Narrative Non-Fiction
Narrative Nonfiction & Reported Features
This story was first published in Mint Lounge in May 2022.
Is this the big moment for Indian writing in translation?
On 26 May, the International Booker Prize will be announced—and it could well go to Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi novel Ret-Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand. If this happens, it will be the first time in the 17-year history of the International Booker Prize (a sister prize of the Booker Prize) that a Hindi book in translation, even a book from South Asia for that matter, will have this honour.
Translations of Indian books into English have made waves from time to time, winning awards or becoming best-sellers. This has become important for a swathe of the English-reading population in the country, especially over the last 20 years or so, given the rise of “language orphans”. The term, which veteran publisher and editor Mini Krishnan has used in interviews over the years, refers to the inability of many people to read (either fluently or at all) in their ancestral languages.
“There are those amongst us who do all their reading in English and were never encouraged to take their mother tongues seriously,” says Krishnan, one of the early editors to make a case for translations from Indian languages into English. “For this section of the reading population in some sense maimed by fate, education, call it what you will, it might take a decade or two before they realise they could relearn, and rediscover what they had missed. This can happen through the only language they have: English. Even though English sets literary limits, even though it is taught imperfectly, it is still the fastest way to drill through language barriers because the sad truth is that we are becoming increasingly monolingual.”
This story was first published in Mint Lounge, in February 2022
The appeal of analogue photography
There aren’t too many like him around, and he knows it. Especially when dealing with a persistent, hopeful customer: “Okay but, ek aur baar try karoge? Ya koi aur hai yahan jisko ek aur baar yeh dikha sakoon? (Try again? Or maybe there’s someone else I can show it to?),” the customer asks, not wanting to give up on the analogue camera that once belonged to his father. The man facing him smiles patiently. The bright white of the tube light overhead bounces off a shiny black badge on his left front pocket. “KIV ENGINEERING. I AM KIV,” it reads.
“Leave it with me, I will check when I have time and call you,” Kiv, aka Kapil Inderjeet Vohra, replies. With this kind of client, half the job consists of offering assurance. The camera in question is, after all, a 30-year-old Pentax K1000, a mechanical, manual focus, single-lens reflex (SLR) camera that uses 35mm film.
There are many such amateur photographers with second-hand or heirloom cameras seeking out Vohra, a 40-something service-person at Chandni Chowk, Delhi. He has been in the trade of repairing cameras for close to two decades, catering to hobbyists as well as professionals with high-end digital gear. With very few stores and workshops taking on SLRs for repair currently, he has become popular with the Capital’s growing community of film-photo enthusiasts.
“Bilkul ek leher si aayi hai (it’s like a wave),” Vohra says, referring to the resurgence of analogue photography. Over the last two-three years, he has noticed that while older professionals are bringing in old analogue gear to sell, young people seem to be wanting to buy vintage cameras. Just a few days earlier, someone with a 40-year-old Nikon FM2 came to Vohra, wanting to sell the camera body, its kit lens, and a flash, for Rs. 22,000. “And there are people willing to spend this much—and more—on old non-digital cameras,” he says.
This story was first published in Literary Hub, in January 2019.
How did an architect of the slam poetry scene become its public enemy no.1?
July 2018: It is a balmy Sunday evening. Despite the commotion at the popular Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in Uptown, Chicago, silence follows Marc Smith as he walks onstage toward the tube-lit, old-school signage hanging on the wall.
He switches it off.
“Okay, folks. We’ll take a quick break and be right back with the competition. In the meantime, use the restrooms, grab a drink or two. Because how else can you understand this stuff better?” he asks, a loud and jovial emcee.
This is Marc Smith’s usual way of welcoming his audiences to the Uptown Poetry Slam, the first performance poetry contest in the country, which he started in 1984. When he turns off the GREEN MILL sign, the 70-year-old poet gives a nod to the reason he started the slam format in the first place: To dim the lights on everything else and turn the spotlight onto accessible, relatable, and enjoyable poetry.
Lately, Smith has found that hard to do.
The Dream Merchants
It’s a warm November afternoon in Kolkata’s swarming Bara Bazaar. On Rabindra Sarani, the street named after great lyricist and poet Rabindranath Tagore, the only music you hear is blaring Bhojpuri pop and the incessant honks of cars and bikes. Sitting for nine straight hours at the counter of one of the many little stores, Milan Goswami, 26, is selling that rarest of commodities—hope.
“Bolo dada, bolo!” he calls out, teasing a middle-aged, comfortably pot-bellied regular. Unfazed by Goswami’s gentle attempt at bullying, the man takes time to think, scratching his head for a few hesitant seconds before finally picking a stack of West Bengal State Lottery tickets for Rs. 501. He takes the bunch and places it in his front shirt pocket for safekeeping.
“This ticket gives me the permission to temporarily feel peace and relief,” says the buyer, Sushil Kumar, 48, smiling to reveal paan-stained teeth. “I can sleep with the possibility of some dreams coming true,” he adds. Kumar, who is here every day, is just one of thousands of people stepping into the constellation of state government-licensed lottery ticket stores in Kolkata…
According to media reports, the West Bengal state government earns up to Rs. 35 crores in revenue through lotteries annually. A proposal to move ticket sales online will reportedly boost these figures by over fifty times more—to Rs. 2000 crores.
But at the sidewalk outlets in Bara Bazaar, in-person sales remain king.
This story was first published in Hindustan Times in January 2019.
This story was first published in Mint Lounge in March 2017.
The House of Forgotten Art
Baij Nath Aryan wants to be immortal. He shakes back his wispy, flyaway white curls as he leans forward to declare this, hugging a particularly expressive brass mukhalinga (a sheath for Shiva lingas, usually engraved with the Hindu god’s facial features). “I want to be immortal so that I can see this sort of beauty around me every day,” he says. He sets the antique back down between roughly 100 other such pieces that his late father, artist and sculptor K.C. Aryan collected from the north Karnataka region.
This collection of mukhalingas, some of them dating back to the 18th century, takes up a portion of one floor in the Aryan home in Gurugram, near Delhi, that BN—as he is better known—shares with his sister Subhashini. The zero-security, two-storeyed house has more than 33,000 other artefacts: textiles and Tantric art hung on the walls, sculptures, terracotta figurines, wooden statuettes and toys stored in scores of glass-paned Godrej bureaux or lining the staircases. Some of them go back as far as 2 BC.
The sexagenarian siblings are the sole custodians of this enormous collection, which their father, artist KC Aryan, a painter awarded by the Lalit Kala Akademi, began putting together in the 1950s.
Learning the weft and weight of weaving in Maheshwar
It is 7am and a group of young men are posing for pictures at Ahilya Fort in the small town of Maheshwar, about 2 hours from Indore. They are wearing self-woven textiles: kurtas, stoles, dupattas. Maheshwar is, of course, known for the seven-yard or nine-yard (nauvari) pure cotton “Maheshwari” sari—soft, light, with a subtle shine. The body has light checks, while the pallu has three or five characteristic stripes in two alternating, complementary colours. Much like the Ahilya Fort and Narmada river form one side of the town’s border, the typical Maheshwari sari too has borders with designs of motifs from the fort’s wall, or the Narmada leher (wave) pattern zari.
Wasim Ansari, 28, and Vijay Ganga Kanere, 32, are outspoken. Wasim comes from one of Maheshwar’s most respected weaving families. “But like most of India’s handlooms, Maheshwari weaves too saw a period of neglect after independence,” says Richard Holkar, who is from the erstwhile royal family of Indore. Falling demand and low wages led to a mass migration from Maheshwar. “In the mid-1970s, there were just about 300 weavers left,” says Richard, who is dressed in a light green Maheshwari kurta with translucent stripes. It was only when he, with his then wife Shalini Devi (Sally) Holkar, began Rehwa Society, a not-for-profit, in 1978 to revitalize the craft and focus on women’s employment at the looms, that this migration stopped.
This story was first published in Mint Lounge in August 2016