Nirmal Verma's exceptionalism in the world of Hindi letters has been universally acknowledged. One of the most widely translated and well-known writers overseas, Verma has employed subjects and themes that are unique in Hindi fiction. He writes of the existential dilemmas of individuals wandering across a European landscape, humming Mozart, and reflecting on Heidegger; or of bohemian intellectuals of the Indian capital, suffering inarticulate tensions in relationships while pursuing their avant-garde interests in humid, beer-drenched terraces of Delhi. In some measure, this reflects Verma's personal background. With a Masters in History from the capital's St Stephen's College, that cradle for IAS officers and English novelists, Verma could well have been an English writer.
Indeed, like Bankim Chandra Chatterji or Michael Madhusudan Dutt, who started their careers as English writers and left volumes of correspondence and journals in that language while churning out formative prose works in Bangla, language played a complex role in Verma's intellectual life. Accused for long of being a vilayati writer for the 'foreignness' of his themes and characters, Verma started his literary life by writing poems in English and ended his career as a bitter critic of English and the destructive influence of Western modernity on indigenous wholesomeness.
One way to recover that wholesomeness, or what Verma termed as atmabodh, was to write in one's own language. Language, he said, "is the most hopeful guarantee against forgetting". It is the "home of one's being". Swaraj in ideas is closely linked with "the freedom to think and conceptualise in our own languages". Knowledge of Sanskrit, he came to believe, was a prerequisite in any attempt towards understanding the uniqueness of Indian civilisation.
This from a writer whose six novels and fifty-odd stories are almost entirely secular and cosmopolitan and translate with ease into foreign languages. With one novel (Ve Din, Days of Longing in K B Vaid's translation) and four volumes of short stories in English translation, a BBC telefilm on his life and work; translations in French, German and Italian; notices in foreign newspapers and scores of readings and seminars abroad, Verma was one of India's best-known non-English authors outside the country. At first sight then, Verma may seem an apt prototype for Dipesh Chakravarty's call for a new kind of transcendence in relations between the dominant West and the rest — the humanities enriched and enriching individual who would move beyond the conditionalities of decolonisation and post-colonialism in this new global and de-territorialised world.