Are you still interested in cinema as an art form?
I was, am, and will always be interested in cinema as an art form and much more. I made my first film on an 8-mm Kodak camera at age 10. Ever since I was a college student in Mumbai in the late 1950s, I hung around Bombay Film and Sound Laboratories, Famous Studios, Ramnord, and Rajkamal Studio where I made friends with technicians to learn about editing, recording, re-recording and mixing. I was a keen photographer. I got a chance to make advertising films in the late 1960s and, from the 1970s, have been making independent documentaries until now.
The only feature film I could make so far was Godam (1983). It won the Jury's Special Award at the Festival of Three Continents, Nantes, France. My filmography and videography includes a range of work, including commercial cinema. To make a film the way I like, I would need a producer who believed in me 100 per cent, or a sponsor with faith in my creative ability. I would not waste time hawking projects or promoting myself among speculators and gamblers who don't know cinema as a serious art form.
At the Kitab festival recently held in Mumbai, you spoke about whether regional writing appealed to a limited audience, and how migration affected writers and writing. What did you want to get across, to the audience attending that discussion?
Being primarily a poet and a translator of poetry and fiction, I was interested in finding out if British publishers, editors and literary agents were really interested in translations from South Asian languages. The point I was making about migration was that it was the key factor in globalisation. People migrate; writers migrate; books migrate. Why don't translations migrate to the same extent? The answer was obvious. Minds in the West that hold all control over English-language publishing aren't yet open to translations from Indian languages, despite the fact that our formidable sized middle-class speaks English as a second language and constitutes a growing part of the global market for English books.
Image: The cover of Der Banyanbaum Ausgewahlte Gedichte (The Banyan Tree: Selected Poems) translated from English and Marathi by Lothar Lutze and published by A1-Verlag, Munich, also the publishers of Kiran Nagarkar's fiction in German.
Also see: History docks in Chennai
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