Portrait Of A Writer As An Artist

Crows is among a clutch of drawings and paintings tucked between the pages of The Blue Book: A Writer바카라�s Journal (HarperCollins India), Kumar바카라�s 바카라�panoramic portrait바카라� in watercolours and words of how he experienced the pandemic. The accompanying text narrates the story of how the sketch came into being. It also includes a short commentary on the importance of having specific knowledge (of birds and trees, for instance) in order to write well. William Maxwell wrote: 바카라�After forty years, what I came to care about most was not style, but the breath of life.바카라� When people ask Kumar about his favourite pieces of writing advice, he remembers this, always. In Crows, he was not bothered about style. He just wanted to catch 바카라�life on the wing, as it were.바카라�

For the past few years, Kumar has been painting watercolours: Tulips in bloom that he first saw in Srinagar, Kashmir, 바카라�where now death blossoms like flowers,바카라� forsythia bush ablaze with colour in the morning light, and trees of his native city, Patna. He also uses gouache (바카라�for its opacity바카라�) and ink on newsprint: for his novel about the news, he wanted to make art that interacted with it. Drawings and writings occupied his imagination when he was working on his novel, A Time Outside Time (Aleph, 2021), which shows us what fiction can do in the post-truth era. 바카라�Like my novel, these drawings are a response to our present world바카라�a world that bestows upon us love and loss, travel through diverse landscapes, deaths from a pandemic, fake news and, if we care to notice, visions of blazing beauty,바카라� he writes in The Blue Book. In A Time Outside Time, he brings news to novel-writing and makes us feel it 바카라�fresh like blood on the bandage.바카라� In today바카라�s novel, he says, news should be like that.

Prose borne out of a mishmash of influences has been Kumar바카라�s preoccupation. Clippings, quotes, sketches and notebooks are vital elements of his process to gather material for his books. His 2017 novel, The Lovers, published in the US as Immigrant, Montana바카라�a meditation on love beyond and across dividing lines바카라�is a patchwork of story and reportage, anecdote and annotation, picture and text, fragment and essay. The diaries he has kept over the last two or three decades have helped him write all his books. The Blue Book is both a diary and a work strung together with diary entries. If you have nothing to write, observe the world and record its ways, he urges us in the book. 바카라�When we do that, we are recording our own history.바카라�

The style of The Blue Book is a nod to John Berger, who has been central to Kumar바카라�s creative endeavours as a writer and artist. He had discovered Berger바카라�s political and sensual world as an undergraduate in Delhi. A Seventh Man (1975), in which Berger and Swiss photographer Jean Mohr reflect on what it means to be a migrant worker in Europe, inspired Kumar바카라�s first genre-bending work, Passport Photo (2000), which combined poetry, cultural criticism and photography to meditate on the everydayness of the immigrant experience; it symbolised the quest to find new poetics and politics of diaspora championed by post-colonial theorists like Edward Said. 바카라�I am touched by Berger바카라�s attentive eye and his unaffected ease; wavering outlines drawn with pen and texture added by rubbing a finger wet with spit,바카라� writes Kumar, who discovered Bento바카라�s Sketchbook (2011) at Michael Ondaatje바카라�s Toronto home during a book tour a couple of years ago. Since then, he has been trying to draw like Berger, every day.

Besides his meditations on Spinoza, Bento바카라�s Sketchbook features Berger바카라�s drawings of irises (바카라�Irises are like prophecies: simultaneously astounding and calm바카라� he tells us), plums, a bicycle, and a sketch of a 15th-century painting of a crucifixion. 바카라�How does the impulse to draw something begin?바카라� Berger poses this question which he elaborates in the book through text and drawings, a style Kumar follows in The Blue Book. Writers and artists like Berger who work with text and images have been his favourites. He collaborated with Teju Cole on an ekphrastic project in which the latter바카라�s photographs intersect and interact with the works of other artists, including Susan Sontag, whose works traversed diverse disciplines. Bento바카라�s Sketchbook revealed Berger바카라�s keen sensibility and new ways of seeing. The Blue Book, shot through with remarkable empathy, goads us to engage with the world around us in a meaningful manner. To see better. To write better.

A collage of the personal and the political as Kiran Desai has called it, The Blue Book marks Kumar바카라�s turn to the visual. It is his personal register of observations, textured with his memory of people, places and things. If his asides and anecdotes take us to the moments he has experienced, his paintings seem to say, 바카라�I was here, I saw this.바카라� With it, he joins the pantheon of poets and writers who also painted: Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, Victor Hugo, Clarice Lispector, Herman Hesse, Federico Garcia Lorca, and, closer to home, Rabindranath Tagore. If his journals are a vehicle to the creation of a sense of selfhood, as it was for Sontag, his painting is a form of keeping a diary, as it was for Picasso.

The question Kumar, 59, asks himself more frequently these days is: how to be more of a human than a 바카라�gadget바카라�? In early 2021, when seated at his desk one morning, he asked himself how would he like to greet the future? 바카라�In the days that are left to me, who is it that I want to be?바카라� he recollects in The Blue Book.  When he reads, say a story by Alice Munro, Anton Chekhov, Ismat Chughtai or Vinod Kumar Shukla, he enters a 바카라�rarer state of mind바카라� in which he pays attention to the inner workings of the world. It바카라�s when he reads, with a sense of focus and empathy that he feels as if 바카라�my humanity has been restored바카라�. Bringing the same level of commitment to the craft of writing impels him to conclude: 바카라�I am a writer; so, every day I write. The days I am given are only for writing.바카라� Drawing and painting make him feel in touch with the world around him.

Kumar arrived at drawing and painting decades ago, when he tried his hand at watercolours as a schoolboy in Patna. However, he found the results unsatisfactory. A few years ago, he started with his son바카라�s box of watercolours. During the lockdown, when his kids바카라�son Rahul and daughter Ila바카라�were at home, he thought he should design something to engage them. He urged them to write, even if it was just a paragraph, and draw every day. As he started to draw, the engagement grew. He began thinking about interacting with the news, which led him to draw and paint on newspapers.  

Elizabeth Bishop, who also attended to Vassar College, has influenced its current professor. Kumar finds her paintings of Brazil, displayed at the college gallery, tremendously fascinating. Although Walcott바카라�s watercolours look 바카라�a little improvised,바카라� they seem to him full of life. Kumar says he likes the fact that your art could be lacking, but because it바카라�s lacking, it바카라�s alive. Picasso바카라�s works appeal to him for their realism and for their sheer brilliance of imagination. He is drawn to the rigour and routine of Japanese-American conceptual artist On Kawara, who produced about 3,000 canvases that can be distinguished from each other only by their unique dates.  

There is a little story behind the title of The Blue Book, which juxtaposes the gloom of the pandemic with the vibrant colours of foliage. In the Patna school Kumar studied in, the report cards would be called 바카라�The Blue Book바카라�: 바카라�Since I was not a good student, I was scared of it. I am taking some agency back by making a different kind of blue book, which doesn바카라�t show the poor percentages.바카라� The Blue Book and A Time Outside Time take forward Kumar바카라�s thesis that literature arises from artifice and that ordinary life can be transformed into art. If purists find fault with his artworks, he has a counterpoint: The priority for him is not to make it perfect, but to attempt to capture what Maxwell called 바카라�a breath of life.바카라� In these paintings, he wanted to create an interaction between language as words on the page and language as images. A space between words and image 바카라�where the reader바카라�s imagination can dance바카라�.

Living in the US, Kumar has stayed connected with India. Most of his works draw on this connection. Some of his paintings depict the disturbing news of lynchings and plight of migrants during the lockdown that reached him: 바카라�The world comes to us in the form of bad news.바카라� A montage shows a migrant family stranded by the roadside as, in another image, petals drop from the sky (at government orders to honour medical workers).

Does Kumar see his divided life feeding into his fiction and non-fiction? 바카라�One cannot know for certain. Of course, different circumstances produce different work. The real question to ask here is that if I hadn바카라�t become a writer, would I have produced this art? I think the answer is no,바카라� he says. Being a writer then is congruent with his practice as an amateur artist, and a compulsive diarist. Like a writer who keeps a diary and, therefore, has more than what he or she has in their published books, he has more paintings other than those are part of The Blue Book. Should we look forward to his art exhibition next? Not quite. For he would rather do a book: 바카라�I바카라�m a books guy who is trying to change the look of the book.바카라�

바카라�We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination,바카라� writes Berger in Bento바카라�s Sketchbook. Perhaps Kumar바카라�s own aim is similar. He wants to freeze his observations on canvas and paper, from the fleeting moments. 바카라�All good writing must turn its face to the world,바카라� Kumar writes in his style manual Writing Badly is Easy (2019). A writer, forever searching for resonances across diverse landscapes, must always have an eye on the world he/she inhabits. As Kumar does.  His greatest wish is to be someone who pays attention. VS Naipaul taught him to avoid the abstract and always go for the concrete. Over the years, he has found his own mantra: 바카라�Write every day, and walk every day.바카라� His routine includes a modest goal of writing 150 words daily and mindful walking for 10 minutes. He asks his students to follow the same regime. 바카라�Imagine, when you walk, that flowers are blooming under your feet,바카라� he tells them.

In his conscentious notes in The Blue Book, he remembers the protests over CAA and NRC, as well as the 2020 Delhi riots. We should remember, he writes, what was done to our fellow human beings and fight for justice on behalf of  those so grievously wronged. The central conceit of art is that it should move readers/viewers and leave them altered and changed. While Kumar has not fully bought into that worldview, he does want to remember. All he wants to achieve through his words and works of art is that they are able to keep alive a memory.