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Journalism of Courage
Vineet Gill’s literary biography of acclaimed writer Nirmal Verma accomplishes many things. But first and foremost, it puts reading back into the map of our literary consciousness. Today, when speculative obituaries of literary genres riding on terms like ‘decreasing attention spans’ and ‘screen time battles’ are constantly capturing our collective imagination, Gill writes his book entirely from the vantage point of just a reader.
His long literary biography of Nirmal Verma, a stalwart of Hindi literature, is titled Here and Hereafter: Nirmal Verma’s Life in Literature. But more than being a ‘literary biography’, this book is a celebration of the very act of reading. Throughout the book, I felt as if I am in conversation with a fellow reader who is talking about a writer in ways in which we talk about writers who, through their work, leave a lifelong impact on our lives and minds. Early on in the book, Gill clarifies that he has “little interest” in the facts of Verma’s life. Instead, his book is about reading, and has been written from the perspective of a reader. While being at it, Gill has consciously tried to put the ‘writing life’ of Verma on the foreground.
For me then, the most significant achievement of this book lies in its attempt to bring back the focus on the text-and-reader relationship. As primary and foundational as this relationship might sound, the truth is that the sanctity of the text and reader space has been impacted immensely by the literature festivals-circuit-driven “celebrity writer” culture.
With the ‘face’ of the writer becoming more important than his text, literary events have turned into ‘photo-ops for social media’ kind of spaces. In such an environment, Gill’s book roots for serious reading and urges to focus the reader’s inquiry on the text of the writer. It also stands as a testament to the magic, rewards and unimaginable powers of a deep literary reading experience.
The ‘aesthetic of rejection’ has played a crucial role in literary choices of both the subject and the writer of this book. For instance, instead of going for the regular biography format, Gill chose a rather new and unexplored format of ‘literary biography’. In his interviews he mentions that he reached the form of his book more by his “aesthetic of rejection” and knowing what he “does not want”. Later in the book, we witness the same ‘aesthetic of rejection’ illuminating his subject’s literary choices over and over again.
We see Verma talking about his text choices during his early Marxist days and saying sentences like – “even when I was a Marxist, Marxism as an ideology had very little impact upon my writing”. Few chapters later in the book, we see Verma recalling one of his most significant life experiences, which he chose to reject as potential ‘material’ in all of his creative oeuvre. During the violent days that followed the Partition of India, Verma, then a young boy, volunteered to help the incoming refugees settle in. Gill writes about a 2001 interview in which Verma mentions his poignant memory of “doing the gut-wrenching work of removing the decomposing dead from empty houses in old Delhi” during the days following the Partition.
“At one of the houses, we could only find, amid rotting flesh, a woman’s severed arm, decked out in bangles. The arm was completely smeared in pus …that arm is still stuck in my memory,” Verma adds. Despite the fact that Partition was a popular theme among many of his contemporaries like Bhisham Sahni, Saadat Hasan Manto, Krishna Baldev Vaid and Krishna Sobti, Verma never used this memory in any of his works.
The ‘aesthetic of rejection’ then is a striking evidence of Verma’s acute clarity about what he doesn’t want to write about. In a conversation about the book, Gill mentions Verma’s literary choices as ‘conscious’ and ‘courageous’ which eventually made him a writer of the margins. Verma’s writing life is full of such deliberate ‘going against the flow’, against ‘popular trends’ and against the pressure of what ‘others want you to write’. And Gill never fails to put the spotlight on such multi-layered sensitive areas of his work.
It is sections like these which makes Gill’s narrative attentive, astute and a deep-reading experience. His writing is lucid and engaging. In his chosen format, his writing keeps switching between the reader-reporter to the reader-writer mode but never loses its reader-friendly storytelling quality.
Given the complex, and, to a large extent, politically debated nature of Verma’s work, the book comes across as a feat free of lopsided biases and parochial judgements. It can serve as a great initiation into Verma’s large body of work for English language readers as yet unacquainted with his work. But for those Hindi readers who have spent long years reading Verma, Gill’s book does not offer much more than a friendly passionate conversation with a fellow reader.
(Priyanka Dubey is an independent journalist and the author of No Nation for Women: Reportage on Rape from India, the World’s Largest Democracy)
