Book Launch: "Here And Hereafter: Nirmal Verma's Life" by Author Vineet Gill, Organised by Penguin India

on Oct 14, 2022

The book is a masterly deep dive into the world of one of Hindi literature’s pioneers and opens a window into his writing style and his sensibilities. Vineet Gill looks at the scattered elements of Verma’s life as ingredients that went into the making of the writer. The places he lived in, the people he knew, and the books he read are all reflected, in Gill’s view, in Verma’s stories and novels. As he attempts to understand the writerly sensibility in Nirmal Verma’s life and work, he finds that the personal and the literary are, on some level, inseparable.

This is a work of intense readerly analysis and considered excavation—a contemplation of Verma’s oeuvre and its place in world literature.

Announcing the release, the author said, ‘It took me three years to finish writing this book, and most of that time was spent trying to find a form, an approach, suitable for my purposes. I didn’t want to write a conventional biography but still wanted to engage with aspects of Nirmal Verma’s life that shed some kind of light on his work. I wanted to look at him as a cosmopolitan writer who was not confined to Hindi or “Indian” tradition. I wanted to highlight his achievements as a reader, essayist, and critic. I wanted to view his work in relation to that of his forebears and contemporaries, and in relation to the politics of his time. And finally, I wanted to create a personal record of sorts—about my own life as a reader and writer, and about how reading can lead to writing. I hope I have managed to bring together these disparate strands in my book.’

Vineet Gill is a writer and editor. His essays, often literary-critical in nature and occasionally personal, have appeared in various Indian and international publications. He has spent the better part of the previous decade trying to read and write and trying to build a life around those two interrelated pursuits. This is his first book.