Vineet Gill's 'Here and Hereafter' delves into Nirmal Verma's mind

Ira Pande

It is interesting to see how writing trends change every few decades. The last century was dominated by fiction, plays and poetry. Then, towards the last decade of the century, non-fiction emerged as the dominant literary genre. Perhaps this was because of the deep connection between politics and literary criticism or perhaps because an interest in the lives of celebrities has become the favourite pastime of the new generation of readers. Memoirs and biographies always enjoyed a certain readership but today almost every best-selling book is a nostalgic (or voyeuristic) recall of an age gone by.

I have recently read two outstanding literary biographies that made me look with fresh respect at this form. The first is Akshaya Mukul’s account of the great Indian polymath, Agyeya. The other is the present book on the noted Hindi writer Nirmal Verma. The two biographers offer two styles: Mukul explores the many persona — writer, rebel, soldier, lover — in a hefty 800-page book with extended footnotes and references, while Vineet Gill’s slim volume is sharply focused on the existential solitude of the exile-writer. Gill’s elegant biography is a poetic translation of the writer’s mind through a close reading of his works. As he himself admits, Gill looks at an author’s work not just as an interpretation of a life but at reading as a form of biographical excavation.

In his impressive prologue, Gill tells us that he never met Verma, nor did he wish to record the conversations and recollections of those close to him; unlike Mukul, he did not have the rich archival trove that Agyeya had left behind. His reading and understanding of Verma’s literary oeuvre are a meditative submersion into the life and times of this complex writer. It is also a personal enquiry into the uneasy relationship between Hindi literature and modernity reflected in Verma’s literary journey from India to Europe and back. What we now call Hindi literature is barely 200 years old, Gill reminds us, and multiculturalism has been an inherent quality from the time that its earliest promoter, Bhartendu Harishchandra, thought of translating world literature into a new language. Similarly, Premchand introduced Persian and Urdu into his writing. Thus, in its early years, Hindi grew by accepting feeder sibling languages ranging from Bengali to Maithili to become the voice of a new kind of writing.

Gill then examines the influence of world literature on those writers struggling to cast off the heavy classicism of Sanskrit and introduce a vocabulary that would find it a place in world literature. Ideas borrowed from across Europe, trends that were emerging from the political upheavals there — all these clashed violently with the enormous pride and native identity of a country that was still struggling to cast off the oppressive presence of colonialism and English.

Few biographers can resist the temptation to take the help of first-hand recollections, yet Gill has understood that Verma’s literary and existential angst was deeper than that. “This is a book about reading, written from the standpoint of the reader,” Gill declares early on to state his purpose in trying to understand the life of a writer through his work and the coils of his brain. Ideas, memories, political leanings and a conscious aloofness — all these shape writers in ways that often a chronological cataloguing of their life is unable to reveal. Interestingly, Verma belonged to a small coterie of Hindi writers who thought in English but wrote in Hindi. While this gave them a window into the world beyond the domestic, it also distanced them from their own roots. Yet, this struggle also turned Verma into a writer who remained ever exiled from the self. How this translated into his writing and the pain he bore because he could never share it with anyone has been captured exquisitely by someone who deconstructs Verma’s life and works in a uniquely personal way.

If you are looking to understand how Verma converted loneliness and restlessness into a deep existential battle, read this sensitive account of a writer who never found a home anywhere in the world, not even in his own.