Home / Sunday-mid-day / / Article /
Many lives. One man
Updated On: 03 April, 2022 08:32 AM IST | Mumbai | Jane Borges
Friends and colleagues celebrate the multi-hyphenate that was Kiran Nagarkar in a retrospective that dips into family archives, manuscripts and advertising copy
Listen to this article :
Kiran Nagarkar’s father Kamlakant’s family. (From left) Kamlakant’s siblings actress Leela Chitnis, Shalini and Mohan. He is missing from this frame
For any Bombay writer, reading Kiran Nagarkar’s literature is part of the initiation rite, just like Saadat Hasan Manto or the more contemporary, Jerry Pinto. The discerning ones might stay uninfluenced. But for some, Nagarkar’s writings will continue to haunt their own body of work. His witty prose, which swayed from ribaldry to the obnoxious, and the tragicomedy of city-life permeate his Ravan and Eddie series. We think it got sullener with his last work Jasoda, where the cruel poverty of Mumbai appeared to be no joke for the writer or his eponymous protagonist. Jasoda, he told us, when we last interviewed him in October 2017, was his “superstar” and had been with him for nearly 20 years. We remember him saying how glad he was to have been able to complete the novel. He passed away two years later, on September 5, 2019.
Walking into Idea Creative Solutions, a digital photography service in Prabhadevi, it feels like Nagarkar has returned to life. Black and white portraits of his are being printed on a large roll of glossy paper. The images emerge slowly from the printer—there’s a tight close-up of him by Chirodeep Chaudhuri, one of Raghu Rai’s where he is sitting at the edge of a bed, and a happy portrait by friend Abodh Aras. Everywhere, Nagarkar is smiling broadly. We can almost hear him whisper, his funny-side intact: “I’m literally on a roll.” Padma Shri-award winning documentary photographer Sudharak Olwe, who this writer is here to meet, is guiding the printers. They are sifting through a vast tome of pictures from Nagarkar’s personal archives, digitised by his partner Tulsi Vatsal last year. Olwe has only read one text by Nagarkar. His first novel in Marathi, Saat Sakkam Trechalis. “I have been a fan ever since,” he tells us. And no ordinary one at that.
Read Next Story
Trending Stories
Latest Photos
Latest Videos
Latest Web Stories
ADVERTISEMENT
Mid-Day Fast
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT