Nirmal Verma (3rd April 1929, Shimla – 25 October 2005)
Ve Din Nirmal Verma’s first novel, was set in Prague, Czechoslavakia. He translated Crech writers Ivan Klima and Milan Kundera into Hindi long before their works were available to English readers. Nirmal Verma, together with Mohan Rakesh, Bhisham Sahni, Kamleshwar, Amarkant, Rajendra Yadav and others, started the Nai Kahani (new short story) movement in Hindi literature. His fiction translated into English include The World Elsewhere, Maya Darpan and Other Stories and The Crows of Deliverance. Nirmal Verma won the Jnanpith award in 1999, the highest literary award for Indian writers.
Not many know about his relation with Kashmir.
An impractical and incompetent person as I am in, what people call, real life, I wonder what would I have done with myself, if an alternative life of writing had not provided me a route of escape. Escape from myself into another self. It is through this ‘other’ that I have been trying to discover in my writing the extent and magnitude of my loss.
The shadow of this ‘loss’ fell on my writing from the very beginning, from the very first story itself. It was written in the memory of two sisters whose father had rented me a room to stay in Baramullah (it was before Independence and partition), when I was returning home from Srinagar after spending my first school holidays in Kashmir. The story was never published and I don’t know what happened to those sisters.
But ‘Kashmir’ followed me like a doomed metaphor. The first person who really published my first story was the senior Sanskrit student, the editor of the Hindi section of Stephanian, of St Stephen’s College, a cousin sister of my friend Razdan. As I remember her after 50 years, she was a very frail and fragile creature, brilliant in her studies. She never told me what she thought of my story. Later, after a few years, when I heard of her death, it seemed to be a ‘sign’. Early, in my writing life, I came to know the color of grief. Since I knew nothing else, between grief and nothing, I chose grief, without knowing anything about Faulkner at that early stage.
Nirmal Verma, writing about his life and work in the July 1999 issue of Gentleman magazine.
Read Nirmal Verma story called “The Lost Stream” and “A Day’s Guest” at Little Magazine.
Hear him at South Asian Writers Literary Recordings Project
