For each hourlong episode, Kitab on Rajya Sabha TV — the brainchild of writer/academician Purushottam Agrawal — takes on a single book to discuss. How long will this unusual show last?

Tucked in a corner of South Delhi’s Kailash Colony, writer and academician Purushottam Agrawal sits at his desk surrounded by hordes of books, most of them Hindi titles, shelves behind him packed to the brim with tomes that cut across not only age, but also languages with titles from Calvino to a personal favourite in Nirmal Verma.

Contrary to the kind of ethos we will be chasing in the conversation to follow, there are pressing concerns that are visibly afflicting Agrawal, like the rest of the country. “I needed some heavy cash for a hospital emergency just days ago. If my wife [she joins us at this time to offer me tea] hadn’t had some money stashed away, I would have been helpless because none of the ATMs in the neighbourhood are working,” he says. The Finance Minister does not live far from the place.

Agrawal has been at the forefront of many things. From campaigns against communalism while he was a student at JNU, to the re-conceptualisation of modernity in Hindi literature, he has done it all. His latest foray into literature, however, is oblique in the sense that Joseph Conrad would interpret it.

Since March of 2016, Agrawal has anchored the television show Kitab on that austere, yet sophisticated anomaly on Indian television, Rajya Sabha TV. “The idea came to me in January. I did not know at the time if any shows like it existed on television already, but I was keen on it. But I had my doubts as well. Who would be interested?” he says. The CEO of Rajya Sabha TV Gurdeep Singh Sappal happened to be at his house when the idea was openly discussed for the first time. Three months later the show held its pilot run, with Amartya Sen as the guest and the Parliament lawns as the venue.

A TV show on books, rather a talk show on books, was now on air. It ran for an hour, and it addressed only the ‘one’ book. This was against everything that works in Indian media. “I did not want to talk about latest books, or even controversial ones. Neither did I want to review them. I wanted to have a discussion around the book, which would be sustained by participation, something that was Sappal’s idea,” Agrawal says. From then on the show had an audience, usually a young crowd. The episodes would be shot outdoors, preferably in colleges where students would engage with the discussion. However, having an hour-long discussion around a single book isn’t the only thing that sets the show apart.

“We held shoots in Shimla and Karnataka. We did not shoot a show on Mahasweta Devi in Bengal or Jharkhand as we did not shoot the episode on Amrita Pritam in Punjab. My idea is to re-affirm and spread a diverse idea of India,” Agrawal says. Kitab as the show is so aptly called, even on a mathematical level, travels not just between ages, but languages as well. There have been shows on Chugtai, Nirmal Verma and Abu’l-Fazl ibn Mubarak’s Akbarnama to name a few. Aside from time and language, the show also delves into depths television in India rarely considers worth its time. Kitab has, for what it is worth, had a full show on American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s work. At which point it is important to understand the how and why of the choice.

“Fukuyama interested me initially. By the time I had read his second book Trust, I was convinced I needed to bring him into public discourse in India, and not for his opinions on India alone. He is a rare entity, someone who doesn’t claim to be a public intellectual but is still trying to connect with the masses,” he says. In the episode for which JNU professor Manindra Nath Thakur was the guest, Agrawal also discussed something that is of immediate importance in the current political climate — nationalism. “Identity is an important word here. And as I mentioned during the show, it is difficult for post-colonial countries to give up the idea of nationalism, because Colonialism actually gave rise to it in the first place. Though, I am against ethnic nationalism, I’m not against the idea of ethnicity itself,” he adds.

Though Kitab is multi-lingual, as is Agrawal himself, there is a prescient emphasis on writers in regional languages. There is then the need to consider the state of that particular literary space in itself, continuously being encroached by the foreign, which Agrawal feels is extremely disheartening. But he acknowledges the problems. “For someone like Nirmal Verma, translation is easy because his influences were largely western. The problem arises with writers who are wholesomely Indian in ethos and inspiration. To translate them is to undertake an undoable task. That said, there should at least be an effort,” he says. But does translation alone solve the problem in a country that is consciously moving towards a language no more its own (but rather, its aspiration)? “I couldn’t agree more. English is not just a language. It is an aspiration in our country. People read in English. But then it is also an opportunity. We are one of the luckiest cultures where we are at the least bilingual, if not multilingual. So if someone, even in today’s day and age, can only speak and write in one language, then he has only himself to blame,” Agrawal says.

Language, of course, at times can be more restrictive than it is a getaway card that clothes our escapism. For example, for even a bilingual reader or writer, does he subconsciously, simply, translate himself? Does he read emotion and reality in Hindi, but write in English, at which point English becomes the language of our intellect while Hindi remains, naturally, the language of our emotions. Agrawal believes it is an open ended question — one that we ourselves need to find the answer to. “Even Nirmal Verma was criticised for thinking in English and writing in Hindi. I think it is down to the individual, because ultimately it has to work for him,” he says.

How long will Kitab work, and stay on, defying every known construct of a populist media we are familiar with? “I don’t know,” Agrawal says, “I hope it does.” And so should we.