In a season of bans, maverick writer Kiran Nagarkar is back with a book which is old yet new. HarperCollins has published Bedtime Story , a play he wrote nearly 40 years ago, along with a screenplay, Black Tulip . In its 40 years, Bedtime Story has survived censorship, bans and obscurity. Heavily slashed by the Maharashtra censor board, it also faced the wrath of fundamental groups, which did not allow it to be staged though it was privately circulated and read. However, a genial Nagarkar does not parade his victimhood. He says the play did run in theatres but did not do commercially well for various reasons.

Unlike the complex, self-conscious craft of his play, Black Tulip the screenplay flows with the ease of a Bollywood story. It is about two women: a con-woman and yoga buff Rani and a no-nonsense cop Regina Fielding. Nagarkar brings them together for a common cause. It shares one crucial feature with Bedtime Story : both show Nagarkar’s deep commitment to the character.

Since Bedtime Story is an experimental retelling of several tales from Mahabharata, it falls in the category of ‘offence art’. But that ought not to be the case as the Mahabharata is not simply a text but a literary tradition. Retellings have always been an intrinsic part of the Mahabharata tradition. Nagarkar has the same actor play different roles in the play, emphasising the continuity of moral dilemmas and social injustices to the present age. One actor plays Draupadi and Gandhari as well as present-day Rupali, a widow, and Salma, a woman from East Pakistan.

Nagarkar deftly splits the tales along the social grain. Arjun is a high-caste medical student while Ekalavya is an untouchable medical student. His Ekalavya does not gift his own thumb to Guru Dronacharya. When Dronacharya demands the gift, he says, “so be it,” and “bends down, picks up a little earth, spits in it, moulds it into the shape of a thumb, places it on a leaf, goes down on his knees and offers it to Dronacharya in cupped hands.” As Ekalavya presents the thumb to him, he says, “Like guru, like gift.”

Nagarkar’s retelling is not of an epic where archetypal characters struggle with destiny and moral dilemmas. However, another Mahabharata interpreter from Maharashtra, anthropologist Iravati Karve, said, “All human efforts are fruitless, all human life ends in frustration...” Nagarkar rejigs the Mahabharata tales to emphasise its contemporary social relevance. “Ekalavya has no quota. He is a self-made man. His tale shines a different light on the current stereotyping of the Dalit youth as inefficient and undeserving,” he says.

Nagarkar is an old-fashioned, self-effacing man who never compromises with his ethics as a writer. He says, “I have to know what the character wants. I don’t care what the public wants.” His English novel Cuckold is a fine study of a fascinating character: the Rajput prince spurned by his wife Meera Bai who had become a saint. These days, he says, many writers present market plans not book proposals. “The entire model has changed.”

He has a unique position in literature for he has made a name in Marathi as well as English writing. Straddling the two worlds allows him critical views of both. At a time when most people like him wrote in English, he began writing in Marathi. Why did he choose Marathi over English? “I am lucky I did not have to think. One thing led to another,” he says. When he began writing in English, he saw a fascism around Marathi, which he had never expected. He was so troubled by the Marathi literary establishment for “betraying his mother tongue” that he slid into medical depression.

Quite unlike high-minded writers, Nagarkar does not carry an aura of pride and is too gentle to argue. He says authors used to be naive, if not innocent, and today they have become smart. Now in his 70s, he is the quintessential man next door.

Dharminder Kumar is a Delhi-based journalist

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