“I knew that I was a hybrid”: An interview with Kiran Nagarkar

Abstract

Kiran Nagarkar is a well-known bilingual novelist in Marathi and in English who has written several notable and award-winning novels as well as plays. In this interview conducted in August 2016, the novelist discusses his background and his beginnings in Marathi writing, and his years in advertising and working with Kersy Katrak. The novelist discusses the biographical connection to the chawls in Bombay and the role of excrement in his own work. Nagarkar also explains the early popular and literary influences on his work, the sense of his own hybridity across the writing in two languages, and his refusal to search for an originary past.

Keywords:

• Fiction
• chawls
• hybridity
• advertising
• Kersy Katrak
• Cuckold

Notes

1. Kamal Desai (1928–2011) was an influential progressive short fiction writer of the period.

2. Dilip Chitre (1938–2009) was a leading poet, editor, artist, scholar of the sathottari (post-1960) period in Bombay and a close associate of many of the writers of the time.

3. An actor who has a small non-speaking role in the background of a scene in a film, seen as insignificant or near invisible in the hierarchy of the people working on the film.

4. Sant literature is bhakti literature, the songs/abhang of the itinerant saint-poets all over India. In Maharashtra, one of the most famous is the 13th-century saint-poet, Dnyaneshwar. Nagarkar here references the siblings of Dnyaneshwar, seen as saints in their own rights (Sopandev, Muktabai) and also the older poet, Namdev, who is central to both Hinduism and Sikhism.

5. Jotiba Phule (1827–1890) was a social reformer and writer who organized activism against caste-based and gender-based inequalities. Gopal Agarkar (1856–1895) was a social reformer and an anti-colonial thinker. Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) was an anti-colonial nationalist and a social reformer.