Nissim Goes Missing

Hailing from a Jewish family in Bombay, Nissim went through an arranged marriage; but as his well-documented affairs testify, he embraced the free love and drugs message of the '60s as happily as he had embraced tradition. He drifted through theatre, journalism and a variety of jobs before becoming a teacher. He lived through increasingly politicised times without ever being a political animal himself, aside from a brief flirtation with the ideologies of M.N. Roy. He has a talent for sly humour; he's also been dogged through much of his life with thoughts of suicide.

Today, as old age takes its toll, Nissim, now living in institutional care, is almost unrecognisable to those who knew him, including many of the young writers he mentored down the years. His memory is fading, his ability to look after himself has dwindled along with his bank balance. The appearance of this biography holds out the promise of a portrait of Nissim as we'd like to remember him, drawn by a fellow poet and friend.

It cannot be said that R. Raj Rao has stinted on his research: in the six years that it has taken him to write this book, he's unearthed manna in the form of uncollected poems and letters to and from Nissim. He's held extensive conversations with other poets, academicians and friends, offering a multilayered perspective on both the man and the poet. And he adds a running commentary of criticism and insight on the poetry itself.

But spadework, essential though it may be, is only half of a biographer's job. The other half is the shape he or she gives to the life of the subject, the perspectives that are added or removed.

The warning signs are etched firmly in the introduction itself. "Between 1994 and now, my own concerns have drastically changed, with gay activism being pretty high on my list of intellectual priorities. I no longer have time for the kind of 'ladies' man' that Nissim was." This is honest, but unfortunately Rao's views intrude so often into his analysis that it blinkers his vision. His gay activism, laudable in its own right, is a bias here, just as it might be if a Leftist historian decided to write the biography of a capitalist hero. Rao's comments on Nissim's sexual proclivities end up revealing far more about Rao than his subject.

More disturbing is Rao's frank admission that this is a "subjective" biography. "I was not interested in cold, clinical objectivity.... I restricted my conversations and interviews to those people with whom I was comfortable...." A subjective biography, especially when it's written by one writer about another, is not necessarily a bad thing. It can transmute into a conversation between differing styles and sensibilities. But in huge chunks of the book, Nissim recedes into the distance, borne inexorably there by the weight of Rao's critiques, attacks, musings, sometimes even by the mass of material selected in order to shed light on the poet.

However, considering that most biographies out of India are actually thinly-disguised hagiographies, Rao cannot be accused of placing a halo round his subject's head. The richness of his research and his obvious commitment redeem a great deal of the book. But the richness of Nissim's life and work remains to be mined by another biographer-perhaps one who can convert distance from his subject into a virtue, or unlike Rao, refrain from allowing familiarity to lapse into a kind of contempt.