Amit Chaudhuri at The Point:
In the late 1990s, I read a short story by Nirmal Verma called “Terminal.” It had been written, like all of Verma’s fiction, in Hindi, and translated into English by the critic Alok Bhalla. I knew something of Verma’s work, because his reputation was a national one. I had taken him to be a kind of European writer in Hindi, though I hadn’t formed this thought clearly in my head, and, if I had, wouldn’t have known with certainty what “European writer” meant. Let’s say a kind of vague symbolist aura—an aura of lyricism but also the air of the nouveau roman—adhered faintly to the reputation. Europeanness was confirmed by Verma’s peculiar personal history: how he went to Prague in 1959 as a literary translator and spent nearly a decade there until his departure during the upheaval of the Prague Spring. During his time there he wrote a travelogue as well as his first novel, Ve Din (translated into English under the title Days of Longing), arising from his experience of Prague. And this period also saw in Hindi literature the emergence of the nayi kahani movement, which in its literal translation—“New Story”—conveyed its own breakaway nature, its movement away from conventional realism toward (given the ethos of the time) the “existential” and the inward (terms that have become obsolete in a way that the stories haven’t), the word nayi or “new” containing in it a powerful suggestion of the strange. Verma was among the movement’s helmsmen.
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