Ithaca College

Award-winning Indian novelist Kiran Nagarkar will visit Ithaca College April 20-24 and will give two public readings from his novels during his time on campus.

• Tuesday, April 21: A reading and discussion of his novel, Ravan and Eddie (Handwerker Gallery, 6:30 p.m.)
• Wednesday, April 22: A reading/discussion: "Violent and Nonviolent Resistance," as part of the CSCRE's lecture series, "Chaos or Community? MLK and the Politics of Resistance" (Klingenstein Lounge, 7:00 p.m.)

Kiran Nagarkar is a bilingual novelist and playwright who writes both in English and in Marathi. Nagarkar's first novel, Saat Sakkam Trechalis (1974), translated as Seven Sixes Are Forty Three, is considered one of the two milestones in post-independence Marathi literature. Many critics consider his unique use of syntax, grammar, and idiom so inventive that it permanently changed the tone and attitude of Marathi literature.

His highly controversial play, Bed-Time Story, ran into so many legal and extra-legal troubles that it was banned for 17 years. The play was finally performed clandestinely in Bombay, Cambridge, and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It still has not made it into print despite the efforts of many publishers.
 
Nagarkar’s Ravan and Eddie (1995) is a searing yet very humorous critique of Bombay in the post-independence era. Nagarkar plays with the narrative voice and the structure of the novel in ways that are delightful and surprising as he gives his readers unique insight into the social, political, and above all religious diversity of India, a diversity that has deep-seated conflict and division as its evil twin. Nagarkar's most acclaimed novel, Cuckold (1999), won the topmost literary award in India, the Sahitya Akademi award, in 2000.
 
Nagarkar's latest novel, God's Little Soldier (2006), tells the story of a brilliant idealist whose fanatical positions turn noble causes into forms of cruelty and destruction. Literary critic Sigrid Loeffler believes that it is " … the most profound novel of the year 2006 on the spiritual root of terrorism." Another critic, Denis Scheck, claims that God's Little Soldier is not just a good book, it is "an extraordinary one, a book which might become a true classic."