Here and Hereafter

‘Here and Hereafter is as much about Nirmal Verma’s life in literature as it is about Vineet Gill’s. There is no other book quite like it’—ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA ‘A literary gem’—AMITAVA KUMAR How is a writer formed? Yes, through labour, commitment, perseverance, grit and various other things that we keep hearing about. But equally, a writer is formed through the workings of a particular kind of sensibility. As Vineet Gill attempts to understand this writerly sensibility in Nirmal Verma’s life and work, he finds that the personal and the literary are, on some level, inseparable. In this masterly deep dive into the world of one of Hindi literature’s pioneers, 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, the books he read are all reflected, in Gill’s view, in Verma’s stories and novels. This is a work of intense readerly analysis and considered excavation-a contemplation on Verma’s oeuvre and its place in world literature.