review of Kiran Nagarkar's Asides, Tirades, Meditations — Selected Essays

The Hindu

25-04-2025

When a writer has written only three or four novels, we may consider each one to be distinct from the rest, so the reader is fully entitled to, say, read and re-read Kiran Nagarkar's Cuckold while ignoring Ravan and Eddie. We give ourselves permission to pick and choose because life is short, and because writers are not uniformly brilliant.
In his introduction to Asides, Tirades, Meditations: Selected Essays by Kiran Nagarkar, Salil Tripathi places Nagarkar in a post-Emergency context of renewed expansiveness, so the reading of this book seems especially apt after an election that seemed to unmute our voices. But the appearance of topicality is a trick that books have. Nagarkar died in 2019, so in reading these essays we must set aside the democratic constriction and release of the past half decade.
On writing
The first essay in the collection is on writing, on how, even for those who are sure they are writers, the beginnings can be arbitrary, the first published work a matter of chance, and the aftermath, when reviewers and interviewers seem to miss the point, incredibly frustrating.
Other essays that stand out include the ones on Gore Vidal, on memory and airbrushing, and on Shiva's blue throat. In this last, Nagarkar talks of Shiva as the artist, who leaps to swallow the poison churned out of the ocean and saves the world. He also writes in this essay about the artist as a god, about novels that should be backed by solid research but not burdened with it. He writes about characters who are mere mouthpieces and have no convincing life of their own. He evokes the creation of literature through research, agendas, metaphor, technique, all of which may be essential, but they are not sufficient without an animating spark, what he calls the 'breath of life'.
Filing the miscellany
The volume contains reviews and reactions to films that will mean little to readers under 60, and many of the pieces are rambling, and sometimes self-confessedly ranting, lacking the artful construction we expect from an essay. The volume is a dutiful filing of all the miscellany of an important writer, and it would have been in keeping with that purpose to give the year of publication for each essay. The age and context in which their sentiments were expressed is not always apparent, and many of them seem somehow more dated because they are undated. A year of publication, in the 1980s, is mentioned for a meditation on leprous Bombay, with dire predictions of the city falling to bits, and the reading experience is better for it.
Revisiting novels
It may be unconventional in a review of one book to direct readers to another one instead, but our excuse is that Nagarkar himself frequently revisits his novels in this volume. It seems unusual for a writer to explain his own works instead of leaving that task to a literary critic of a later era. A breathtaking novel like Cuckold, playing with love, politics, court intrigues, and Meera's bhakti poetry, needs no explanation or afterword. Nagarkar created a human being from the shadowy figure of Meera's husband, about whom almost nothing is known historically. And we are with this character from page one. He is more than plausible, he is alive. The author of such a work need not point and say, 'See what I did there?' Yet, in more than one essay, he explains how he chose the subject, how he visited Meera's birthplace, and even how his novel was interpreted. While plodding through all that, the reader may wonder whether Cuckold was all that brilliant. The answer is yes, it was, and it still is.
Asides, Tirades, Meditations: Selected Essays; Kiran Nagarkar, Bloomsbury, ₹699.
The reviewer is a writer and editor based in Palakkad, Kerala.