Kiran Nagarkar is a novelist, playwright, film and drama critic and screenwriter both in Marathi and English, and is one of the most significant contributors to postcolonial literature in India. He has written five novels, establishing his reputation as an outstanding representative of contemporary Indian literature. His books are a target of ideological critique due to the hybrid nature of his version of postcolonialism, involving irreverence alongside seriousness. In his first play Bedtime Story (1978), Nagarkar took on the subject of modern responsibility by broaching the topic of political crises of the day. The play could not be staged until 1995. Nagarkar talks to Mathew M Philip on the politics of the written word and his own work

Your play Bedtime Story released after the Emergency was  banned for a long time. And today there are writers like Kalburgi who have faced the consequences of writing liberally. What do you think about our society’s progress from Emergency to now?
Of course, we have progressed a lot in terms of economy and development, but we have also progressed colossally in terms of corruption, especially during the Congress’ rule. But today, along with monetary corruption what we are witnessing is a corruption of the soul. Take, for instance, the Muslim community where women are so oppressed. But the problem is with us, as we have not gone completely overboard to make sure that every Muslim child, like a Hindu child, gets equal education and job opportunities.
And here is a current regime whose double speak is fantastic, where we see so many wonderful talks being delivered but never backed up in action. It’s very sad that minority religions are being antagonised under their rule. The progress that we have made is in making secularism a taboo, because anyone who does not agree with this one single notion of jingoistic patriotism is being targeted today.
What is it about fabricated and doctored ‘truth’ of  historical/mythological events that makes you want to write about how you see the truth?
Dinanath Batra’s history books are being made mandatory as a supplementary read in the whole of Gujarat education institutions, and he is a person who promotes notions like we had aeroplanes during Ramayana or looks at the practice of sati in a sympathetic manner. Even our Prime Minister, during the inauguration of one of the most advanced medical facilities in the world, said that we knew medical transplantation and stem cell research and cited Ganpati as an example. It’s very disturbing to think that we are telling our children these horrendous lies. We should stop trying to glorify our pasts and need to accept the truth as it is.
Cuckold paints a huge canvas in terms of the number of character, elements, stories and sub-stories present in the book. How much of it was research and how much was pure creative genius?
Some of it was definitely research. I was very lucky that a companion of mine gifted me Babur’s autobiography which was a tremendous help to me in understanding Babur. When I read the autobiography, I realised how honest he was when compared to other autobiographies which are complete hagiographies. And creativity is also there, as I was inventing characters alongside as the story and plot developed.
In Cuckold you paint an unpleasant truth—that Rana Sanga invited Babur to tackle internecine feuds. Can such a truth be reiterated in today’s India where there is a concerted emphasis on downgrading the Mughal rule in history textbooks?
Rana Sanga, in fact, wrote a letter to Babur to do away with Ibrahim Lodi, but then backed out from it. And today we are trying to wipe these facts from history. Take the history of Marathas; we were complete bandits, absolutely amoral. We don’t need to shy away from these facts, we should be reiterating them and embrace our past the way it is.
Your first novel Saat Sakkam Trechalis was in Marathi and it tried to reinvent the language. How was it received among Marathi readers?
Majority of the critics completely dismissed my book. But those critics who thought the book was a complete departure from traditional Marathi novels were the ones who pointed out that I had reinvented the language, without me realising it. I did not have the full weight of the tradition behind me since I never had a very close contact with Marathi. I was making up the language as it went along—my syntax, my grammar and even the way I arranged things in the book were very different and therefore the language came out as very different.
You stuck with writing in English thereafter. Is it because your stories come out better in English or was it a conscious decision to increase the scope and width of your readership?

It’s not that my stories come out better in English. In fact, I began writing Ravan & Eddie in Marathi but then realised I had very little Marathi audience. And I write for my readers, I want them to know what I am writing about. So I scrapped those 70 pages and re-wrote Ravan & Eddie in English. So in a way yes, the decision to write in English was made to increase readership.