There Are Few Things as Dangerous as Apathy: An Interview with Kiran Nagarkar

Sukruti Anah Staneley for The Caravan
20 March, 2015

In 1978, when Kiran Nagarkar’s play, Bedtime Story, based on the Mahabharata, was put before the Maharashtrian censor board, it came back to the writer with 78 cuts, after which fundamentalist Hindu organisations prevented rehearsals from taking place. The play has been published for the first time this year by HarperCollins India along with a new screenplay, Black Tulip. Caravan staffer Serena Peck briefly met Nagarkar at the India International Centre, New Delhi, and asked him a few questions about the play and his thoughts on the current state of affairs in India.

Serena Peck: In the introduction to the new volume, you’ve said that you chose to adapt the Mahabharata for Bedtime Story because it flows through every Indian’s veins. Would you like to expand on that?

Kiran Nagarkar: I would like to the think that the stories from the great epics, be it the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Mahabharata are so memorable that they take permanent residence in our minds. The very fact that so many of the great analysts, psychological or otherwise, keep going back to them is proof of this. I can’t remember how many of these stories I have used in my own work. They’re the common pool of references that we share. And no, I did not watch the Ramayana or Mahabharata as it was shown on TV.

I come from a rather peculiar stock, in the sense that I come from a marginal Hindu denomination. I’m from the monotheistic Brahmo Samaj. Luckily that has only made me more open to seeing the enormous range and depth of the Mahabharata.

Have you read that book called Many Ramayanas, edited by Paula Richman? The first essay is by Ramanujan. Those Indians who are asking for all kinds of things to be banned, do they know and understand the value of our epics? Do they know the history of their literature and their mythology? From time immemorial, there have been so many different versions of the stories from the epics and the Puranas, so what are they objecting to? To the fact that I love the Mahabharata? That there have been so many versions and mine must be just one small attempt at trying to make it contemporary Think about it, there’s a women’s Ramayana, a Bhakti Ramayana and God alone knows how many hundreds more. Actually, you really can’t put a number on the ‘tellings’ of Ramayana or the Mahabharata.

What am I trying to get at? If you don’t know your history, the very things that make for the genuine richness of this country are viewed as problems. And so you bring to bear the weight of the state on those whose opinions or worldview is at variance with yours? And censor and persecute them? In the process what you are doing is to destroy the very fabric of democracy and the fundamental right of freedom of expression on the pretext that a particular group’s feelings are being hurt. Indeed, and what about the feelings of the other groups? And the sanctity of free society?

But the common man who should be raising his voice is also missing. This is the point. Bedtime Story was written with only one purpose. Anything that happens anywhere in the world, you and I are responsible. There are few things as horrible and dangerous as apathy. You remember when that young woman was killed recently? Nobody knows whether she was killed by the Jordanian planes or by ISIS in Syria. She said: “If you are silent, you are participating in the crime.” Do we really understand the import of what she’s saying? I think we are participating in the crimes that are being perpetrated in the name of religion. Ghar wapsi, love jihad, I could go on and on. The only thing that will help is if all of us stand up and raise our voices. But how many people are doing it?

SP: When you wrote Draupadi in this play, did you deliberately craft her character as a woman who questions what people decide for her?

KN: I don’t think feminism was anywhere near the centre of it. It’s just like the Ekalavya story; I mean, isn’t it shocking that for hundreds of years, even today, the story has been told to us as the paradigmatic idea of a student–guru relationship. I’ve had two gurus, and I owe a hell of a lot to them; things like the way I look at ethics, literature, democracy, political systems, and I suspect, even the way I am inclined to question received wisdom and myself and the guru-shishya parampara. Dronacharya is revered as a guru and we are meant to admire him even when he asks the tribal Eklavya, to part with his right thumb just so that the high caste Kshatriya prince, Arjun can retain his position as the finest archer in the world. Eklavya, is after all, what we would call a Dalit or at the very least an OBC and we expect him to give in to the guru’s fiat. Something about this situation must have riled me and hence my Eklavya episode ends very differently.

As for feminism, we Indians still can’t seem to acknowledge that women are every bit as bright and capable as men, if not far wiser and sharper at times. But when I wrote the play, all that mattered to me was the notion of equality, fair-play and justice. My calculus was simple. Why would I want to waste 50 percent of our planet’s precious brain-power and resources which women represent? Period. End of matter.

SP: In 1977, when you had just finished writing Bedtime Story, the Janata Party had come  to power. But they lost the next election to Indira Gandhi because of their infighting. Does that situation seem similar to you to what’s happening in Delhi right now with the current state of the Aam Aadmi Party? Also, would you say that your play is as relevant today as when it was first published?

KN: First of all, I’m not sure that the AAP scenario at the present moment is a replay of what happened after the Emergency, because the victory of AAP is on a limited scale. We’re just talking about Delhi, whereas during the Emergency it was the central government that went to pieces. We had just come out of the trauma of the Emergency. Luckily Mrs Gandhi had made the mistake of calling for elections.  And immediately the new Janata government went about destroying all the gains they had made and ensured that Indira Gandhi would be back in three years.

In the case of AAP, I’m completely foxed. I’ve often used a sentence, not in a smartassed way at all: “The one thing that experience teaches us is to make the same mistakes again.” But in the case of AAP this time, I feel as if someone has hit me over the head with a hammer or something. It’s difficult to understand how anybody can make a comeback on that extraordinary scale in the capital and instantly go about trying to destroy itself once again. One of the good things about AAP was that there were a few spokespeople who could actually talk without screaming. They could make sense and put forward a point of view—even if you differed with it—with a great deal of sanity and rational argument. Will Mr Kejriwal and his party members once again squander the hopes of a great many people in Delhi? Let’s not forget that even outside the capital, across the whole country, a great majority of people were looking to revive their faith in democratic principles and the end of corruption through the AAP mandate.

Now to the second part of your question. It is unfortunate that the relevance of Bedtime Story is far greater today than when I wrote it because we’re faced with such colossal calamities and crises across the world. I was giving a lecture at the David Sassoon Library, and I was asked a question about what do I see as the hope for this country of ours, and my main hope was that responsible individuals would come together, and I mentioned the AAP. I had no idea I would be so foolish as to misread the signs.

SP: Do you think that Indian society is veering towards a conservatism that’s problematic?

KN: Yes, it most certainly is. I had taken it as read that the ruling party like most other parties was bound to have extremist elements. But of course there would also be sane and wise folks in it. But it turns out that the most prominent fighters for freedom of expression during the Emergency have either been gagged, or they prefer to opt out and be silent. Dinanath Batra and company have therefore been having a field day deciding which books are to be banned, while there is not a peep out of Arun Shourie, Advaniji or MJ Akbar to name only a few. And that seems to be a truly problematic sign, and it does not give me any heart.

But oddly enough there are not too many voices from the educated population of this country either. One of the most heartening and solid qualities about our people is their faith in education. And yet these men and women, young and old, too, seem to have lost their voices. What is the future of this country if the students from every discipline like physics, biology, history, sociology, pure maths, medicine and engineering to name just a few are going to be taught that in ancient times we knew the secret of nuclear science, aeroplanes, transplant surgery, stem cell research? Or that Akhand Bharat including Pakistan is what we are striving for. Imagine Batra’s books being supplementary reading in every school in Gujarat. What chance does Make in India have if our students are fed this hokum?

The elections were won on the platform of development. But who is asking what are the contours and contents of this development? All the money is being poured into insane city expansion; the taller the high-rises, the better. The richest industrial houses get licenses that will make them unconscionably richer but plunge the subcontinent into irretrievable climate crises. The planet will outlive all of us but are we even remotely conscious of how close we are to the deadliest environmental crisis mankind has seen?

Will someone tell me how Greenpeace is unpatriotic or a national danger? Tell me how that documentary India’s Daughter is giving the nation a bad name in the international press but not the horrendous rapes?

In one of my books there’s the sentence: “Let’s close our eyes so no one will see us.” Now, this is what we are hoping will happen: we hope that just because we close our eyes to the horrors and atrocities around us, the world won’t notice and everything will turn out to be hunky dory.