2024-04-30 01:22:25
The readership of famous Hindi writer Nirmal Verma has continued to grow even 18 years after his death. Some people find the reason for this in his stories dealing with modern loneliness, while others look for his novels exploring human relationships. Recently Rajkamal Prakashan has published a new book of his uncollected works titled ‘Thigaliyan’. Along with this book, there are other aspects of Nirmal Verma’s creative world. Priyanka Dubey His wife and well-known poet-proseist Gagan Gill talked to. Here are the main excerpts from the conversation:
Question: After almost 24 years, Nirmal Verma’s new fiction has come among the readers through the collection ‘Thigaliyan’. Tell us a little about it.
answer: Some of the stories published in this collection were found by me myself, while others were helped by friends. For example, some stories were very old and friends made them available by tearing old issues of the magazine. Every writer takes so much care in the initial phase of his career that only his strongest work comes out. Therefore, he does not publish those works which he believes do not represent his work or which are weak. Perhaps that is why Nirmal ji would not have included these stories in his first collection. But when those four old stories came into my view, I found them all better than one another. Especially regarding ‘Thigliyan’, I could not understand why he did not keep such a sad story in his collections at that time! I think this must be his artistic insistence because we did not see any weakness in this story.
Question: You have written the introduction, compiled the content in it and also written some notes at the end of the book.
answer: I was hesitant in writing this preface and notes because I found myself in a very awkward situation with Nirmal ji. He was my husband, so I feel I have no right to talk about his writings. However, this time while reading his stories, I definitely felt that I had seen the life of its author declining. So perhaps I can talk from the perspective of how life happens and how stories are made. This is what I have tried to include in my notes and introduction. Perhaps this will provide some clarity that nothing in literature happens in space. Whatever is going on in life, some parts of it filter into our literature also. When does he come, how does he come, this is a mystery.
Question: There is a deep influence of Urdu and Punjabi language in the story ‘Thigaliyan’ which brings alive the picture of Delhi just after partition. Did he create this language specifically for this story as an experiment?
answer: I think that the linguistic environment of this story was the real linguistic environment of its author. His father came from Patiala, grandfather also lived for a long time, so Punjabi-Hindi mix was spoken in his house. By the way, Nirmal used to change his language a lot in his compositions. You see that in a foreign story their language is different and then by the time they reach ‘Antim Aranya’ their language becomes Pahari. It was his great strength as a writer that he used to create language and world according to the environment, time and situation.
Question: In all his other fiction, Nirmal Verma has examined violence in its interiority whereas the violence of Partition was very concrete, direct and tangible. Do you think he kept ‘Thigaliyan’ away from his collections because the story did not match his vision of interiority?
answer: I agree with you and I have also understood the matter in the same way. Nirmal was always hesitant about external pain. Perhaps he wanted to keep the inner pain at the center of his creative world.
Question: The way he records Delhi from ‘Ek Chithra Sukh’ to ‘Raat Ka Reporter’, his internal self always goes hand in hand with the external…
answer: A writer always carries his internal and external self together. When the 1984 riots took place, even telephones were not so accessible and Delhi, engulfed in violence, was in a bad condition. Then Nirmal was not able to contact me either. At that time he issued an appeal for peace in Navbharat Times, which was his own statement. Looking at him, I feel that the trauma of Partition continues to persist in his mind. That trauma remained with him throughout his life and kept recurring in his stories. He is coming in ‘Thigaliyan’ in 1955 and in ‘Ishaare’ in 2000.
Question: ‘Ishaare’ is a very haunted story on partition.
answer: How deep is the pain of ‘leaving’ in him! And it is very interesting that this story was published in the year 2000. At that time, Indian politics was changing and Nirmal was being accused of going towards this or that ideology. His public statements made then are also in front, but I have nothing to say about those statements today. On one hand, this is his self which was giving that statement and on the other hand, his ‘gestures’ are the self coming in the story. This shows that at the very time when there was separation between the two camps in Indian politics, there is a tension in the writings of this writer. Kasak who says that this separation should not happen among the common people.