaya.
#
Suna hai, unka niryat hoga.
#
Bideson me sraddhawan chehron ki badi maang hain.
#
Waha pichle 300 barat se unki paidawar band hain.
#
Aur niryat badta hain, to humari pratistha baddi hain.
#
And what a line, jaante hain ki humare chehron pr nay chehre hain.
#
So Trisha actually, my friend, she translated,
#
No one knew us, our faces were reverent, we were all called inside.
#
Her face was blank, she cast a glance at us.
#
Our faces were blank, she signaled that all our faces be removed.
#
Our faces were removed, she signaled that they should hand out honors.
#
We were all given swords of honor with new faces attached.
#
Her folded palms were a signal.
#
We were bid goodbye and squatted outside.
#
Outside everyone knew us.
#
They knew our old faces had new faces tacked on.
#
The reverential faces have been taken off inside.
#
They will be exported, it seems.
#
There is a great demand for reverential faces abroad.
#
Production there stopped 300 years ago.
#
And when exports rise, so does our prestige.
#
This is on emergency. Amazing.
#
So, you know, so this...
#
And this, of course, there's time, I'll read out one last poem,
#
which kind of explains his life.
#
His, you know, what we talk of, multitudes.
#
Neither do the poles have a rope on them, nor do the lights see the dance.
#
People only see the dance.
#
But what I dance on, and what I dance on the rope,
#
the light that falls on the poles,
#
the light that falls on the poles,
#
I don't actually dance on that rope.
#
I only run from this pole to that pole.
#
Or I open the rope from this or that pole so that the tension bends,
#
and I have a break in the sluggishness.
#
But the tension doesn't fall.
#
And I run from this pole to that pole,
#
but the tension remains the same.
#
Everything remains the same.
#
And that is my dance, which everyone sees.
#
Not me, not the rope, not the pole, not the light, not the tension,
#
but they see the dance.
#
This was also written during emergency.
#
And of course, this is the most famous,
#
most well-known poem which gets,
#
Saap, which is again of our times.
#
Saap, tum sabhi toh huye nahi,
#
nagar mein basna bhi tumhe nahi aaya,
#
ek baat puchu, uttar doge,
#
tab kaise seekha dasna,
#
I mean, the art will really outlive the artist.
#
In fact, you know, when Ranjeet came, I requested him,
#
so this thing with his friends like him,
#
he was like, this is his whole poem which he wrote in the beginning,
#
mujhe aaj hasna chahiye, you know.
#
So, you want me to read this?
#
Ek din mai raah ke kinare mara paaya jaunga,
#
tab murmur kar sadhikaar log puchenge,
#
kya hme pehle kyu nahi bataya gaya kis mein jaan hai.
#
Par tab der ho chuki hogi,
#
Is baat ko lekar mujhe aaj hasna chahiye.
#
Itihas ka kaam itne se sadh jaayega,
#
ab nahi hai, paaya gaya.
#
Par jo mai jiya, jo mai jiya,
#
jo kiya, uska kya hoga?
#
Uske liye bhi hai ek naam, aaya gaya.
#
Mujhe is naam ko lekar mujhe aaj hasna chahiye.
#
Mere jaise karodon hain,
#
jin se itihas ka kaam jis hi tarah satta hai,
#
unka sukh dukh paana khona artha nahi rakhta,
#
kebal hona ya antata na hona,
#
ve nahi jaante itihas ya artha,
#
ve hasthe hain aur lete hain bhagwan ka naam.
#
Mujhe is baat ko lekar mujhe aaj hasna chahiye.
#
Isi liye to jin ka itihas hota hai,
#
unke devta haste huye nahi hote.
#
Aur jinke devta haste huye hote hain
#
unka itihas nahi hota hai.
#
Mujhe is baat ko lekar mujhe aaj hasna chahiye.
#
I mean his poems are like completely
#
and things that he is writing.
#
at the time when he is kind of getting involved with
#
which is most of the poem
#
He is writing in Monterey Beach in California.
#
So, all these poems are like
#
completely Sagar Mudra poem
#
he became, you know, as I said earlier,
#
But for him he remains my poet.
#
Of course, Madi Ke Duip is something I like more now.
#
I mean that is like a classic.
#
That should be translated well
#
because his own translation is very bad.
#
It is a bad translation.
#
So, let me ask you the penultimate question
#
you got into this project partly because
#
Agya's work meant something to you personally
#
the process of writing this book changed you?
#
Because it must be very emotional also.
#
This work has affected you.
#
You are delving deeper into the work.
#
You are delving deeper into the man.
#
You are kind of living and reliving
#
those emotions all the time.
#
It is about you also the book.
#
So, how have you changed while writing this book?
#
how much I have changed.
#
I will tell you something which
#
this conversation I had with
#
someone like Patrick French
#
and now that he is gone
#
and I miss him every day.
#
we will always discuss this
#
about how should you deal with a life.
#
I remember he telling me
#
I will always ask him, Naipaul
#
So, he said look some people
#
and you are doing biography. I face my usual
#
Again what will happen and he had done his research
#
he was such a thorough man.
#
but he is nearly alive.
#
So, it is tough and it will change.
#
thing what it makes you
#
realize in a way that you asked
#
that how it has changed me.
#
It has basically you know you
#
I mean before I wrote this book
#
even after I read so many biographies
#
I have read lots of biographies
#
but till I got on to writing this
#
you know this whole thing of realizing
#
the complexity of each person.
#
Patrick would say abominable
#
you know you fall in love with him another year.
#
How do you deal with him?
#
he will constantly say you know
#
your research should never end.
#
The questions should always be addressed
#
and you leave everything.
#
And that is how it has changed and that will kind of
#
in a way it has sorted out many
#
problems that would have faced with JP.
#
Although JP is a very different character.
#
He is a politician, he is a Gandhian.
#
His life is not so fascinating.
#
I am talking the personal life.
#
He has a very fascinating political life
#
the difficulty of trying to judge
#
to the calm eye of the reader.
#
So that is the job of a writer.
#
I used to think even after having read
#
I used to think oh biography this that
#
who read the draft and I was
#
especially showing to many women readers
#
friends editors all of them
#
everyone would say that oh you know you have been
#
I said yeah it is fine.
#
I was not being deliberately unkind or anything
#
nothing should be brushed aside
#
nothing should be brushed under the carpet
#
everything should be given.
#
But it also taught me that
#
it is not my job to judge.
#
Biographer's job is not to judge.
#
I have mentioned that book
#
which actually Abhishek had first recommended me
#
which is on the biography writing
#
I am forgetting the name of the
#
you know who writes on the
#
autobiography writing or even someone like
#
James Atlas who wrote on
#
So that has in a way changed me
#
that the fear of looking at someone
#
even if I write and I will do
#
and I will leave it to the reader.
#
How do you judge a person
#
who is so bad with women? Look at Agne
#
My job is to just leave it out
#
to the cold eyes of the reader
#
and this is like Patrick's
#
So one other thing and he said that it will help you
#
and he has been working on Doris Leysing
#
Doris Leysing was alive when he started working
#
so he will always say that look
#
I have kind of figured this out
#
so that also you should do because
#
just think of saying that Agne is dead
#
because the number of people he asked
#
everyone I asked about Agne
#
they talked about him as if they met him yesterday
#
this whole thing of not
#
another era, how do you judge
#
motivations of another person
#
I think this is a book that actually
#
and maybe it is my biased
#
response to it because of
#
what I read but I think this is a book
#
that will make a reader not judgemental
#
because so much of a person's life
#
So many things have happened to all of us
#
we have gone through those things
#
in life and you said oh okay
#
Thank you for writing this beautiful book
#
and I will ask you to end with something that
#
these days I don't know if I asked you the last time
#
we recorded but these days I always ask my
#
guests to end by recommending
#
for me and my listeners
#
books, films, music which really mean a lot
#
to you and you want to share it with the world
#
Well I will just give one Hindi, two English
#
you know I keep going back
#
whole collection of volumes called
#
The Most of Nora Ephraim
#
So yeah it's a collection
#
of all writings, how to write, lead
#
after this thing, her days as a Washington Post
#
rising through the ranks and
#
all kinds of, she was as
#
irreverent about her beta divorce
#
to everything she's written and this is
#
and some of the scripts from
#
When Harry Met Sally and all those things are there
#
She written a lovely book called What Women Want
#
if I remember correctly I love that
#
So I consider her like kind of
#
I keep telling, I teach journalism
#
students in Jindal and I keep telling them
#
that read her, read her, how to write
#
This is a book I mentioned during
#
the conversation it's called
#
Franco Hara, My Father and Me
#
which is by Ada Calhoun
#
Ada Calhoun is kind of a non-fiction
#
critic in New York Times and New York
#
also a regular writer, so this is about
#
father's failure to write a biography
#
of Franco Hara and it's so
#
fascinating everyone should read it
#
And third author I will mention
#
everyone, Hindi writers to read
#
him, he is a journalist
#
He has the most edgy voice in a long
#
long time, it's called Anil Yadav
#
There is a book called Keera Jari
#
It's a travelogue but it's
#
completely, it's mind blowing
#
in the hills, Uttarakhand
#
Civilization the way we understand it
#
has left them untouched and how
#
brilliant book, Anil Yadav
#
is a voice, everyone should read him
#
So these are three books that I will
#
kind of comment as of now and well
#
of course there is always lots of
#
poems and I keep going back to old
#
of course the new poets, Maya
#
Mostly yeah, it's a mix of
#
I'm a kind of a serial monogamous when it
#
comes to poets, so I'm kind of
#
Music remains mostly, I'm kind of
#
I'm very boring, I only listen to
#
mostly Hindustani classical
#
I learnt it from few years
#
There was no way one could have become Tansen
#
but yeah, became Kansen
#
trained ears, so I have, I can say I have
#
trained ears, so I keep
#
listening and this old fabrics
#
There's the singer from Bengal
#
I listen to Mukul, Mukul Sepotra
#
listening to them, many of them
#
kind of even hobnobbing
#
Hindustani classical music, so I keep
#
going back to Aamir Khan on a day
#
Aladhiya Khan or everyone
#
some rare recording which
#
on their own erase and I'm trying to get it
#
back from some friend who had
#
some of these Marathi women
#
were part of this larger
#
Mughubi, Kudhikar generation of singers
#
some of them completely unknown
#
so their recording I had
#
cassette and I used it and I
#
transferred it, you know digitized
#
it so to say and then somehow it
#
just called gone, so I'm trying to get them
#
so I keep listening to this Hindustani, that's my
#
I kind of haven't watched in a while
#
mostly now I have been kind of some friends
#
have put me on this Korean OTT
#
there is a term for if you're getting obsessed
#
with Korean I am forgetting that term which
#
other day a friend's wife told us
#
getting there but you also have
#
to kind of because if you're writing work so I'm
#
now kind of trying to cut on
#
watching so listening is still better
#
I'm cutting down on watching because I have been
#
there was a whole phase after Agare book
#
when I was just mindlessly watching movies
#
and again I have problem
#
I keep going back to classics the movie
#
collection and criteria
#
collection. You earned the mindless
#
watching and you know thank you so much for
#
your insights and all the time you've given me
#
like I have to now confess that for everyone
#
who's waiting for Akshay's JP biography
#
to come out I'm sorry it is delayed by half
#
a day because of me but thank
#
you so much. It's always a pleasure talking to you
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode
#
check out the show notes enter rabbit holes
#
at will visit your nearest bookstore
#
online or offline and pick up both
#
of Akshay's books on the Geeta Press as well
#
as writer, rebel, soldier, lover the many
#
lives of Agare. You can follow Akshay on
#
Twitter at Akshay Mukul you can follow me on Twitter
#
at Amit Verma A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A
#
you can browse past episodes of
#
The Scene and the Unseen at www.sceneunseen.in
#
thank you for listening
#
you can go over to sceneunseen.in
#
slash support and contribute
#
any amount you like to keep this
#
podcast alive and kicking
