Anurag Kashyap’s two great passions are cinema and reading. Playing Scrabble on the iPad clocks a distant third. We’re aboard the TGV from Avignon to Paris, exhausted from a two-day cultural conference, but Kashyap perks up when I bring up the subject of books. “I always wanted to write a novel,” he says, “but couldn’t because I was restricted by language. Hindi is no longer my language, and English never was my language, so I’m in between. That’s probably why I write my books through the camera.”
Kashyap is one of India’s most exciting young directors with films like Dev D, Gulaal and Black Friday to his credit, along with several screenplays. He grew up in small towns all over Uttar Pradesh, where he says, books were his main entertainment. The first text he consciously remembers reading was the Mahabharata. Thanks to his grandfather, he was exposed to a lot of Hindi literature. At nine, he went to boarding school because his father was in a transferable job, and every time he was dropped off, he was given either a Hardy Boys or Enid Blyton, which he never read because he was intimidated by the language. “By the time I was sixteen, I’d run out of Hindi literature, and then there was no reading for a few years, because I went to college, and discovered girls.”
One of Kashyap’s first jobs was as a copy editor for Rupa Publications, where he edited, in exchange for free board. His job entailed reading Indian literature translated into English, but he also ripped through the existentialists, the classics, and pulp fiction from all over the world. When it came to Indian writing in English though, Kashyap says he always had reservations. He loved Haroun & the Sea of Stories but struggled with Midnight’s Children. The book that did him in for good was The God of Small Things. “After that I couldn’t read any more Indian English literature,” he said.
“For me, as a filmmaker, language can sometimes get in the way. If I have to concentrate too much on the words, then I stop seeing the book. What I’ve found from reading pulp is that even though it’s largely unreal, it brings the politics and time of a country within context. I learned a lot about Brazil by reading Leighton Gage.”
When Kashyap starts working on a film, the inspiration often comes from a book or newspaper article which allows him to start seeing the physical space. “I’ve been a writer for a very long time,” he says, “I wrote movies for other people before making my own, and I often disagreed with the way they shot them because I felt they didn’t have the right sense of time and place. If I tell a story I want to explore every possible angle, and I’ll go and shoot it, and perhaps chuck it out when I’m editing, but I have to shoot it, because I have to know everything.”
According to Kashyap, cinema in many places has replaced literature, but in India it hasn’t taken on the responsibilities of literature. “I think cinema should serve every purpose,” he says. “It should entertain, and sometimes it should educate, and sometimes it should just be a mirror… If I’m going to watch something that’s just pure pleasure for my eyes, that doesn’t engage or provoke, then I’m not interested in it.”
The writer is a dancer, poet and novelist
